Gail Shaw escribió:
> Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
> implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)
> 

Like the LIMIT clause?

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> 
> I think it's not so much a case of "Linux isn't ready for the desktop",
> but rather "Linux is misplaced on the desktop". But I don't see anybody
> developing anything else currently...
> 

Linux is not displaced on desktop, but it's a great failure to say that
all desktops should be alike. Different desktops for different people
and for different jobs.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

Post a reply to this message

>>>> but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]
>>>
>>> sigh.
>>
>> Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P
>>
> 
> I live in South America (Argentina). I have probably been to Walmart 
> *once*, since it's not exactly the most popular store (heck maybe 
> there's only one Walmart in the whole country). But I know what it is...

Sure. And I vaguely know what it is. But I have no idea why it's 
considered "evil"...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Oh. Oh yeah. Closing the window on your PC doesn't *actually* make the 
> server stop processing the request. Duh. :-S

God!  well at least you learned it...

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> The issue is that any word processor coming by should handle doc format
> perfectly -- no matter how good it is at an open format like ODF --
> because that's what people send you and expect from you.  Not an easy
> task reverse enginneering an obscure, undocumented format like that.

Especially while the format itself ain't compatible between its versions.

> OTOH, I've successfully opened older doc formats with OpenOffice while
> Word was complaining the format was too old. :)

Which was proven... ;)

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Just being curios... What's a 'cursor', and why is that bad?

well, at least you're now curious about things.  That's good, keep it 
up, Mr. Bean.

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>> Just being curios... What's a 'cursor', and why is that bad?
> 
> well, at least you're now curious about things.  That's good, keep it 
> up, Mr. Bean.

I've always been curios about technologies that interest me. It's just 
the politics and economics that don't interest me so much. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> 
> I don't particularly. In fact I'm actually moderately tempted with a Mac
> Mini.

Plusadvantage - Mac Mini is laptop-technology, so it's more efficient on
electric usage than most PC's.

> OTOH, I have many hundreds of pounds worth of software that won't work
> on it. Which is fine I guess - I just keep *that* software on my PC
> instead. But then... what exactly am I going to use this shiny new Mac
> for? 

Desktop computing. You'll run 'bout everything you can on it and use VNC
session to hold the Windows -PC in touch. OR you can use Parallels and
install and use both OSX and WinXP on that MacMini.

> I guess there's a way to run POV-Ray on it

Certainly.

> , and it has a nice big
> dual-core CPU in there, so that looks good. But... I don't know... Do I
> really want to spend basically £400 just to find out what a Mac is like?

No, you'll first need to find out what's it like and then decide if it's
what you'll want.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> 
> They can't buy Linux. They can, however, pay the hardware guys to only
> supply new computers with M$ Windows preinstalled, make them sign
> agreements not to develop drivers for other platforms, and so forth.
> 

*That* would be a serious case of taking misadvantage of monopoly status.

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

Post a reply to this message

"Nicolas Alvarez" <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote in message
news:47b20953$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail Shaw escribió:
> > Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
> > implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)
> >
>
> Like the LIMIT clause?

Is that Oracle? Not offhand familar with it. Is it the equivalent to TOP
(SELECT  top 10 SomeColumn FROM sometable)?

I was thinking the NTile or Row_Number in SQL Server 2005, or the identity
column. Top works, but needs various hoops jumped through to get the second
and subsequent pages.

Post a reply to this message

Eero Ahonen wrote:

>> OTOH, I have many hundreds of pounds worth of software that won't work
>> on it. Which is fine I guess - I just keep *that* software on my PC
>> instead. But then... what exactly am I going to use this shiny new Mac
>> for? 
> 
> Desktop computing. You'll run 'bout everything you can on it and use VNC
> session to hold the Windows -PC in touch. OR you can use Parallels and
> install and use both OSX and WinXP on that MacMini.

Most LOL-inducing moments: Standing in PC World and looking at the "Why 
Mac?" sticker on the shelf.

"#7: It runs Micro$oft Office."

Uh, dude, isn't the whole *point* of a Mac to get *away* from M$ 
products? :-P

Anyway, whatever. I doubt running highly compute-intensive applications 
in Parallels is a good idea...

>> But... I don't know... Do I
>> really want to spend basically £400 just to find out what a Mac is like?
> 
> No, you'll first need to find out what's it like and then decide if it's
> what you'll want.

Heh. Well. No obvious way to do that...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

Post a reply to this message

"Eero Ahonen" <aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid> wrote in message
news:47b208fb$1@news.povray.org...
>
> Vista's getting a lot of angry comments now and it hasn't got it's
> footprint out (yet). If MS broke backward compatibility totally now, how
> would you think Vista would be selling?

Pretty much not at all.

Talking about Vista, word is that MS has written that off as a mistake and
is hard at work on its replacement (Windows 7). A full year or more ahead of
their plans....

Post a reply to this message

"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47b2057c$1@news.povray.org...
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> > Orchid XP v7 escribió:
> >> but I don't actually know who Walmart are, so...]
> >
> > sigh.
>
> Well I don't live in America, do I? :-P

Neither do I.
I still know what Walmart is and why people consider it an evil empire

Post a reply to this message

Gail Shaw escribió:
> "Nicolas Alvarez" <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote in message
> news:47b20953$1@news.povray.org...
>> Gail Shaw escribi�:
>>> Nope. That's paging. Lots of set-based solutions to that (exact
>>> implementation depending on the db engine you want to run it)
>>>
>> Like the LIMIT clause?
> 
> Is that Oracle? Not offhand familar with it. 

No, I'm only familiar with MySQL.

LIMIT {[offset,] row_count | row_count OFFSET offset}

Goes after the WHERE clause.

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Just being curios... What's a 'cursor', and why is that bad?

As for the "what is it", it's a structure that lets you loop through 
results inside a stored procedure. I.e., a cursor pointing into a table 
where you can do things like "get the next row".

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

"Nicolas Alvarez" <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote in message
news:47b20d36$1@news.povray.org...
> Gail Shaw escribió:
> > Is that Oracle? Not offhand familar with it.
>
> No, I'm only familiar with MySQL.
>
> LIMIT {[offset,] row_count | row_count OFFSET offset}
>
> Goes after the WHERE clause.

OK. Haven't done much MySQL either. That looks good for paging then, seeing
as it has an offset. That's one down side of top in SQL server. You can't
ask for the 'next' top 30 easily

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> And no, it's not just something doing a global grab or something. Cursor 
> locks up, and it doesn't answer pings.

sorry to hear that.  Perhaps swap got full?...

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> no, I'm simply saying that those "multiple operating systems" are using 
> the same old code from the same single company to handle old apps, so 
> that doesn't count as multiple operating systems.

Well, no, they're not. That's just factually incorrect. If that was the 
case, DOS programs couldn't write to files on NTFS partitions or access 
network shares, nor would software that writes directly to the screen 
work inside a window.

> A pure Java/Python/whatever program using standard interprocess 
> communication channels to deal with the underlying OS and using a 
> cross-platform GUI such as Swing/GTK+ will run in pretty much any major 
> OS unaltered. 

OK, that's a library.

> Blender the graphical modeller has its interface 
> implemented in OpenGL, which means little problem porting it everywhere. 
>  Coding a database using strict ISO SQL will make it pretty much 
> portable among many implementations.

I.e., you've pushed off the work of porting your stuff to the author of 
the interpreter.

Yet "mono" for some reason is "proprietary Microsoft code"?

>> The internet doesn't make programs run cross-platform. It just gives 
>> you a way to access them when they're running on someone else's platform.
> 
> It doesn't really matter where a web app is running as long as it does 
> what I mean.

That doesn't make it "cross-platform".

> 
>>> quite a few cross-platform development languages (Java, Python, Perl 
>>> etc)
>>
>> And BASIC. Which used to run everywhere. And was promoted and 
>> implemented by MS (amongst others).
> 
> Visual Basic is not plain Basic. 

Who put the word "visual" in there? You *are* aware that MS has been 
making BASIC interpreters since like Atari 800 days, right?

>> Except they don't provide executables.
> They sure do.  And they are truly cross-platform.

Python compiles down to an executable I can run on both Windows and 
Linux without installing a Python interpreter? Cool.

>> I agree that open source software is probably a better way to do 
>> stuff, as long as you aren't worried about making a living at it.
> 
> the folks at RedHat or Novell seem to be doing fine.

Yeah, much much better than Microsoft.

> 
>> Uh, so, how much Linux software runs without recompiling under 
>> Solaris? Does that actually work?
> 
> no, different executable format.  One of the areas that are not 
> standardized.

Bingo.

>  But the source is there 

... if you don't mind giving it away ...

> If you want truly cross-platform apps without recompiling, target a 
> programming language with a cross-platform runtime.  You won't need to 
> recompile your apps, but should install the proper runtime for your 
> system, which will be provided from the people who compiled them to your 
> system.

Yep. In other words, recompile.  As opposed to Microsoft, which manages 
to do it without recompiling and without a "cross-platform language".

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> 
>> Do you seriously think you can add support for VM, protected mode, 
>> networking, and lots of different kinds of hardware without making the 
>> OS more complicated?
> 
> I guess the killer question is "can you do it without making it buggy". 

It's a question of expense. I, personally, have never had my machine 
crash because of a bug in the VM code that Microsoft wrote. At least, as 
far as I know.

I think it's generally other parts of the code that crash.

> I was programming in Pascal - why?

Fair enough. Pascal can be fairly safe if you're not using too many 
dynamic structures.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
> 
>>> Only hyper-nerds are going to be able to get anything remotely useful 
>>> out of a dump file. To everybody else, it's just wasted disk space.
>>
>> Generally, the source code is sufficient.
> 
> Cool. Let me just contact the makers of every device driver I'm running 
> and we can see where th... no, wait, that won't work. ;-)

Or send them the core file.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> I didn't realise there were *any*? 

Go look at the author information in the hardware manager.

> What I can do is get a graph of various things like number of processes 
> running, CPU usage per process, memory per process, memory free, etc.

I.e., performance information from one program, namely the scheduler. 
Not all that helpful in the real world.

> Integrating that with performance data from other apps? Well, that would 
> require the other apps to supply performance data.

Yep. And MS has an interface in the OS for doing that that everyone 
uses, and therefore it is available. Because it's damn useful in the 
real world.

> And some ARexx 
> scripting to link them together. And by the time you get there, you 
> might as well write the monitoring app yourself, at which point it 
> ceases to be about what the "OS" can do.

Monitoring app? What app are you going to write that's going to tell you 
the queries per second that the SQL server is using, and whether its 
disk I/Os are for indexes or data?

>> Fair enough. I haven't really used an Amiga since the 1000/500 days. 
>> Who is selling it nowadays?
> 
> Selling it? Heh. Last I heard [long time ago], "Amiga" is a 
> software-only company now. No, I have no idea how the hell that makes 
> any sense... IIRC, AmigaOS was ported to PPC or something. Whatever.

Ah, cool.

> The hardware hasn't been on sale for a while now, AFAIK. But then, would 
> *you* buy a "personal computer" powered by a 20 MHz 68030 with 2 MB RAM?

Maybe. Is the OLPC any more powerful?

>> If the file is corrupt on the disk, and a later update replaces that 
>> file, I'd expect that would fix it, yah.
> 
> Mmm, I guess. However, given how much everybody complained about XP 
> crashing when it first came out, and it's not *as bad* today, I think 
> it's a case of M$ actually fixing some of the more serious bugs...

Well, yeah. Hundreds. :)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> scott <sco### [at] laptopcom> wrote:
>> And you guys are trying to convince me my mum could use Linux .... ha!
> 
>   I wouldn't not recommend Linux for your mother. I would recommend you
> buy her a Mac mini.

Yah. My mac-using co-worker got kind of twitchy when I told him he might 
have to use the command line to check out the software from subversion 
onto the server. :-) Yet OS X is a very unixy system.

I look forward to convincing my wife I need to buy a Mac. ;-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Darren New escribió:
>> The hardware hasn't been on sale for a while now, AFAIK. But then, 
>> would *you* buy a "personal computer" powered by a 20 MHz 68030 with 2 
>> MB RAM?
> 
> Maybe. Is the OLPC any more powerful?
> 

433 MHz, 256 MB of RAM, 1GB of Flash memory as storage.

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> You don't need to install anything to test it out, most install CD/DVDs 
> these days are LiveCDs which run from memory, without touching the disk 
> unless you click on some "Install to disk" button and pressing a few Nexts.

It was nice being able to go to the local electronics store and boot up 
Linux on their machines, lookign for one t would run on.  Very handy.

(Oh, and I didn't have any trouble installing it on *this* machine. Just 
on my home machine was a nightmare.)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> indeed.  makes everyone blind and willing to defend and champion M$ from 
> any criticism.

Not everyone. I only defend them from blind bashing and stupid 
criticisms. ;-)


-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>>> Er... Mono is an free reimplementation of M$ proprietry technology 
>>
>> It's not proprietary any more. It's an ECMA standard. Certainly the 
>> part that Mono implements is.
> 
> The way I heard it, the ECMA standard (ISO also? maybe?) doesn't cover 
> everything in the M$ .NET framework implementation.

Right. Nor does the Java standard cover everything in Sun's Java 
distributions. Nor does the POSIX standard cover everything that 
UNIX-like systems do.

But the part that Mono implements? It's the ECMA standard.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> SUSE 10.1 would crash during install on my machine unless I managed to 
>> interrupt it in the 0.75 seconds before it installed the buggy USB 
>> driver that would take out the system.  It took me literally two days 
>> of trying before I could get to a login prompt after an install.
> 
> hmm, you interrupt it before it installs a "buggy" USB driver? 

I don't remember exactly what it was. It was one of the packages that 
was optional that didn't work with my machine. Then the next one, then 
the next one, etc etc etc.  One of which was some strange problem in the 
USB stuff.

 > It would
> crash without the interrupting?  what has you hooked to the USB port?

Well, I unplugged everything unnecessary.

> I understand that Linux just install everything automatically. 

Well, everything available, yah.

> Under Windows, you install the basic OS and then go on manually inserting 
> driver CDs or downloading them and installing for yourself, with any 
> luck. 

Unless the vendor gives the drivers to the central distribution site 
known as "Windows Update". :-)  I know lots of sysadmins of windows 
systems that won't purchase hardware whose device drivers need you to be 
at the machine to install.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Eero Ahonen wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
>> Darren New wrote:
>>> SUSE 10.1 would crash during install on my machine unless I managed to
>>> interrupt it in the 0.75 seconds before it installed the buggy USB
>>> driver that would take out the system.  It took me literally two days
>>> of trying before I could get to a login prompt after an install.
> 
> What driver? What kernel does the system have?

I don't know. That was a while ago. It was apparently a known problem, 
not that it made it any easier to work around.  It sucks when youhave a 
bug in the software update software. :-)

> I'm being curious. Yes, it can be a buggy driver. OTOH, USB is pretty
> standardized system and AFAIK there hasn't been a lot of changes is USB
> host systems, so I think I should have heard of such a problem, but I
> never have.

Actually, I may be confused. The USB problem was the USB kernel thingie 
going compute-bound at high priority.  Fixed after an update.

There was soemthing else about the install.

> distribution", but I still don't think it should be generalized to be a
> *Linux* -feature.

I'm amused how whenever there's something good, it's a Linux thing, and 
whenever there's a problem, it's not Linux's fault but someone else's. ;-)

> Nope, you install NIC drivers and download the rest from the Internet ;).

And from one place!

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Warp wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>>>> The best part is when you say "make configure", and it says 
>>>> "Unrecognised arch 'i586/SuSE 10.3'". And you're like "WTF? Now what do 
>>>> I do??"
>>>   Yes, it's clearly a problem with *linux* when some software you are
>>> trying to install is broken.
> 
>> Right. And the fact that the design of Unix is overly complex and 
>> incorporates several decades of backwards compatibility is unrelated? ;-)
> 
>   It's not like Windows is any better in that regard.

Actually, much of the *design* of Windows was pretty clean. It's the 
implementation and backwards compatibility of stuff that's ugly. (To a 
large extent, a lot of the backwards-compatibility uncleanness is for 
supporting people who didn't actually follow the APIs, and did stuff 
like wrote .ini files instead of using the ini system calls, and 
hard-coded paths instead of asking the OS where files should go, and so on.)

The original UNIX *design* was clean too, but the accumulation of 
historical file names is nasty. The other ugliness, IMO, is the number 
of places where an API is not provided but instead it's a file format, 
or a library, or something like that. Stuff like opening a directory as 
a file to read the directory (cured when BSD 4 forced a directory format 
changed), reading /etc/passwd and parsing it to get information (cured 
when shadow password files became common), etc.

>   At least Apple dares to break backwards compatibility with ancient
> software and architectures. It hasn't slowed them down much.

Yep.

>   Unix was never designed for people who don't know nor want to know
> anything about computers. It was designed for sysadmins and the like.

Well, yeah, I suppose that's true too. :-)  Good point.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:12:54 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

> It's still not [yet] as easy to use.

Wrong.

> Most hardware companies don't supply drivers for it, and refuse to hand
> over the information required for anybody else to write those drivers.

Wrong; this used to be the case, but not any more.

> If you're into gaming, forget it. Almost no big developers target that
> platform.

Hmmm, Unreal Tournament III runs on it natively, and Cedega does a very 
nice job for non-Linux games.  Again, maybe 5 years ago this was the 
case, but these days there are plenty of game developers writing to 
Linux.  It's not on par with Windows, true.  But it's improved greatly.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:53:37 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

> [Last I heard - and I don't have any hard data for this - the guys you
> named aren't exactly short of cash.]

They're not, but what does that have to do with hardware support?  Dell, 
HP, IBM/Lenovo all sell machines with Linux pre-installed on them.  It 
would see that this would be hard to do if hardware support "wasn't there 
yet".

Jim

Post a reply to this message

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:01:49 +0000, Orchid XP v7 wrote:

> I was thinking more "we'll give you this big bulk discount on a bunch of
> Windows CDs, but only if you sign this agreement not to offer any other
> OS"...

That's called "anticompetitive behaviour" and something that Microsoft 
used to do with their OEM agreements, but they've been told the behave 
themselves, and at least on that front, they are.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> Darren New escribió:
>>> The hardware hasn't been on sale for a while now, AFAIK. But then, 
>>> would *you* buy a "personal computer" powered by a 20 MHz 68030 with 
>>> 2 MB RAM?
>>
>> Maybe. Is the OLPC any more powerful?
>>
> 
> 433 MHz, 256 MB of RAM, 1GB of Flash memory as storage.

Wow. How times have changed.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> And no, it's not just something doing a global grab or something. 
>> Cursor locks up, and it doesn't answer pings.
> 
> sorry to hear that.  Perhaps swap got full?...

I wouldn't think so, unless there's something running I don't know about 
that just chugs memory. I have the little barchart in the bottom and I 
don't ever see the swap color getting used, either. I have like 2G RAM 
and 2.5G swap, so ... probably not.

And I'd certainly hope Linux wouldn't stop responding to pings just 
because swap got exhausted.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Darren New escribió:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
>> Darren New escribió:
>>>> The hardware hasn't been on sale for a while now, AFAIK. But then, 
>>>> would *you* buy a "personal computer" powered by a 20 MHz 68030 with 
>>>> 2 MB RAM?
>>>
>>> Maybe. Is the OLPC any more powerful?
>>>
>>
>> 433 MHz, 256 MB of RAM, 1GB of Flash memory as storage.
> 
> Wow. How times have changed.
> 

And most of the user interface and programs are made in Python.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> nemesis wrote:
>> no, I'm simply saying that those "multiple operating systems" are 
>> using the same old code from the same single company to handle old 
>> apps, so that doesn't count as multiple operating systems.
> 
> Well, no, they're not. That's just factually incorrect. If that was the 
> case, DOS programs couldn't write to files on NTFS partitions or access 
> network shares,

once the NTFS partitions or network shares are "mounted", I guess they 
just made it available to the DOS IO calls as local files in DOS 
"standard file format".  Little extensions and adjustments to let the 
old dog keep moving.

> nor would software that writes directly to the screen 
> work inside a window.

why not?  videogame emulators have long been tricking console software 
dumps into thinking a rectangular area in a windowing system is actually 
the TV screen...

> I.e., you've pushed off the work of porting your stuff to the author of 
> the interpreter.

so what?  old DOS apps running on Windows also did that.

Your code is portable and you don't have to recompile nor compile the 
runtime for yourself.  Are people never satisfied?

> Yet "mono" for some reason is "proprietary Microsoft code"?

besides the untested IP aspect that can give M$ weapons for spreading 
"Linux uses our IP" FUD by distorting some truth, the real horrendous 
aspect of mono is that it gets people hooked on yet another M$ dependent 
  technology that'll never run as well on the real thing and that is 
always one step behind the original.

> That doesn't make it "cross-platform".

but it is:  I can use from Windows at work, Linux at home, whatever...

> Who put the word "visual" in there? You *are* aware that MS has been 
> making BASIC interpreters since like Atari 800 days, right?

yes, but when you come up with Basic and M$, today, it's all about VB. 
and besides, old M$ bas files are not cross-platform either.

>>> Except they don't provide executables.
>> They sure do.  And they are truly cross-platform.
> 
> Python compiles down to an executable I can run on both Windows and 
> Linux without installing a Python interpreter? Cool.

I thought you saying the companies did not provide executables.

>>> I agree that open source software is probably a better way to do 
>>> stuff, as long as you aren't worried about making a living at it.
>>
>> the folks at RedHat or Novell seem to be doing fine.
> 
> Yeah, much much better than Microsoft.

they don't have a monopoly in their hands to rip off their userbase.

>>  But the source is there 
> 
> ... if you don't mind giving it away ...

we're talking about open-source software here, aren't we?

> Yep. In other words, recompile.  As opposed to Microsoft, which manages 
> to do it without recompiling and without a "cross-platform language".

they recompiled their own DOS runtimes and APIs and introduced 
"middlemen" so as to make them see network shares or windows as 
traditional resources.

Why are you so obsessed with recompilations when it's not even any 
trouble for you as a user?

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> I was thinking more "we'll give you this big bulk discount on a bunch of 
> Windows CDs, but only if you sign this agreement not to offer any other 
> OS"...

Actually, that wasn't the deal. The deal was "we'll give you a volume 
discount if you pay MS for a copy of Windows on every machine you sell." 
  They could offer other OSes too, but they'd still have to pay for 
Windows on that machine.  So MS could track how much they were owed by 
how many machines were sold.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

On Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:40:51 -0800, Darren New wrote:

> Actually, that wasn't the deal. The deal was "we'll give you a volume
> discount if you pay MS for a copy of Windows on every machine you sell."

Well, the original OEM agreements included verbiage that said that they 
would not only pay for a license for each machine sold, but that Windows 
would be the installed OS on that machine.

Some of the agreements also included verbiage that forbade the 
installation of another OS even as a dual-boot option.

Jim

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> Darren New wrote:
>> nemesis wrote:
>>> no, I'm simply saying that those "multiple operating systems" are 
>>> using the same old code from the same single company to handle old 
>>> apps, so that doesn't count as multiple operating systems.
>>
>> Well, no, they're not. That's just factually incorrect. If that was 
>> the case, DOS programs couldn't write to files on NTFS partitions or 
>> access network shares,
> 
> once the NTFS partitions or network shares are "mounted", I guess they 
> just made it available to the DOS IO calls as local files in DOS 
> "standard file format".  Little extensions and adjustments to let the 
> old dog keep moving.

Yes. It's called "compatibility". Honestly, think about it. You have 
DOS, which was written before NTFS, which managed the file system on the 
disk. Indeed, that's pretty much the only thing it did.

Now you have a completely different file system that's incompatible with 
DOS. What parts of DOS are you reusing?

>> nor would software that writes directly to the screen work inside a 
>> window.
> 
> why not?

What part of DOS was responsible for making programs that wrote directly 
to screen memory instead write into a window?

Have you forgotten what we're discussing at this point?

>  videogame emulators have long been tricking console software 
> dumps into thinking a rectangular area in a windowing system is actually 
> the TV screen...

It's called a "genlock". While most video cards have genlocks on them 
these days (also called "overlays"), that isn't how Windows does it.

>> I.e., you've pushed off the work of porting your stuff to the author 
>> of the interpreter.
> 
> so what?  old DOS apps running on Windows also did that.

I don't think you are keeping track of what we're discussing. Because 
this rejoinder makes no sense to me.

> Your code is portable and you don't have to recompile nor compile the 
> runtime for yourself.  Are people never satisfied?

Quite satisifed, yes. What's wrong with VMWare, again?

>> Yet "mono" for some reason is "proprietary Microsoft code"?
> 
> besides the untested IP aspect that can give M$ weapons for spreading 
> "Linux uses our IP" FUD by distorting some truth, the real horrendous 
> aspect of mono is that it gets people hooked on yet another M$ dependent 
>  technology that'll never run as well on the real thing and that is 
> always one step behind the original.

Hmmmm... Like, say, Java?

>> That doesn't make it "cross-platform".
> but it is:  I can use from Windows at work, Linux at home, whatever...

I'm not sure you and I are speaking about the same thing.

>>>> Except they don't provide executables.
>>> They sure do.  And they are truly cross-platform.
>>
>> Python compiles down to an executable I can run on both Windows and 
>> Linux without installing a Python interpreter? Cool.
> 
> I thought you saying the companies did not provide executables.

No. We're talking about Windows providing backward compatibility for 
compiled executables on multiple operating systems. Why would I be 
talking about recompiling python interpreters?

>>>  But the source is there 
>> ... if you don't mind giving it away ...
> we're talking about open-source software here, aren't we?

Not exclusively. The advantage that MS has over its competitors is they 
managed to get executables that are *NOT* open source to run on multiple 
operating systems over the years. *That* is a big part of why they have 
a monopoly.

>> Yep. In other words, recompile.  As opposed to Microsoft, which 
>> manages to do it without recompiling and without a "cross-platform 
>> language".
> 
> they recompiled their own DOS runtimes and APIs and introduced 
> "middlemen" so as to make them see network shares or windows as 
> traditional resources.

And you know this ... how?  What makes you think there's any significant 
amount of DOS code left in XP?

> Why are you so obsessed with recompilations when it's not even any 
> trouble for you as a user?

Because that's what we're talking about - closed-source commercial 
for-fee executables running on multiple OSes.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Jim Henderson wrote:
> Some of the agreements also included verbiage that forbade the 
> installation of another OS even as a dual-boot option.

I must have missed that part of the evidence. :-) Yeah, that's pretty nasty.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

Darren New wrote:
> Have you forgotten what we're discussing at this point?

look at the size of this goddamn thread, man!  I don't even know who am 
I anymore... I've been into this all day long!  I'm on vacation and 
should be away from computers, perhaps on a trip on something.

I've opened a beer and so, cheers!

Post a reply to this message

nemesis escribió:
> Darren New wrote:
>> Have you forgotten what we're discussing at this point?
> 
> look at the size of this goddamn thread, man! 

241 posts to be exact (242 with this one). At least it got long and not 
deep. Thunderbird makes it hard to see posts when they get too high in 
the thread nesting...

Post a reply to this message

nemesis wrote:
> I've opened a beer and so, cheers!

And same to you!  I'm off to see family on the other coast in a couple 
hours. Enjoy your vacation! :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     On what day did God create the body thetans?

Post a reply to this message

And lo on Tue, 12 Feb 2008 19:12:37 -0000, Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom>  
did spake, saying:

> Phil Cook wrote:
>> and yet prior to Windows 95 there were quite the number of competing  
>> OSs.
>
> Afterwards, too. Just not on the same hardware. And not really offering  
> a whole lot more.

True, but I think that period was really the turning point.

>>> Apple requires you to buy new hardware, so it's not purely a software  
>>> decision.
>>  Yet everyone loves their monopolistic ways :-)
>
> And the software is subsidized by the hardware, which *would* be  
> monopolistic if Apple split into two companies.

At least now it's possible to install non-Apple software on an Apple with  
greater ease.

> And it *still* costs roughly the same for Apple software as MS software,  
> in spite of the subsidy.

'Companies charge what the market will bear' so often misunderstood

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

Post a reply to this message

>> I was programming in Pascal - why?
>
> Fair enough. Pascal can be fairly safe if you're not using too many 
> dynamic structures.

This is a good point - on my Acorn, one typo in assembler, or in basic when 
you're playing about with memory addresses (which usually you were when 
developing desktop applications) and you'd get the dreaded "Internal Error: 
Abort on data transfer" or such and be forced to *reset*.  Fortunately you 
need to work *really* hard to achieve the same on Windows :-)

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v7 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> Heh. Reminds me of my first attempt to use Perl for CGI. I tried to run 
> it, and it didn't work. After a while I gave up waiting and closed IE. I 
> did some more poking and prodding of the code before the lead tech came 
> over and said "hey, you've using up 100% CPU on the webserver".

  Web servers which are configured properly will automatically kill
any CGI process which is taking too long to terminate. Apparently
that one wasn't.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

>> And you guys are trying to convince me my mum could use Linux .... ha!
>
>  I wouldn't not recommend Linux for your mother. I would recommend you
> buy her a Mac mini.

Yes I heard good things about those from non-tech people, mainly via my 
sister who does graphics/arts stuff.  However, the mac mini is twice the 
price of the PC my mum has with XP, and she is happy with XP because she 
knows (roughly!) how to use it.  Maybe when she has some more money to 
spend, or some hardware breaks she will consider it.

Post a reply to this message

Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >   Now, try to google without an internet connection because you just
> > failed to install the driver necessary for the internet connection.

> Go over to the next machine and google it.

  It was the only computer at that home. The next computer accessible by
me was kilometers away.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message

> Give you mom Ubuntu and she'll never ever touch a command-line, except for 
> running "pppoeconf" and providing ADSL login and password on installation.

She has a wireless router/modem that I set up for her downstairs - so it 
would just be a case of configuring the wireless USB stick to pick up an IP 
address with DHCP .... is that easy?

Post a reply to this message

Eero Ahonen <aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid> wrote:
> Vista's getting a lot of angry comments now and it hasn't got it's
> footprint out (yet). If MS broke backward compatibility totally now, how
> would you think Vista would be selling?

  I don't believe too many people would complain if Vista broke
compatibility with Windows 3.1 and DOS (which would be approximately
the same thing MacOS X has done).

  (OTOH, I don't really know if Vista actually has done that. I assume
it hasn't.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

Post a reply to this message