Many of the older IBMs (and probably the newer ones?) came with (by default or as an option) asset tracking capabilities - I know all of my smaller ones had them by default (including the RFID unit) - though my bigger ones do not come with them (I guess because you'd need a few people or a forklift to move them). You may want to look into that for your IBM servers. It included (among other features) RFID tracking to know when/if a machine was moved, moving, being removed, etc.
You have REXX interpreters for linux, and perl, python, and other interpreted languages for OS/2 (even bash,afaik). Rexx was great, easy to learn and clear to read, as far i remembe, but if you already manage perl it will look very limted.
No it wont. I started on Perl... learned REXX, and never went back. REXX is far more capable, especially with a plethora of "REXX Add-On DLLs" that allow it to do just about anything. And of course, on OS/2, it can "do everything and more - including interfacing with much of the WPS, networking (NetBIOS, TCPBEUI, TCP/IP, etc), interfacing with memory subsystems, calling other non-REXX DLLs and in various cases, interact with and/or control various PM and CLI apps.
Are you sure? Some folks at IBM disagree. It was not released to many people. Odin was partially based on some of the work that did make it out (DAXIE to be specific).
And odds are they were using the Watcom Compiler, who's Windows support I considered shit. OS/2 and protected mode DOS however, it was pretty solid.
Or VAC++ or C-Set/2 and simply compiling for Win32 environment instead of OS/2.
I see your point, but perhaps it would be possible to run OS/2 on powerful virtual machines? That way you could have the visualization software deal with the hardware.
Most of the setups in question driving this movement require a lot of specialized device drivers. Thus, a VM wouldnt quite work for them.
Re:An updated Workplace Shell would be great
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 1
The OS/2 WPS was a mess, gleefully ignoring years of UI design built into contemporary operating systems.
Ummm... what? You mean it wasnt like Win 3.1? What other UI design was there that was prominent back in 1992? And it was such a mess that Microsoft copied it (yes, it, not MacOS) for Win95 (check the DOJ court docs and such for proof).
There is no doubt it was powerful, but the WPS was very easy to destablize (e.g. by installing an app that had WPS SOM objects),
Really? Are you sure? Every true/native OS/2 app is a collection WPS SOM objects or acts like one. There were some poorly written ones that didnt work perhaps... but those were rare. And even in that event, an OS/2 system runs TWO Workplace Shells... not one. If an app crashes the WPS, OS/2 switches the context info and such to the second copy and kills the first... then spawns yet another background copy of the WPS for the possibility of another crash. I have rarely seen WPS crashes or "destabilization"
it was very ugly to look at
Compared to Win3.1 again? Really? You cant change history by repeatedly saying "was" but forgetting that Win3.1 was the only other competing standard at the time.
, and employed some arcane / bizarre notions of usability thanks to CUA. Even simple things like cutting and pasting were far complicated than the equivalent Windows / Mac.
Huh? You mean "select", right click, copy... click in field, right click, "paste" - wow, that's complex... and the way virtually everything does it nowadays...
Opening a simple object's settings might reveal some ugly notebook style dialog with tabs running down two axis with buttons on tabs leading to even more dialogs.
Ah... you are comparing OS/2 2.0's setup... the only thing "ugly" about that was not a ton of eye candy... that was changed in later releases to top style tabs... which are far nicer to use and look at that WinXP's variant that does row upon row of tabs. Instead, it does it in a way that was later adopted by Firefox for website tabs in it's multi-tabbed interface.
Even in its day it compared quite poorly against the Windows 95+ interface. Win95 had it's own faults (e.g. shortcuts sucked compared to shadows), but it was cleaner, simpler, and more responsive.
It (Win95) was never more responsive for the feature set. Win95 was slower due to the overhead of using a web browser component to open every folder view.
I don't see any reason at all to dig up WPS for any reason except nostalgia. It might be nice if GNOME/KDE had a better support for "live" objects much like SOM but I hoped they learnt from the mistakes of WPS if/when they implement them.
I dont see anything in your post that resembles reality.
There are two EDM machines that run OS/2 where I work. Both are less than 5 years old.
And a number of specialized laser machines, assembly line machines, transportation machines (ie: train switching and control), power plant controllers and on and on.
It had the ability to be reliable. I used to work for a company developing telephony voice response applications. The vast majority of our voice response units ran OS/2. We had dinosaurs still running MS OS/2 1.3, most running Warp. I can't remember if we ever sent any out with 4.0. It wasn't unusual to have uptime over a year even with heavy call traffic.
And the newer versions of the boards (Win only versions of the Voice reponse boards and the fax boards) could not handle nearly as many ports as the original OS/2 counterparts. To think an ancient 486 (or even 386 back in the Warp 3 days) could handle 64 lines at a time with no hiccups. The later Windows replacements required a lot more hardware to come anywhere close. NEC's IVR system for one, was amazing running on Warp 3 and Warp 4.
And even today, OS/2 still has pretty much those same memory requirements. The only place it differs is in supporting various Win Ports (such as Firefox and OpenOffice) or Linux ports (such as mPlayer, KMP, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc) where the greater functionality of the app (not the OS's needs) require more CPU power.
I remember OS/2 being the opposite of reliable. I used versions 2.1 and 3.0. Did they make a quantum leap in 4.0, or are you just speaking nonsense?
No... you are just speaking nonsense. I've used OS/2 since v2 BETA up to and including the latest eComStation releases. I still support a bunch of OS/2 boxes - that is if you consider "support" cleaning the dust out of them every now and then while they merrily continue to run the plethora of server side apps they do to support our customers.
The only problems I had with it are either cheapo buggy hardware or buggy drivers. I avoided those by buying good hardware that came with good drivers. All my NICs are decent to high end Intel, for instance. All my SCSI cards are LSI or Adaptec (and not the cheapo consumer crap). Amazing how stable the OS is with good hardware.
Now keep in mind, this push is for big companies with good quality hardware who want to continue using an OS that has been rock solid stable for them. Hmmm... kinda like me.
NT4 didnt bury it. Not nearly. Win95 (and then Win98) drove the migration to Windows 2000.
To this day, OS/2 Warp Server STILL outperforms Windows Server Anything (NT4 onwards) in handling high traffic. I know... I run a high traffic site that bombed on WinServer 2003 when it only had one tenth of the traffic. It was migrated to Linux and had less problems... then to OS/2 Warp Server.
Warp 4.0 was released in September of 1996, a full year after the Windows 95 launch (August 1995).
True... and Warp 3 Connect already had Win95 beat. And of course Win95 was a mangled beast of workarounds until OSR2.5 in Nov 1997 - a year AFTER Warp 4.
Although there are a lot of virtues in UNIX programming, some people just don't like it. They prefer richer APIs that Windows and OS/2 provide.
That's why there are richer toolkits that sit on top of POSIX and X11, such as Glib/GDK/GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, and Winelib.
Assuming that is correct, the direction noted in the article leverages OS/2's API and the various incompatible Linux APIs. Ya see... much of those things noted above already are ported to OS/2.
Quite some time ago, IBM did release the source code of the WorkPlace Shell for Windows under the Common Public License. So if someone really wanted to examine a WorkPlace Shell implementation... It does exist in open source form...
That's really a tiny tiny subset of the capabilities of the true WPS. While it did add things that Windows still hasnt gotten correct (like object tracking to some extent and properties notebooks linked to objects) it leaves out a lot.
I really liked OS/2's Workplace Shell but for one nagging problem that you wouldn't think was a problem until you experienced it first-hand. The WS remembers every window's size and position. Not some, but *all* of them, even if they were just regular applications like, say, the file manager. What do you think happens when you reduce screen resolution because of, say, a new graphics card, and you try to right-click "Properties" to adjust the resolution? It's off the right-hand side of the screen.
I always thought it simply scaled the stuff to the new resolution. That's actually what the appropriate DC and WC functions do (Device Context and Window Context). Sounds like a buggy driver or an app that was hastily ported without taking into account how OS/2 overcame that problem (as Windows still hasnt fully).
It's also why since two decades ago, one could manage one presentation space, regardless of resolution, and then assign it to whatever appropriate device space the user/programmer wanted to, and OS/2 would take care of all of the resolution translation automagically.
This is actually one of the most basic parts of the OS/2 API and been in since day one of OS/2 2.0
the reason why OS2 was so "stable" is because at the end of the day, it really didn't do much.
Nope, that's not true. Ask anyone who has run OS/2 for mission critical stuff where it does a lot EVERY day. I've got clients running on it still who have never rebooted their servers and are running entirely server side apps.
Re:Not many OS/2 Apps that people are wanting
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
·
· Score: 1
I'm not sure... I think that the OSX dock went a bit further than the OS/2 PM dock...
OS/2's dock was something very simple that IBM threw together - almost TWO decades ago no less. As anyone who has done WPS programming will tell you, it doesnt even begin to touch upon the capabilities of WPS. There's nothing the OSX dock can do that cannot be done on WPS - all with full WPS integration.
Re:Not many OS/2 Apps that people are wanting
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 1
I am not aware of any apps that are in demand, that only ran on OS/2.
There are tons. You forget the numerous specialized apps that were OS/2 only. Some of which have been rewritten for Windows and an even smaller amount for Linux. You can start with the banking industry, numerous large oil corporations systems, the insurance industry, numerous massive manufacturing or production companies, various web appliances, two different IBM mainframe lines that ran OS/2 in the "background" as a sorta "BIOS"/"subsystem to control their various hardware, elevator systems, rail/transit systems and on and on... the list is actually very massive. Not all of these industries, each with their own specialized needs, has moved away from OS/2. There's a leading (top 5) beverage company that still relies heavily on OS/2. There are various power infrastructures in various countries that rely heavily on it still as well (oddly, these are the ones that havent seemed to suffer the "we've been hacked again" problems the US's new Windows based infrastructure has). There are still numerous ATM companies that use it for their lower end ATMs. There are still a number of supermarket chains that still rely on it for all their Point of Sale and server stuff (some who moved to OS/2 AFTER IBM announced discontinuing it). And in all of these markets, there are still a lot of applications that have not been ported to anything else.
Stop and think how much money it would cost to port all the apps that one's OS/2 setup uses to control specialized hardware that runs all your assembly and shipping lines.
Again, thinking in terms of end-user needs will obviously take you down the wrong road and to the wrong conclusions... this isnt because the end users need it to run OpenOffice or such - OS/2 already runs that, and a plethora of other Linux software - meaning OS/2 needs no changes to allow such for those who want to stick with it or eComStation. It's for specialized apps that Linux and Windows do not (yet) have counterparts for.
Sure they do... the WPS, the better threading management, the retardedly extensible subsystems... All it lacks is a 64bit kernel (and the prerequisite other things it will gain from that like greater memory management, more threads than the max 4096, higher number of processes, etc).
There were a number of things that OS/2 had that no OS still has.
Anyway, the reason for this are a few large companies who STILL rely heavily on OS/2 and want a seamless transition to a setup that protects their current investment without requiring a large investment in cash for app rewrites (linux), or a faaaar larger support staff (Windows). I know this from discussing this with one particular company (a Fortune 500 company (roughly top 50) with a market cap in the billions) and passing their info on to Mensys.
What is their agenda? (other than to promote lung health, which no reasonable person could criticize)
e-cigs are probably the best vehicle in assisting smokers who wish to quit to do so while releasing an immeasurably small amount of "second hand" anything for those around them who do not smoke.
Unlike the patch and such, it also fulfills the habitual tendencies that smokers have a difficult time overcoming (and that patches and pills do not fix).
In addition, being just as "dangerous" as the patch, and far less dangerous than say... Chantix (which is legal, even if by prescription). So... while Chantrix has such side effects as:
changes in behavior, hostility, agitation, depressed mood, suicidal thoughts or actions, changes in thinking, or mood that are not typical for you, or you develop suicidal thoughts, mania, abnormal sensations, hallucinations, paranoia, or confusion
Hmmm... I'd rather see them support Chantix than e-Cigs. Oh wait... nevermind.
Perhaps it's similar to how making someone smile affects the person who smiles?
Of course, that would be kinda sad if money has gotten so all-important to people's emotional and mental well-being.
That's part sarcasm and part observation about how our very materialistic society has changed our core values to create such a situation where one has to recognize the "importance" of money at least in order to survive in this society...
If you had this issue in MT, it would be:
a) Trivial to just hold the clutch and disengage the gears.
b) On the AT model, pushing the accelerator would switch gears, while in MT you would still be in your current gear.
You have way more control. Also, the whole calculation done is probably different, I'm guessing even completely different, so, maybe the bug isn't present in those versions.
If you had that issue with an AT, it is EVEN SIMPLER to simply shift the gear shifter into neutral. No clutch depression needed, no nothing other than hit the shifter.
And wonderfully, it automatically will stop moving (the shifter) at the neutral point and will not move to reverse (unless one presses the shift release button - but that would be idiocy - and pretty much akin to same idiot shifting from 4th or 5th through neutral into reverse - actually, that's more likely as there is no shift lock to prevent it).
I had an older car where after replacing a broken accelerator cable, it became stuck while driving. It was simple as anything to simply nudge the shifter to move it into neutral, and then kill the engine (since being such an old car, it had absolutely no redline protection).
Then, there's the e-brake... those all still seem to be mechanical.
Fact is, doesnt matter if it's an AT, or an MT... people not knowing how to deal with such eventualities will run into problems. People with slower reaction times (older people perhaps?) or little driving experience (younger people perhaps?) will run into problems regardless. But an MT is not the solution to the situation, especially since shifting out of gear is actually easier on an AT.
I suspect that the creative ingenuity and engineering effort involved in solving this problem is *not* sufficient to warrant a monopoly on putting little lights on a game controller. Being the first person to do something useful shouldn't give you a right to prevent other people copying it.
Now, if there was some major hurdle to adding lights to a game controller I hadn't realised, and Microsoft have somehow solved it: patent away!
Especially considering that keyboards and other input devices have had backlighting for ages. To single out a particular type of input device for such a patent sounds absurd and a patently obvious "innovation" - at least in my mind.
NO one has three phase running to their home unless they are an industrial complex or shopping mall...
Or at our little filming studio;-)
The hum of the transformers in the building is quite calming... till one realizes just how much power goes through the beasts.
And yes, it requires THREE separate transformers outside on the property to deliver the voltage to the transformers in the building which drop it to 110V.
I wouldnt mind getting such a setup for the home... ya know... for the day when decent electric cars are available on this coast...
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Many of the older IBMs (and probably the newer ones?) came with (by default or as an option) asset tracking capabilities - I know all of my smaller ones had them by default (including the RFID unit) - though my bigger ones do not come with them (I guess because you'd need a few people or a forklift to move them). You may want to look into that for your IBM servers. It included (among other features) RFID tracking to know when/if a machine was moved, moving, being removed, etc.
I agree... if it were me, I'd be waiting at the place the next morning the minute they opened...
You have REXX interpreters for linux, and perl, python, and other interpreted languages for OS/2 (even bash,afaik). Rexx was great, easy to learn and clear to read, as far i remembe, but if you already manage perl it will look very limted.
No it wont. I started on Perl... learned REXX, and never went back. REXX is far more capable, especially with a plethora of "REXX Add-On DLLs" that allow it to do just about anything. And of course, on OS/2, it can "do everything and more - including interfacing with much of the WPS, networking (NetBIOS, TCPBEUI, TCP/IP, etc), interfacing with memory subsystems, calling other non-REXX DLLs and in various cases, interact with and/or control various PM and CLI apps.
Um, OS/2 never had a WindowsNT 3.51 emulator.
Are you sure? Some folks at IBM disagree. It was not released to many people. Odin was partially based on some of the work that did make it out (DAXIE to be specific).
And odds are they were using the Watcom Compiler, who's Windows support I considered shit. OS/2 and protected mode DOS however, it was pretty solid.
Or VAC++ or C-Set/2 and simply compiling for Win32 environment instead of OS/2.
I see your point, but perhaps it would be possible to run OS/2 on powerful virtual machines? That way you could have the visualization software deal with the hardware.
Most of the setups in question driving this movement require a lot of specialized device drivers. Thus, a VM wouldnt quite work for them.
The OS/2 WPS was a mess, gleefully ignoring years of UI design built into contemporary operating systems.
Ummm... what? You mean it wasnt like Win 3.1? What other UI design was there that was prominent back in 1992? And it was such a mess that Microsoft copied it (yes, it, not MacOS) for Win95 (check the DOJ court docs and such for proof).
There is no doubt it was powerful, but the WPS was very easy to destablize (e.g. by installing an app that had WPS SOM objects),
Really? Are you sure? Every true/native OS/2 app is a collection WPS SOM objects or acts like one. There were some poorly written ones that didnt work perhaps... but those were rare. And even in that event, an OS/2 system runs TWO Workplace Shells... not one. If an app crashes the WPS, OS/2 switches the context info and such to the second copy and kills the first... then spawns yet another background copy of the WPS for the possibility of another crash. I have rarely seen WPS crashes or "destabilization"
it was very ugly to look at
Compared to Win3.1 again? Really? You cant change history by repeatedly saying "was" but forgetting that Win3.1 was the only other competing standard at the time.
, and employed some arcane / bizarre notions of usability thanks to CUA. Even simple things like cutting and pasting were far complicated than the equivalent Windows / Mac.
Huh? You mean "select", right click, copy... click in field, right click, "paste" - wow, that's complex... and the way virtually everything does it nowadays...
Opening a simple object's settings might reveal some ugly notebook style dialog with tabs running down two axis with buttons on tabs leading to even more dialogs.
Ah... you are comparing OS/2 2.0's setup... the only thing "ugly" about that was not a ton of eye candy... that was changed in later releases to top style tabs... which are far nicer to use and look at that WinXP's variant that does row upon row of tabs. Instead, it does it in a way that was later adopted by Firefox for website tabs in it's multi-tabbed interface.
Even in its day it compared quite poorly against the Windows 95+ interface. Win95 had it's own faults (e.g. shortcuts sucked compared to shadows), but it was cleaner, simpler, and more responsive.
It (Win95) was never more responsive for the feature set. Win95 was slower due to the overhead of using a web browser component to open every folder view.
I don't see any reason at all to dig up WPS for any reason except nostalgia. It might be nice if GNOME/KDE had a better support for "live" objects much like SOM but I hoped they learnt from the mistakes of WPS if/when they implement them.
I dont see anything in your post that resembles reality.
There are two EDM machines that run OS/2 where I work. Both are less than 5 years old.
And a number of specialized laser machines, assembly line machines, transportation machines (ie: train switching and control), power plant controllers and on and on.
It had the ability to be reliable. I used to work for a company developing telephony voice response applications. The vast majority of our voice response units ran OS/2. We had dinosaurs still running MS OS/2 1.3, most running Warp. I can't remember if we ever sent any out with 4.0. It wasn't unusual to have uptime over a year even with heavy call traffic.
And the newer versions of the boards (Win only versions of the Voice reponse boards and the fax boards) could not handle nearly as many ports as the original OS/2 counterparts. To think an ancient 486 (or even 386 back in the Warp 3 days) could handle 64 lines at a time with no hiccups. The later Windows replacements required a lot more hardware to come anywhere close. NEC's IVR system for one, was amazing running on Warp 3 and Warp 4.
And even today, OS/2 still has pretty much those same memory requirements. The only place it differs is in supporting various Win Ports (such as Firefox and OpenOffice) or Linux ports (such as mPlayer, KMP, Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc) where the greater functionality of the app (not the OS's needs) require more CPU power.
I remember OS/2 being the opposite of reliable. I used versions 2.1 and 3.0. Did they make a quantum leap in 4.0, or are you just speaking nonsense?
No... you are just speaking nonsense. I've used OS/2 since v2 BETA up to and including the latest eComStation releases. I still support a bunch of OS/2 boxes - that is if you consider "support" cleaning the dust out of them every now and then while they merrily continue to run the plethora of server side apps they do to support our customers.
The only problems I had with it are either cheapo buggy hardware or buggy drivers. I avoided those by buying good hardware that came with good drivers. All my NICs are decent to high end Intel, for instance. All my SCSI cards are LSI or Adaptec (and not the cheapo consumer crap). Amazing how stable the OS is with good hardware.
Now keep in mind, this push is for big companies with good quality hardware who want to continue using an OS that has been rock solid stable for them. Hmmm... kinda like me.
NT4 didnt bury it. Not nearly. Win95 (and then Win98) drove the migration to Windows 2000.
To this day, OS/2 Warp Server STILL outperforms Windows Server Anything (NT4 onwards) in handling high traffic. I know... I run a high traffic site that bombed on WinServer 2003 when it only had one tenth of the traffic. It was migrated to Linux and had less problems... then to OS/2 Warp Server.
Warp 4.0 was released in September of 1996, a full year after the Windows 95 launch (August 1995).
True... and Warp 3 Connect already had Win95 beat. And of course Win95 was a mangled beast of workarounds until OSR2.5 in Nov 1997 - a year AFTER Warp 4.
Although there are a lot of virtues in UNIX programming, some people just don't like it. They prefer richer APIs that Windows and OS/2 provide.
That's why there are richer toolkits that sit on top of POSIX and X11, such as Glib/GDK/GTK, Qt, wxWidgets, and Winelib.
Assuming that is correct, the direction noted in the article leverages OS/2's API and the various incompatible Linux APIs. Ya see... much of those things noted above already are ported to OS/2.
Quite some time ago, IBM did release the source code of the WorkPlace Shell for Windows under the Common Public License. So if someone really wanted to examine a WorkPlace Shell implementation... It does exist in open source form...
That's really a tiny tiny subset of the capabilities of the true WPS. While it did add things that Windows still hasnt gotten correct (like object tracking to some extent and properties notebooks linked to objects) it leaves out a lot.
I really liked OS/2's Workplace Shell but for one nagging problem that you wouldn't think was a problem until you experienced it first-hand. The WS remembers every window's size and position. Not some, but *all* of them, even if they were just regular applications like, say, the file manager. What do you think happens when you reduce screen resolution because of, say, a new graphics card, and you try to right-click "Properties" to adjust the resolution? It's off the right-hand side of the screen.
I always thought it simply scaled the stuff to the new resolution. That's actually what the appropriate DC and WC functions do (Device Context and Window Context). Sounds like a buggy driver or an app that was hastily ported without taking into account how OS/2 overcame that problem (as Windows still hasnt fully).
It's also why since two decades ago, one could manage one presentation space, regardless of resolution, and then assign it to whatever appropriate device space the user/programmer wanted to, and OS/2 would take care of all of the resolution translation automagically.
This is actually one of the most basic parts of the OS/2 API and been in since day one of OS/2 2.0
the reason why OS2 was so "stable" is because at the end of the day, it really didn't do much.
Nope, that's not true. Ask anyone who has run OS/2 for mission critical stuff where it does a lot EVERY day. I've got clients running on it still who have never rebooted their servers and are running entirely server side apps.
I'm not sure... I think that the OSX dock went a bit further than the OS/2 PM dock...
OS/2's dock was something very simple that IBM threw together - almost TWO decades ago no less. As anyone who has done WPS programming will tell you, it doesnt even begin to touch upon the capabilities of WPS. There's nothing the OSX dock can do that cannot be done on WPS - all with full WPS integration.
I am not aware of any apps that are in demand, that only ran on OS/2.
There are tons. You forget the numerous specialized apps that were OS/2 only. Some of which have been rewritten for Windows and an even smaller amount for Linux. You can start with the banking industry, numerous large oil corporations systems, the insurance industry, numerous massive manufacturing or production companies, various web appliances, two different IBM mainframe lines that ran OS/2 in the "background" as a sorta "BIOS"/"subsystem to control their various hardware, elevator systems, rail/transit systems and on and on... the list is actually very massive. Not all of these industries, each with their own specialized needs, has moved away from OS/2. There's a leading (top 5) beverage company that still relies heavily on OS/2. There are various power infrastructures in various countries that rely heavily on it still as well (oddly, these are the ones that havent seemed to suffer the "we've been hacked again" problems the US's new Windows based infrastructure has). There are still numerous ATM companies that use it for their lower end ATMs. There are still a number of supermarket chains that still rely on it for all their Point of Sale and server stuff (some who moved to OS/2 AFTER IBM announced discontinuing it). And in all of these markets, there are still a lot of applications that have not been ported to anything else.
Stop and think how much money it would cost to port all the apps that one's OS/2 setup uses to control specialized hardware that runs all your assembly and shipping lines.
Again, thinking in terms of end-user needs will obviously take you down the wrong road and to the wrong conclusions... this isnt because the end users need it to run OpenOffice or such - OS/2 already runs that, and a plethora of other Linux software - meaning OS/2 needs no changes to allow such for those who want to stick with it or eComStation. It's for specialized apps that Linux and Windows do not (yet) have counterparts for.
Sure they do... the WPS, the better threading management, the retardedly extensible subsystems... All it lacks is a 64bit kernel (and the prerequisite other things it will gain from that like greater memory management, more threads than the max 4096, higher number of processes, etc).
There were a number of things that OS/2 had that no OS still has.
Anyway, the reason for this are a few large companies who STILL rely heavily on OS/2 and want a seamless transition to a setup that protects their current investment without requiring a large investment in cash for app rewrites (linux), or a faaaar larger support staff (Windows). I know this from discussing this with one particular company (a Fortune 500 company (roughly top 50) with a market cap in the billions) and passing their info on to Mensys.
What is their agenda? (other than to promote lung health, which no reasonable person could criticize)
e-cigs are probably the best vehicle in assisting smokers who wish to quit to do so while releasing an immeasurably small amount of "second hand" anything for those around them who do not smoke.
Unlike the patch and such, it also fulfills the habitual tendencies that smokers have a difficult time overcoming (and that patches and pills do not fix).
In addition, being just as "dangerous" as the patch, and far less dangerous than say... Chantix (which is legal, even if by prescription). So... while Chantrix has such side effects as:
changes in behavior, hostility, agitation, depressed mood, suicidal thoughts or actions, changes in thinking, or mood that are not typical for you, or you develop suicidal thoughts, mania, abnormal sensations, hallucinations, paranoia, or confusion
Hmmm... I'd rather see them support Chantix than e-Cigs. Oh wait... nevermind.
Perhaps it's similar to how making someone smile affects the person who smiles?
Of course, that would be kinda sad if money has gotten so all-important to people's emotional and mental well-being.
That's part sarcasm and part observation about how our very materialistic society has changed our core values to create such a situation where one has to recognize the "importance" of money at least in order to survive in this society...
If you had this issue in MT, it would be:
a) Trivial to just hold the clutch and disengage the gears.
b) On the AT model, pushing the accelerator would switch gears, while in MT you would still be in your current gear.
You have way more control. Also, the whole calculation done is probably different, I'm guessing even completely different, so, maybe the bug isn't present in those versions.
If you had that issue with an AT, it is EVEN SIMPLER to simply shift the gear shifter into neutral. No clutch depression needed, no nothing other than hit the shifter.
And wonderfully, it automatically will stop moving (the shifter) at the neutral point and will not move to reverse (unless one presses the shift release button - but that would be idiocy - and pretty much akin to same idiot shifting from 4th or 5th through neutral into reverse - actually, that's more likely as there is no shift lock to prevent it).
I had an older car where after replacing a broken accelerator cable, it became stuck while driving. It was simple as anything to simply nudge the shifter to move it into neutral, and then kill the engine (since being such an old car, it had absolutely no redline protection).
Then, there's the e-brake... those all still seem to be mechanical.
Fact is, doesnt matter if it's an AT, or an MT... people not knowing how to deal with such eventualities will run into problems. People with slower reaction times (older people perhaps?) or little driving experience (younger people perhaps?) will run into problems regardless. But an MT is not the solution to the situation, especially since shifting out of gear is actually easier on an AT.
I suspect that the creative ingenuity and engineering effort involved in solving this problem is *not* sufficient to warrant a monopoly on putting little lights on a game controller. Being the first person to do something useful shouldn't give you a right to prevent other people copying it.
Now, if there was some major hurdle to adding lights to a game controller I hadn't realised, and Microsoft have somehow solved it: patent away!
Especially considering that keyboards and other input devices have had backlighting for ages. To single out a particular type of input device for such a patent sounds absurd and a patently obvious "innovation" - at least in my mind.
In addition, they apparently do not cite the authors. Another violation.
This is ridiculous.
NO one has three phase running to their home unless they are an industrial complex or shopping mall...
Or at our little filming studio ;-)
The hum of the transformers in the building is quite calming... till one realizes just how much power goes through the beasts.
And yes, it requires THREE separate transformers outside on the property to deliver the voltage to the transformers in the building which drop it to 110V.
I wouldnt mind getting such a setup for the home... ya know... for the day when decent electric cars are available on this coast...
Or three wire split phase.
Guess I've spent too much time working on residential dual zoned (res/com) buildings wired for commercial.