On 15/04/2011 13:34, Stephen wrote:
> On 15/04/2011 11:55 AM, Invisible wrote:
>> Then again, back in the 1980s, how many home users had experience of
>> computers?
>
> All of them or they wouldn't be users :-P
>
> Most people I knew who bought a home computer then had experience of
> them from work.

Really? Interesting... I'm not old enough to know, but I didn't think 
that was actually the case in the 80s.

> A question I was often asked was "Why do you want an computer and what
> can you do with it?"

Now *that* is a question worth asking!

The possible answers include:
- Play video games.
- Type letters without having to retype the entire thing if you make one 
tiny mistake.
- Store large amounts of information without filling your filling 
cabinet. [Assuming you write the software to load and store this stuff 
and don't mind waiting 2 hours for it to load off cassette tape.]

>> Today, if you buy a new PC, you don't get a manual at all.
>
> Every laptop I have bought has come with either a CD/DVD manual or a
> manual installed on the HDD.

Really?

> You don't get a manual with a toaster or an electric kettle and that's
> what home computers are now a days, white goods.

Actually, usually you *do* get a manual with toasters and kettles, even 
though you don't need one! o_O

> Outside of this group* I don't know anyone who uses a computer at home
> for anything other than email, Skype, browsing the internet or
> downloading books, films, music, or porn.

What, you don't know any gamers? ;-)

> * And we are special (I know because I went to a special school) ;-)

Vehraaay thpesshul. :-P

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On 15/04/2011 1:51 PM, Invisible wrote:
> On 15/04/2011 13:34, Stephen wrote:
>> On 15/04/2011 11:55 AM, Invisible wrote:
>>> Then again, back in the 1980s, how many home users had experience of
>>> computers?
>>
>> All of them or they wouldn't be users :-P
>>
>> Most people I knew who bought a home computer then had experience of
>> them from work.
>
> Really? Interesting... I'm not old enough to know, but I didn't think
> that was actually the case in the 80s.

 From my memory. The very first time I heard anyone outside of work 
talking "computer speak" was in 1996 when I overheard two women talking 
about a C:\ drive, in the street. Slatterns! ;-)

>
>> A question I was often asked was "Why do you want an computer and what
>> can you do with it?"
>
> Now *that* is a question worth asking!
>
> The possible answers include:
> - Play video games.

There weren't any then. Text games or wireline graphics.

> - Type letters without having to retype the entire thing if you make one
> tiny mistake.

Most people used pen and paper. Most people could not type and the ones 
that could probable learned how to at commercial lessons or typing classes.

> - Store large amounts of information without filling your filling
> cabinet. [Assuming you write the software to load and store this stuff
> and don't mind waiting 2 hours for it to load off cassette tape.]
>
I don't think that there was any need back then. Paper ruled!


You probably don't realise how much things have changed just in my 
lifetime.
Cars were for the rich, children could play in the street without fear 
of getting knocked down. But collecting number plates (I don't mean 
ripping them off cars) had just gone out of fashion but adults thought 
that it was a suitable hobby. Ballpoint pens were banned in schools, we 
used dip pens. (That changed when I went to high school). The first 
check book I got cost 1/2d per check for stamp duty. People used to go 
out to the airport to see planes taking off and landing for 
entertainment. Foreign holidays were unheard of for most people.
Now if Larry Hudson is about I'd like to hear how things have changed in 
his lifetime.

>>> Today, if you buy a new PC, you don't get a manual at all.
>>
>> Every laptop I have bought has come with either a CD/DVD manual or a
>> manual installed on the HDD.
>
> Really?

Yes, the ones I've bought. This one is number six. My first was bought 
around 1997.

>
>> You don't get a manual with a toaster or an electric kettle and that's
>> what home computers are now a days, white goods.
>
> Actually, usually you *do* get a manual with toasters and kettles, even
> though you don't need one! o_O
>

Yes, plug it in and clean with a damp cloth but not at the same time.

>> Outside of this group* I don't know anyone who uses a computer at home
>> for anything other than email, Skype, browsing the internet or
>> downloading books, films, music, or porn.
>
> What, you don't know any gamers? ;-)
>

Only you. My brother-in-law plays some sort of fantasy football game but 
that is a solo thing, I think. I don't play games myself I'm not any 
good at them.

>> * And we are special (I know because I went to a special school) ;-)
>
> Vehraaay thpesshul. :-P

You got the reference (I thought that the language may have changed).

-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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>>> Most people I knew who bought a home computer then had experience of
>>> them from work.
>>
>> Really? Interesting... I'm not old enough to know, but I didn't think
>> that was actually the case in the 80s.
>
> From my memory.

That's not how I remember it, but hey, OK...

>> The possible answers include:
>> - Play video games.
>
> There weren't any then. Text games or wireline graphics.

I certainly remember knowing several people who owned a C64 or a ZX 
Spectrum or something similar exclusively so they could play games on it.

>> - Type letters without having to retype the entire thing if you make one
>> tiny mistake.
>
> Most people used pen and paper. Most people could not type and the ones
> that could probable learned how to at commercial lessons or typing classes.

Again, I certainly remember us owning a typewriter. Me and my sister 
used to type stuff on it just for entertainment. Having a word processor 
made life so much easier. And then my parents got a dot matrix printer 
to go with it...

As late as 1995, one of the people at school paid hundreds of pounds for 
an "electronic type writer" that was basically a computer keyboard, dot 
matrix printer and a tiny LCD all in one unit. So, like a real 
typewriter, but computerised. (I don't think you could even turn it off 
without losing your work, mind you...)

>> - Store large amounts of information without filling your filling
>> cabinet. [Assuming you write the software to load and store this stuff
>> and don't mind waiting 2 hours for it to load off cassette tape.]
>>
> I don't think that there was any need back then. Paper ruled!

Yeah, I'm having trouble thinking of any large volume of information 
that you'd actually bother keeping that would be too large to hold on 
paper... The contents of your filofax maybe.

> You probably don't realise how much things have changed just in my
> lifetime.

I know how much they changed in *my* lifetime, but I'm not quite as old. ;-)

> Cars were for the rich, children could play in the street without fear
> of getting knocked down. But collecting number plates (I don't mean
> ripping them off cars) had just gone out of fashion but adults thought
> that it was a suitable hobby. Ballpoint pens were banned in schools, we
> used dip pens. (That changed when I went to high school). The first
> check book I got cost 1/2d per check for stamp duty. People used to go
> out to the airport to see planes taking off and landing for
> entertainment. Foreign holidays were unheard of for most people.

As I say, I'm younger.

When I was a kid, almost everyone had a TV, most people had a knackered 
old car that they spent months per year fixing, and some but not all 
families owned an 8-bit home computer of some sort. I can distinctly 
remember being utterly addicted to Space Invaders, so much so that I 
didn't want to leave my friend's room when mum said it was time to go home.

My parents bought a ZX Spectrum so they could run "educational" type 
games on it for me and my sister. Later my dad had a Commodore Plus4. 
That died spectacularly; left on his bed, the air vents apparently got 
blocked, and I came back to find that the tape hadn't finished loading. 
Instead, the screen was now pink with diagonal white stripes and random 
flashing glyphs. It never worked again, so we got a C64. Pitty; the 
Plus4 was better.

>>> Every laptop I have bought has come with either a CD/DVD manual or a
>>> manual installed on the HDD.
>>
>> Really?
>
> Yes, the ones I've bought. This one is number six. My first was bought
> around 1997.

I haven't seen that one yet. Then again, I've only really got experience 
of one brand - Acer.

Unless you count that IBM thing I was allowed to use, way back in 
1990-something. You know, when only business executives, accountants and 
professional programmers could such things. Cyan and magenta screen that 
rippled when you touched it. VGA graphics FTW! :-D

> Yes, plug it in and clean with a damp cloth but not at the same time.

During boiling, the outside of the kettle may become hot. This does not 
indicate a fault condition.

>> What, you don't know any gamers? ;-)
>
> Only you. My brother-in-law plays some sort of fantasy football game but
> that is a solo thing, I think. I don't play games myself I'm not any
> good at them.

Solo games are still games. ;-)

>>> * And we are special (I know because I went to a special school) ;-)
>>
>> Vehraaay thpesshul. :-P
>
> You got the reference (I thought that the language may have changed).

Oh, I'm sure it has. But what would I know about that? ;-)

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On 4/15/2011 3:55, Invisible wrote:
> In short, almost nothing is documented. I find this extremely frustrating.

It is all documented. It's just not documented in a place that it's easy for 
non-programmers to get to. Do you have an MSDN subscription, for example?

Basically, documentation of this type costs extra. :-)

> When you *buy* an expensive commercial product, you expect better than this.
> Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't.

Yes, that's really my gripe. I'd be happy to pay $100 for a program I can 
get free elsewhere if it comes with good documentation. I'm still pissed 
that I bought a $300 modeler and they sent me the documentation from the 
version two generations back because they hadn't sold as many copies of the 
software as they expected and printed too many manuals 3 years ago.

The other problem is people are starting to write test-driven-design style 
documentation for products that have APIs. And that's just the *wrong* way 
to do things. You can't design a public API based on tests. Otherwise you 
wind up with crap like this:

this.Exit() will cause the game that's running ("this") to exit the next 
time it leaves the Update phase of the game loop. Unfortunately, you can't 
run two games in a row with the same process (say, for unit testing) because 
it also makes any subsequent games leave the update loop after the first 
time. Perfectly reasonable, as long as you never *tested* running two games 
in the same process and hence didn't design it to handle that.

There's like a dozen of these in XNA. There's an example of how to do 
things, and if you do things *differently* from the example, it screws you. 
Creating a new graphics device disposes of the old graphics device some time 
later in the initialization loop. You basically have
constructor->initialize()->update()->draw()->update()->draw()->...
If you reconfigure the graphics device in the constructor, the framework has 
apparently been holding onto the old one and disposes it for you. But if you 
load a texture in the constructor (instead of initialize), it uses the old 
graphics device (and stores it in the texture structure) even if you've 
already set up the new one. So when you later try to draw with the texture, 
it crashes out.  There are so many undocumented rules, you might as well 
just be as absolutely conservative as possible, because there's no 
documentation saying what you can't do, just examples of what you can.

Documentation by hypothesis and induction. The whole coding exercise turns 
into one giant cargo cult exercise. "I have to put this here and that there, 
because that's what the people before me did. I don't know why, but if I 
don't do what they did, the cargo won't come."

So there's an example of taking one model and drawing thousands of copies. I 
copy it and try to draw several different models using the same technique. 
OK, it works when I get my own bugs out. Then I add a model with two 
different textures, and even the ones that worked stop working now, except 
only on the xbox and not on the PC, so it's probably not my code at all. Now 
it only draws the first instance of each texture. But the example uses all 
kinds of routines that are documented with things like "Texture GetTexture() 
returns the texture."  Gee, thanks for that. Maybe the guy who writes the 
example in the documentation shouldn't be the guy who has access to the 
source code that actually describes what the crap does inside the library. 
Because there's no documentation about how to set any of that up or what it 
does beyond tracking through the type signatures of routines. And if you 
want to make a change, like use the *same* code to draw a *different* model, 
there's zero guidance, because your only documentation is how to do it with 
exactly the model that came with the sample code.

</rant>

I feel *much* bettahhhh...

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 4/15/2011 5:34, Stephen wrote:
> anything other than email, Skype, browsing the internet or downloading
> books, films, music, or porn.

I think it's safe to say there are lots of *users* out there. They print 
flyers for their yard sale, they do their banking and taxes, etc. But they 
don't know what it's doing inside. They do more than that stuff, but it's 
all basically commercial software that keeps you from having to know how 
anything works.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On Fri, 15 Apr 2011 11:55:53 +0100, Invisible wrote:

>> Most of the MS documentation is pretty good, really, but it has indeed
>> been going downhill.
> 
> The thing that annoys me about MS products is that if one day somebody
> phones you up and says "when I try to open Outlook it says error 28123",
> there is *no way* of discovering WTF this code actually means. If you
> open the settings for a program and some option has an ambiguous name,
> you can't look up what the setting actually does. [Bonus points for
> inventing the "help button" which informs you "no help is available for
> this item".] If I see something in Task Manager called mdm.exe, there is
> no way of finding out what this is, what it actually does, or anything
> about it. "Cryptographic Services". Cryptography *for what*? So, do I
> need this? Is it safe to turn it off? Or is it vital?
> 
> In short, almost nothing is documented. I find this extremely
> frustrating.

Now it's been years since I had to seriously look up a Windows error 
code, but it at least used to be that the MS Knowledgebase was pretty 
good about having the things I needed (usually STOP error codes).  Maybe 
that's changed since I switched to Linux; the last Windows thing I did 
was set up a 2008 server and XP clients for our mobile testing centre, 
but I don't use Windows if I don't have to (as you probably know by now).

> The Commodore 64 came with an extensive (yet surprisingly small) user
> manual which, as well as telling you how to wire up the device [which
> admittedly isn't that hard] and advertising all the addons you could buy
> [not many], also tells you everything there is to know about programming
> in BASIC. Well, except for the part about how to *design* a program. It
> tells you exactly what every single command and function in the language
> does. [Admittedly, there aren't that many to describe.]

Yes, the C64, with only 64 KB of memory and a 1 Mhz (more or less) 
processor was a much simpler machine from a much simpler time.  
Similarly, the Model T Ford was a lot simpler than the hybrid Ford 
Focus.  That should really not be that surprising. ;)

Jim

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On 15/04/2011 04:51 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/15/2011 3:55, Invisible wrote:
>> In short, almost nothing is documented. I find this extremely
>> frustrating.
>
> It is all documented. It's just not documented in a place that it's easy
> for non-programmers to get to. Do you have an MSDN subscription, for
> example?
>
> Basically, documentation of this type costs extra. :-)

So I paid money for some software, but I need to pay more money to find 
out how to actually use it? WTF?

I find it really bizarre that if I want to look up the name of the Win32 
function call to open a new window, that's free, but if I want to find 
out what a particular configuration setting for MS Word does, I have to 
pay money for that. [Or at least, that's what your post implies. I'm not 
aware of this information being available *anywhere*, paid or not.]

>> When you *buy* an expensive commercial product, you expect better than
>> this. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't.
>
> Yes, that's really my gripe. I'd be happy to pay $100 for a program I
> can get free elsewhere if it comes with good documentation. I'm still
> pissed that I bought a $300 modeler and they sent me the documentation
> from the version two generations back because they hadn't sold as many
> copies of the software as they expected and printed too many manuals 3
> years ago.

It's annoying when freebie stuff isn't very well tested, or doesn't do 
what the documentation says it does, or there's just no documentation. 
But when you pay money for it (and MS products are insanely expensive), 
you don't expect this kind of nonesense.

> The other problem is people are starting to write test-driven-design
> style documentation for products that have APIs. And that's just the
> *wrong* way to do things.

This is so very, very wrong.

> Documentation by hypothesis and induction. The whole coding exercise
> turns into one giant cargo cult exercise. "I have to put this here and
> that there, because that's what the people before me did. I don't know
> why, but if I don't do what they did, the cargo won't come."

So wrong.

> </rant>
>
> I feel *much* bettahhhh...

But do you? Do you *really*? You still have to figure this crap out, 
remember? ;-)

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

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Le 2011/04/15 06:55, Invisible a écrit :

> The Commodore 64 came with an extensive (yet surprisingly small) user
> manual which, as well as telling you how to wire up the device [which
> admittedly isn't that hard] and advertising all the addons you could buy
> [not many], also tells you everything there is to know about programming
> in BASIC. Well, except for the part about how to *design* a program. It
> tells you exactly what every single command and function in the language
> does. [Admittedly, there aren't that many to describe.]
>
> The Sam Coupe had an excellent manual. Actually, it was excellent
> hardware. It's surprising that nobody's ever heard of it. If you imagine
> a C64 or a ZX Spectrum with a 6MHz CPU, 256KB RAM (upgradable to 4MB),
> 128-colour graphics, stereo digital sound and an implementation of BASIC
> with primitives like drawing a curved line with one command, that's
> basically the Sam. The manual was extensive, assumed no prior experience
> with computers, and told you EVERYTHING.
>

I still have the documentation that came with my Apple ][+. It does 
include the full source code, in assembly, of the "system monitor" ROM 
code, or bios. It also included the electric scematics.
Add the documentation of 2 flavours of basics: integer only (integer 
basic) and floating point support (Applesoft basic, by Microsoft).



Alain

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On 4/15/2011 10:16, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> So I paid money for some software, but I need to pay more money to find out
> how to actually use it? WTF?

No. You have to pay money to learn how to fix it. "I paid all this money for 
my car, and when it breaks down I have to pay a mechanic to repair it too?"

> I find it really bizarre that if I want to look up the name of the Win32
> function call to open a new window, that's free, but if I want to find out
> what a particular configuration setting for MS Word does, I have to pay
> money for that. [Or at least, that's what your post implies. I'm not aware
> of this information being available *anywhere*, paid or not.]

Now you're changing what you're talking about again. What word configuration 
are you curious about.

> (and MS products are insanely expensive)

Generally not. Have you looked at the price of something like autocad or maya?

> But do you? Do you *really*? You still have to figure this crap out,
> remember? ;-)

Well, I just spent an hour putting my own 2-color trivial model in in place 
of the 1-color trivial model in the demo, and confirmed that it works in 
every configuration *except* the one I actually need to use.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   "Coding without comments is like
    driving without turn signals."

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On 15/04/2011 4:53 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/15/2011 5:34, Stephen wrote:
>> anything other than email, Skype, browsing the internet or downloading
>> books, films, music, or porn.
>
> I think it's safe to say there are lots of *users* out there. They print
> flyers for their yard sale, they do their banking and taxes, etc. But
> they don't know what it's doing inside. They do more than that stuff,
> but it's all basically commercial software that keeps you from having to
> know how anything works.
>
Yes there must be, I agree.
I’m probably in a strange position having worked in the computer/tech 
business for 40 years and not having any friends who use them for 
anything other than work or trivial entertainment.


-- 
Regards
     Stephen

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