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Comments on news posted 2009-12-11 18:25:10: It's the weekend, so talk it out in the comment section below. ..
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 | | Yay On vacation for the rest of the year! | |
| |  statestress magnetPremium,Mod
join:2002-02-08
Purgatory
kudos:6 | Re: Yay Me too! Oh, wait, that's just for the rest of the weekend. Frick. | |
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bbbrain
join:2005-03-20
Richardson, TX Reviews:
 ·AT&T U-Verse
| Ancient Mariner blathers on and on... Back in my day, the huge computer in the fancy computer room had no keyboard access, at all. You rented a machine to punch holes in cards. The computer read the cards and did what they said. Or sometimes just stopped dead if they had a typo... depends which card in the sequence and which typo. They also just stopped dead for many, many other reasons  The computer companies sent "Field Engineers" out to get them running again, usually in only a few days, or weeks. Big customers got full time "Customer Support Engineers" assigned by the computer company. They improved fixes to a few hours, or days. But, even after it was all fixed, it took a few days to "reboot". Customers bought entire backup computer systems to make the "uptime" numbers look better in the Annual Report. Hard to imagine, these days, huh?
Years flowed by and more and more companies and organizations bought or leased their very own computer. It was the thing to do. Everybody hired a herd of programmers. Eventually, even the Higher Education bidness saw a way to get some more money and started teaching "Computer Science". I took an early "Introduction to Computer Science" class at the University of Minnesota. I think it was 1-005. Bureaucracy predates computers  I had been earning too much money for many years and thought I should stay "informed".
No chance
Next time I will misremember when some geek genius taught a computer to talk directly to a Terminal! The mighty and majestic Teletype KSR-33, with optional paper tape reader/ punch. You had to have to have been toggling paddle switches to talk to a computer for many years to appreciate what a joy That was...
We used to say: "Happy Friday! Only two more working days until Monday!" Some things never change... | |
| | Stumbles
join:2002-12-17
Port Saint Lucie, FL | Re: Ancient Mariner blathers on and on... We had a TTY-35 connected to a HP2114 ("A" model IIRC). We used it mostly for diagnostics. The 2114 was loaded via paper tape and had one row of capacitance switches (arranged in octal IIRC or was it hex?). I always thought it was a rather neat machine. | |
| |  rchandraStargate Universe fanPremium
join:2000-11-09
14225-2105 | hey, I will further add:
I am really sad when I see people that consider themselves good at using computers, but they are WIMP people (window, icon, menu, pointing device). Although in high school Data Processing class I saw those Hollerith cards you're talking about, and a bit about how to program sorting machines and such, I never had to set panel switches or punch any of those cards. I had always been more used to a character cell terminal and a modem, and at 1200 bps, reading just about as fast as the characters were coming over the line.
What's really sad is these WIMP people can't appreciate a good VMS/Unix/Linux system, and how utterly easy they are to administer since they don't rely so heavily on a graphical environment. I could be half way around the world in Manila, but as long as I can pull up a SSH client, I can get in there and fix things. There is no need for a graphics card or mouse, or RDP or VNC. It just works, and doesn't take up a whole helluva lot of network bandwidth either. Heck, there are some systems where I know a modem number, and if I can just dial that up, I can telnet to some systems to fix things, or monitor what's going on. That's how low the requirements are.
And if things get a bit more complicated, I can start up good ole PPP on that modem, and open multiple SSH sessions to different hosts, and still work comfortably rapidly. The only bonuses a graphics card gives you for this are the ability to have several (X11 XTerm) windows open at the same time, and the ability to copy/paste with the mouse (possibly between them, sometimes with the same window). IF there's something that will genuinely be helped along by graphics, I can set DISPLAY and get some app to connect back to my X server (over Ethernet hopefully).
Similarly, those who are only aware of the graphical part of Windows are often hamstrung when it comes to automation...in particular, doing things periodically. Sure, there's the Task Scheduler which operates a lot like cron, but how exactly would you connect to some remote database (say an HR one), look for new hires, then connect that to MMC (dsa.msc) to create new domain users? Too bad they've never used things like sqlplus, dbaccess, or dsadd. Since they've never or very rarely seen the character cell based world (such as cmd), they're a little disadvantaged.
Sigh. owell...
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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when a writer chooses not to follow those rules.
Jeopardy! replies REALLY suck! | |
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rchandraStargate Universe fanPremium
join:2000-11-09
14225-2105 |  Can I please have a Web browser that's LESS helpful???
So I had read someplace one can get an email-only account over at AOL, so I thought this would be the perfect thing: just attempt to send a message to myself, and see if it 1.) bounces, or 2.) never arrives (goes to the big bit bucket in the sky). Right.
So I pull up my trusty Firefox, and use Google to find "aol email". It shows and takes me right to a page which has a "Sign up for a FREE account" button on it. Right. Perfect. So I try clicking it. Naturally, for whatever reasons, this is a JavaScript button, and NoScript has done its job and blocked execution. Fine. I told NoScript, temporarily allow all this page, and refresh. And I click on the button again. The status bar tells me, "Connecting to new.aol.com..." and hangs there.
Hmmm...actually, this is nothing new; on certain occasions, it's been my experience that the JS on some pages is better handled by Opera than by Firefox. So I get Opera 10.10 going, and copy/paste the URI from FF to Opera, click the same button on the page, and I don't see any better result...this time it's an error page from the server. Huh...
OK, so just thinking dumbly for a second, I type in http: // new.aol.com (without the spaces; didn't want that autoconverted to a hyperlink...) whereupon Opera spits out this error page about not being able to connect to that URI, with a full page of things to try to clear the error...stuff about refresh, toggling proxy on and off with F12, and a whole bunch of other DRECK!!!!!!!
Oh, no. No. NO. NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
Has Microsoft infiltrated the minds of the Opera programmers??? This page was sooooooooooo reminiscent of "page cannot be displayed." Except there was one difference: often at the end of all that IE goo, there is an occasionally helpful reason why "the page cannot be displayed." There was no such luck with this Opera session.
Unfortunately, past a certain release, Firefox is no better. Its error pages are now filled with similar "helpful" suggestions on how I might get the page I expected.
Please...I do not need to be helped like that. I do not need to be told repeatedly to refresh the page, try again, check my network connection, my proxy settings, or anything else. Just tell me what the !@#$@ happened!!! Please!!! Do not tell me "server not found or DNS error." TELL ME WHICH ONE IT WAS!!!! In fact, "DNS error" sort-of means NXDOMAIN...but not always. "Server not found" most often means what us old net veterans would call "connection refused"...but alas, not always.
Why, oh why, do you not just tell me "name does not exist?" Why not tell me "connection refused?" Is there some compelling reason you can't tell me "no route to host" like other programs (ping) will tell me? I've looked at and done some socket programming before; I know the errors are there IF THE APP WOULD *JUST* DISPLAY THEM!!
I want my browsers to be LESS helpful, as in, don't suggest how I might recover. Ironically, instead simultaneously I want them to be MORE helpful, and tell me EXACTLY what failed, and let ME decide what the best way to remedy my issue is. All the rest is less-than-useful noise.
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English is a difficult enough language to interpret correctly when its rules are followed, let alone when a writer chooses not to follow those rules.
Jeopardy! replies REALLY suck! | |
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