Serial Ports: How else are you supposed to hook up a dumb terminal to your computer. USB?
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
Next time your grandmother goes in to get her hearing aid adjusted, look at the PC that's doing the job. It has an interface box connected to a serial port. And the base software is Windows 3.1.
Also, I've had to use a machine's serial port to connect to an external modem instead of the machine's internal modem which had an un-resolvable software conflict with a crucial networking application.
I still read 5 1/4" floppies at least once a quarter so one of my machines does have a 1.2 MB drive.
Man, you got a good deal. My table at the last itec was #80 and the electic was $90.
Don't forget the cost of *attending* a show. I paid $5 for parking at the last ITEC - almost 1 mile away from the cow barn ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H exhibit hall in beautiful scenic Novi Michigan. Once inside, $3+ for a coke or a hot dog.
WATFIV (and WATFOR, WATBOL etc) are the classic example in my mind. Made by the University of Waterloo, now languishing somewhere (at Sybase maybe?!).
NO! Open Watcom 1.0 Release Candidate, which contains C, C++ and Fortran 77 compilers was just posted to www.openwatcom.org.
Now there are some things missing, like Fortran sample and include files, but so far this looks and works remarkably like Watcom's 11.x line. I don't know if there are MFC libraries and I do know that the STL is left out, but it's far from dead and buried. And it's open source.
Why this did not get reported on Slashdot is a total mystery to me. Maybe because it's about a DOS/Windows product instead of Linux:-(.
MSDE (The desktop edition) is installed, by default with a few pieces of software, including Visio Enterprise, MacAfee's centralised virus admin thingy (hey, I've only just woken up, I can't remember the name ), FlipFactory (an automated video encoding system) and others. There is no user interface to MSDE, you'd have to install SQL tools from a "grown up" installation, then add it as a new server, then set the SA password.
There *is* a user interface to MSDE, it's called OSQL and it *is* usable from the command line.
In Norway there has been a study that shows that children learn to read and write faster using personal computers.
Computers are a good tool in teaching writing *if* you also have a good teacher who can take the time to go over individual student work and show the student where he can improve. Computers make it easier to put down a series of ideas for a draft, but the student has to be taught how to revise.
Actually computers would help me teach writing, since they slow down my critical process. I'm such a miserable SOB as an editor that no-one would learn from me if I had a red pencil in my hand.
Also don't forget the use of computers as an exploratory tool in math. Understanding of math is aided by concrete things from the real world. Very few people are able to crunch through theorems to their inevitable conclusion. No, most people need models to help them in geometry as well as in abstract math.
How many people using a graphing calc (yes, a computer.. just small type) can acutally still do trig and calc functions without it's (sic)use....
I half jokingly suggest that students go back to the slide rules and log and trig tables that I used in high school, along with punch cards and computers with console switches.
I'm not a fan of Steiner or Waldorf education, but I do believe that people do learn by doing and that physical movement does re-inforce learning.
That said, students need to know 1) how to use computers and 2) how computers work on some conceptual level.
Back in high school, we were required to take and pass a typing course in order to graduate. I still type to this day (on a computer) and thank the school board for requiring it. Leaving the educational merits of computers aside, it's important that high school graduates be able to use computers in the workplace.
Understanding how things work is also part of the educational process. My GF, for example, wishes she had taken a course in samll engine work in high school. Is she going to strip down our lawn mower - no! But such a course would have made her feel less intimidated when she goes to the car dealer to have her car repaired.
People need to understand how computers work and something about the limitations of machine computation so that they can make better decisions as informed citizens.
- Just as they need to know something about science or history. Here's one of my pet examples - CFCs get banned. Ask the man on the street why CFCs are bad, and maybe he will say "they're poking a hole in the ozone layer". Does he know what ozone is? What UV is? What a chemical catalyst is? I'll bet any reasonable sum the answer is no.
Meanwhile people have a god like respect for computers and the answers that come from them. Your account *must* be overdrawn, the computer says so!
Do I think that the man on the street should know that adding up money using floating point numbers is a bad thing - you bet I do. Just as I expect them to know in general why we fought the Revolutionary war.
Also consider one of the primary interviewees was Sherry Turkel, who has *long* been a skeptic of the value of computers in education and of their impact on society.
In "The Second Self", published about 15 years ago, she has a rather long and disparaging chapter about (avid) computer programmers, citing a particularly colorful passage from Weizenbaum about "coding bums" - along the lines of "food was brought to them at their terminals.... they were slovenly, etc."
The only thing I know of that even comes close to this notion is the idea suggested by recent research that not providing sound stimuli to an already damaged ear might accelerate hearing loss. (This really applies to the issue of monaural vs binaural amplification).
[I briefly considered asking my GF who is working on a doctorate in Audiology about this, but I quickly realized that she would have laughed me out of the room for bothering her with this B.S.]
So my question is, does anyone have any idea what this "new level of abstraction" might be?
[writing an OS in a HLL is more secure?]
Remember Multics? It was written in a HLL and still managed to have exploitable security holes. Then the DOD mandated Ada which is so bloated that no one uses it (voluntarily).
The University of Wisconsin is doing some pretty major research...
Given the quality of their veterinary school and the proximity of the UW to the state health lab, I'm sure the UW will make major progress on this.
Meanwhile in Michigan, hunters are worried about a CWD outbreak along with a not yet controlled outbreak of bovine TB. In years past hunters have been asked to stop at DNR check stations and leave their deer heads for examination for TB. I did not see any of these stops on southbound I-75 this year.
The local news stations here all have "Problem Solver" segments where people call in problems about corrupt builders not finishing jobs, city works slacking off and not doing their jobs, etc.
I suggested this story to the local TV station who runs "Problem Solvers" before the first story ran in the Free Press about Ralsky. I guess they were not interested at the time.
Perhaps the reason this story has run twice in the newspapers and has not run on TV is that it can't be explained quickly to the public. It's not difficult to explain film showing a city worker goofing off on the job, but it's harder to first explain spam, then do the rest of the story.
SBC is now bundling Yahoo's so-called "services" with DSL. They install adware and spyware, then insist on an EULA that doesn't let you remove the stuff. How much of Yahoo's "sales" are actually based on that?
I managed to upgrade my dial up to SBC-Yahoo without using their install kit by going to a web site (very well hidden) for people with computers not capable of running the install kit. Setting up DUN and IE was easy - mail was not.
Yahoo's server authentication broke my old Eudora client. Ultimately I had to switch to Outlook Express (Bleah). Moving a subsidiary mail account went through a very intrusive sign up process.
Now I can get my e-mail on the web but even though I am paying for the account (through my ISP), I still get the usual ads and trash.
Believe it or not, this is an improvement over SBC's previous match with Prodigy!
And why, again, does domino manipulation constitute hacking?
One of the original uses of "hack" is to describe a stunt or practical joke. It also features the clever use of a mechanical device which makes it nerdly.
It's in the same spirit as writing an otherwise useless program that runs on a PDP-8 which will play music through a transistor radio placed next to the computer.
Because the first step to solving any problem is always to create more problems.
Especially in academics or government. Actually this is a corollary to the principle that generalizations eventually become untrue. Or in other words, the lies you teach undergraduates you unravel in graduate school.
After 5 years of programming, my favorite language has become assembler - not because I hate HLL's, but rather, because you get exactly what you code in assembler. There are no "Leaky Abstractions" in assembly.
Ah, but you are wrong, and I'm speaking as someone who has written over 100,000 lines of assembly code. The great majority of the time, when you're faced with a programming problem, you don't want to think about that problem in terms of bits and and bytes and machine instructions and so on. You want to think about the problem in a more abstract way.
I'd love to put Randy Hyde (author of High Level assembler) in the same room with Monte Davidoff (Multician, PL/I fan and author of the math package in Altair Basic).
Sometimes the abstraction is best cast at a lower level, that's one reason Knuth used MIX in his "Art of Computer Programming". Other times, higher level languages don't do the job.
Here are three examples:
1) Write a transparent filter for Windows 9x that runs in a DOS box. It must handle binary files without discarding LF on input and prefixing LF with CR on output. Try various C compilers and fail.
2) Translate Microsoft MBF (Microsoft Binary Format) single precision to IEEE singles. Yes you can do it in C, but the assembly version is compact and elegant (ignoring exponent underflow and de-normalization). Portable - no!
3) Examine the built in random number generator in PCC 1.2c. (DeSmet's C). It was supposed to be the same algorithm used in the so called "minimal standard" (also common to APL) but it's buggy. Not only does the C generated library code completely screw up by confusing unsigned and signed arithmetic, but it's a horror to debug. Even restricting yourself to 8088 code, a routine using simulated division is faster, cleaner and easier to verify as correct. On a 386+, even in real mode DOS, an assembly routine is a snap.
The only way to do something more easily or more efficiently is to restrict your scope. If you know something about a particular operation, or if you can make a few assumptions about it, your life because much easier.
On embedded or limited hardware systems, the overhead involved in high level abstraction sometimes 1) hurts performance 2) makes debugging difficult. Consider a simple task - putting an "A" in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Written in C it might be 14K or so of code. Written in C++ say 100K or so. On an Apple II it is 6 bytes. (lda #$c1, sta $400, rts). Now consider tracing through the three sets of code with a debugger.
On the other hand, if you have sufficient computing horsepower, abstraction is very nice. For small numbers of records, I can whip up a data tabulating program in AWK in a few seconds:
{a[$0]++}END{for(i in a)print a[i],i}
I can even write programs in GW-BASIC that are fast enough. But eventually the data sets get large enough so that it's back to the exercise wheel inside my cage for me!
Re:$5 to anyone who proves this statement wrong-
on
The Economics of Spam
·
· Score: 1
We all knew that spammers weren't the brightest bulbs on the planet, but giving an interview with your real name and location to a national newspaper does seem a bit foolish, doesn't it?
Alan Ralsky recently starred in a front page spread in the Detroit News/Free Press. AFAIK, he's still in business, even though his home address and phone have been published on the Internet for a number of years.
"... is what FORTRAN is good for: number crunching. F77 is a perfect tool for many scientists who don't care about pointers or object oriented programming or nice graphical output subroutines or any other nice things that other programming languages have. They want something that will do some number crunching for them and won't screw up or cause problems."
I'm another old duffer who likes F77 with extensions. If I want to write in C or C++, I'll write in C or C++. Most numeric computation depends on good software libraries. Object oriented programming has no advantages in making library calls. In fact, it just adds another layer of abstraction and obscurity.
Since the remaining commercial version of this language is put out by a single company, it doesn't matter what the language is called, since Intersystems is going to be selling it.
Problems at UUNet + MichNet/Merit would explain the increadibly slow connections I've observed accessing web sites and transferring files via http from sites at U. of Michigan and U. of Wisconsin today. I've never seen 600 bytes/sec from a site in the US until yesterday and today.
Slashdot Mirror
The more they tax, the more they'll spend.
Remember, Californians wanted to assess property tax on satellites orbiting above them in space.
Serial Ports: How else are you supposed to hook up a dumb terminal to your computer. USB?
Will the 0.02% of the population using dumb-terminals on their home PCs please stand up?
Next time your grandmother goes in to get her hearing aid adjusted, look at the PC that's doing the job. It has an interface box connected to a serial port. And the base software is Windows 3.1.
Also, I've had to use a machine's serial port to connect to an external modem instead of the machine's internal modem which had an un-resolvable software conflict with a crucial networking application.
I still read 5 1/4" floppies at least once a quarter so one of my machines does have a 1.2 MB drive.
Man, you got a good deal. My table at the last itec was #80 and the electic was $90.
Don't forget the cost of *attending* a show. I paid $5 for parking at the last ITEC - almost 1 mile away from the cow barn ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H exhibit hall in beautiful scenic Novi Michigan. Once inside, $3+ for a coke or a hot dog.
perhaps WATFOR & WATFIV are not from the same codebase as WATFOR-77, but WATFOR has maintained two major features from the old mainframe days:
1) its use as a debugging compiler
2) "load and go" mode
WATFIV (and WATFOR, WATBOL etc) are the classic example in my mind. Made by the University of Waterloo, now languishing somewhere (at Sybase maybe?!) .
:-(.
NO! Open Watcom 1.0 Release Candidate, which contains C, C++ and Fortran 77 compilers was just posted to www.openwatcom.org.
Now there are some things missing, like Fortran sample and include files, but so far this looks and works remarkably like Watcom's 11.x line. I don't know if there are MFC libraries and I do know that the STL is left out, but it's far from dead and buried. And it's open source.
Why this did not get reported on Slashdot is a total mystery to me. Maybe because it's about a DOS/Windows product instead of Linux
MSDE (The desktop edition) is installed, by default with a few pieces of software, including Visio Enterprise, MacAfee's centralised virus admin thingy (hey, I've only just woken up, I can't remember the name ), FlipFactory (an automated video encoding system) and others. There is no user interface to MSDE, you'd have to install SQL tools from a "grown up" installation, then add it as a new server, then set the SA password.
There *is* a user interface to MSDE, it's called OSQL and it *is* usable from the command line.
osql -U sa -P "" -Q "sp_password NULL,foo,sa"
see MS KB Q322336
Should older packets become dumped
and never brought online,
Let newer packets take their place
on all our T-1 lines!
To the tune of "Mr. Ed":
a host is a host from coast to coast
and no one will talk to a host that's close
unless the host that isn't close
is busy, hung or dead
In Norway there has been a study that shows that children learn to read and write faster using personal computers.
Computers are a good tool in teaching writing *if* you also have a good teacher who can take the time to go over individual student work and show the student where he can improve. Computers make it easier to put down a series of ideas for a draft, but the student has to be taught how to revise.
Actually computers would help me teach writing, since they slow down my critical process. I'm such a miserable SOB as an editor that no-one would learn from me if I had a red pencil in my hand.
Also don't forget the use of computers as an exploratory tool in math. Understanding of math is aided by concrete things from the real world. Very few people are able to crunch through theorems to their inevitable conclusion. No, most people need models to help them in geometry as well as in abstract math.
How many people using a graphing calc (yes, a computer.. just small type) can acutally still do trig and calc functions without it's (sic)use....
I half jokingly suggest that students go back to the slide rules and log and trig tables that I used in high school, along with punch cards and computers with console switches.
I'm not a fan of Steiner or Waldorf education, but I do believe that people do learn by doing and that physical movement does re-inforce learning.
That said, students need to know 1) how to use computers and 2) how computers work on some conceptual level.
Back in high school, we were required to take and pass a typing course in order to graduate. I still type to this day (on a computer) and thank the school board for requiring it. Leaving the educational merits of computers aside, it's important that high school graduates be able to use computers in the workplace.
Understanding how things work is also part of the educational process. My GF, for example, wishes she had taken a course in samll engine work in high school. Is she going to strip down our lawn mower - no! But such a course would have made her feel less intimidated when she goes to the car dealer to have her car repaired.
People need to understand how computers work and something about the limitations of machine computation so that they can make better decisions as informed citizens.
- Just as they need to know something about science or history. Here's one of my pet examples - CFCs get banned. Ask the man on the street why CFCs are bad, and maybe he will say "they're poking a hole in the ozone layer". Does he know what ozone is? What UV is? What a chemical catalyst is? I'll bet any reasonable sum the answer is no.
Meanwhile people have a god like respect for computers and the answers that come from them. Your account *must* be overdrawn, the computer says so!
Do I think that the man on the street should know that adding up money using floating point numbers is a bad thing - you bet I do. Just as I expect them to know in general why we fought the Revolutionary war.
See "Silicon Snake Oil" by Clifford Stoll
.... they were slovenly, etc."
Also consider one of the primary interviewees was Sherry Turkel, who has *long* been a skeptic of the value of computers in education and of their impact on society.
In "The Second Self", published about 15 years ago, she has a rather long and disparaging chapter about (avid) computer programmers, citing a particularly colorful passage from Weizenbaum about "coding bums" - along the lines of "food was brought to them at their terminals
or MinGW
It's easier to create Windows DLLs with MinGW. (Isn't the parent thread about component based development?)
The only thing I know of that even comes close to this notion is the idea suggested by recent research that not providing sound stimuli to an already damaged ear might accelerate hearing loss. (This really applies to the issue of monaural vs binaural amplification).
[I briefly considered asking my GF who is working on a doctorate in Audiology about this, but I quickly realized that she would have laughed me out of the room for bothering her with this B.S.]
So my question is, does anyone have any idea what this "new level of abstraction" might be?
[writing an OS in a HLL is more secure?]
Remember Multics? It was written in a HLL and still managed to have exploitable security holes. Then the DOD mandated Ada which is so bloated that no one uses it (voluntarily).
The University of Wisconsin is doing some pretty major research...
Given the quality of their veterinary school and the proximity of the UW to the state health lab, I'm sure the UW will make major progress on this.
Meanwhile in Michigan, hunters are worried about a CWD outbreak along with a not yet controlled outbreak of bovine TB. In years past hunters have been asked to stop at DNR check stations and leave their deer heads for examination for TB. I did not see any of these stops on southbound I-75 this year.
The local news stations here all have "Problem Solver" segments where people call in problems about corrupt builders not finishing jobs, city works slacking off and not doing their jobs, etc.
I suggested this story to the local TV station who runs "Problem Solvers" before the first story ran in the Free Press about Ralsky. I guess they were not interested at the time.
Perhaps the reason this story has run twice in the newspapers and has not run on TV is that it can't be explained quickly to the public. It's not difficult to explain film showing a city worker goofing off on the job, but it's harder to first explain spam, then do the rest of the story.
SBC is now bundling Yahoo's so-called "services" with DSL. They install adware and spyware, then insist on an EULA that doesn't let you remove the stuff. How much of Yahoo's "sales" are actually based on that?
I managed to upgrade my dial up to SBC-Yahoo without using their install kit by going to a web site (very well hidden) for people with computers not capable of running the install kit. Setting up DUN and IE was easy - mail was not.
Yahoo's server authentication broke my old Eudora client. Ultimately I had to switch to Outlook Express (Bleah). Moving a subsidiary mail account went through a very intrusive sign up process.
Now I can get my e-mail on the web but even though I am paying for the account (through my ISP), I still get the usual ads and trash.
Believe it or not, this is an improvement over SBC's previous match with Prodigy!
And why, again, does domino manipulation constitute hacking?
One of the original uses of "hack" is to describe a stunt or practical joke. It also features the clever use of a mechanical device which makes it nerdly.
It's in the same spirit as writing an otherwise useless program that runs on a PDP-8 which will play music through a transistor radio placed next to the computer.
See http://hacks.mit.edu/
Because the first step to solving any problem is always to create more problems.
Especially in academics or government. Actually this is a corollary to the principle that generalizations eventually become untrue. Or in other words, the lies you teach undergraduates you unravel in graduate school.
After 5 years of programming, my favorite language has become assembler - not because I hate HLL's, but rather, because you get exactly what you code in assembler. There are no "Leaky Abstractions" in assembly.
Ah, but you are wrong, and I'm speaking as someone who has written over 100,000 lines of assembly code. The great majority of the time, when you're faced with a programming problem, you don't want to think about that problem in terms of bits and and bytes and machine instructions and so on. You want to think about the problem in a more abstract way.
I'd love to put Randy Hyde (author of High Level assembler) in the same room with Monte Davidoff (Multician, PL/I fan and author of the math package in Altair Basic).
Sometimes the abstraction is best cast at a lower level, that's one reason Knuth used MIX in his "Art of Computer Programming". Other times, higher level languages don't do the job.
Here are three examples:
1) Write a transparent filter for Windows 9x that runs in a DOS box. It must handle binary files without discarding LF on input and prefixing LF with CR on output. Try various C compilers and fail.
2) Translate Microsoft MBF (Microsoft Binary Format) single precision to IEEE singles. Yes you can do it in C, but the assembly version is compact and elegant (ignoring exponent underflow and de-normalization). Portable - no!
3) Examine the built in random number generator in PCC 1.2c. (DeSmet's C). It was supposed to be the same algorithm used in the so called "minimal standard" (also common to APL) but it's buggy. Not only does the C generated library code completely screw up by confusing unsigned and signed arithmetic, but it's a horror to debug. Even restricting yourself to 8088 code, a routine using simulated division is faster, cleaner and easier to verify as correct. On a 386+, even in real mode DOS, an assembly routine is a snap.
The only way to do something more easily or more efficiently is to restrict your scope. If you know something about a particular operation, or if you can make a few assumptions about it, your life because much easier.
On embedded or limited hardware systems, the overhead involved in high level abstraction sometimes 1) hurts performance 2) makes debugging difficult. Consider a simple task - putting an "A" in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Written in C it might be 14K or so of code. Written in C++ say 100K or so. On an Apple II it is 6 bytes. (lda #$c1, sta $400, rts). Now consider tracing through the three sets of code with a debugger.
On the other hand, if you have sufficient computing horsepower, abstraction is very nice. For small numbers of records, I can whip up a data tabulating program in AWK in a few seconds:
{a[$0]++}END{for(i in a)print a[i],i}
I can even write programs in GW-BASIC that are fast enough. But eventually the data sets get large enough so that it's back to the exercise wheel inside my cage for me!
We all knew that spammers weren't the brightest bulbs on the planet, but giving an interview with your real name and location to a national newspaper does seem a bit foolish, doesn't it?
Alan Ralsky recently starred in a front page spread in the Detroit News/Free Press. AFAIK, he's still in business, even though his home address and phone have been published on the Internet for a number of years.
"... is what FORTRAN is good for: number crunching. F77 is a perfect tool for many scientists who don't care about pointers or object oriented programming or nice graphical output subroutines or any other nice things that other programming languages have. They want something that will do some number crunching for them and won't screw up or cause problems."
I'm another old duffer who likes F77 with extensions. If I want to write in C or C++, I'll write in C or C++. Most numeric computation depends on good software libraries. Object oriented programming has no advantages in making library calls. In fact, it just adds another layer of abstraction and obscurity.
Re: Mumps, MUMPS, M
Since the remaining commercial version of this language is put out by a single company, it doesn't matter what the language is called, since Intersystems is going to be selling it.
The current status message, at approx 6:00 PM EDT is:
If you wish to speak with our network support staff, please call us at 1-800-900-0241.
Nothing about outages, but no status info either.
Problems at UUNet + MichNet/Merit would explain the increadibly slow connections I've observed accessing web sites and transferring files via http from sites at U. of Michigan and U. of Wisconsin today. I've never seen 600 bytes/sec from a site in the US until yesterday and today.