I had the "pleasure" to work on eveolutive maintenance of a large Progress project for 4 years.
Progress, despite its name, is really a collection of relic, non-standard concepts and technologies, with bizzarre and arbitrary ideas like implicit transaction scope, rollback on memory data structures, a 4GL that grown in a sort of Frankestein monster of a language, pathetical error checking, inflexible data model and convoluted syntax to replicate stuff, like cursors, that other DBMS had sported for decades.
Add horrible performance under ODBC/JDBC ("but we have solved that now, and we needed only 3 major revisions of the platform to get it right!"), grudgily, non-integrated support for SQL (SQL-89 to be precise) a bolted-on-the-side OO (released this February, so untested in the field, apart from the obvious fact that they added another cartload of statements to a bloated language) and the fact that anything invented in the last 30 years (from sockets to XML) is either impossible to do or extremely clunky, and you have "Progress".
My opinion is that it survived because it was quite successfully in the 80s, and created a niche industry centered around specific vertical solutions. Imagine Powerbuilder without the OO or the ability to interface with diverse RDBMS and you will have a vague idea of what Progress is.
Progress - the company - actually controls an umbrella of diverse technologies, some even very interesting like Sonic, but Progress - the product, is something that should have died a long ago, or be revamped instead of adding more and more stuff without ever deprecating language features from 5+ versions ago.
Re:Sounds like typical video game designers...
on
Playing The Escape
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· Score: 1
This sounds like a solid design effort, worthy of most video game levels.
I recommended Real Basic over any other language (like Java) because from your original post I reckoned that your company cannot affor a complete rewrite... RB claims to be similar enough to make porting a breeze, and even offer a conversion tool that could theoretically make things easier (even if you will have to do some work to complete the port).
I like Java myself, but any language apart from RB will force you to a complete rewrite and there is no specific support for converting from VB to Java... or at least noone I know.
You probably already know about this, but in case you didn't, realbasic (www.realbasic.com) is considered the most viable migration path for people with visualbasic code and skills.
Have a look (I cannot vouch for them personally, because I have exactly 0 experience with VB myself, but everything someone ask for a VB "replacement", Real Basic always crops up).
Can't say about Apple I (never seen one directly) but I can assure you that Apple ][ had a Reset button, too.
It had a stronger spring under it so you wouldn't push it "by accident", and IIRC there was a switch on the motherboard so that you could decide to have to press CTRL+RESET together, for extra security.
But imagine a world where an 8mhz 286 with 2-4 MEG of RAM was fast enough to do everything you do today. We could have been building on that for nearly 20 years.
Today I have a Gig of RAM and a 3Ghz CPU. It's barely adequate on many apps. This story certainly makes me ask "what if?"
Agreed. I noticed that with old, stable HW (e.g.: Apple ][, the old Atari 2600)... when the hw base did not change (no trace of Moore's law), SW tended to routinely set new records in terms of efficiency/features/power.
On the other hand, there was much less interoperability (i.e. none whatsoever) among the various models/makes etc.
Perhaps the best of both worlds would be a slower cycle of Moore's law coupled with today's multiplatform-oriented stuff (USB, WWW interfaces...)
Can you, or anyone else, please provide pointers to a *technical* overview, possibly including code examples?
A book would be the best thing, if such a beast does exist, but web pages/PDFs could do.
Thanks.
You could go for a (preferably non-competitive) Martial Art.
Works for me, at least. I study Aikido.
Note that I am talking more in the context of the original post (i.e. avoiding depression, having something interesting and distracting to look forward to at the end of the day) more than "fitness".
...There were plenty of times I'd take a long hike in the woods and sit down in the middle of the woods on a log and program on my PDA for a few hours...
Would you mind telling me what did you program in (on your PDA)? I sometimes wonder if it can be used for prototyping small algorithms while commuting, for example, but I never actually found out an "IDE" (in the sense of editor/runtime env. combo) for it.
Opinions?
Two things I have already re-implemented a couple of times, and which are (IMO) easy enough to do in a couple of hours, and good enough to get a feel for a specific language:
1) Today
An old program (may had different names on different OSes) that, given the system date, will spew forth a list of things that happened in the past on the same date.
Tricky part: you can augment its files adding programmable stuff like "on the third sunday of august, show this message" or "if the 4th of October is a Saturday, print this" plus reminders that appear n-days before the actual event.
2) Simplistic accountancy
This is even easier. Write a small program which consumes.csv files containing date, short description, amount and a specific string which acts as a sort of "EXPENSE TYPE" marker. Sum up all expenses by type (i.e. FOOD, RENT, CAR, MAGAZINES, BOOK...) and calculate the percentage for each different type vs. the total of all expenses.
Example of a record:
"20/05/2004","Sony Clie' battery",-23.45,"PDA"
Make it work for single files, or for all files matching a regexp:
While I agree with most of your post, I'd like to add that you'd better not to let your dog sleep on the bed.
This was covered in conferece by a Vet specializing in psychological rehab and training for dogs (especially for dogs who have been taken to a pool/shelter).
I do community work at a local animal shelter, this was a series of conferences to help the people to better work with the dogs and the people who wanted to adopt them.
There are some signals/behaviours that could confuse the dog idea of his own place in your household hierarchy. Your relationship with the dog works best if he (she) understands that the the human is the "pack-leader" (and that any other human in the household is higher in the hierarchy).
Making him sleep on the bed gives the wrong signal. Just like having the dog eat before the humans.
It's an interesting theory that you provide, but "it was all a dream" is not what I'd call a hallmark of cinematic greatness either. It would negate a lot of the (apparently) illogical things about the movie, but not really absolve it from laziness in the writing.
It depends. If you have an absurd movie and then the main character wakes up and openly states "it was just a dream" (possibly with a last detail that shows the audience how there was something real in it) you have something that is completely cliched.
On the other hand, if you create a movie which "works" like a dream, but you never "officially" declare it as such, you are trying something a little more daring... in fact, the vast majority of people will not get it, and will blame your movie as one of "Worst movie I had ever seen".
This is just my theory, (i.e. prepend a large "IMHO" sign to it) and I will not say that "Signs" is an exceptionally good film, but I am sorry that most people stopped at the most superficial level ("Water-Soluble Aliens... Blecch!!!") without even trying to look for something else in it. Especially because the director was already famous for movies with surprising elements in them, and should not be dismissed firsthand like, say "Independence Day" with its own brand of ridicolously implausible ideas.
(btw, sorry for any mistakes in trying to explain my POW, English is not my first language).
I already explained what the actual meaning of the film was (IMHO), so please have a look here (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=76036&cid=679 3075) before the usual tirade about how water-soluble aliens are "implausible"...
MIT Technology Review had an article about MS new research lab in China a few weeks ago.
You could check it ("The World's Hottest Computer Lab" by: Gregory T. Huang) online for more info, but it requires PAID subscription.
I use putty and like it, but found it severely limted regarding keyboard emulation. I connect from windows to a Sun machine to access a legacy application.
Such application expect "terminals" to be vt100 or vt320 compatible. Unfortunately, some of the function keys available under vt100 do not work from putty, and I have been unable to find a way to configure it for specific key emulation.
Any tips?
Does it include something like, well "QDBC"?
on
A Taste of Qt 4
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· Score: 1
i.e. a standardized way to interact with relational DBs (like ODBC and JDBC)?
If the answer is "No", I cannot really see the point.
Here is CICAP entry on this phenomenon (in Italian sorry).
CICAP is a group of scientists who routinely investigate (and debunk) any so-called supernatural phenomenon in Italy (they cover anything: ESP, religious miracles, even omeopathy). Sort of a James Randi fan club.
I suppose most of Slashdot's reader cannot read Italian: the gist of it is that they suspect a prank. According to similar phenomena they investigated in the past, the first accidents are caused by natural causes (short-circuits, overload).
But then people start talking, and making hypotesis, and someone starts causing this as a prank or a way to get attention, media coverage etc. Then CICAP arrives, and start looking aroud, and everything goes back to normal.
CICAP sums this as follows:
100% of phenomena happen when controls are at 0%
0% of phenomena happen when controls are at 100%
Slashdot Mirror
About "Signs", here is my personal take on it (contains spoilers) http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=76036&cid=6793 075
And I think that the idea is at the basis of all his movies. I.e. everyone of his movies is a different take on a different dream.
I had the "pleasure" to work on eveolutive maintenance of a large Progress project for 4 years.
Progress, despite its name, is really a collection of relic, non-standard concepts and technologies, with bizzarre and arbitrary ideas like implicit transaction scope, rollback on memory data structures, a 4GL that grown in a sort of Frankestein monster of a language, pathetical error checking, inflexible data model and convoluted syntax to replicate stuff, like cursors, that other DBMS had sported for decades.
Add horrible performance under ODBC/JDBC ("but we have solved that now, and we needed only 3 major revisions of the platform to get it right!"), grudgily, non-integrated support for SQL (SQL-89 to be precise) a bolted-on-the-side OO (released this February, so untested in the field, apart from the obvious fact that they added another cartload of statements to a bloated language) and the fact that anything invented in the last 30 years (from sockets to XML) is either impossible to do or extremely clunky, and you have "Progress".
My opinion is that it survived because it was quite successfully in the 80s, and created a niche industry centered around specific vertical solutions.
Imagine Powerbuilder without the OO or the ability to interface with diverse RDBMS and you will have a vague idea of what Progress is.
Progress - the company - actually controls an umbrella of diverse technologies, some even very interesting like Sonic, but Progress - the product, is something that should have died a long ago, or be revamped instead of adding more and more stuff without ever deprecating language features from 5+ versions ago.
This sounds like a solid design effort, worthy of most video game levels.
Dunno. Do they have crates in it?
Robodoc is similar to Doxygen but is more liberal in the languages it can recognize/work with (i.e. it does not require a C-family syntax).
http://www.xs4all.nl/~rfsber/Robo/robodoc.html
A fairly obscure Italian boardgame from 1994.
Check more about it here: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/game/7580
I recommended Real Basic over any other language (like Java) because from your original post I reckoned that your company cannot affor a complete rewrite... RB claims to be similar enough to make porting a breeze, and even offer a conversion tool that could theoretically make things easier (even if you will have to do some work to complete the port).
I like Java myself, but any language apart from RB will force you to a complete rewrite and there is no specific support for converting from VB to Java... or at least noone I know.
You probably already know about this, but in case you didn't, realbasic (www.realbasic.com) is considered the most viable migration path for people with visualbasic code and skills.
Have a look (I cannot vouch for them personally, because I have exactly 0 experience with VB myself, but everything someone ask for a VB "replacement", Real Basic always crops up).
HTH.
Disclaimer: I work for Atos Origin.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atos_Origin will give you the meaning/history of the name.
Can't say about Apple I (never seen one directly) but I can assure you that Apple ][ had a Reset button, too.
It had a stronger spring under it so you wouldn't push it "by accident", and IIRC there was a switch on the motherboard so that you could decide to have to press CTRL+RESET together, for extra security.
...
But imagine a world where an 8mhz 286 with 2-4 MEG of RAM was fast enough to do everything you do today. We could have been building on that for nearly 20 years.
Today I have a Gig of RAM and a 3Ghz CPU. It's barely adequate on many apps. This story certainly makes me ask "what if?"
Agreed. I noticed that with old, stable HW (e.g.: Apple ][, the old Atari 2600)... when the hw base did not change (no trace of Moore's law), SW tended to routinely set new records in terms of efficiency/features/power.
On the other hand, there was much less interoperability (i.e. none whatsoever) among the various models/makes etc.
Perhaps the best of both worlds would be a slower cycle of Moore's law coupled with today's multiplatform-oriented stuff (USB, WWW interfaces...)
Real B-movies started with a title, next they made a poster, then they made the movie, and then they copied it down in the script.
Hey, it works for technical documents!
Most of the answers to the article point to PDF.
Anyone can compare with "Altova Authentic"? (see http://www.altova.com/products_doc.html).
Can you, or anyone else, please provide pointers to a *technical* overview, possibly including code examples? A book would be the best thing, if such a beast does exist, but web pages/PDFs could do. Thanks.
You could go for a (preferably non-competitive) Martial Art.
Works for me, at least. I study Aikido.
Note that I am talking more in the context of the original post (i.e. avoiding depression, having something interesting and distracting to look forward to at the end of the day) more than "fitness".
...There were plenty of times I'd take a long hike in the woods and sit down in the middle of the woods on a log and program on my PDA for a few hours... Would you mind telling me what did you program in (on your PDA)? I sometimes wonder if it can be used for prototyping small algorithms while commuting, for example, but I never actually found out an "IDE" (in the sense of editor/runtime env. combo) for it. Opinions?
1) Today
An old program (may had different names on different OSes) that, given the system date, will spew forth a list of things that happened in the past on the same date.
Tricky part: you can augment its files adding programmable stuff like "on the third sunday of august, show this message" or "if the 4th of October is a Saturday, print this" plus reminders that appear n-days before the actual event.
2) Simplistic accountancy
This is even easier. Write a small program which consumes
Example of a record:
Make it work for single files, or for all files matching a regexp:
Thanks for the tip. I have just added the book you suggested to my Amazon basket. (it's by Patricia PhD McConnell, right?)
While I agree with most of your post, I'd like to add that you'd better not to let your dog sleep on the bed.
This was covered in conferece by a Vet specializing in psychological rehab and training for dogs (especially for dogs who have been taken to a pool/shelter).
I do community work at a local animal shelter, this was a series of conferences to help the people to better work with the dogs and the people who wanted to adopt them.
There are some signals/behaviours that could confuse the dog idea of his own place in your household hierarchy. Your relationship with the dog works best if he (she) understands that the the human is the "pack-leader" (and that any other human in the household is higher in the hierarchy).
Making him sleep on the bed gives the wrong signal. Just like having the dog eat before the humans.
It's an interesting theory that you provide, but "it was all a dream" is not what I'd call a hallmark of cinematic greatness either. It would negate a lot of the (apparently) illogical things about the movie, but not really absolve it from laziness in the writing.
It depends. If you have an absurd movie and then the main character wakes up and openly states "it was just a dream" (possibly with a last detail that shows the audience how there was something real in it) you have something that is completely cliched.
On the other hand, if you create a movie which "works" like a dream, but you never "officially" declare it as such, you are trying something a little more daring... in fact, the vast majority of people will not get it, and will blame your movie as one of "Worst movie I had ever seen".
This is just my theory, (i.e. prepend a large "IMHO" sign to it) and I will not say that "Signs" is an exceptionally good film, but I am sorry that most people stopped at the most superficial level ("Water-Soluble Aliens... Blecch!!!") without even trying to look for something else in it.
Especially because the director was already famous for movies with surprising elements in them, and should not be dismissed firsthand like, say "Independence Day" with its own brand of ridicolously implausible ideas.
(btw, sorry for any mistakes in trying to explain my POW, English is not my first language).
I already explained what the actual meaning of the film was (IMHO), so please have a look here (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=76036&cid=679 3075) before the usual tirade about how water-soluble aliens are "implausible"...
MIT Technology Review had an article about MS new research lab in China a few weeks ago. You could check it ("The World's Hottest Computer Lab" by: Gregory T. Huang) online for more info, but it requires PAID subscription.
Except that "f1", for example, works fine, but there is no way (that I could find, at least) to emulate "f5". Or any "f" after "f4".
Other terminal emulators I used in the past were able to somehow make even obscure key combo work.
Apparently vt100 emulation in putty is more about the output than the input.
I use putty and like it, but found it severely limted regarding keyboard emulation. I connect from windows to a Sun machine to access a legacy application. Such application expect "terminals" to be vt100 or vt320 compatible. Unfortunately, some of the function keys available under vt100 do not work from putty, and I have been unable to find a way to configure it for specific key emulation. Any tips?
i.e. a standardized way to interact with relational DBs (like ODBC and JDBC)?
If the answer is "No", I cannot really see the point.
First of all, this is pretty old news in Italy.
Here is CICAP entry on this phenomenon (in Italian sorry).
CICAP is a group of scientists who routinely investigate (and debunk) any so-called supernatural phenomenon in Italy (they cover anything: ESP, religious miracles, even omeopathy). Sort of a James Randi fan club.
I suppose most of Slashdot's reader cannot read Italian: the gist of it is that they suspect a prank. According to similar phenomena they investigated in the past, the first accidents are caused by natural causes (short-circuits, overload).
But then people start talking, and making hypotesis, and someone starts causing this as a prank or a way to get attention, media coverage etc. Then CICAP arrives, and start looking aroud, and everything goes back to normal.
CICAP sums this as follows: 100% of phenomena happen when controls are at 0% 0% of phenomena happen when controls are at 100%