Programming in the Middle Ages: Docker makes a lovely pair of trousers These days we hear a lot about luring the young away from happy, fulfilling careers and into the world of programming. The kids have been freed from the tedious yoke of the boring and 'Microsoft-heavy' ITC syllabuses courtesy of popular hero Michael Gove. Now every child receives more Raspberry Pi than rice pudding; double …
Not just functional programming. We used to do lots of procedural programming too. We used Pascal, so we could do both, because Pascal has functions and procedures.
I genuinely laughed out loud at that one. I must remember it to quote to other greybeard Pascal programmers I know.
Now what was it again?
You mean the one that forces you to open up a multi-port hole the size of the Thames estuary through the firewall?
Made me think of WMI ... might as well turn off the Firewall if you want to use WMI remotely ... saves valuable system resources ... what use is a firewall if 'alf the bloody ports are open ?
I suggest that while disks sizes may have changed, the amount of information stored is constant.
A classic example of this was a BBC Horizon programme transcript (they used to post these on the BBC website prior to iPlayer) that converted a 45 minute video into about a page and a half of A4 text. Take out the repetitions and it would have fitted comfortably on a postcard. There was a lot of speculative CGI eye-candy, and very little information.
Thus the silver haired are using the correct unit as a 128 GB iPhone contains 128 MB of information, just padded out in HD video.
Thanks, Mage!
A little bit of Googling using "Chaos Manor" provided me with a very interesting history I didn't know!
How Jerry Pournelle Got Kicked Off the ARPANET
From what I gleamed from the page linked, I'm afraid that the "HW abuser" in your comment doesn't mean "Hardware Abuser".
I suddenly feel less sympathy for the late Mr. Pournelle. :-(
Ooppss!
I forgot the second link!
> From what I gleamed from the page linked, I'm afraid that the "HW abuser"
> in your comment doesn't mean "Hardware Abuser".
I couldn't sort out what you were figuring "HW abuser" stood for based on that page or the one it linked to, but based on the Wikipedia description of the Chaos Manor column, "HW abuser" sounds like it was in fact about a standard user/non-expert "abusing" hardware:
"Pournelle wrote the "Chaos Manor" column in Byte. In it Pournelle described his experiences with computer hardware and software, some purchased and some sent by vendors for review, at his home office."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Journalism
Precursor to pascal (so I'm told). Queens University Belfast Algorithmic Language (maybe).
Tony Hoare supposedly worked on it, then Pascal. Wirth went on to Modula-2 and Oberon, Hoare was involved with Occam and I never heard what Jensen did after Pascal, or what the QUB and ETH connection was.
All too long ago. I write novels now instead of programs. It was sad seeing UL using Modula-2 as Pascal and not explaining Modules, Procedure types, anonymous vs explicit types, virtual functions, dynamic arrays and co-routines and all the other stuff that Modula-2 has that Pascal hasn't. Pascal, like BASIC (Beginners cut down Fortran, clue in acronym) was only intended for teaching. Then they switched to C and Java. Meh, might be useful in the market place, but is it computer science?
I can write ForTran or Modula-2 programs in nearly any language.
Even later doing Fortran we used hand printing on coding forms. Trusted students doing Fortran could punch their own cards using a machine with not very many keys, or a slower but quicker to master giant dymo style punch with an alphanumeric punch. But that was later and not QUB.
The only QUB teletype I ever used was at an Expo thing in the Botanic Gardens (or near it) and running a poker dice program. I never got near a teletype till my first job, and didn't use it there either. My first real time computer access was on a Z80 development board and also an Apple II with a Z80 card (Why did it get written as Apple ][ ?). I should have bought an S100 machine.
"The only QUB teletype I ever used was at an Expo thing in the Botanic Gardens (or near it) and running a poker dice program."
I remember that. I think it was to mark 50 years of Stormont or something similar. IIRC it was in the new Stranmillis sports centre.
I used to use the old computer centre in University Square Mews. There was a punch room upstairs. Although during the day most of the machines were used by data entry staff keying in from coding sheets which was the most practical way of getting your first draft onto cards a lot of changes ended up being done in the evenings.
Even on the Teletype system FORTRAN had to be compiled from cards and the executable stored online - you just ran it from the Teletypes.
Kids today 0 they'd never believe it.
"Why did it get written as Apple ][ ?"
Marketing/Steve Jobs?
"I should have bought an S100 machine."
Another memory.
Anyone who has done a basic course in logic or optimised game theory realises this as the obvious fallacy it is.
In a properly multigender loo, simply leaving the seat where you last put it is by far and away the optimal way to minimise seat activity.
Consider.
It's a stream of females. Leaving it where it is is the same as remembering to put it down
It's a stream of males, and so putting it down is two seat movements per urination. a complete waste of effort.
Its a a random stream of either. So on balance there is a 50:50 chance of the seat being in the right place already. So that's one seat movement for every other gender that arrives. 50% seat movement per urination.
It's completely clear that putting the seat down is an obvious case of female laziness and sexism, since its net result is that females do no work, and it's all done my men, and it costs more than any other solution.
Beforr feminism: chopping wood and fetching water and getting nagged.
After feminism: chopping wood and fetching water AND putting the seat down afterwards and getting nagged more.
Ergo, the true purpose of feminism is to give women even more scope for nagging.
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Why not just enter the toilet area FORWARDS and use your EYES to see where the seat currently is and adjust it for the use you need it for? The only possible explanation for the "leave the seat down!!!" mania is people wishing to do a sit-down-toilet enter the toilet backwards with their eyes closed.
Personally, I leave toilets with the LID down.
And the door CLOSED. I mean, what is it about American sitcoms where every possible shot of the living area includes a clear open shot of the toilet? Seinfeld, I'm looking at you - and unavoidabley, your loo as well.
...And... I'm pretty sure it's not advancing years (despite now needing varifocals).
Must be some reference to popular culture that was too popular for me...mind you, I'd have recognised Al Mc Cogan, despite not exactly knowing who (she) was, thanks to a Monty Python sketch (the professional logician https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZqs36C5sgM ).
"and you end up making the Guest account an administrator, and it still doesn't work"
But of course not! The reason it doesn't work is that it requires authentication in both directions. Typically this isn't possible, so you end up getting stripped of identity when calling back. Consequently, you need to make the anonymous logon an administrator. Then it will work ... maybe.
OPC: A data distribution protocol designed by someone to whom actual networks came as a nasty surprise.
Named Pipes
The example didn't work because it assumed a nul security descriptor was a nil pointer. It's not, it's a pointer to a security token that says "this thing isn't bothering with user accounts".
NT Security is much misunderstood.
EVENTUALLY, I figured how to use a named pipe from a DOS program (DOS with MS TCP/IP!) to an NT Server creating Named Pipes.
Also you can create Named pipes on any version of NT Workstation*, but not on Win32s on Win3.x, or Win9x, or ME (they can only be clients like DOS) proving that they are rubbish.
[*Win2K, XP, Vista, Win7, Win8.x Win10]
Unix/Linux has a mechanism similar to Named Pipes, also for local or network use.
You're wrong. The server authenticates the client, but if you use callbacks in DCOM, the roles become inverted (it's the "server" calling the "client", so the server acts as a client and needs to be authenticated).
In this case you need to lift the "anonymous logon" remote access and launch and activation permission *limits* only when you don't set a specific user for the DCOM server, and use the "launching user" identity. You never need to make anonymous logon part of the administrators group (it will give the rights explained before, sure, and everything else).
If the DCOM server is run using a specific user, permission needs to be given to that user. Of course, everything is slightly easier if the client and server are in the same domain (or at least domains with proper trust relationships). If they are not, there are a few more settings needed (i.e. if Simple File Sharing is enabled, it forces guest access...)
DCOMCNFG: the tool that tells you who really know Windows, and those who pretend to know it.
Er, whoosh?
(In fairness, had I been serious then you would have made excellent points. It is a pity that the numpty who wrote OpcEnum.exe didn't know all this. Last I looked, it was still calling CoInitializeSecurity in a way that is appropriate for DOS-based Windows and which, on NT, actually makes it *harder* to get stuff to work without using DCOMCNFG to drop everyone's trousers.)
Google tells me:
The OPC is a church with a more "mainline" heritage. It was formed by faithful ministers, elders, and members forced out of the chief Presbyterian denomination in the northern states (the PCUSA) in 1936. It has been characterized over its short lifetime by a strong emphasis on rigorous ministerial examination, a representative (federal) General Assembly, a high view of office, and usually a dedication to presuppositional apologetics. It is not an exclusive Psalmody church.
Sounds a bit like APL?
Just because vintage techies hold their mobile phones at arm's length in order to be able to read the ridiculously titchy text
Dear God yes. When did it become de rigeur to use tiny, pale grey text on the Web, readable only by 21 year olds with 20/20 vision?
Then again, does the use of more or less unreadable typefaces explain the development of emojis?
"Why do you need a thesaurus when you have a smiley faced poop icon?"
Was that not the period when your data centre could be ruined by Vikings raiding the monastery and burning down the scriptorium?
A time when an execution failure usually meant an incompetent axeman, and secure storage solutions often involved a portcullis.
It's the doublet and hose.
Now we all have higher-resolution displays, you need more RAM for your frame buffer. (You don't have to wait for the vertical flyback to do your business logic anymore! Luxury!) Which in turn takes longer to shunt all this data around, so you need faster clock speeds. And it all grows out of control, each improvement ending up cancelling out the last-but-one like some kind of upgrade treadmill. Bigger monitor, better graphics card, more RAM, new motherboard, SSD, bigger monitor .....
I totally get the associative memory thing, though. I've been known to compose entire sentences in which every noun was either a metasyntactic variable such as "thingy" or a circumlocutory phrase such as "her from accounts who had the nervous breakdown, her cousin's best mate". And guess who once spent 15 minutes trying to open the combination lock on the server room door with her PIN -- not even the current one, but one from two bank cards ago? Name a pop star and I can tell you exactly where I was on the day they died and what I had for breakfast that morning; but I wouldn't know what colour knickers I put on this morning without pulling my jeans down. (Which I'm probably going to have to do soon enough anyway, mind. That Earl Grey just goes right through me .....)
But these youngsters ..... I'll dare bet what you like none of them have ever had to sneak a variable into display memory and hope the user doesn't stomp on it with too long an input string. They don't know they're born!
Perl -- my weapon of choice -- is now considered about as old-fashioned as COBOL.
I use strict and warnings not because I want to win any coding style awards, but so I don't forget what my variables are supposed to be called.
And my old habit of still putting my opening posh bracket at the end of the control statement a.o.t. on a new line by itself is actually coming in useful now, with these modern trendy widescreen monitors giving hundreds of columns by about 16 rows .....
Please read up on serial commas and the fact they are NOT required where you have a conjunction, depending on what writing STYLE you happen to have adopted.
If you have a preferred style, fine. The serial comma is common in the US (and Oxford, natch). There's nothing about an "and" that implies the entities are "a couple".
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