Re:An updated Workplace Shell would be great
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 1
***Currently, if I want to write a GUI program for Linux, I have to choose Gnome, or KDE, or whatever.***
I'm not as smart as I once was, but I thought you had to choose a toolkit not a desktop. KDE programs use the QT toolkit, but if you want to run a program that uses the GTK (Gnome) toolkit, KDE will let you do that. And vice versa. Am I missing something here?
Re:Great! Another deskop environment to mix things
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
·
· Score: 1
There's a free clone of WPS for Windows 3.1 that ran after a fashion on Windows 95. I played with it some a decade ago and I kind of liked it -- which is unusual as I don't care for Apple's offerings, think that Windows peaked back about the Win95OSR2 release, and am certain that Gnome has to be some sort of joke. (Mostly I use XFCE and the KDE applications).
***Seems to be a lot of Linux/Gnome/KDE bashing on slashdot these days. Makes me think that the Microsoft Trolls have come out to play.***
Could just be folks admitting that Unix has a lot of problems also. OTOH, if I use Unix (which I do), I get mediocre software for a bit less than it's worth instead of paying too much, I don't have to worry about licensing, and I don't have to deal with the $#@(&% registry.
***Taking this path isn't "fixing" a problem, it's caving to 20+ years of false advertising.***
You're correct, much good may it do you. AFAICS, 50% or more of the human race has dedicated their heart and soul to making things work as badly as possible. Existing conventions? Screw that nonsense -- we're gonna do things MY way.. or else.
If I have this right, the BBC hits Brits for a non-optional 142 pounds per year for a website and a bunch of radio and TV channels. Murdoch is going up against that with a web site for a marginally better than mediocre newspaper -- albeit a newspaper with an illustrious history -- at 104 optional pounds per year.
I sort of think that the British better have a lot more disposable income than I think they do for this to work.
I doubt that failure will drive Murdoch into bankruptcy, but I must say that I think I will be able to restrain my grief somehow if it does.
Subsidence or wave erosion of course. Sea Level rise continues at about 29 cm (a foot for us Americans) a century. Rates computed from sea level gauge and satellite data are similar. I'm guessing that it would take about 500-1000 years to get anything that was called an island rather than a reef to go away at current rates of sea level rise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
***No, absolutely not... Physics uses Math: Physics without Math is unthinkable. Math without Physics is absolutely possible. There was pretty much maths before physics. The old Greeks were more Mathematicians than Physicists.***
The Greeks and Romans didn't have that much in the way of math really. Plane geometry, trigonometry -- that's about it. They didn't have calculus, cartesian coordinates, vector spaces, matrices, or even numeric notation that was easy to work with. Try division with Roman numerals some time. But they were still able to build big buildings, build bridges, figure out that the Earth was spherical and to calculate its diameter, and even propose a heliocentric model of the solar system.
***Biochemically it it can enter the glycolytic cycle and is rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose.***
Ahem... I'm about 80% sure that's wrong. Glucose is metabolised by any cell in the body. Fructose is handled in the liver and only the liver. Only a fraction of it is converted to Glucose. The rest of it ends up as fatty acids. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose#Fructose_metabolism
I have a degree in Chemistry BTW from a reputable university (probably a mistake on their part), but that was five decades ago and I've never done chemistry since then. Fructose metabolism is right at the limit of my understanding and it's possible that I have this wrong.
***If you had the article, you'd know that this isn't true.***
And if you had done some research, you would know that it actually is true. Despite the name, the High Fructose Corn Syrup used in soft drinks is a mixture of glucose and fructose that is only slightly more fructose heavy than table sugar (sucrose) after digestion. HCFS-55 is purportedly quite similar to honey in it's basic sugar mixture. Here's the Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
There's something clearly wrong here. Bad study? (Wouldn't be the first) Maybe we know a lot less about sugar metabolism than we think? Something else? Who knows?
I'm not defending fructose. In fact, it's metabolic path is thought to be decidedly different than glucose and it may well be bad news. Personally, I've suspected as much for quite a while. But this study just doesn't seem to fit with anything "we" thought we knew about sugar metabolism.
The country doesn't have to be big. There are probably 20 countries that could, in theory, destroy GPS satellites. And they don't even have to destroy them, all they have to do is jam them from orbit. At least 10 countries have launched satellites -- not all of them countries you'd expect. Iraq launched one in the late 1980s. Many more could launch a satellite if they wished. For all we know, the Russians, Chinese, Indians, Japanese already have GPS jammers/spoofers in orbit ready to be turned on should the need ever arise.
***2) It should have the ability to make FAT format floppies. Do it piecemeal, if you can find a 1.2 MB 5-1/4 drive for a PC anymore.***
My memories of stuff two decades ago are hazy at best, but I have this vague memory of writing FAT formatted floppies in Xenix(?)/SCO Unix(?) (The outfit I worked for had clients with both) being VERY, VERY slow. Something about resetting the drive and repositioning the heads between every sector(?). Maybe it was some other situation. Or maybe I didn't do things right. But anyway, it might turn out that the serial port isn't that much slower than a floppy.
And since I haven't seen anyone else mention it, if the serial port is configured to use hardware flow control RTS, CTS, DTR etc, getting it to talk to another computer can be a non-trivial and decidedly annoying task. If the two devices aren't configured compatibly, not only may they refuse to talk, they may talk, but cheerfully discard a lot of the data without notification.
It's a BBS? Is it possible to call into it and extract the call logs through the BBS software? My guess is that the system used an external modem and that calling in would be an enormous amount of work unless the modem it used is still hooked to it and works. But still, it is another possibility.
People are going to be able to get drivers licenses, passports, register vehicles, etc over the Internet and presumably with no manual verification of supporting documentation? What could possibly go wrong?
***Yeah, but the 45-byte program doesn't say "Hello World".***
Yeah, noticed that myself. Looks to me like he/she got rid of printf, but never replaced it with anything.
FWIW, here's a link to an 18 byte version of "hello world" machine code version from a couple of decades ago that actually displays the text under msdos and, I assume, Windows 9 when booted to a command prompt.
I don't think we should all be stuffing bytes into memory with DEBUG. But neither do I think much of C, C++, Java which have always seemed to me like a deceptively difficult way to do simple stuff poorly. Surely there must be some middle ground that doesn't create unreliable, insecure, bloated, buggy software put together from overlapping layers of distraction. Wish I knew what it is.
I really don't think that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
Greenland (Danish: Grønland; Kalaallisut: Kalaallit Nunaat, meaning "Land of the people")[4] is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
I'm no expert on this, but I do know that several of the authors of parts of the Vermont Geological Surveys in the early years of the twentieth century, had extremely un-nice things to say about the accuracy of the USGS maps of the era. It is apparently very difficult to mark a rock outcrop on a map if you are perched on the bank of a stream and your map says you are on top of a hill. I would guess that maps of other places from the same era might be as bad or worse. If there is a land survey like the US's Public Land Survey or Canada's Dominion Land Survey and the survey points are marked on the maps, that might help a lot. My understanding is that here in North America, they don't move those even if they turn out to be in the wrong place.
Anyway, the project sounds like a lot more fun than most programming/computer stuff.
***GOTO is a good example, 'GOTO considered harmful' is practically biblical law amongst many programmers,***
It's well to remember that at the time Dijkstra wrote "GOTO Considered Harmful", he was working very hard on automated proof of correctness. We've pretty much abandoned that for everyday code because we can't figure out how to do it. If you can rigorously describe function, you don't need to test function, you need a compiler for the rigorous description.
Anyway, I have long thought that Dijkstra's point was mostly that if you allow programmers to transfer control any place they feel like going any time they feel like going there, you've made proof of correctness orders of magnitude harder. And I think he was right about that. Indeed, modern GUIs tend to go anyplace they feel like going any time the user twitches and testing GUIs is next to impossible -- which IMO is a large part of why they often work badly.
Thanks for the link -- hadn't read that paper before. Clearly, it needs a lot of reading for any degree of understanding if you are as dumb as I am.
I agree on all counts. Python has its moments -- especially when the student moves on to lists and classes and especially when they fall afoul of the unexpected consequences of = being a binding operation rather than an assignment. But in general, the simple stuff is simple. And it works. I think that's really what you want in a tutorial language. And it's probably not all that bad in many real applications either.
If Python has a problem as a language for tutorial programming, it is probably in its rather limited error checking.
I think that if you look into it, you will find that the population density of Northern Scandinavia is pretty low -- lower than a lot of rural areas in the US that do not have broadband coverage.
***You are assuming an even distribution of people. You can toss out the north 80% of Canada's land area and only loose 5% of their population.***
On top of which, from what I find on the Internet, Canada actually does a decent job of getting DSL to wide spots in the road 200 miles from the nearest traffic light. Whereas in the US anyone who has the poor judgment to live in the boonies very likely has neither cable, nor DSL. When it comes to broadband, some North Americans are more equal than others.
I suspect that I have more than normal bad luck with tapes. But in my experience -- nearly 50 years of occasional dealing the stuff, putting your data on a tape is the IT equivalent of handing a package to an airline small package service. The chances of seeing it again aren't all that good. If one must use tape, it is absolutely essential that tapes be read back fairly frequently and the data actually examined for integrity.
***You do know that Somalia has improved steadily since the disolution of the state, and at a faster rate than it's state ridden neighbors?***
I don't have time this morning to refresh my memory completely, but as I recall that's at best half right. Some parts of Somalia along the Red Sea coast are functioning quite well since the collapse of the central government. Other parts along the Indian Ocean are a near total shambles that is being exacerbated by the US's moronic war on any muslim who doesn't like us -- (which would be most of them).
***Any other county in California, there's certainly more conservative places out there in other states.***
I wouldn't be too sure of that. Orange County is one looney place. It's dominated by fairly high income anglos who have little or no contact area with reality. It filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s when it went all in with its operating funds and managed to lose a leveraged bet that interest rates would drop.
I personally think that San Diego County is even nuttier, but it may be a bit less conservative and bit more just plain crazy.
Does is have to be a hard drive? The Apple IIe was a wretched computer with awful software, but it had a floppy controller that was possibly the cutest electronic device ever made. It's been an awfully long time, but my recollection is that it was built from a handful -- six or eight -- of TTL chips and that not only COULD one control exactly what was written where in software, one HAD to control what was written where in software.
No matter how pro nuclear power one is, it's really, really hard to support licensing and approving operating permits for an outfit who apparently can not read the blueprints for their own nuclear power plant. AFAICS, Entergy is not capable of safely operating a coffee maker, much less a 600MW nuclear reactor.
Slashdot Mirror
***Currently, if I want to write a GUI program for Linux, I have to choose Gnome, or KDE, or whatever.***
I'm not as smart as I once was, but I thought you had to choose a toolkit not a desktop. KDE programs use the QT toolkit, but if you want to run a program that uses the GTK (Gnome) toolkit, KDE will let you do that. And vice versa. Am I missing something here?
There's a free clone of WPS for Windows 3.1 that ran after a fashion on Windows 95. I played with it some a decade ago and I kind of liked it -- which is unusual as I don't care for Apple's offerings, think that Windows peaked back about the Win95OSR2 release, and am certain that Gnome has to be some sort of joke. (Mostly I use XFCE and the KDE applications).
Anyway, the Zip file is still downloadable -- http://ftp.gaby.de/pub/win3x/wpsfw151.zip and there are some screen shots at http://toastytech.com/guis/wps.html.
I wonder if WPS will run under wine?
***Seems to be a lot of Linux/Gnome/KDE bashing on slashdot these days. Makes me think that the Microsoft Trolls have come out to play.***
Could just be folks admitting that Unix has a lot of problems also. OTOH, if I use Unix (which I do), I get mediocre software for a bit less than it's worth instead of paying too much, I don't have to worry about licensing, and I don't have to deal with the $#@(&% registry.
***Taking this path isn't "fixing" a problem, it's caving to 20+ years of false advertising.***
You're correct, much good may it do you. AFAICS, 50% or more of the human race has dedicated their heart and soul to making things work as badly as possible. Existing conventions? Screw that nonsense -- we're gonna do things MY way .. or else.
Gee, I wonder why nothing works quite right.
If I have this right, the BBC hits Brits for a non-optional 142 pounds per year for a website and a bunch of radio and TV channels. Murdoch is going up against that with a web site for a marginally better than mediocre newspaper -- albeit a newspaper with an illustrious history -- at 104 optional pounds per year.
I sort of think that the British better have a lot more disposable income than I think they do for this to work.
I doubt that failure will drive Murdoch into bankruptcy, but I must say that I think I will be able to restrain my grief somehow if it does.
***Global warming? Or mere subsidence?***
Subsidence or wave erosion of course. Sea Level rise continues at about 29 cm (a foot for us Americans) a century. Rates computed from sea level gauge and satellite data are similar. I'm guessing that it would take about 500-1000 years to get anything that was called an island rather than a reef to go away at current rates of sea level rise. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_sea_level_rise
***No, absolutely not... Physics uses Math: Physics without Math is unthinkable. Math without Physics is absolutely possible. There was pretty much maths before physics. The old Greeks were more Mathematicians than Physicists.***
The Greeks and Romans didn't have that much in the way of math really. Plane geometry, trigonometry -- that's about it. They didn't have calculus, cartesian coordinates, vector spaces, matrices, or even numeric notation that was easy to work with. Try division with Roman numerals some time. But they were still able to build big buildings, build bridges, figure out that the Earth was spherical and to calculate its diameter, and even propose a heliocentric model of the solar system.
***Biochemically it it can enter the glycolytic cycle and is rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose.***
Ahem ... I'm about 80% sure that's wrong. Glucose is metabolised by any cell in the body. Fructose is handled in the liver and only the liver. Only a fraction of it is converted to Glucose. The rest of it ends up as fatty acids. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fructose#Fructose_metabolism
I have a degree in Chemistry BTW from a reputable university (probably a mistake on their part), but that was five decades ago and I've never done chemistry since then. Fructose metabolism is right at the limit of my understanding and it's possible that I have this wrong.
***If you had the article, you'd know that this isn't true.***
And if you had done some research, you would know that it actually is true. Despite the name, the High Fructose Corn Syrup used in soft drinks is a mixture of glucose and fructose that is only slightly more fructose heavy than table sugar (sucrose) after digestion. HCFS-55 is purportedly quite similar to honey in it's basic sugar mixture. Here's the Wikipedia link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-fructose_corn_syrup
There's something clearly wrong here. Bad study? (Wouldn't be the first) Maybe we know a lot less about sugar metabolism than we think? Something else? Who knows?
I'm not defending fructose. In fact, it's metabolic path is thought to be decidedly different than glucose and it may well be bad news. Personally, I've suspected as much for quite a while. But this study just doesn't seem to fit with anything "we" thought we knew about sugar metabolism.
The country doesn't have to be big. There are probably 20 countries that could, in theory, destroy GPS satellites. And they don't even have to destroy them, all they have to do is jam them from orbit. At least 10 countries have launched satellites -- not all of them countries you'd expect. Iraq launched one in the late 1980s. Many more could launch a satellite if they wished. For all we know, the Russians, Chinese, Indians, Japanese already have GPS jammers/spoofers in orbit ready to be turned on should the need ever arise.
***2) It should have the ability to make FAT format floppies. Do it piecemeal, if you can find a 1.2 MB 5-1/4 drive for a PC anymore.***
My memories of stuff two decades ago are hazy at best, but I have this vague memory of writing FAT formatted floppies in Xenix(?)/SCO Unix(?) (The outfit I worked for had clients with both) being VERY, VERY slow. Something about resetting the drive and repositioning the heads between every sector(?). Maybe it was some other situation. Or maybe I didn't do things right. But anyway, it might turn out that the serial port isn't that much slower than a floppy.
And since I haven't seen anyone else mention it, if the serial port is configured to use hardware flow control RTS, CTS, DTR etc, getting it to talk to another computer can be a non-trivial and decidedly annoying task. If the two devices aren't configured compatibly, not only may they refuse to talk, they may talk, but cheerfully discard a lot of the data without notification.
It's a BBS? Is it possible to call into it and extract the call logs through the BBS software? My guess is that the system used an external modem and that calling in would be an enormous amount of work unless the modem it used is still hooked to it and works. But still, it is another possibility.
People are going to be able to get drivers licenses, passports, register vehicles, etc over the Internet and presumably with no manual verification of supporting documentation? What could possibly go wrong?
***Yeah, but the 45-byte program doesn't say "Hello World".***
Yeah, noticed that myself. Looks to me like he/she got rid of printf, but never replaced it with anything.
FWIW, here's a link to an 18 byte version of "hello world" machine code version from a couple of decades ago that actually displays the text under msdos and, I assume, Windows 9 when booted to a command prompt.
I don't think we should all be stuffing bytes into memory with DEBUG. But neither do I think much of C, C++, Java which have always seemed to me like a deceptively difficult way to do simple stuff poorly. Surely there must be some middle ground that doesn't create unreliable, insecure, bloated, buggy software put together from overlapping layers of distraction. Wish I knew what it is.
I really don't think that we live in the best of all possible worlds.
***Greenland is a country?***
Wikipedia thinks it is:
Greenland (Danish: Grønland; Kalaallisut: Kalaallit Nunaat, meaning "Land of the people")[4] is an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, located between the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland
I'm no expert on this, but I do know that several of the authors of parts of the Vermont Geological Surveys in the early years of the twentieth century, had extremely un-nice things to say about the accuracy of the USGS maps of the era. It is apparently very difficult to mark a rock outcrop on a map if you are perched on the bank of a stream and your map says you are on top of a hill. I would guess that maps of other places from the same era might be as bad or worse. If there is a land survey like the US's Public Land Survey or Canada's Dominion Land Survey and the survey points are marked on the maps, that might help a lot. My understanding is that here in North America, they don't move those even if they turn out to be in the wrong place.
Anyway, the project sounds like a lot more fun than most programming/computer stuff.
***GOTO is a good example, 'GOTO considered harmful' is practically biblical law amongst many programmers,***
It's well to remember that at the time Dijkstra wrote "GOTO Considered Harmful", he was working very hard on automated proof of correctness. We've pretty much abandoned that for everyday code because we can't figure out how to do it. If you can rigorously describe function, you don't need to test function, you need a compiler for the rigorous description.
Anyway, I have long thought that Dijkstra's point was mostly that if you allow programmers to transfer control any place they feel like going any time they feel like going there, you've made proof of correctness orders of magnitude harder. And I think he was right about that. Indeed, modern GUIs tend to go anyplace they feel like going any time the user twitches and testing GUIs is next to impossible -- which IMO is a large part of why they often work badly.
Thanks for the link -- hadn't read that paper before. Clearly, it needs a lot of reading for any degree of understanding if you are as dumb as I am.
I agree on all counts. Python has its moments -- especially when the student moves on to lists and classes and especially when they fall afoul of the unexpected consequences of = being a binding operation rather than an assignment. But in general, the simple stuff is simple. And it works. I think that's really what you want in a tutorial language. And it's probably not all that bad in many real applications either.
If Python has a problem as a language for tutorial programming, it is probably in its rather limited error checking.
***it says Sweden is a lot easier to serve.***
I think that if you look into it, you will find that the population density of Northern Scandinavia is pretty low -- lower than a lot of rural areas in the US that do not have broadband coverage.
***You are assuming an even distribution of people. You can toss out the north 80% of Canada's land area and only loose 5% of their population.***
On top of which, from what I find on the Internet, Canada actually does a decent job of getting DSL to wide spots in the road 200 miles from the nearest traffic light. Whereas in the US anyone who has the poor judgment to live in the boonies very likely has neither cable, nor DSL. When it comes to broadband, some North Americans are more equal than others.
I suspect that I have more than normal bad luck with tapes. But in my experience -- nearly 50 years of occasional dealing the stuff, putting your data on a tape is the IT equivalent of handing a package to an airline small package service. The chances of seeing it again aren't all that good. If one must use tape, it is absolutely essential that tapes be read back fairly frequently and the data actually examined for integrity.
Interesting Blog. Good luck with your project.
***You do know that Somalia has improved steadily since the disolution of the state, and at a faster rate than it's state ridden neighbors?***
I don't have time this morning to refresh my memory completely, but as I recall that's at best half right. Some parts of Somalia along the Red Sea coast are functioning quite well since the collapse of the central government. Other parts along the Indian Ocean are a near total shambles that is being exacerbated by the US's moronic war on any muslim who doesn't like us -- (which would be most of them).
***Any other county in California, there's certainly more conservative places out there in other states.***
I wouldn't be too sure of that. Orange County is one looney place. It's dominated by fairly high income anglos who have little or no contact area with reality. It filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s when it went all in with its operating funds and managed to lose a leveraged bet that interest rates would drop.
I personally think that San Diego County is even nuttier, but it may be a bit less conservative and bit more just plain crazy.
Does is have to be a hard drive? The Apple IIe was a wretched computer with awful software, but it had a floppy controller that was possibly the cutest electronic device ever made. It's been an awfully long time, but my recollection is that it was built from a handful -- six or eight -- of TTL chips and that not only COULD one control exactly what was written where in software, one HAD to control what was written where in software.
No matter how pro nuclear power one is, it's really, really hard to support licensing and approving operating permits for an outfit who apparently can not read the blueprints for their own nuclear power plant. AFAICS, Entergy is not capable of safely operating a coffee maker, much less a 600MW nuclear reactor.