Are you aware that Canada is run by a dictator, prime ministers for life, Jean Chretien?! Here is our fearless leaders with a weapons of mass destructions. Be carefuls!
Anyone here ever had or have a SuperPet? Fortran, Basic, APL, Cobol and Pascal all in ROM? Incredibly cool at the time as otherwise you needed a mainframe to run such software. Does anyone know if an emulator exists?
I'm a Mac fan and don't like this attitude, which seems to be very common in the Mac world. One should not revel (too much) in the misfortune of others and you'll look silly when OS X is hit, as it almost certainly will one day. The fact you are up, running and productive while the PHBs and PHB wannabes on Windows are f***ed should be satisfaction enough.
the HP way, though laudable, represents a bygone era that simply can't be applied to modern business
You got that right. The old HP way was to make money with excellent engineering. The new way is to try to create a monopoly with cheap shoddy junk and drive up your stock with shady accounting practices (all with a wink and a nod from ol' Uncle Sam).
Could not an Open Source developer include a disclaimer like "Yes, this stuff has more bugs than you'll find under a big rock and if you use it most probably hackers will invade your system and steal your first born"? (I am NOT trolling here) Would this protect against being sued?
The problem comes down to: people now are no good and greedy. And getting what they deserve.
Will you pay $5 more for that product knowing that the company that made it provides decent health care for its employees? No, you'll buy the cheap knock off from the company that doesn't.
Will you pay more in taxes for a decent and humane health care system? NO WAY!
Will you vote for better health care? No, you'll vote for whatever manufactured issue corporate interests tell you on the TV to vote for. Everytime.
I get a kick out of the PC experts at work who daily price billy boxes as though they are buying 500 a week. Funny they only buy one about every 2 years and then gripe about it the whole time. The pissing matches between these bozos about who can buy ram or hard drives at the lowest price are very amusing.
Usually any money these PHBs and MCSEs and general idiots saved on their crafty computer shopping is wasted on continual upgrades and repairs. Not to mentions Windows troubleshooting. The worse the problem is and the longer the amount of time required to fix it seems to be a badge of honour.
Me: "You could have restored from a ghost image in 20 minutes but you spent 8 hours troubleshooting that DLL problem? Why?"
MCSE: "If I ever see the problem again I'll be able to fix it in 5 minutes."
Me: "When was the last time you ever saw the same problem twice that wasn't documented in TechNet?"
Sorry you lost your job (honestly). But being stuck in 1971 though means not having to worry about viruses, trojans, hackers, crackers, EULAs, Microsoft and BSODs. It means users using the computer to get the job done, not web surfing, playing minesweeper or struggling with the latest Outlook disaster. It means hardware, operating systems, compilers and utilities debugged over nearly 40 years that work 7/24 without a hiccup. Whats wrong with this?
Granted, JCL does suck, thats why there is VM/CMS.
At my university we had fun with the dork operators who would leave punched card decks or coffees/cokes on top of the printer. We would submit a job to overprint say 100 lines, causing the paper to become wet & weak, followed by say 7 page ejects. After making some incredible noises the printer would jam and the victim would usually raise the cover in a panic without remembering to first clean it off, causing whatever was on top to spill on the floor.
When they got wise to this we found after a little investigation that there was a "raise cover" command word for the printer. After this they taped a lot of little pyramids made out of punched cards to the top of the printer to remind the operators not to leave anything on top.
Yes, but remember you have to have a working reader. All the card readers I ever used would usually "PIC CHECK" (wtf did that lamp mean? I never found out) on a deck more than few months old unless the card reader was kept in excellent condition (meaning serviced weekly).
I used to use 'em until I saw APL being used on a Decwriter (a printing terminal) for the first time and immediately started hating the old cards.
However, there was one odd use I eventually found for the punched cards. I didn't always behave myself (sent nasty messages to other users, played super Startrek way too much) on the old York time sharing APL system at my university and would be punished by the operator by having my account "superlocked", that is, my accounts password would changed to 8 carriage return characters, which of course made it impossible to login from a terminal. However, good old York APL could actually accept APL programs on punched cards. Yes, it was a bitch to punch APL programs on cards but I found that with crafty keypunching you could code the 8 carriage return characters (EBCDIC X'15') on the York APL login card and thus successfully submit a job, the last line of which would be ")OFF:newpassword" to change the logon password to whatever I wanted. I was never superlocked out again for for than a few minutes.
The problem with the older TI calculators (and almost all other non RPN "scientific" ones) was that they used or use a poor algebraic entry system.
For example, say you wanted to calculate "sin(2+3)". On the TI the "sin" button immediately calculated the sin of the currently displayed number, so you had to enter "2 + 3 = sin". I found that this "moving around" of functions confused a lot of users and was a rich source of errors even for experienced users.
The way they should have done it is that all the functions should have been put on the stack, so you would enter "sin ( 2 + 3 ) =". I suspect this was not done as the stack would have required more RAM.
Disclaimer: I have not used a scientific calculator for some time now (I have a little pocket computer that runs Basic that I use as a calculator), so I don't know the situation with todays calculators. But I think that if done properly that algebraic entry is a better method, requiring little translation by the user from formula to keystrokes.
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Are you aware that Canada is run by a dictator, prime ministers for life, Jean Chretien?! Here is our fearless leaders with a weapons of mass destructions. Be carefuls!
Actually it usually ran on minis like the pdp 11 ya fathead, not mainframes.
For me the NOISER the drive is the better (well, to a point). I like the noise, helps me get to sleep.
yeah most of apple's stuff doesn't have to be constantly reinstalled
The George Event, a thermonuclear physics experiment
Yeahhhh!
Madnick sold out, now the U of W has as well. Whats next, Lynn Wheeler extolling the virtues of Microsoft's "trustworthy computing"?
You must be joking! I'll miss Cops, Trailer Park Boys and Oz! No freggin' way!
Agreed. These are the kinds of applications that call out for a drum; unfortunately nobody makes them anymore.
Anyone here ever had or have a SuperPet? Fortran, Basic, APL, Cobol and Pascal all in ROM? Incredibly cool at the time as otherwise you needed a mainframe to run such software. Does anyone know if an emulator exists?
I'm a Mac fan and don't like this attitude, which seems to be very common in the Mac world. One should not revel (too much) in the misfortune of others and you'll look silly when OS X is hit, as it almost certainly will one day. The fact you are up, running and productive while the PHBs and PHB wannabes on Windows are f***ed should be satisfaction enough.
Down with Soviet Spies!
the HP way, though laudable, represents a bygone era that simply can't be applied to modern business
You got that right. The old HP way was to make money with excellent engineering. The new way is to try to create a monopoly with cheap shoddy junk and drive up your stock with shady accounting practices (all with a wink and a nod from ol' Uncle Sam).
Could not an Open Source developer include a disclaimer like "Yes, this stuff has more bugs than you'll find under a big rock and if you use it most probably hackers will invade your system and steal your first born"? (I am NOT trolling here) Would this protect against being sued?
Wadda gonna do, expose us to the smell of your canuck undies? Don't you guys have running water up there?
You use that contraption on an airplane and I guarantee you your next stop will be Camp X-Ray.
Will you pay $5 more for that product knowing that the company that made it provides decent health care for its employees? No, you'll buy the cheap knock off from the company that doesn't.
Will you pay more in taxes for a decent and humane health care system? NO WAY!
Will you vote for better health care? No, you'll vote for whatever manufactured issue corporate interests tell you on the TV to vote for. Everytime.
Usually any money these PHBs and MCSEs and general idiots saved on their crafty computer shopping is wasted on continual upgrades and repairs. Not to mentions Windows troubleshooting. The worse the problem is and the longer the amount of time required to fix it seems to be a badge of honour.
Me: "You could have restored from a ghost image in 20 minutes but you spent 8 hours troubleshooting that DLL problem? Why?"
MCSE: "If I ever see the problem again I'll be able to fix it in 5 minutes."
Me: "When was the last time you ever saw the same problem twice that wasn't documented in TechNet?"
MCSE: "Errrrrr...."
Granted, JCL does suck, thats why there is VM/CMS.
When they got wise to this we found after a little investigation that there was a "raise cover" command word for the printer. After this they taped a lot of little pyramids made out of punched cards to the top of the printer to remind the operators not to leave anything on top.
I would dig thru the garbage looking for mispunched //$JOB cards with good account #s... never ran out heh heh heh.
Yes, but remember you have to have a working reader. All the card readers I ever used would usually "PIC CHECK" (wtf did that lamp mean? I never found out) on a deck more than few months old unless the card reader was kept in excellent condition (meaning serviced weekly).
However, there was one odd use I eventually found for the punched cards. I didn't always behave myself (sent nasty messages to other users, played super Startrek way too much) on the old York time sharing APL system at my university and would be punished by the operator by having my account "superlocked", that is, my accounts password would changed to 8 carriage return characters, which of course made it impossible to login from a terminal. However, good old York APL could actually accept APL programs on punched cards. Yes, it was a bitch to punch APL programs on cards but I found that with crafty keypunching you could code the 8 carriage return characters (EBCDIC X'15') on the York APL login card and thus successfully submit a job, the last line of which would be ")OFF:newpassword" to change the logon password to whatever I wanted. I was never superlocked out again for for than a few minutes.
Ok, so go ahead and laugh ...
IBM VM (VM/370, then known as VM/SP, now known as VM/ESA) has been around since 1967.
BTW it is OS/360 (MVS, now OS/390) is the OS that uses JCL, not VM.
For example, say you wanted to calculate "sin(2+3)". On the TI the "sin" button immediately calculated the sin of the currently displayed number, so you had to enter "2 + 3 = sin". I found that this "moving around" of functions confused a lot of users and was a rich source of errors even for experienced users.
The way they should have done it is that all the functions should have been put on the stack, so you would enter "sin ( 2 + 3 ) =". I suspect this was not done as the stack would have required more RAM.
Disclaimer: I have not used a scientific calculator for some time now (I have a little pocket computer that runs Basic that I use as a calculator), so I don't know the situation with todays calculators. But I think that if done properly that algebraic entry is a better method, requiring little translation by the user from formula to keystrokes.