XP is garbage

is

I have W2K on C: (occasional use only), D: is eCS (OS/2), E: is app software, F: is data. G: is FAT32 which can be read and written by both OSs. The odd exception creeps in but not many.

Ted

The only exception I take to that is I ZIP the drives and write to CD/DVD. Handy and saves space.

Ted

I used to think it was poor management, but management keeps turning over, all the way to the top, and it continues, so I think the best answer is that they do whatever makes the most money for the shareholders, this quarter, and then react however necessary when the next quarter comes around.

IBM long ago lost any desire to be a technology leader. They are now content to just ride the coat tails of M$ and others and make the officers and owners filty rich for the short term. One day soon, they will be completely irrelevant. Its their choice, but if they had the mentality today, that they had forty years ago, we would be bitching about flaws in OS/2, and Microsoft would be playing catchup.

JB

Reminds me. 1974. Living in Kingston, Ontario. Lake front property (relevence to come). All of us are in the living room. Wife was reading. Kids watching TV. I was writing a program on the MCM70Exec.

TV quit, Kids wanted it back. I commenced to investigate. Fortunately before getting to involved, I looked out the side window and noticed that there were no lights on at the neighbours. A look around outside showed that the power was out in the whole area. Except for the TV we wouln't have noticed. See, we were using Alladin lamps (kerosene, mantle) because we enjoyed the atmosphere. The MCM70exec was the world's first laptop general purpose computer. It ran APL. Our property looked over Collins Bay to a park that was closed for the winter. The navagation lights to the SW were also shut down for the winter. Looking out our fron window at that time of year we would see no lights. So the only thing that we noticed was the TV failing. :-)

Ted

We had an early one of those things that could be set on an overhead projector and connected to a laptop. When I was teaching introduction to programming, I would typically spend the first quarter to half the period introducing something new. I would then state a problem and enter the code the class suggested and try to run it. When it didn't work, we would go through looking for the problem.

This whole thing went over very well because it was _their_ program not mine and they got to see what doesn't work as well as what does.

Ted

I read in sci.electronics.design that Ted Edwards wrote (in ) about 'XP is garbage', on Sat, 16 Apr 2005:

Brings back memories of WW2. Atmosphere 10% carbon dioxide, 50% water vapour and 2% sundry light hydrocarbons. Fabulous.(;-)

Hello Ted,

That is not a bad thing. It requires them to figure out how to entertain themselves without being passive all the time. Or get a lesson in business savvy by playing monopoly ;-)

With us it wasn't even the TV. When I went to get a cold one I realized that the fridge light bulb didn't come on. I almost started to change it when I realized that the town in the distance was unusually dark.

APL was a powerful language. My father used to love it. I just wonder why IBM drops the ball on a lot of this stuff. APL is gone, OS/2 is almost gone, their PC biz was sold to China...

Regards, Joerg

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. ;-)

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.

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

APL requres someone who thinks a matrix is life. Given that it's a wonderful write-only language. It's not a general purpose language.

Well... That *is* their job.

This isn't a fair statement at all. Who else has a *research* division?

Really? If you think IBM is all about M$, I suggest that you have a

You really don't get out much, eh?

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005 10:00:50 -0700, John Larkin wrote (in article ):

XP, being a touchy, sore topic with many WinTel users, is almost a flammable topic. It's bound to get a huge response. One might almost call you a troll!

(Just kidding on that last one... :-) )

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.

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:, 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).

I have once. Installing what turns out to have been a defective piece of software, I managed to clobber my OS/2 installation. No sweat. Format D:, unzip backup to drive and CAD. Back up.

I can't claim quite that since I have always enjoyed having a laptop as my only machine. Each upgrade required some different drivers but that was no big deal every few years since 1997. I'm now using eCS.

Ted

Well, then introducing any topic of conversation is a troll. The more interesting the topic, the troll-ier.

Anybody want Mo's recipe for Paprika Chicken? It's awfully good. It looks a lot like Genome's chicken thing, only orange.

John

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

PL/I.

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.

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

...made grading a PITA too.

As Mark Twain said, "The rumours of my demise have been greatly exagerated." Both APL and OS/2 are alive and kicking. IBM has pretty well, but not completely, deserted OS/2 however it has been picked up by Serenity Systems in Europe and is being sold and developped as eCS. See

APL is also still around. Personally, I use IBM's APL2 for OS/2 which is no longer supported by IBM - they have gone to 'doze and Linux with their new one. Fortunately the last APL2 for OS/2 was a well developped, reliable product. I haven't run into any bugs for quite some time and I am a _very_ heavy user of it.

Ted

Dunno. What with Mo being half Italian, we serve it over pasta. But the dumplings thing sure sounds good, too.

Will post.

John

I gather that you've had minimal, if any, exposure to it. I have been using it since 1967 and still do. As I have migrated from system to system over the years I have frequently enhanced or re-written functions to advantage of advancements in both the language and the implementations. I don't know where you got your misinformation but I have written a library full of mathematical routines, a couple of data bases, a graph plotter, a word processor (before the term was coined - I called it a text editor) and am currently developing a reliable incremental backup setup for my hard drive.

What language would you call "general purpose" other than assembler?

Ted

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

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. :-)

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

Ted