Windows never had anything called "Presentation Manager"--that was the GUI shell for OS/2. Windows Explorer is the default GUI file/directory navigation tool, equivalent to GMC or Nautilus under GNOME, or Konqueror under KDE. The Windows GUI is simply referred to as USER, after the implementing library (originally user.dll, these days user32.dll).
Focus is the same in Windows as it ever was. There is the Microsoft Power Tool "Xmouse", which makes the mouse behave in a vaguely X-like manner. But it confuses some too-clever-for-their-own-good applications. Some UNIX-y friends who were new to UNIX initially turned on Xmouse, and later switched it off, as it caused more problems than it solved. It doesn't appear to have been ported to XP, and I doubt the older versions still work (not that they ever worked that well). As for personal taste, I prefer the Windows method for focus control, but then I'm used to it.
Sadly, text copy and paste between "console" (glass TTY) applications in Windows is still inconvenient. The default is bad, and "Quick Edit" is worse. There is third-party software to correct this deficiency (for instance, "Take Command" by JP Software), but it is difficult to use it with some interactive glass TTY apps as they scan the keyboard directly instead of reading from stdin. ("Take Command" addresses this with what it calls "Caveman mode", but years ago when I tried it I found it both unreliable and too CPU-expensive. Thankfully such apps are more and more rare.)
I haven't played with the.NET environment, but outside of that regex system libraries are still not standard equipment with Windows. That's an aftermarket part.
I'm not going to wade into the whole GUI / CLI debate, as it's going a bit far afield from my original point.
One final bit that might amuse you. Dave Cutler, the head of the original NT development project (and I assume still the head of its ongoing development), wanted to ship NT as a glass-TTY OS. The GUI would be a distinct application, as X/GNOME/KDE is distinct from Linux/Solaris/etc. Management overrode him, and NT shipped always using a GUI.
As for working out-of-the-box, I will go ahead and answer your rhetorical question: no. Windows comes with nearly none of those tools installed. But you're changing the subject. We were not discussing convenience, we were discussing ability. They said (or certainly strongly implied) that Windows was not capable of managing data in the method he suggested. I completely disagree.
Yes, it's inconvenient for a Windows user to download and install the extra applications (a better shell, all the command-line tools you'd want, perhaps Python). But this inconvenience is a trifle compared to switching operating systems, as g4dget had suggested would be necessary before Windows users could employ his data-management methodology.
p.s. I feel it's up to the user to decide for themselves what the point is of having a computer. My nephew doesn't use his computer for processing data, unless you feel "Red Alert 2" is an elaborate GUI for data processing. One could argue that it is. But I haven't seen it pre-installed on a computer yet.
p.p.s. I wasn't aware of "GNU" being a name or nickname for a particular operating system. Were you referring to "GNU/Linux", "GNU Hurd", or something else?
I didn't say one way or the other, but no, I have never actually run large scale computational experiments. And, no, I didn't make any recommendations on how to run them on Windows. That's because your original posting did a good job of describing one approach to solving this problem. My point was to correct your error in saying Windows was "no good for this sort of thing". It is entirely capable of doing "this sort of thing".
What I meant by "system services" was services offered to user programs by an operating system. Things like: files, directories, networking, and job control. ("System services" was the term we used in my operating systems class, lo these many years ago; is there some newer term I should have used instead?) UNIXes provide them, and yes indeed so does Windows, and so do many other desktop operating systems, which makes them perfectly workable tools for this sort of analysis.
My technical contribution seems to have passed you by, so I will state it once again: everything you mention in your original posting can be done, in the same way and using the same tools you mention, under Windows. Your assertion that a user must switch to UNIX in order to do these things is wrong.
In your reply dated 4/20 @6:30pm, you say:
If you have to use Windows, stick to relational databases, because that's how large amounts of data are handled on Windows.
I don't know how you came to this conclusion. Perhaps it was the convention in environments you have encountered. But do not mistake convention for the limits of capability. Indeed, let me assure you that Windows operating systems are more than capable of storing large amounts of data as files in a directory hierarchy, with meaningful filenames and in plain text, and processed with shell text processing tools. Just as you suggest to the intrepid original poster.
If it would help, I could reply with a point-by-point analysis of your original posting saying "yep, you can do that under Windows", "yep, you can do that under Windows too, and here's how", but I felt it would be redundant. Would you like to see it anyway?
If you are using Windows, switch to UNIX. Windows may be good for starting up MS Office, but it is no good for this sort of thing. If you absolutely must use Windows for data analysis, stick your data into a relational database or Excel spreadsheets.
What is it intrinsically about Windows that makes it "no good for this sort of thing"? Windows provides all the system services you need to do these tasks, and all the tools you mention are available natively for Windows. Come to think of it, they're available for OS/2, QNX, Mac OS X, and nearly every other desktop operating system out there. One could erase every mention of UNIX-specificness from your post, and not only would your post still hold true, it would be an improvement. Your knee-jerk UNIX advocacy, nestled in and disguised as helpful advice, is a disservice to the original poster.
Suggesting that the original poster must be using UNIX in order to get their work done is wrong in several senses of the word; it is not factual, and it is irresponsible. On the contrary--I am certain that their current choice of operating system is entirely up to the task. He or she should feel absolutely no onus to switch.
If you really want to support an artist, download what you want from the P2P networks (or FTP or IRC), and send the artists a check in the mail.
I'd love to do this if this was a legally supported model. I would love to hear an artist saying "For $0.50 per track I grant you the right to own a copy of our music." I rather suspect plenty of artists would love to enact a system like that, as this would be far and away more money per license per track than they ever get to see.
Unfortunately, I haven't heard of this happening. I wonder sometimes if this isn't the recording industry protecting itself through solidarity; if, say, Courtney Love set up a site where you could buy license to her tracks for $0.50, would she have a lot more trouble getting her next record produced, distributed, and advertised?
Also, I should point out that many artists don't own their own recordings. (The record industry really has a wonderful scam worked out; they rip off the artists coming and going.) Thus, even if Ms. Love wanted to set up such a system, she might not be legally empowered to grant licenses to her recordings.
In the meantime, what you suggest is moral; however it is neither legal nor practical. Sending a check to Ms. Love does not legally obviate your need for a legal license to Mr. Love's music. Also, Ms. Love receiving ten checks for $2 apiece wouldn't be worth her time to cash; Ms. Love receiving ten thousand checks for $2 apiece would be a logistical nightmare.
If any such system comes to pass, and it had music I wanted, I would very likely sign up. Until then, I will keep my checks to myself, and continue buying CDs... lots, and lots, of CDs.
Just as a point of reference, I don't think any professional astronomers think oxygen and nitrogen are required for life on other planets.
Certainly they weren't present when life began in the rocky soup of the Earth, billions of years ago. When life began on the earth, the atmosphere was mostly hydrogen-rich gases, like methane, ammonia, and water vapor.
IIRC my science, gaseous oxygen is in many ways anethema to life... it's caustic. The only reason we breathe it is because the earliest forms of life gave off oxygen as a waste gas! As a result, the atmosphere became loaded with oxygen, so the animals that attempted to move on land had to adapt or die.
(The first two paragraphs are information from the second episode of Cosmos (now available on DVD!), One Voice In The Cosmic Fugue. The last paragraph is partially from that, and partially me dimly remembering an SF story with aliens who were revolted at humans breathing oxygen.)
Finally, let me say that astronomers are for the most part really really smart folks. Dare I say it, brainy eggheads. They are
entirely well-researched and current on the science of the beginnings of life, and
plenty smart enough to cover their asses with "maybes" and "it's possible" when they don't know for sure.
I didn't see the article where they claim this cast doubt on the existance of life on Europa... the New Scientist article didn't address it, and the Google link in the original article didn't work for me. But I bet what the astronomers said was accurate to the best of our current scientific knowledge.
You've mentioned several times in your work that you can "taste the difference" between closely-related ingredients. In the episode "Yogurt: Good Milk Gone Bad", you said you can tell whether or not homemade yogurt was made with organic milk. And in "I'm Just Here For The Food", you say (emphasis mine):
I can
always tell when food has been sprinkled with table salt because salt is the first thing I taste.
From your book, I can tell you're a genuine scientist; your experiment with grilling steak tells me that. So: can you back up these assertions? Can you really tell? Have you done a double-blind taste test and everything?
p.s. Because of you, I now keep brown paper bags and a stapler near the microwave...
We've seen you making egg souffles, pasta salad with marinated artichoke hearts, curried pickled cauliflower... but what do you eat when other people aren't watching? What are your guilty pleasures?
Let me recommend something that I would have loved as a college student: a set of Etymotic Research headphones. They are reference-quality headphones which also act as earplugs--thus, you simultaneously drown out 27dB of noise and get high-fidelity sound reproduction. A set of those and a portable MP3 player would prepare her for long study sessions almost anywhere.
An ex-girlfriend of mine told me she was very popular on the first day in the dorms because she brought a hammer. Everybody wanted to put up pictures, shelves, etc. A small, basic, but complete tool box might well be a godsend. I'd go with a Leatherman, a nailing hammer, a rubber mallet, and one roll each of duct and electrical tape.
A lockpick set is overkill. Probably all she needs is a Slim Jim... the car-door-opening kind, not the imitation-beef-jerky kind.
And hey! if you really want to be subversive, get her a pair of fur-lined handcuffs!
Slashdot Mirror
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Windows never had anything called "Presentation Manager"--that was the GUI shell for OS/2. Windows Explorer is the default GUI file/directory navigation tool, equivalent to GMC or Nautilus under GNOME, or Konqueror under KDE. The Windows GUI is simply referred to as USER, after the implementing library (originally user.dll, these days user32.dll).
-
Focus is the same in Windows as it ever was. There is the Microsoft Power Tool "Xmouse", which makes the mouse behave in a vaguely X-like manner. But it confuses some too-clever-for-their-own-good applications. Some UNIX-y friends who were new to UNIX initially turned on Xmouse, and later switched it off, as it caused more problems than it solved. It doesn't appear to have been ported to XP, and I doubt the older versions still work (not that they ever worked that well). As for personal taste, I prefer the Windows method for focus control, but then I'm used to it.
-
Sadly, text copy and paste between "console" (glass TTY) applications in Windows is still inconvenient. The default is bad, and "Quick Edit" is worse. There is third-party software to correct this deficiency (for instance, "Take Command" by JP Software), but it is difficult to use it with some interactive glass TTY apps as they scan the keyboard directly instead of reading from stdin. ("Take Command" addresses this with what it calls "Caveman mode", but years ago when I tried it I found it both unreliable and too CPU-expensive. Thankfully such apps are more and more rare.)
-
I haven't played with the
.NET environment, but outside of that regex system libraries are still not standard equipment with Windows. That's an aftermarket part.
I'm not going to wade into the whole GUI / CLI debate, as it's going a bit far afield from my original point.One final bit that might amuse you. Dave Cutler, the head of the original NT development project (and I assume still the head of its ongoing development), wanted to ship NT as a glass-TTY OS. The GUI would be a distinct application, as X/GNOME/KDE is distinct from Linux/Solaris/etc. Management overrode him, and NT shipped always using a GUI.
Yes, it's inconvenient for a Windows user to download and install the extra applications (a better shell, all the command-line tools you'd want, perhaps Python). But this inconvenience is a trifle compared to switching operating systems, as g4dget had suggested would be necessary before Windows users could employ his data-management methodology.
p.s. I feel it's up to the user to decide for themselves what the point is of having a computer. My nephew doesn't use his computer for processing data, unless you feel "Red Alert 2" is an elaborate GUI for data processing. One could argue that it is. But I haven't seen it pre-installed on a computer yet.
p.p.s. I wasn't aware of "GNU" being a name or nickname for a particular operating system. Were you referring to "GNU/Linux", "GNU Hurd", or something else?
What I meant by "system services" was services offered to user programs by an operating system. Things like: files, directories, networking, and job control. ("System services" was the term we used in my operating systems class, lo these many years ago; is there some newer term I should have used instead?) UNIXes provide them, and yes indeed so does Windows, and so do many other desktop operating systems, which makes them perfectly workable tools for this sort of analysis.
My technical contribution seems to have passed you by, so I will state it once again: everything you mention in your original posting can be done, in the same way and using the same tools you mention, under Windows. Your assertion that a user must switch to UNIX in order to do these things is wrong.
In your reply dated 4/20 @6:30pm, you say:
I don't know how you came to this conclusion. Perhaps it was the convention in environments you have encountered. But do not mistake convention for the limits of capability. Indeed, let me assure you that Windows operating systems are more than capable of storing large amounts of data as files in a directory hierarchy, with meaningful filenames and in plain text, and processed with shell text processing tools. Just as you suggest to the intrepid original poster.If it would help, I could reply with a point-by-point analysis of your original posting saying "yep, you can do that under Windows", "yep, you can do that under Windows too, and here's how", but I felt it would be redundant. Would you like to see it anyway?
What is it intrinsically about Windows that makes it "no good for this sort of thing"? Windows provides all the system services you need to do these tasks, and all the tools you mention are available natively for Windows. Come to think of it, they're available for OS/2, QNX, Mac OS X, and nearly every other desktop operating system out there. One could erase every mention of UNIX-specificness from your post, and not only would your post still hold true, it would be an improvement. Your knee-jerk UNIX advocacy, nestled in and disguised as helpful advice, is a disservice to the original poster.
Suggesting that the original poster must be using UNIX in order to get their work done is wrong in several senses of the word; it is not factual, and it is irresponsible. On the contrary--I am certain that their current choice of operating system is entirely up to the task. He or she should feel absolutely no onus to switch.
I'd love to do this if this was a legally supported model. I would love to hear an artist saying "For $0.50 per track I grant you the right to own a copy of our music." I rather suspect plenty of artists would love to enact a system like that, as this would be far and away more money per license per track than they ever get to see.
Unfortunately, I haven't heard of this happening. I wonder sometimes if this isn't the recording industry protecting itself through solidarity; if, say, Courtney Love set up a site where you could buy license to her tracks for $0.50, would she have a lot more trouble getting her next record produced, distributed, and advertised?
Also, I should point out that many artists don't own their own recordings. (The record industry really has a wonderful scam worked out; they rip off the artists coming and going.) Thus, even if Ms. Love wanted to set up such a system, she might not be legally empowered to grant licenses to her recordings.
In the meantime, what you suggest is moral; however it is neither legal nor practical. Sending a check to Ms. Love does not legally obviate your need for a legal license to Mr. Love's music. Also, Ms. Love receiving ten checks for $2 apiece wouldn't be worth her time to cash; Ms. Love receiving ten thousand checks for $2 apiece would be a logistical nightmare.
If any such system comes to pass, and it had music I wanted, I would very likely sign up. Until then, I will keep my checks to myself, and continue buying CDs... lots, and lots, of CDs.
Certainly they weren't present when life began in the rocky soup of the Earth, billions of years ago. When life began on the earth, the atmosphere was mostly hydrogen-rich gases, like methane, ammonia, and water vapor.
IIRC my science, gaseous oxygen is in many ways anethema to life... it's caustic. The only reason we breathe it is because the earliest forms of life gave off oxygen as a waste gas! As a result, the atmosphere became loaded with oxygen, so the animals that attempted to move on land had to adapt or die.
(The first two paragraphs are information from the second episode of Cosmos (now available on DVD!), One Voice In The Cosmic Fugue. The last paragraph is partially from that, and partially me dimly remembering an SF story with aliens who were revolted at humans breathing oxygen.)
Finally, let me say that astronomers are for the most part really really smart folks. Dare I say it, brainy eggheads. They are
- entirely well-researched and current on the science of the beginnings of life, and
- plenty smart enough to cover their asses with "maybes" and "it's possible" when they don't know for sure.
I didn't see the article where they claim this cast doubt on the existance of life on Europa... the New Scientist article didn't address it, and the Google link in the original article didn't work for me. But I bet what the astronomers said was accurate to the best of our current scientific knowledge.From your book, I can tell you're a genuine scientist; your experiment with grilling steak tells me that. So: can you back up these assertions? Can you really tell? Have you done a double-blind taste test and everything?
p.s. Because of you, I now keep brown paper bags and a stapler near the microwave...
Frozen Ding-Dongs?
Popeye's Chicken?
Deep-fried Twinkies?
An ex-girlfriend of mine told me she was very popular on the first day in the dorms because she brought a hammer. Everybody wanted to put up pictures, shelves, etc. A small, basic, but complete tool box might well be a godsend. I'd go with a Leatherman, a nailing hammer, a rubber mallet, and one roll each of duct and electrical tape.
A lockpick set is overkill. Probably all she needs is a Slim Jim... the car-door-opening kind, not the imitation-beef-jerky kind.
And hey! if you really want to be subversive, get her a pair of fur-lined handcuffs!
larry