Cardfile was a free program distributed with with Windows 3. Basically, it is a flat database that gives you a title line/sort key and around 400 free form characters per "card". It ran fine in Windows 9 and I think in XP. Might not work with Vista as it was a 16 bit program. There used to be a couple of freeware cardfile clones around, maybe one of them would do. Cardfile also would allow one OLE object per card, but that needs 16bit OLE which is not implemented in WINE and I expect not in NT based Windows either.
Hey, I remember Fidonet. Sort of like my 1950 Plymouth. Probably not as satisfactory as what replaced it, but a solid, useful, product/service in its time.
A belated thanks for your efforts on it.
***So in France people HAVE to buy computers only from Asus??***
Don't be obtuse. You surely know that consumer PCs without preinstalled Windows are about as common as new cars sold without engines. And please don't tell me that I'm wrong just because your notions of what the free market should provide don't match the reality of what the free market does provide.
I imagine that it is no easier to find a Windowless PC in France than in the US. In fact, it is damn near impossible for a consumer in the US to buy a PC without Vista much less without a Microsoft OS.
Don't believe me? Try it. I have. It's possible. It's not easy.
About the only MS-less PC you can buy easily in the US is Wal-Mart's $199 PC (Everex TC2502) which comes with a Linux gOS that is gorgeous visually, but quite buggy compared to other Debian based Linuxes. The TC2502 uses a Via C7 CPU running at 1.5GHz. I personally think that's good because of its low power consumption, but this is a low end machine with 500mb of memory, 80GB hard drive, ho-hum graphics, slow CPU. If I recall correctly, they have to upgrade the hardware (and the price of course) in order to shoehorn Vista into it.
If you have tried to siphon gas from an American car in the past 30 years, you'd know that there are baffles in the fill pipe and tank that make inserting a siphon hose next to impossible. You need to either get access to the fuel tank by removing the in tank fuel pump (not too hard on many cars) or you need to disconnect a fuel line and probably activate the in tank fuel pump.
***bacsue dimwits still code their pages to not display if you're not using IE ("please upgrade to a modern browser?***
Surely there must be some way to sterilize those birdbrains via the internet so that their genetic material is not allowed to contaminate the human gene pool.
Having worked in a K-8 school myself, I share your skepticism about 1:1 PCs in underdeveloped countries. However, I never thought the OLPC would work out all that well as a teaching/learning tool. What I've always hoped is that after the OLPCs fail to do much for education, many will find their way out into the general community where storekeepers, artisans, etc will find productive uses for the machines.
***Then to top it off, since no company wants to spend the fortune it would cost to serve a few customers you want me (aka the guy who funds the government with the help of a bunch of other income earners) to pay for it?***
You're already paying for it. It's called the Universal Service Fund and it's a surcharge on phone bills to ensure that rural phone rates are relatively comperable to urban rates. A few small phone companies in rural areas actually use the USF money to provide DSL to rural customers (e.g. Waitsfield Telecom which serves a bunch of little tiny towns in central Vermont). The major phone companies provide the minimum the law requires and presumably magic the USF money into more profitable activities. Corporate Ethics? An oxymoron.... Only in America.
***DIAL UP IS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD***
No it's not. Unless the phone service is really wretched, it'll deliver between 6 and 15% of the speed of a DSL connection. I haven't been forced to use dial up for five or six years, but when last I used it, it appeared to be faster than many internet servers. Web site access times at work with a rural dial up connection weren't much different from those at home with DSL. I could even receive audio streams if there weren't many other users sharing the bandwidth. And this was a mediocre phone line which maxed out at around 20-30K. Now file downloads... that's a whole different story.
Some people were still dinking around with IBM 1401 (late 1950s) code as recently as 2000. http://www.multicians.org/thvv/1401s.html, but not for any productive purpose. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find Fortran/Cobol programs originally written for the IBM709 or CDC1604 still in use. Not on the original hardware of course -- too expensive to run
Maybe the right question is what is the oldest computer still in use somewhere in the world? Odds are pretty good that some of the code from its early years is still around.
Open source is likely to be a very good software environment when it is finished. However, that will take at least a decade, maybe two.
Microsoft OTOH is caught in a dead end. The only chance I can see for them to be relevant 20 years from now is a gamble and not at favorable odds. They need to loose WGA, meaningless product definition, and all the other annoying and ineffective marketing tricks and focus their considerable talents on building the best servers and desktop systems they possibly can. They have lost over a decade since their last user oriented release (Windows 95) and will already be playing catch up in many areas.
Yes, they will leave money on the table short term. But if they can get their act together, they may have an expanding base of happy and enthusiastic customers ten years from now. If they don't do that, they are doomed to lose out to Apple, Open Source, and Google who do have such a base.
BTW, I just had to deal with a series of hardware and software meltdowns that required getting both a Windows XP and a Linux PC up with just basic install software and a backup of the old applications. Neither operation was fun, but Windows was especially awful -- a sort of ongoing horror show of stupid and arbitrary constraints on what could be done and how it could be done. The only place where Windows was clearly superior was in installation of a network printer. And eventually CUPS will be usable by mere mortals, so Windows won't even have that to brag about.
To sum it up. Windows and Open Source both have a long way to go. Open Source looks to be chugging along. Windows is lost in a horrendous swamp. It isn't hard to see the eventual outcome.
***Any manufacturer that did so would be open to all sorts of legal trouble, assuming they could get any hospital to risk using such a thing.***
Windows hasn't been suitable for much of anything since about 1997. Does that keep people from not only using it, but paying good money to finance their descent into hell? Of course not.
Have you ever tried to explain to a dentist how to move a newly popped-up window off from on top of the window he is actually interested in while your mouth is anesthesized and full of plumbing?
***The Hobbit is a much better story than LOTR. Just my opinion of course***
Mine also. And it'll make a better motion picture I think. My wife doesn't mind fantasy. She was OK with the original Star Wars. She likes the Harry Potter films -- quite a lot. As we were walking out of the first LOTR movie she turned and said. "My God that was tedious. Why don't they just give him the damn ring and get on with it?" Needless to say, we did not see the other two installments
***I have a bunch of CD's that I bought from a record store that went belly up. They still work.***
You, sir are engaged in theft of services. Your access to licensed products terminated when your provider ceased to exist as a legal entity. I hereby inform you that you are LEGALLY OBLIGATED to render those CDs unreadable. You may of course retain the CDs once you have ensured that the LICENSED MATERIAL is unusable. If you fail to comply, you will -- in accordance with laws currently in place -- potentially be liable for 3gazillion, 206 thousand, three dollars and change in economic damages for each unlicensed, playable musical piece in your possession.
Everything would be OK if people in Vermont lived on top of the hills, but for some reason, they built in the valleys where line of sight is restricted. Once, a number of years ago, I had reason to look into setting up a wireless connection to a rural site in Vermont. I walked up the only accessible ridge and looked around to see what was in line of sight. What I could see was a barn about 400 meters away... and trees -- about ten thousand trees. We actually could see a tree covered hill about three miles away, and I suppose we could have tried to negotiate a tower there. But we would still have needed at least two -- probably more -- additional relays to get to a place where we could hook up to broadband.
Cell phone signal? Well there is spot about 500 meters down the road where you can get one, maybe two, bars if you hold the phone just right.
You can hang a 56K modem on a rural Vermont phone line, but will you get 56K? I used to work in Westford where 56K modems do 28K on good days. There are towns further out where rates aren't that high. A lot depends on where the ISP is. the connection to Earthnet from one coworker's house dropped to about 1200 baud when Earthnet moved its connection point to a different town.
***Since they did the f*cking thing has failed to record the shows I want to watch about half the time.***
I'm pretty sure that someone -- Verizon? Microsoft? -- has a patent on not doing what is requested about half the time. Another patent infringement? Dish's patent problems may not be over.
Unfortunately, since the US uses NTSC for analog and our frequency allocations are different from anyplace outside the Western Hemisphere and I believe our digital formats also are unique, your $20 converters won't work here. Ours didn't even show up in the stores until about 30 days ago and cost USD $60 or so. There is will be $40 off coupons available from the government and I've requested one, but it hasn't turned up yet. Oh yeah, and last time I looked, only 3 of our 8 local stations have their DTV transmitters on the air.
And there is the seldom mentioned problem that analog TV viewers tend to be folks living on small incomes, fixed incomes, or both. They don't necessarily have even $20 to spare.
I'm curious how well digital is going to work in my area which has a lot of hills and where folks tend to get marginal coverage. Analog coverage around here used to be described as "one and a half stations". Rumor has it that digital coverage is not as good as it was with analog. Oh yeah, cable coverage around here is minimal. I have cable. Folks in the next towns out from Burlington don't have cable (or DSL, but that's another story). And not everyone has a clear line of sight to satellites.
The US DTV rollout has been an on-going shambles. It looks like they are going to procede with it whether digital works or not. I wouldn't bet that they don't turn analog back on about 30-60 days after they turn it off. There are possibly going to be a LOT more complaints than anyone anticipates.
I'm not against digital, but the entire roll out in the US has been a textbook study in how NOT to manage a technology upgrade. We'll see what happens in about ten months.
***I'm curious to know how exactly it is "easy" to bypass running as a limited user.***
Go to Google and enter "privilege escalation" followed by the name of your OS. You'll get somewhere between 60,000 (OS-X) and 330,000 (Linux) hits. Of course not all the hits will lead you to an exploit, and many of the exploits you find will unavailable in your configuraton, fixed, hard to use, imaginary, etc. But my guess is that you will find some ideas there.
I did something along that line a number of years ago when I needed to get into a Red Hat Linux machine whose root password was not available from the vendor who sold the thing. It took me about 20 minutes to find a way in.
***on the application level, Java is the biggest, most succesful language ever***
Surely, that title belongs to COBOL. Maybe Java wins in the the "Biggest, most successful, unreadable language" subcatagory. I'm not a COBOL programmer BTW. I'm not even sure that the term "Cobol Programmer" isn't an oxymoron as most of the "Cobol Programmers" I met back in the decades when it dominated the business world struck me as being somewhat on the not real swift side of confused.
I lack the patience to program in COBOL, but the couple of times I've needed to dig into a COBOL program to figure out what it was doing, I found it to be orders of magnitude more comprehensible than C, C++ or Java.
Seriously, I think the write-only nature of modern languages is a huge contributor to the dubious quality of software. Trying to scale programming languages that lead to baffling code at the toy/small program level to huge systems works about as well as one might expect -- Poorly. Frankly, I see virtually no progress on the big system side since the first non-assembler big systems I saw 40+ years ago written in Fortran and Jovial. In fact, some parts of OSS programs I've looked at written in C++ look to be a decided step backwards.
So I'm an old foggy who is stuck in the past? Perhaps. Probably even. But I do see significant progress in some areas. List programming is a step forward although I'm not that good at it. Same with Object Orientation. Perl is a vastly better tool for quick and dirty little programs than anything we had in the 1960s. Python is even better. I expect there are even better languages for many jobs.
But if you ask me, C sucks at least at many of the jobs it is being used for. Bad with object orientation pasted on is lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig and it's still bad. (I'd have thought that C might be OK for some simple embedded programming -- especially if the alternative is Intel's abominable assembly language. But embedded programmers have told me otherwise. Easier to code, but performance is deficient.)
I'll finish this rant with a quote from the Appendix B to the Unix Hater's Handbook (I use Slackware 12.0 BTW. It has it's moments, but for the most part I'm a Linux fan).
... we quickly added additional cryptic features and
evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a
clean compile on the following syntax:
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that
allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science
progress back 20 or more years.... http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf
That's parody of course. But good parody is usually built on a kernel of truth.
For those with simple photosizing, rotation, etc needs and who are not GIMP compatible, irfan runs perfectly well under WINE. (http://www.irfanview.com/)
***I think that "the most difficult language to learn" varies from culture to culture. If you speak French then learning Spanish or English isn't too much of a stretch, but learning Japanese is going to be challenging. Similarly, I think that a Japanese person would find almost any western language very challenging to learn in comparison to say, Chinese, which at least has a similar "alphabet" (Kanji obviously, not hiragana and katakana). ***
Many Japanese can make sense out of written Chinese, but that doesn't mean they find the spoken language easy to learn. From their point of view, it seems to be every bit as devoid of logic as English. Despite having borrowed a lot of words from Chinese, the underlying language is very different from Japanese.
A multilingual Japanese once told me that Spanish is the easiest foreign language for Japanese speakers to learn. Its grammer is regular and it uses about the same set of sounds that Japanese does.
Clearly, you have failed to research the method used by the USPTO in evaluating patents. It involves converting the patent to electronic form then scanning the text for the phrase "perpetual motion". If the phrase is not found, the patent is awarded.
Let me respond concisely -- HOGWASH. Most paint jobs -- there have been a few exceptions -- will protect the car from corrosion for 20 years in the sun and weather without doing any more than fading a bit. The paint job has virtually no affect on resale value after 10-12 years. After 15 years the car is worth whatever the junk yard will pay for it -- an amount that may well be negative. And Joe's Auto Salvage couldn't care less about the paint job. It's possible to keep a car on the road longer --especially if you do your own maintenance. But repair parts get hard to find and it's hard to justify the effort unless the car is something special. In most cases, the paint will outlast the car with no cleaning whatsoever.
Come on man -- unless it's your hobby (in which case wash, wax, and baby it to your hearts content) it's just a car -- wheels. Nothing more. Don't aggrandize the silly thing.
***use this technology on the body so I don't have to wash my car as often.***
Do WHAT to your car? Look man, If cars needed washing the dealer would do it for you before you drove the car off the lot.
And, more seriously, haven't you got better things to do with your life than wash a stupid car? Maybe, once a year, in the springtime if the car is elderly and you live in an area that uses road salt -- or a few times in midsummer if you don't get Summer rainfall. But mostly washing cars is about as foolish a use of time and resource as dealing with a damn lawn.
***Its been pretty much confirmed by everyone, the hazards of the fuel where nil. This was all a dickwaving scheme by the military who not too long ago was up in arms over China doing the EXACT same thing... ***
It's not the EXACT same thing even though it might look and sound like it on the surface. The Chinese intercept took place at a substantially higher altitude and left a lot of junk in long term orbit around the planet where it will constitute a hazard to satellites for a long time. The US test used an anti-ballistic missile to intercept a decaying satellite that was going to renter on its own. Hopefully all the fragments will burn up in the atmosphere in or re-enter in the near future.
There are good geopolitical arguments that appear to be quite beyond the comprehension of the bozos currently running the US for not deploying ABM technology. Many serious people are against ABMs because they believe that ABMs are expensive, easily and cheaply defeated, and do not make their owners one whit safer. But even if you are in that camp as I tend to be, we should acknowledge that this test looks to be far more responsible than the Chinese test was.
That said, the business about the fuel tank being a hazard looks to be pretty much nonsense. This was an ad hoc test of the oldest and most reliable of the US's multitude of ABM projects (There were at least four the last time I looked). One of them was originally designed to do something else and has proved in the past to be pretty much totally incapable of hitting an incoming missile. A second has trouble hitting even objects that want to be hit and is highly dubious, but is being deployed anyway. The third -- on paper better system -- is several years from deployment.
It should be noted that in a real attack, the target will be smaller, and will probably have a small and deliberately deceptive radar profile. It will probably be accompanied by decoys and very likely by sophisticated radar jamming devices. The difference -- if you will -- between hitting a beachball thrown by a six-year old, and a disguised hardball thrown by a major league pitcher along with a couple of oranges, a strobelight, two snowballs and a flatiron fired off on the same trajectory as the hardball at the same time by a pitching machine.
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Cardfile was a free program distributed with with Windows 3. Basically, it is a flat database that gives you a title line/sort key and around 400 free form characters per "card". It ran fine in Windows 9 and I think in XP. Might not work with Vista as it was a 16 bit program. There used to be a couple of freeware cardfile clones around, maybe one of them would do. Cardfile also would allow one OLE object per card, but that needs 16bit OLE which is not implemented in WINE and I expect not in NT based Windows either.
Hey, I remember Fidonet. Sort of like my 1950 Plymouth. Probably not as satisfactory as what replaced it, but a solid, useful, product/service in its time. A belated thanks for your efforts on it.
Don't be obtuse. You surely know that consumer PCs without preinstalled Windows are about as common as new cars sold without engines. And please don't tell me that I'm wrong just because your notions of what the free market should provide don't match the reality of what the free market does provide.
I imagine that it is no easier to find a Windowless PC in France than in the US. In fact, it is damn near impossible for a consumer in the US to buy a PC without Vista much less without a Microsoft OS.
Don't believe me? Try it. I have. It's possible. It's not easy.
About the only MS-less PC you can buy easily in the US is Wal-Mart's $199 PC (Everex TC2502) which comes with a Linux gOS that is gorgeous visually, but quite buggy compared to other Debian based Linuxes. The TC2502 uses a Via C7 CPU running at 1.5GHz. I personally think that's good because of its low power consumption, but this is a low end machine with 500mb of memory, 80GB hard drive, ho-hum graphics, slow CPU. If I recall correctly, they have to upgrade the hardware (and the price of course) in order to shoehorn Vista into it.
If you have tried to siphon gas from an American car in the past 30 years, you'd know that there are baffles in the fill pipe and tank that make inserting a siphon hose next to impossible. You need to either get access to the fuel tank by removing the in tank fuel pump (not too hard on many cars) or you need to disconnect a fuel line and probably activate the in tank fuel pump.
Surely there must be some way to sterilize those birdbrains via the internet so that their genetic material is not allowed to contaminate the human gene pool.
Having worked in a K-8 school myself, I share your skepticism about 1:1 PCs in underdeveloped countries. However, I never thought the OLPC would work out all that well as a teaching/learning tool. What I've always hoped is that after the OLPCs fail to do much for education, many will find their way out into the general community where storekeepers, artisans, etc will find productive uses for the machines.
You're already paying for it. It's called the Universal Service Fund and it's a surcharge on phone bills to ensure that rural phone rates are relatively comperable to urban rates. A few small phone companies in rural areas actually use the USF money to provide DSL to rural customers (e.g. Waitsfield Telecom which serves a bunch of little tiny towns in central Vermont). The major phone companies provide the minimum the law requires and presumably magic the USF money into more profitable activities. Corporate Ethics? An oxymoron. ... Only in America.
***DIAL UP IS NOT THE END OF THE WORLD***
No it's not. Unless the phone service is really wretched, it'll deliver between 6 and 15% of the speed of a DSL connection. I haven't been forced to use dial up for five or six years, but when last I used it, it appeared to be faster than many internet servers. Web site access times at work with a rural dial up connection weren't much different from those at home with DSL. I could even receive audio streams if there weren't many other users sharing the bandwidth. And this was a mediocre phone line which maxed out at around 20-30K. Now file downloads ... that's a whole different story.
Some people were still dinking around with IBM 1401 (late 1950s) code as recently as 2000. http://www.multicians.org/thvv/1401s.html, but not for any productive purpose. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find Fortran/Cobol programs originally written for the IBM709 or CDC1604 still in use. Not on the original hardware of course -- too expensive to run Maybe the right question is what is the oldest computer still in use somewhere in the world? Odds are pretty good that some of the code from its early years is still around.
Microsoft OTOH is caught in a dead end. The only chance I can see for them to be relevant 20 years from now is a gamble and not at favorable odds. They need to loose WGA, meaningless product definition, and all the other annoying and ineffective marketing tricks and focus their considerable talents on building the best servers and desktop systems they possibly can. They have lost over a decade since their last user oriented release (Windows 95) and will already be playing catch up in many areas.
Yes, they will leave money on the table short term. But if they can get their act together, they may have an expanding base of happy and enthusiastic customers ten years from now. If they don't do that, they are doomed to lose out to Apple, Open Source, and Google who do have such a base.
BTW, I just had to deal with a series of hardware and software meltdowns that required getting both a Windows XP and a Linux PC up with just basic install software and a backup of the old applications. Neither operation was fun, but Windows was especially awful -- a sort of ongoing horror show of stupid and arbitrary constraints on what could be done and how it could be done. The only place where Windows was clearly superior was in installation of a network printer. And eventually CUPS will be usable by mere mortals, so Windows won't even have that to brag about.
To sum it up. Windows and Open Source both have a long way to go. Open Source looks to be chugging along. Windows is lost in a horrendous swamp. It isn't hard to see the eventual outcome.
Windows hasn't been suitable for much of anything since about 1997. Does that keep people from not only using it, but paying good money to finance their descent into hell? Of course not.
Have you ever tried to explain to a dentist how to move a newly popped-up window off from on top of the window he is actually interested in while your mouth is anesthesized and full of plumbing?
Mine also. And it'll make a better motion picture I think. My wife doesn't mind fantasy. She was OK with the original Star Wars. She likes the Harry Potter films -- quite a lot. As we were walking out of the first LOTR movie she turned and said. "My God that was tedious. Why don't they just give him the damn ring and get on with it?" Needless to say, we did not see the other two installments
You, sir are engaged in theft of services. Your access to licensed products terminated when your provider ceased to exist as a legal entity. I hereby inform you that you are LEGALLY OBLIGATED to render those CDs unreadable. You may of course retain the CDs once you have ensured that the LICENSED MATERIAL is unusable. If you fail to comply, you will -- in accordance with laws currently in place -- potentially be liable for 3gazillion, 206 thousand, three dollars and change in economic damages for each unlicensed, playable musical piece in your possession.
Cell phone signal? Well there is spot about 500 meters down the road where you can get one, maybe two, bars if you hold the phone just right.
You can hang a 56K modem on a rural Vermont phone line, but will you get 56K? I used to work in Westford where 56K modems do 28K on good days. There are towns further out where rates aren't that high. A lot depends on where the ISP is. the connection to Earthnet from one coworker's house dropped to about 1200 baud when Earthnet moved its connection point to a different town.
I'm pretty sure that someone -- Verizon? Microsoft? -- has a patent on not doing what is requested about half the time. Another patent infringement? Dish's patent problems may not be over.
And there is the seldom mentioned problem that analog TV viewers tend to be folks living on small incomes, fixed incomes, or both. They don't necessarily have even $20 to spare.
I'm curious how well digital is going to work in my area which has a lot of hills and where folks tend to get marginal coverage. Analog coverage around here used to be described as "one and a half stations". Rumor has it that digital coverage is not as good as it was with analog. Oh yeah, cable coverage around here is minimal. I have cable. Folks in the next towns out from Burlington don't have cable (or DSL, but that's another story). And not everyone has a clear line of sight to satellites.
The US DTV rollout has been an on-going shambles. It looks like they are going to procede with it whether digital works or not. I wouldn't bet that they don't turn analog back on about 30-60 days after they turn it off. There are possibly going to be a LOT more complaints than anyone anticipates.
I'm not against digital, but the entire roll out in the US has been a textbook study in how NOT to manage a technology upgrade. We'll see what happens in about ten months.
Go to Google and enter "privilege escalation" followed by the name of your OS. You'll get somewhere between 60,000 (OS-X) and 330,000 (Linux) hits. Of course not all the hits will lead you to an exploit, and many of the exploits you find will unavailable in your configuraton, fixed, hard to use, imaginary, etc. But my guess is that you will find some ideas there.
I did something along that line a number of years ago when I needed to get into a Red Hat Linux machine whose root password was not available from the vendor who sold the thing. It took me about 20 minutes to find a way in.
Surely, that title belongs to COBOL. Maybe Java wins in the the "Biggest, most successful, unreadable language" subcatagory. I'm not a COBOL programmer BTW. I'm not even sure that the term "Cobol Programmer" isn't an oxymoron as most of the "Cobol Programmers" I met back in the decades when it dominated the business world struck me as being somewhat on the not real swift side of confused.
I lack the patience to program in COBOL, but the couple of times I've needed to dig into a COBOL program to figure out what it was doing, I found it to be orders of magnitude more comprehensible than C, C++ or Java.
Seriously, I think the write-only nature of modern languages is a huge contributor to the dubious quality of software. Trying to scale programming languages that lead to baffling code at the toy/small program level to huge systems works about as well as one might expect -- Poorly. Frankly, I see virtually no progress on the big system side since the first non-assembler big systems I saw 40+ years ago written in Fortran and Jovial. In fact, some parts of OSS programs I've looked at written in C++ look to be a decided step backwards.
So I'm an old foggy who is stuck in the past? Perhaps. Probably even. But I do see significant progress in some areas. List programming is a step forward although I'm not that good at it. Same with Object Orientation. Perl is a vastly better tool for quick and dirty little programs than anything we had in the 1960s. Python is even better. I expect there are even better languages for many jobs.
But if you ask me, C sucks at least at many of the jobs it is being used for. Bad with object orientation pasted on is lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig and it's still bad. (I'd have thought that C might be OK for some simple embedded programming -- especially if the alternative is Intel's abominable assembly language. But embedded programmers have told me otherwise. Easier to code, but performance is deficient.)
I'll finish this rant with a quote from the Appendix B to the Unix Hater's Handbook (I use Slackware 12.0 BTW. It has it's moments, but for the most part I'm a Linux fan).
... we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:
for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+(*u++/ 8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2);
To think that modern programmers would try to use a language that allowed such a statement was beyond our comprehension! We actually thought of selling this to the Soviets to set their computer science progress back 20 or more years. ... http://www.simson.net/ref/ugh.pdf
That's parody of course. But good parody is usually built on a kernel of truth.
For those with simple photosizing, rotation, etc needs and who are not GIMP compatible, irfan runs perfectly well under WINE. (http://www.irfanview.com/)
Many Japanese can make sense out of written Chinese, but that doesn't mean they find the spoken language easy to learn. From their point of view, it seems to be every bit as devoid of logic as English. Despite having borrowed a lot of words from Chinese, the underlying language is very different from Japanese.
A multilingual Japanese once told me that Spanish is the easiest foreign language for Japanese speakers to learn. Its grammer is regular and it uses about the same set of sounds that Japanese does.
No, I'm not sure that I'm kidding.
Come on man -- unless it's your hobby (in which case wash, wax, and baby it to your hearts content) it's just a car -- wheels. Nothing more. Don't aggrandize the silly thing.
Do WHAT to your car? Look man, If cars needed washing the dealer would do it for you before you drove the car off the lot.
And, more seriously, haven't you got better things to do with your life than wash a stupid car? Maybe, once a year, in the springtime if the car is elderly and you live in an area that uses road salt -- or a few times in midsummer if you don't get Summer rainfall. But mostly washing cars is about as foolish a use of time and resource as dealing with a damn lawn.
It's not the EXACT same thing even though it might look and sound like it on the surface. The Chinese intercept took place at a substantially higher altitude and left a lot of junk in long term orbit around the planet where it will constitute a hazard to satellites for a long time. The US test used an anti-ballistic missile to intercept a decaying satellite that was going to renter on its own. Hopefully all the fragments will burn up in the atmosphere in or re-enter in the near future.
There are good geopolitical arguments that appear to be quite beyond the comprehension of the bozos currently running the US for not deploying ABM technology. Many serious people are against ABMs because they believe that ABMs are expensive, easily and cheaply defeated, and do not make their owners one whit safer. But even if you are in that camp as I tend to be, we should acknowledge that this test looks to be far more responsible than the Chinese test was.
That said, the business about the fuel tank being a hazard looks to be pretty much nonsense. This was an ad hoc test of the oldest and most reliable of the US's multitude of ABM projects (There were at least four the last time I looked). One of them was originally designed to do something else and has proved in the past to be pretty much totally incapable of hitting an incoming missile. A second has trouble hitting even objects that want to be hit and is highly dubious, but is being deployed anyway. The third -- on paper better system -- is several years from deployment.
It should be noted that in a real attack, the target will be smaller, and will probably have a small and deliberately deceptive radar profile. It will probably be accompanied by decoys and very likely by sophisticated radar jamming devices. The difference -- if you will -- between hitting a beachball thrown by a six-year old, and a disguised hardball thrown by a major league pitcher along with a couple of oranges, a strobelight, two snowballs and a flatiron fired off on the same trajectory as the hardball at the same time by a pitching machine.
Well, yeah ... But if the arrows don't work, the hunters get nukes. OK?