Posts by Richard Plinston 2609 posts • joined 27 Apr 2009
> Another related problem is time difference.
That can be an advantage rather than a problem. A few years ago I was developing a fairly large system for a UK based company while residing in NZ. I would develop and code during the day and early evening and then send the new code to the UK agent (using 56k modems) and they would test and I would have the results and comments by breakfast. We got a lot done in a very short time.
> this-is-a-file-name.txt ... Yet I've never been able to get Python to allow me to do this. Is it really forbidden?
You are talking nonsense. A filename in Python must be in a string, such as in quotes or apostrophes, and thus almost any character is allowed, including hyphens.
fd = open("this-is-a-file-name.txt", mode)
is perfectly valid.
> #2 for so long is generally followed eventually by being #3 and then #4, etc
The ranking is based on the number of people asking questions. To bring a language back to number one just put out a new release with lots of new features that programmers will want to try to use.
> You don't implement the Quicksort algorithm in COBOL.
I have done that, in CIS COBOL on 64Kb CP/M. While COBOL does have a SORT verb, at the time it only worked on files and the program needed an array sorted. Since the mid 80s SORT has worked on arrays.
> but that's not its problem space so just don't.
Sorting is very much part of COBOL's problem space.
> [most likely an oral account penned to papyrus by Moses or one of his scribes]
it is unlikely that _anything_ in the bible was written down before 'fist temple' around 10C BCE. The main reason for this is that before then there was no written form of Hebrew. This is several centuries after the alleged time of Moses. Most of the stories in Genesis are retellings of older stories taken from other tribal groups, and are just stories (and not 'accounts').
Around 3C BCE the various different collections of stories and other writings were combined with some being discarded to arrive at what later became the OT.
> If you want to tst things out for yourself you don't rely on optical instruments when the Mk 1 eyeball suffices.
Mk 1 eyeballs are completely unreliable in so many ways. They are also only backed up by human memory which is even more unreliable. If you have two observers of an event you are likely to get three or more incompatible descriptions of what happened.
Optical instruments can be calibrated and corrections applied. They can also record so that comparisons can be made.
> anyone that believes it has to be so batshit crazy
Not any more so than your average fundamentalist christian bible believer. Most of those seem to function OK in normal society, most of the time. Geocentralism is the next stage because why would their god create earth in a backwater of a massive galaxy among millions. They want to feel that they personally are the centre of the universe and the reason for everything.
Yea, OK, they are batshit crazy.
> a religious belief connected to biblical literalism.
As one flat earther put it: "If we are monkeys on a spinning ball then there is no god."
They want to have been created as the centre of the universe. Being on an insignificant rock around a mediocre sun on the edge of one of millions of galaxies just doesn't make them feel important enough to overcome the failure that they were told they were all through school.
> those Brits who see that as a version of a weight-describing Pound symbol!
You are confused. The 'Brits' do not use 'hash' as pound weight. It happens that on a US keyboard the 'hash' is shift-3 while on a UK keyboard that is where the pound money symbol (stylized L) is. The use of hash as a form of 'lb' (pound weight), according to Wikipedia, is chiefly in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass)
> 'the most popular language' = what shows up in 'wanted, experience in ...'
Ahh, the 'empty desk count'. That has been used to claim 'popularity' in some form, as if the lack of people willing to fill the desk that requires working in that language represents it being popular.
:=)
> Algol 60's assignment operator.
No. In C the equal sign (=) is an _operator_ that causes assignment in an expression. 'x = 0' is an expression. This is why assignment can be done in an if statement evaluation.
In Algol and Pascal the ":=" is part of the syntax of an assignment statement. 'x := 0' is a statement, not an expression, because ':=' is not an expression operator.
This is a fundamental difference between Pascal like languages and C like. Assignment in an 'if' can lead to errors, not only because '=' can be mistakenly written instead of '==' but because of 'short circuiting' evaluations may fail to do the intended assignment.
> They make far more income from accepting applications than rejection,
Also, if an agent rejects a patent application, they have to write a report explaining why. If they accept it nothing is required.
If an organization challenges a patent asking for a review, then they get to pay for that too.
> Python does in fact support semicolon termination.
No. You are wromg. Python uses the semicolon as a separator, not a terminator.
"""Python uses the ; as a separator, not a terminator. You can also use them at the end of a line, which makes them look like a statement terminator, but this is legal only because blank statements are legal in Python -- a line that contains a semicolon at the end is two statements, the second one blank."""
> Windows kind of works on Raspberry Pi
There was a version of Windows IoT (Internet of Things) that would run on Pi3 (not 2 or Zero) but it had no desktop and wouldn't run anything but UWPs. Actually it would only run one UWP because there was no launcher - it was boot and run only. It required a full Windows 10 PC to get it to do anything.
> The jobs "lost" in the short term are retail jobs.
"""Trump's trade war with China has reduced U.S. employment by 300,000 jobs through a combination of eliminated jobs by companies struggling with tariffs and jobs that would have been created but weren't because of reduced economic activity. Moody's Analytics forecasts that the job toll from the trade war will hit about 450,000 by the end of the year, if there are no changes in policy. (Yahoo Finance)"""
> The gains long term are in [local] manufacturing.
No. They just move the manufacturing to Vietnam or Taiwan (or ship there to re-brand).
The problem in your argument is the "long term". With Trump being so unstable no one knows what he will do tomorrow, there is no 'long term', all plans are dealing with what happened today.
> it is more in the range of half that at retail,
You don't understand how retail price is set.
It may be that the tariff that had been paid was a smaller fraction of the retail price but retailers don't care about that, they just add their margin (up to 100%) to whatever cost price they have to pay.
> and offsets other taxes
It doesn't offset the taxes paid by the consumer, they still pay taxes _and_ pay more for their goods.
As these tariffs are likely to reduce corporate profits then it may reduce the tax on profit paid by companies and the very very wealthy.
> It doesn't hurt the business so much as they just pass along the costs to us
Price increases -> reduced sales -> reduction in production -> employee layoffs. This leads to fixed costs being supported by reduced gross profit. Loss of experienced employees means that if/when the tariffs are reduced/removed it takes longer/costs more to build up production again.
The consequence is that manufacturers will try to absorb the extra costs in order to keep production up and keep employees expecting that the trade war will end. If it doesn't then the business may fold completely.
I am not sure why you think that this "doesn't hurt the businesses".
> An incompatible change in either may spoil your day.
Actually I see it the other way. The cross-platform layer will cope with changes in the OS layers better than application code using that directly. Given that Microsoft has dead-ended or re-implemented several of its toolkits over the years some isolation from this may be appropriate.
> It has pretty much always been multi platform
NT yes. Windows 1 to 3 was 8086, 80286 and 80386. NT was written on MIPS because the contemporary 20MHz 80386 was not up to doing the job.
But it is the applications that have not been multi-platform. Office had to run in a form of emulation mode on Alpha and the RT version was very cut down and still needed Win32 libraries that were unavailable to other applications.
Most applications can't or won't be ported to other CPUs making it pointless to run Windows on anything but Intel/AMD.
Even though this WoA will run x86 (32bit only and slowly) many applications are 64bit only now. I recall when MS was trying to force everyone to 64bit by announcing that Windows 7 was the 'last 32bit version'.
> Yes, it is the GUI that spoils portability.
In the past I have written Python/Glade GUI applications that ran on Linux, Windows and Nokia N800 (small ARM tablet) with no code changes and no recompiles. Just make sure that the GTK libraries are installed, load and run.
> Maybe Windows on Arm is just a big stick for Microsoft to beat Intel with.
Previous iterations of WoA, which became Windows RT, was a big stick to beat OEMs with: "Make your ARM devices run WoA or lose your 'loyalty' discounts on _all_ devices and computers."
This worked for HP and WebOS.
Actually i think that this iteration of WoA is to beat OEMs who think they can make ChromeBooks and still keep their discounts. It would be a shame if they had to pay retail prices for Windows 10 and Office to install on their PCs and laptops they wanted to sell.
Similarly they revived XP to beat netbook making OEMs who thought they could get away with running Linux.
> The other issue IINM is that FAT32 use beyond 32GB is discouraged
I recall when FAT was limited to 32 megabytes. This was FAT16 of MS-DOS 3.x and limited to 16,000 (or so) clusters of 2,048bytes. Several manufacturers, such as Compaq and Gateway raised the limit in various incompatible ways. This made IBM uncompetitive because they stuck with the 32Mb limit until they rewrote the code to give a 128Mb limit and handed it back to MS to be MS-DOS 4.01.
The main problem with FAT though is that it is awful in handling large random access files, such as ISAM or databases. To access a particular sector it must start at the directory entry and read every FAT entry for that file until it gets to the required sector. This is very, very slow. Fortunately DR-DOS 3.x could format a disk with larger clusters. 8K clusters gave a 3x performance improvement on standard 2K clusters on ISAM files randomly read simply due to less FAT entries needing to be read for every step.
> OS/2 never supported ...
There were other Microsoft tricks that were done to break OS/2:
* OS/2 required about 22 diskettes. When a new release of OS/2 was due Microsoft went to the few diskette manufacturers and bought the next six month's supply of diskettes. These were loaded with 'Windows for Workgroups 3.11' and stored in several warehouses awaiting sale as it was around a year's supply. Then MS announced Windows 95 and sales of WFW dropped. Eventually this became known as 'Windows for Warehouses' and millions of diskettes were dumped. It did kill OS/2 sales though which is what was intended.
* IBM was allowed to use any _current_ version of Windows. When Windows was originally to be included in OS/2 the current version was 3.1. Microsoft announced that 3.11 would be released 'soon' so IBM built the new OS/2 with 3.11 and announced it. The anti-monopoly ruling required that IBM could not pre-announce products more than 3 months ahead so there was a date that they had to release by. Microsoft held off the release of 3.11 until after that date so that OS/2 had to be released with the old 3.1.
> Anyway, OS/2 never supported 32 bit applications,
OS/2 supported OS/2 32 bit applications.
Windows 3.11 on OS/2 could run 32 bit applications when the win32s add-on was installed, exactly like the usual Windows 3.x. However, Microsoft added a particular feature in a later version of win32s that did a memory access beyond the 2Gb virtual memory limit of the OS/2. The only purpose of that was to stop the latest version running on OS/2.
"The job ain't done 'til Lotus won't run!"
> Wasn't FAT based on one of the hundreds of CP/M formats.
No. There were not "hundreds of CP/M formats". There was one file system implemented on many different capabilities of hardware. For example drives may have been hard sectored or soft sectored, FM or MFM, single density, double density, quad density, 40 or 80 track. 8, 9 or 10 sectored, with various skew factors. These different types of hardware were chosen for various cost, performance and availability reasons. For example particular controllers were slower and required a longer time between sector reads and thus a particular skew factor and/or inter-sector gap.
Even with [MS-]DOS there were still 'dozens of formats'. The original diskettes on an IBM PC were 160Kb. Other companies used different controllers and drives and could not directly exchange data with different machines. PC-Alien could read and write many 'alien' CP/M formats _and_ many 'alien' MS-DOS formats.
It was only when all manufacturers started building IBM clones that they (mostly) used the same drives and controllers and became compatible with IBM PC diskettes.
But, no, FAT file system in the way it allocates and records file sectors is completely different from CP/M's. The only similarity is part of the directory entry so that the FCBs can be compatible for converted software.
> As DOS itself was a rip off of CPM/86.
No. It was a rip off of CP/M converted to 16bit 8086/8088. It was probably CP/M 1.3 because PC-DOS 1.0 had a bug in the FCB handling on a close that existed in that version of CP/M. Both Microsoft and SCP were OEMs for DRI CP/M (MS for their Z80 softcard) and had all the code that DRI gave to OEMs.
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