XP is garbage

[Keith Williams]

In article <42653488$1$woehfu$mr2ice@news.aros.net>,
learning@learning.com says...

In <MPG.1ccec2fd836640b09899e4@news.individual.net>, on 04/19/05
at 08:26 AM, Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> said:


Actually, NT has nothing to do with OS/2. It was *supposed* to be OS/2
V3.0, but that never came to be.


Not quite. NT/2000 uses code taken from the early versions of OS/2 back
when billy and IBM parted ways. Until it was bastardized into XP, OS/2
text mode apps ran quite well in it. Why, it even creates OS/2 directories
during the install, which I am sure galled mr bill no end. The man never
created anything. He's just one of the best resellers on the market <g

The only thing in NT that is remotely OS/2 is NTFS, which is nearly
HPFS, both written by M$ (Balmer, IIRC). NT has more VMS parentage (D.
Cuttler) than OS/2.

--
Keith

 

In <MPG.1ccf06b29fa300d19899eb@news.individual.net>, on 04/19/05
at 01:15 PM, Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> said:

In article <42653488$1$woehfu$mr2ice@news.aros.net>,
learning@learning.com says...
In <MPG.1ccec2fd836640b09899e4@news.individual.net>, on 04/19/05
at 08:26 AM, Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> said:


Actually, NT has nothing to do with OS/2. It was *supposed* to be OS/2
V3.0, but that never came to be.


Not quite. NT/2000 uses code taken from the early versions of OS/2 back
when billy and IBM parted ways. Until it was bastardized into XP, OS/2
text mode apps ran quite well in it. Why, it even creates OS/2 directories
during the install, which I am sure galled mr bill no end. The man never
created anything. He's just one of the best resellers on the market <g

The only thing in NT that is remotely OS/2 is NTFS, which is nearly
HPFS, both written by M$ (Balmer, IIRC). NT has more VMS parentage (D.
Cuttler) than OS/2.

Sorry, I won't go to war with anyone over OS/2 anymore. BTDT. If you
research it, you will find that I am right. I was there when it was going
on. If you don't want to research it, that's okay Life is too short to
bother fussing over something that old.

JB

 

[Ted Edwards]

Keith Williams wrote:

A laptop and a projector, since '73? You're smokin' something. I was

The projector didn't come until the '80s. Large wall mounted monitors
were available (and I used 'em) in the mid '70s. If you don't believe
the laptop, check out the Copenhagen daily, "Politiken" for 1973 Aug 29.

teaching in the late '70s captive, and in a local college from '82-'85.
I have nothing against APL. It's a great language for engineers. It's
not a GP language though.

Personally, I don't think there's such a thing if you consider in the
cost in time/money to create the application. Your comments on matrices
suggest you aern't really into anything mathematical. I'd really hate
to have to write some of my stuff in PL-1. Life is too short.

BTW, the presentation software was written in APL.

Sure, when all you have is a nail... ;-)

At the time I had, and was familiar with, 8086 assembler, BASIC, Pascal,
C and APL compilers and or interpreters. I have worked with others but
these were the ones I was using on a daily basis. I used the tool that
would produce a quality piece of software in a timely fashion. BTW, I
still have that software and have developed it further. I now use it for
documenting my various projects. Much quicker, better graphics, less
physical storage space and easier to find again than paper.

Precisely. When I posted solutions to assignments, I always had across
the top in bold red print, "Here is _A_ solution to assignment #__".

...made grading a PITA too.

Not really. The students handed in their assignments on floppies.
Source code, data and output from a run all there. Easy for me to read,
test and add comments when appropriate.

Ted

 

[keith]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 19:55:51 +0000, Ted Edwards wrote:

Keith Williams wrote:
I used APL extensively in the 70s and very early 80s. I thought it was
WO then, and I still think so. I've seen process tracking tools
written in APL that weren't supportable and were left in place because
no one had a clue how they worked. No documentation (and please don't
tell me APL is self-documenting) and no comments (not easy in APL).

No language, and I have used quite a few over the last 50 years, is self
documenting except in certain very rare circumstances. Your statement
re commenting is wrong. For many years APLs have allowed comments on
the same line as code.

Comments were always allowed, just awkward, given the way APL is written.
It really does suggest one-line functions (programs). It is powerfule,
no doubt, but that's also it's downfall. Again, I used APL for a decade
and found it very useful, but *not* a GP language.

Only the very early ones required comments to be
alone on a line. Also, documentation and comments took up space and in
the early days with 32KB workspaces that could present a problem.
Sometimes those separate workspaces got lost. On the other hand ANY
language can be missused to produce undocumented, uncommented and
unreadable code.

Sure, APL suggests this though. Block-structured languages are quite
different in this way. I hear even BASIC can be documented. ;-)

My practice, these days, is to produce one or more (usually more) lines
of comments at the beginning of a function briefly explaining its
purpose, what is expect as argument(s) and what is the nature of the
result. In the body of the function, I add a comment to the line
stating _what_ I'm doing, not _how_ I'm doing it. Read the code for
that.

<shrug> That might work for you, but what about the next poor slob?

A very simple example avoiding the character set problem:
{del} z{is}D_S_T yr;M;DTS;D;dt;{quad}IO

[1] {rem} E*2 941213 Start and end of Daylight saving time in year, yr

[2] {quad}IO{is}1 {diamond} 'Daysof Day' need 'date'

[3] dt{is}400 1000+10000{times}yr {rem} Apr and Oct as yymm00

[4] D{is}0=0 Day{each}{each}DTS{is}Daysof{each}dt {rem} Dates and
which are Sundays
[5] z{is}(<\{take}D)/{take}DTS {rem} DST start date

[6] z{is}0.02+z,({rot}<\{rot}2{disclose}D)/2{disclose}DTS {rem} DST
starts/ends
{del}


However, If I had to fix some problem in poorly documented code, I'd
rather it was APL than C or FORTRAN or PL-I, ...

You are indeed unique! I'd rather deal with PL/I (actually I'm a hardware
type, so I do VHDL these days).

They were finally replaced wholesale, though I don't remember by what.

Obviously they didn't have anyone competent in APL on staff. I've been
there and done that. If the code was badly written, I'd figure out
enough to know what was to be done and rewrite it.

Ok, you're the king of APL. I bow to you. We're not talking about doufs
here. APL was simplay an inappropriate language to build a business
around. You diagree. Fine, bbut business is a littl e more complicated
than "getting it done".

Regarding the readability of APL, in the early '70s, I was invited by
Garth Foster to give a talk at Syracuse University on what I was then
working on. On the way to the lecture hall, Garth told me that he
wanted to do an experiment with regard to the readability of APL. He
said that he had put a rather complex single line on the blackboard and
wanted to see how long it would take me to figure out what it does and
how. Although I had never seen this code or the methodology it used, by
the time Garth finished an introduction (a couple of minutes), I was
able to state that it right justified a line of text making a rather
tricky use of {grade-up}. "If you can say the word for a knot, you will
know how to untie it." Samuel R. Delany in "Babel 17".

Ok. You the boss. <yawn>. DO you want to *OWN* that code for the rest
of your life? No one else does either. APL sucks for static problems
(like databases). It's great for engineering problems, but they're hardly
static.

What language would you call "general purpose" other than
assembler?
PL/I.

No more so that C or several others.

Nonsense. C sucks as a GP language. Add on the ++ and it's horrid.

--
Keith

 

[keith]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 20:27:19 +0000, Ted Edwards wrote:

Keith Williams wrote:
A laptop and a projector, since '73? You're smokin' something. I was

The projector didn't come until the '80s. Large wall mounted monitors
were available (and I used 'em) in the mid '70s. If you don't believe
the laptop, check out the Copenhagen daily, "Politiken" for 1973 Aug 29.

teaching in the late '70s captive, and in a local college from '82-'85.
I have nothing against APL. It's a great language for engineers. It's
not a GP language though.

Personally, I don't think there's such a thing if you consider in the
cost in time/money to create the application. Your comments on matrices
suggest you aern't really into anything mathematical. I'd really hate
to have to write some of my stuff in PL-1. Life is too short.

Bullshit! YOu didn't read *anything* I wrote. It's a *great* language,
if you think the world is a matrix. It's unsupportable by people who
don't think that way. You're an engineer and think of life as a matix.

BTW, most scientific work is still done in FORTRAN. Why? Because of its
imaginary numeric packages. I do believe there's some matrix
manipulations in there too.

BTW, the presentation software was written in APL.

Sure, when all you have is a nail... ;-)

At the time I had, and was familiar with, 8086 assembler, BASIC, Pascal,
C and APL compilers and or interpreters. I have worked with others but
these were the ones I was using on a daily basis. I used the tool that
would produce a quality piece of software in a timely fashion. BTW, I
still have that software and have developed it further. I now use it for
documenting my various projects. Much quicker, better graphics, less
physical storage space and easier to find again than paper.

Your fav nail was (ans is still) APL. You have much invested in it so you
find a way to continue. <shrug>

Precisely. When I posted solutions to assignments, I always had across
the top in bold red print, "Here is _A_ solution to assignment #__".

...made grading a PITA too.

Not really. The students handed in their assignments on floppies.
Source code, data and output from a run all there. Easy for me to read,
test and add comments when appropriate.

Perhaps you had a better class of students than I. Grading programs was
a PITA. Few worked, most crashed the system. Fortunately that was in the
days of floppys, so I didn't have to worry abut infecting my system.

--
Keith

 

[keith]

On Tue, 19 Apr 2005 11:34:50 -0600, learning wrote:

In <MPG.1ccf06b29fa300d19899eb@news.individual.net>, on 04/19/05
at 01:15 PM, Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> said:

In article <42653488$1$woehfu$mr2ice@news.aros.net>,
learning@learning.com says...
In <MPG.1ccec2fd836640b09899e4@news.individual.net>, on 04/19/05
at 08:26 AM, Keith Williams <krw@att.bizzzz> said:


Actually, NT has nothing to do with OS/2. It was *supposed* to be OS/2
V3.0, but that never came to be.


Not quite. NT/2000 uses code taken from the early versions of OS/2 back
when billy and IBM parted ways. Until it was bastardized into XP, OS/2
text mode apps ran quite well in it. Why, it even creates OS/2 directories
during the install, which I am sure galled mr bill no end. The man never
created anything. He's just one of the best resellers on the market <g

The only thing in NT that is remotely OS/2 is NTFS, which is nearly
HPFS, both written by M$ (Balmer, IIRC). NT has more VMS parentage (D.
Cuttler) than OS/2.

Sorry, I won't go to war with anyone over OS/2 anymore. BTDT. If you
research it, you will find that I am right. I was there when it was going
on. If you don't want to research it, that's okay Life is too short to
bother fussing over something that old.

'Tis Ok, if you're wrong. M$ bailed on OS/2 V3 and went their own way on
NT. IBM pulled back too and did their own V3. Notice that NT doesn't have
anything like the WPS. It can't.

--

Keith
> JB

 

In <pan.2005.04.20.02.32.18.710116@att.bizzzz>, on 04/19/05
at 10:32 PM, keith <krw@att.bizzzz> said:

'Tis Ok, if you're wrong.

But I am not wrong.

M$ bailed on OS/2 V3 and went their own way on
NT. IBM pulled back too and did their own V3. Notice that NT doesn't
have anything like the WPS. It can't.

Notice that NT and Win2K run OS/2 text apps natively. Bill would never
allow that if he had a choice. I am sure he always loved having NT/2K
install OS/2 files and system info on his might server software. Its not
there because he was doing IBM a favor or anything.

Part of the split was for billy to abscond with the base code that his
group had begun to develop jointly with IBM, and go from there. That is
why microsoft owns the rights to HPFS, IBM just owns the license to sell
it, so M$ had to make do with the sadly inferior NTFS instead.

And no one who ever worked for microsoft was EVER intelligent enough to
create something like the WPS..... <g>

John

 

[Pooh Bear]

bigcat@meeow.co.uk wrote:

Pooh Bear wrote:
bigcat@meeow.co.uk wrote:

c) including a fast track miniOS, a little like DOS, enabling parts
of
apps to run at top speed bypassing the main OS,

Have you ever seen 32 bit DOS in operation ?

Was stunningly / blindingly fast. Microsoft clearly wanted to kill
that one
very quickly. You could do *real* pro non-linear video editing on a
486 !


Graham

Interesting. Is it available on the net anywhere?

NT

Loads of hits from Google.

The original DOOM used a 32 bit DOS extender IIRC.


Graham

 

[Joel Kolstad]

"keith" <krw@att.bizzzz> wrote in message
newsan.2005.04.20.02.30.24.551101@att.bizzzz...

BTW, most scientific work is still done in FORTRAN. Why? Because of its
imaginary numeric packages. I do believe there's some matrix
manipulations in there too.

I really find it hard to believe that most *newly* developed code for
scientific work is done in FORTRAN. C++ has complex number support built-in
as well, and it's very clean to provide matrix support by overloading
operators.

Perhaps you had a better class of students than I. Grading programs was
a PITA. Few worked, most crashed the system.

What was your grading policy? Seems to me that -- assuming you provided some
test input files -- a program that crashed the system was if anything worse
than not even turning in the assignment and would receive an immediate "F"

I took a few CS classes back at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the
late '80s, and one of the things I'm (now) very glad they did to us was to
give us input files that were well defined but full of as much gratuitous
"junk" (extra spaces, tabs, blank lines, extra characters at the end of the
lines, etc.) as the file definition would allow -- it forced everyone to write
reasonably bullet-proof parsers.

---Joel Kolstad

 

[Ted Edwards]

keith wrote:

re commenting is wrong. For many years APLs have allowed comments on
the same line as code.

Comments were always allowed, just awkward, given the way APL is written.

Comments were always allowed, true, but in early APL's (e.g. the first
APL\360) comments were only full lines. Later comments could full lines
or at the end of any line. I can't see why adding a comment to a line
is any more difficult than in other languages. In fact, i have to type
four characters to put in a comment in C whereas only one is needed in APL.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusiont that you have a lot of personal
biases that you are stating as facts.

and found it very useful, but *not* a GP language.

What sort of application have you written in PL-I that couldn't be done
in current APL2?

shrug> That might work for you, but what about the next poor slob?

If he/she can't read the code to see the details, what is he/she doing
trying to modify it? C, PL-I, Pascal are so verbose that you say what
you are doing more compactly than the code expresses it. Of course,
after a few cycles of "enhancing", "modifying" or "correcting", the
comments have little to do with what the code does.

Ok, you're the king of APL. I bow to you. We're not talking about doufs
here. APL was simplay an inappropriate language to build a business
around. You diagree. Fine, bbut business is a littl e more complicated
than "getting it done".

The big advantage of PL-I in business is that you need ten of your
"doufs" (sic) to do what one competent APL programmer could do. It is
well known that managers pay is dependent on how many people are under
him/her. Thus no IT manager wants APL - it would make hi/her redundant
or at least "worth" less money.

Ok. You the boss. <yawn>. DO you want to *OWN* that code for the rest
of your life? No one else does either. APL sucks for static problems
(like databases). It's great for engineering problems, but they're hardly
static.

OK. Enjoy your rut. I'm done.

Ted

 

[Ted Edwards]

keith wrote:

Bullshit! YOu didn't read *anything* I wrote.

All I'm going to read. This is a waste of time. You are stuck in the
PL-I rut and think everything and everybody else is a waste of space-time.

It's a *great* language, if you think the world is a matrix.

Actually the world is a high order tensor. Latest theories suggest
perhaps as high as 10.

It's unsupportable by people who don't think that way.

You mean like you?

You're an engineer and think of life as a matix.

Interesting. You are wrong again.

BTW, most scientific work is still done in FORTRAN. Why? Because of its
imaginary numeric packages.

APL2 has complex numbers at the primitive level. Has had for years.
Before that my complex arithmetic package, originally written for
APL\360 in 1967, was quite widely distributed. I wrote it because a
collegue and I were working on different applications involving
microwave propagation in lossy dielectrics.

Perhaps you had a better class of students than I. Grading programs was
a PITA.

Certainly would be if you didn't have anything better than PL-I plus a
couple years to write your software.

Few worked, most crashed the system.

I guess you had crappy systems.

Ted

 

[Ted Edwards]

Joel Kolstad wrote:

I took a few CS classes back at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the
late '80s, and one of the things I'm (now) very glad they did to us was to
give us input files that were well defined but full of as much gratuitous
"junk" (extra spaces, tabs, blank lines, extra characters at the end of the
lines, etc.) as the file definition would allow -- it forced everyone to write
reasonably bullet-proof parsers.

It's too bad that more web page authors didn't take that course!

Ted

 

[Keith Williams]

In article <qdS8e.37529$vt1.17866@edtnps90>, Ted_Espamless@telus.net
says...

keith wrote:
Well, I was teaching (indeed most of what I taught was intro to
programming) a decade-and-a-half before laptops and projectors were
available. ;-)

When was that? I've had a laptop since 1973. Of course you wouldn't
have liked that one as it ran APL.

A laptop and a projector, since '73? You're smokin' something. I was
teaching in the late '70s captive, and in a local college from '82-'85.
I have nothing against APL. It's a great language for engineers. It's
not a GP language though.

I can see how this would work and I'd try it if I were in that position
again. As it was, I let them try on their own in a "lab" setting. I'd
then walk around and observe/help.

We did both. We had lecture and lab so the students got plenty of
oportunity to work on their own.

BTW, the presentation software was written in APL.

Sure, when all you have is a nail... ;-)

Sure. If it's yours, xenocryptophobia quickly sets in.

Precisely. When I posted solutions to assignments, I always had across
the top in bold red print, "Here is _A_ solution to assignment #__".

....made grading a PITA too.

--
Keith

 

[Frithiof Andreas Jensen]

"Rich Grise" <richgrise@example.net> wrote in message
newsan.2005.04.15.18.29.45.240296@example.net...

Somebody needs to teach your friend about drive partitions. I try to
repartition such that there's one of the minimum possible size for the
OS, and NEVER store anything but the OS itself on that partition - put
ALL of your data on a second or third partition. That way, when the
OS crashes and you have to reformat/reinstall, you only lose the OS,
and not all of your data.

Noooo, that way is The Way Of Pain(tm) -

EXACTLY how to smoke out a legion of subtle bugs and incompatibilities in
Windows that will cripple the system and add layers of grease to your
friends arteries.

You will also notice that Windows leak disk space - eventually your "minimum
partition" will be full and you will have to repartition the drive anyway;
having learned, you will slap it all in C: as Bill intended ;-)

Who carez if the installation goes, it can be recreated.

And, he might not know that it's entirely possible to make a directory:
D:\Program Files , and install your apps there. They probably won't
stay installed when the registry goes away, but at least your data
and options will still be there.

So goes the *Theory* but this will absolutely not work In Practice:

Microsoft Office 2000 f.ex. will break on about the Third Office FixPack
when installed outside of C:<wherever-it-wants-to-be>, Windows Update won't,
Outlook will be a struggle, games a pain, e.t.c, e.t.c.

Back up the data instead and/or keep them on a Network drive (that actually
works - because that is what the business customers routinely do. For
convenient recovery, the application CD's can be imaged onto the network
drive too).