Affordable PCB Layout Software ???

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The joy of microsoft operating systems that have consistently stayed two steps ahead of available hardware. Requiring 3 BILLION bytes of memory just to draw a desktop and run a few relatively simply low performance applications like a word processor and web browser is an incredible feat.

Just think. In ten years will have 200ghz machines and microsoft will still make them dog slow.

Reply to
AZ Nomad
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AZ Nomad wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@ip70-176-155-130.ph.ph.cox.net:

That's not (only) Microsoft. That's Software Engineer and OO programming.

Bye Jack

--
Eroi non si nasce, ti incastrano
- Jim Belushi
Reply to
Jack

It's not embedded linux, it's a dual core desktop. It responds as fast as the DVD drive can.

Cool in the summer, warm in the winter ;-)

formatting link

Reply to
DJ Delorie

On Aug 26, 5:49 pm, David Brown wrote: [....]

You missed an item here.

Most *nix applications are reasonably robust against errors in the configuration. They generally will give you a hint about where the problem in the xxx.conf is. This is because it is much easier and natural to print something meaningful when the file being read is plain ascii.

Many years back I wrote a DOS application that needed to store a fairly complex configuration into an INI. My solution was, I though at the time a good one:

The program was object oriented and the objects may point to each other etc. Each object needed to be stored and loaded and have the pointers restored without forcing fixed addresses.

I turned the pointers into "name tags" for the objects as I stored them. Each object grew a "store()" method to do the write and a "load()" method for the read. The type of the each object was written as a text string. The result looked like this:

TheObjectType AB_CD_EF_GH ( Item1=12345 Item2="this is some string" ) ... etc ...

[....]

Yes you can do that. If you keep a Puppy Linux live CD on hand. Puppy will back up a XP system and a good 50% of the time, you can put back the damaged files. and get it working again.

It is fairly amazing that they were able to reverse engineer the NTFS file system. Microsoft hasn't published a standard for it.

You can even back up and restore a password protected file system. You can take a snapshot of the whole system and put it back to that point.

If some fool sets it up as a "domain log in" machine. It is harder to get it going again. You have to put back the local disk and the directory on the server at the same time.

[....]

Make a backup of the disk.

Delete the *.reg and try it.

Put back *.reg and instead delete /windows and try it.

By trying with random collections of the existing files I have managed to get the Windows repair to put basically an whole new install in place.

[.. Microsoft..]

I have never found Windows easy to use. For some reason I can almost never double click.

Reply to
MooseFET

Did I miss something here? There's no DVD drive in my cable box. I've seen several references to embedded Linux in Motorola DCT6412 cable boxes.

Mark Borgerson

Reply to
Mark Borgerson

Same thing happens if your configuration files get corrupted on *NIX systems and, as I mentioned, often far lesser corruption leads to far greater loss of functionality (e.g., Xorg.conf being a little corrupted completely removes your ability to get to a GUI desktop.)

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Every *NIX OS I've ever installed requires you to set up an administrative account too, you know? :-)

That being said, it was of course poor that it wasn't until Windows XP that the default install didn't make some effort to *not* have you "sign yourself up" as an administrator, and that until Vista operating as a regular or "power" user and then occassionally needing to perform administrative actions was rather klunky; many *NIX distributions (including the Mac's OS X) were well ahead of Microsoft in this area.

That being said, you have to keep in mind that the "computer model" for *NIX was always that you'd have multiple users with various skill levels/needs and therefore it was obvious that a system providing different capabilities to different users was necessary. With Windows, the model started with "there is one person using this machine, and they're user, administer, everything" -- and even today this is probably true for 75+% of PCs. Hence, it took time to get all those "single users" used to the idea of needing too different "access levels" on their PC, educating them about how always running as an administrator is a real risk they may very well not want to take. I just can't imagine that back in 1995 the whole, e.g., Vista user authentication control (UAC) system would have been successful at all -- look how many people still bitch about it today. (Granted, Microsoft did go a little too far in UAC, IMO -- I remember one of the Vista service pack 1 "improvements" was something like, "only requires 1 UAC activation rather than 4 to rename a file residing in a system directly." Uggh!)

Yes, although poor administrators can and do cause plenty of problems and lost productivity for regular employees as well... and poor administrators seem a lot more common in the Windows world than the *NIX world.

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

So re-install the software. *NIX has the exact same problem -- if you restore configuration files for a different version of some applicaiton, it's a toss up as to whether or not the software will still work.

One monolithic registry, one monolithic file system storing all your configuration files -- it's really not much different. The registry is just a database optimized for storing program settings... heck, some *NIX programs use, e.g., SQLLite these days for their configuration settings...

Reply to
Joel Koltner

There are plenty of people in the Linux community who are actively working to make it just as easy to use as Windows is. In many areas once can reasonably claim it's comparable or perhaps even better (printer and software installations are often quite painless these days compared to what they once were); it others, yes, it still needs works (there's a very active project in getting scanners to "play nice" with Linux, for instance). I'd admit that Linux doesn't pass the "grandma test" as well as Windows does in most cases (but in many cases it can, indeed, now pass -- whereas 5+ years ago generally it couldn't)... but then again, Windows doesn't pass it as well as the Mac OS X (*NIX-derived, of course) either.

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Good post, David -- thanks. I don't agree completely with everything, but I think your points have plenty of merit. I'd only add that I just haven't had the amount of problems with registry corruption that it appears that you have -- if I had, I could very easily find myself thinking much more poorly of the registry.

Yes, my criticisms were that the format isn't standardized (as you point out), often *isn't* hierarchical, and -- for the *average* user -- isn't always in an "obvious" location (copying /etc is easy, but then you need, umm... .mozilla? .gnome-desktop? etc.? --> the average user shouldn't have to dig through their home directory figuring out which "dot" directories contain configuration information).

For publicly-developed programs, almost as many? ...it's just that so many more "typical" programs on a Windows PC are commercial, and these of course often don't document their settings.

Yeah, I know -- ostensibly it was for performance, right? That video back in the NT 3.51 days going through the Kernel each time was never going to be fast enough for games/multimedia applications?

---Joel

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Thus increasing the user's productivity significantly!

formatting link
(chapter seven)

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Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! I'm a GENIUS!  I want
                                  at               to dispute sentence
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Reply to
Grant Edwards

It is only microsoft. Other companies have no problem using OO programming and actually getting *more* efficient over time.

Reply to
AZ Nomad

Except that on a unix/linux system, the config file can be repaired. On windows, it'll be impossible to even run regedit or to even reinstall the OS without blowing away the entire system.

Reply to
AZ Nomad

Here's direct link to that chapter:

formatting link

[Somebody needs to run a spell-checker on that page -- I've never seen so many typos on a web page before.]
--
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow! I brought my BOWLING
                                  at               BALL -- and some DRUGS!!
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Reply to
Grant Edwards

Nice.

I think it was the Qt documentation that, at one point while discussing fonts, made a point of how easy it was with Qt compared to, "...the horror that is X."

Reply to
Joel Koltner

Easy to fix. Boot with init 3 then cp your xorg.conf.orig to xorg.conf. Or you might not even have to reboot. Just switch to a virtual console via Ctrl-Alt-Fn.

--
Good day!

____________________________________
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Reply to
Chris Carlen

I've only seen one windows installation with the registry as completely trashed as the one I mentioned (as another poster said, there are a few more recovery procedures I could have tried). But partly corrupted registries are not uncommon - I've had my user registry scrambled a couple of times.

The average user doesn't need to directly access configuration files (or the windows registry) for common programs. To most users, it does not matter whether Firefox settings are in ~/.mozilla or ~/.firefox, as they access them with "Tools | Options".

Having said that, the location for almost all configuration files *is* obvious. If it is a system level configuration file, it will be in /etc. If it is a user level configuration file, it will be in a hidden file or directory in your home directory (it's hidden simply because you are not normally interested in seeing these files when you are looking for other files in your home directory).

If by "publicly-developed" you mean "open source", then I think you are probably wrong. Windows registry settings are often considered "developer information", not "user information". So they are documented in the same way as most programmers (open or closed source) document most of their code - there are brief comments, but otherwise the programmer assumes the information is obvious.

For windows "commercial" software (or more generally, closed source software - including freeware), you are right that the registry settings are seldom documented. However, for commercial and/or closed source software on *nix, configuration files *are* generally documented.

Many of the changes were for performance reasons, others were for backward compatibility, and others were for economic reasons - sales on non-x86 platforms were too low for MS to spend the time and money on the Alpha, MIPS and PPC ports of Windows. Of course, if they'd just written the system properly, the ports would have involved only a tiny proportion of the source code at negligible cost. The problem was that in large sections of the windows code that could easily have been cross-platform, programmers were assuming an x86 architecture.

Reply to
David Brown

Only Microsoft? You are showing you bias. Adobe is another fine example, ever looked at recent versions of Acrobat Reader? It gets buggier, slower, bigger and behaves more and more like a pig with every new release. And frankly even Linux distributions have become more a lot more bloated over the years.

I do remember the time when you could still comfortably surf the internet and run a wordprocessor on a machine with 64MB and a processor than ran at less than 300MHz, and I can't help wondering why nowadays you need at least 0x10 times as much to do basically the same job.

Reply to
Dombo

I remember doing all that on a 5 MHz S-100 bus machine with 768k RAM and a 360k floppy drive. Of course, it wasn't called "the internet" back then.

Let the one-upping begin :-)

Reply to
DJ Delorie

And there ws no such thing as a web browser, or even a GUI. All applications were character based.

Reply to
AZ Nomad

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