A propeller would be of no use to me on my current project because I have critical timing constraints.
Without any idea of what your project is I can't say if the Propeller is a good fit or not. But "critical timing constraints" is exactly where the Propeller shines. What better way to handle multiple critical timing events on pins than having separate processors to handle them at the same time if need be? Certainly a lot better than polling pins and jumping to handler code on a single CPU. Better and much easier than using interrupts.
Also, you can certainly branch on condition codes after an instruction in PASM.
For our main attraction, we have a twelve round bout. In one corner we have Ttailspin Tommy representing Windows 8.1 and in the other we have Loopy Byteloose representing Linux. The referee for the bout will be the Super Moderator - Publison.
For our main attraction, we have a twelve round bout. In one corner we have Ttailspin Tommy representing Windows 8.1 and in the other we have Loopy Byteloose representing Linux. The referee for the bout will be the Super Moderator - Publison.
DING DING
As a late addition, on the same card, we have the heavy weight Juan Core "The Interrupter" versus the unorthodox soft-fighting styles of Octavio Cog "The Spin Master" for a good old fashioned rasslin' match!
For our main attraction, we have a twelve round bout. In one corner we have Ttailspin Tommy representing Windows 8.1 and in the other we have Loopy Byteloose representing Linux. The referee for the bout will be the Super Moderator - Publison.
DING DING
OK, I'll chime in Windows.
I was, and still am an XP user. I still have two computers that I rely on that use XP.
I did buy Windows 7 when it was half price, I was in beta testing. I like it as much as XP.
I will keep my two XP machines running for as long as possible, because they just work. AV AntiVirus is a must!
Bruce, I'll be watching the bout as long as I don't have to give my credit card for a pay per view channel.
I quite liked the diversion of this thread into matters Propeller and PASM.
Much more interesting than XP.
The Windows vs Linux match is pointless. It seems people can get by with a totally dysfunctional operating system without it worrying them. I'll leave it to the reader to decide to which OS I am referring.
Back in 2001, M$ tried to block other browsers on MSN, or rather, they deliberately sent miscoded pages designed to Smile out specific browsers.
One they targeted specifically was the Opera web browser...
Their response was the 7.01 "Bork" edition, which 'translated' specific MSN pages to... well... if you ever saw the Muppet Show, you can guess...
It's still available for download... http://arc.opera.com/pub/opera/win/bork/std/
I was more referring to Hobby VS Professional, I am a hobby computer user, and that's why i can get by with a dysfunctional system, well..that, and I live in a trailer park...
Okay, I need to confess where my bias against Microsoft and Windows XP originates from.
After years of struggling with other Microsoft stuff, I purchased a complete new ASUS Tualitin, XP Professional in English, and Microsoft Office in English in hope of putting all the junky problems behind me. I also purchased annual subscriptions the System Mechanic for AV and Registry clean up.
+++++++++++
I had to special order the English versions in Taiwan and pay top dollar as Microsoft was very upset about the piracy in Asia. I had to register ownership via telephone with Singapore.
And then................ I could access Microsoft XP support directly on line.
Not so great. MIcrosoft in all its wisdom would ONLY provide me Chinese language support for my English language Windows Professional XP. I had to complain vigorously and wait years before English language support for my software was provided.
Meanwhile, System Mechanic and the free Norton AV went to battle with each other. And Apple was battling with Microsoft over whether Media Player or Real Player should be installed. Together... all these turf wars made XP unpleasant and unstable. I wanted both Media Player and Real Player at the time for my English teaching course (BBC was only Real Player, textbooks and local publishers were Media Player).
It is just that Kafkaesque. I finally gave up and got a 64 bit Vista computer, but that is another saga of stupidity.... Vista came free with the computer, but ONLY with the Chinese. MS wanted a top bilingual OS upgrade to switch to English at about $900 USD.
So I moved to Linux. Greed in the software industry abuses the end-users mightily.
For those that may be interested in a program like QuickLinks and trust my programming, I am providing a copy of the QuickLinks program in the attachment below. Please keep in mind that this is only version 1.0 and I still want to do a little more work to it, such as, providing better support for the various list views, perhaps allow individual selection of the network connection to enable/disable, keep track of window placement per user, etc... However, in it's current state, it is a very handy tool to have in the system tray.
If you download this program, here are a few things to keep in mind:
When you first run the program and display the main window, by left clicking the system tray icon, a new directory named "QuickLinks" will be created in your favorites folder.
To fill this main window with internet shortcuts, simply browse to your favorite locations, and add each location to the QuickLinks directory within the favorites folder, and the main window will automatically update to include your new shortcut. When adding items to this folder, keep the names at a maximum of about 15 characters, to keep it nice looking
QuickLinks is a top window application, meaning it stays on top of all other windows. When you select a website, from the main application window, the window will disappear. Visibilty of this window can be toggled by left clicking the system tray icon.
Until I get around to doing some more work on this program, the list style view or detail view provides the best looking appearance of the main window.
In addition to being a top window application, the main window has a fixed size and location. The location of the window will be the lower right hand corner of your screen.
I hope you like it, because I know I do.
Bruce
P.S. It may work on more recent versions of Windows, but it has only been tested on XP.
... Microsoft and Windows....
...
It is just that Kafkaesque. ....
I don't know what the first global economic implosion is going to look like exactly, but whatever it is, I'm sure it will be alit by the cheerless glow of a Blue Screen of Death.
I quite liked the diversion of this thread into matters Propeller and PASM.
Much more interesting than XP.
The Windows vs Linux match is pointless. It seems people can get by with a totally dysfunctional operating system without it worrying them. I'll leave it to the reader to decide to which OS I am referring.
If you REALLY need XP then pony up some cash and get a large USB flash drive or a HDD and then use clonezilla to dupe over your entire HDD and then if you have a problem then you can just dupe back a readdy to run entire PC .
AVG-Free
MalWareBytes (Free version does not automatically update)
SpyBot
ZoneAlarm (Firewall only version)
AVG has a rescue CD that you can download from their site which is good if your system is badly infected.
I just aborted the latest installation of AVG-Free this week because it was about to install a permanent toolbar into my browser IIRC.
Hate those toolbars, BING!
But the latest free Malwarebytes did an amazing job of resurrecting an old Vista drive with the US Courts virus. I plugged that drive as a slave into my Win8 machine and cleaned it.
Superantispyware and CCleaner are also free and very good.
I just aborted the latest installation of AVG-Free this week because it was about to install a permanent toolbar into my browser IIRC.
Hate those toolbars, BING!
But the latest free Malwarebytes did an amazing job of resurrecting an old Vista drive with the US Courts virus. I plugged that drive as a slave into my Win8 machine and cleaned it.
Superantispyware and CCleaner are also free and very good.
It does that by default but you can uninstall it or if I remember there is window where you can uncheck it's installation.
I can't stand toolbars myself and I especially hate when there is no option to not install it.
Hey guys! I took a new job, and it's been quite the challenge between that role and industry change and contracting for one I worked for just a few months ago. Need the $$$ and gotta get life sorted. I'll step it up here again, once things are secure and I'm all good. Priorities, until then. You all know how it is. (hopefully)
This thread is worth a post.
RANT MODE = 1
I've got one XP laptop. It is my original Propeller development machine. Really, it made the best sense to take it off the network. Once in a while, there is something on it, or I want to run something, and I do. Win 7 actually will run OK on that one, and I may well upgrade it. Maybe not. It's an old laptop now. I won't get another one, and I will begin to forget XP, just as I did lots of other stuff. I just about don't need it, mostly nostalgia now. I may virtualize it. Probably not.
Time to move on. Ditch that XP. Yesterday. You might not need a newer OS, but you may well need to network, or maybe you need to get things done instead of fight what others did to you, but that's just me.
My current machines are Win 7 and Mac OS, with various Linuxes on live boot media when I need them.
Back in the late 90's, I jumped on Red Hat 5.2 Still got the cool box somewhere. At the time, I had left windows for SGI IRIX. (real computers as opposed to toys, which I thought then, and still do --it's just that IRIX got trapped by MIPS and some ugly business deals and I had to move on from those too)
The combination of IRIX and Linux was great for me. I got to learn the X Window system, compile code, write cross platform C, and learn a ton about filesystems, operating systems, kernels, ports, and countless other things. Back then, OSS was just starting to rock, and I decided to make an investment to get myself boot strapped onto Linux. IRIX was a very sweet, and to a degree, futuristic OS. It had things then we didn't get elsewhere for years. Sort of Amiga like, if that makes any sense, but with some real serious computing power under the hood. Despite it being the very best computing experience I've ever had, I knew that one was doomed too.
They all are, but not Linux.
Also back then, the state of OSS was mixed! We were starting to get some good programs, but real productivity was still a ways away. But I invested anyway, and here is why:
When you sink it all into some closed OS, you map your skills onto something that somebody else is going to kill off or change when they think it makes the best sense. That's not ever really going to match up with your needs, and so you will absolutely lose on that investment. Your skills may be relevant, but without some mapping done onto relevant operating systems, those skills grow antiquated, unproductive, isolated and increasingly useless over time.
Why do that?
Since I came up during the 8 bit era, it was rather ordinary to deal with very different machines. What mattered most was common data. Different programs could be written or used, depending on what one chooses to do or is able to do, and those uses can get stuff done on lots of machines in lots of different ways.
This is why a whole pile of people really like plain old ASCII text. You can stuff anything into text form, push it about, and then use it on most anything you can compile software for. Similar arguments exist for most basic open data formats, pictures, whatever.
As the body of OSS grew and matured, it didn't take but a couple of years to get skilled enough to use machines running most anything. Only a couple of years. That's all it will really take to pry yourself from some operating system lock in.
The other decision I made back then was I really only run Windows software that somebody else pays for. If my skills are good, truth is somebody will buy a license, and I'm good. And that all works, until it doesn't too. And I've held to that over the years with few worries. Doing it sorts out the professional lock in that can occur. Microsoft Office and other specific programs tend to center on Windows and that keeps a lot of people from really exploring other environments. Windows will work, until it doesn't, and as long as it works, that's easier than building up something else and so we see it done.
Today, lots of people are fat 'n happy on XP, or some other Windows OS, and they've bought their software, often with node lock or machine lock licenses that are painful to get away from. This is understandable, but very, very expensive!
And often one pays over and over, or they pay in terms of keeping older environments around, and all that comes with doing things like that. It's just tedious.
That two years saw me run Mandrake, Gentoo, various Red Hats, and it all kind of worked out. Soon, the OSS applications made sense, and I could build up environments that just boot on most any box when I want them and I did. Quit paying for image software, illustrations, word processing, development tools, file system tools, and a ton of other things out there. I think it saves me $1000 / year overall. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
Ever notice how you sort of know Windows? Things get moved around, but the basics are ingrained enough to stumble and fumble around when you need to? Getting going on Open Source Software is the same way. Once you make that initial investment and "get there" you can step away, much like running Win 7 for a while, then getting stuck with a Vista or XP box. The core is done, meaning it's not too tough to figure out from there at any one time.
Linux and OSS is like this. Just the other day, some guy I'm working with was struggling with Adobe and their expensive stuff. In the time it took for them to get licenses sorted and software installed, I had put Inkscape and GIMP on a machine, output the art needed and moved on gratis! That's keeping skills mapped to things we can count on. Versions vary, but not too much. I can jump on a version of most of the better OSS out there and just go. You can too.
There are people still compiling all those things for IRIX boxes! If I want to, I can go and get an older machine of Ebay, go and find the folks and the toys and get setup on one of those in a day, just as I can pull some machine out of the corner and do the same thing using Linux.
Today many (and increasingly so) of the skills I need to make money with exist in OSS land. Sometimes I run windows and just get software. Other times, I'll put a Linux on something and do that too. Mac OS? Just another Unix with some extras, etc...
I very strongly recommend strengthening your familiarity with a UNIX. Just do one. Once you do, it's like knowing what word processing or image manipulation is, not just what Microsoft Word or Photoshop does specifically. Both are nice programs, and both are not needed for an extremely large number of use cases too.
Over time, this dynamic has turned Windows into a painful place, unless one is very careful and I am. I typically run plain, generic, with good protection-ware, and I strip away all the little utility programs that just increase dependencies I don't need, and get good at the rest. Result? I can jump on a Mac, Linux, Windows, whatever box and get things done when I need them done.
Still thinking about getting an Android machine, just because some basic operating system skill building pays off so darn well.
I very highly recommend you invest in operating systems. You don't have to be an expert. Heck, at my peak on these things, I probably knew half of UNIX. Today, I recall and use maybe a third of that, looking the rest up here and there, but... It's enough. More than plenty in most cases.
Your time here is short. Not making good choices, or being limited in your choices due to closed operating systems can be very expensive, limiting and mentally frustrating. And change is good.
Once I gave away my IRIX bunker. It was cheaper to do that and move on to other things of interest, one of which was the Propeller. At one point, that collection of stuff could easily hit $100K. Some guy packed it into his Suburu and I'm sure had one heck of a time living the 90's over again on great hardware! (some very expensive programs too) I didn't spend $100K on the stuff. Some was given to me, some was ebay, etc... And the software was a part of the deal in many cases But it was cheaper in the sense of my time, head space, etc... Honestly, I may have kept a machine, maybe that O2 I like, and an Indy, but there were few to no open Propeller tools, so I parked all of that on XP at the time. Today, I can do Mac and Linux! (Sweet)
The first time you do this, it's hard. That Red Hat 5.2 experience was pretty rough. Loaded it on an Intergraph Pentium 90 machine, with a spiffy Matrox G400 graphics card. I think it took a couple of days to get the X Window system on that one working well. Funny thing about UNIX though. While I was learning how to do that, I just used an IRIX box for a display, until the native one was running proper...
Almost gave up, until I found one killer app. That was the DVD player OGLE. Great little program which used the Matrox hardware decode engine very well. Once I got that setup on a good screen, being able to play movies on it with no user restrictions, forced previews, etc... proved high value. That machine entertained my wife and I for a few years. Was all nearly free, even the old Intergraph, which really wasn't a good Windows NT machine, despite it being a perfectly capable machine otherwise. Played a mean DVD at 90Mhz though.
Each experience will be a little like that. Running Open Office, or one of the forked versions is a bit odd compared to MS Word. Sort of like Word Perfect, if you've ever run that. But it sticks after you use it, and you just keep doing it. Soon, you will find a ton gets done, and those expensive licenses can be something other people can buy, or you can rent, borrow, ignore, whatever. The more the better. Put your dollars into retirement, or new toys, and not into constant changes in versions, and other madness we don't like.
When I boot up that XP machine, it's kind of funny! Familiar, but limited. So many things are better now, and for the few that aren't, I can plug a little USB flash drive in and have my favorite Ubuntu (10) environment up and running in half a minute, maybe one minute tops? And Ubuntu is off on a crappy lark right now. Maybe I'll load another one, or back to the core Debian. Doesn't matter much in Linux land, once you have the basic skills you need.
Notably, some of the contracting I do involves operating systems. An expensive program needs sales and service support, and I've got that program down cold. It's more money than I would personally ever pay, but I don't have to, because I get to run it as part of that work. Nearly all of my peers today have no idea about operating systems. If it's not Windows, they sort of shut down, and those calls and deals end up on my desk, and I make a lot of money when they do.
Right now, the systems admin at the company I work for is being mentored into some of this stuff. He's a good Windows guy, but when the Microsoft tools don't work, he's kind of wondering what does. Somebody gave me a server that got retired due to it's services being delivered via the Internet. "Cloud" style. Rather than setup yet another Windows server 'test lab" to better understand what won't work or will be broken with the next round of changes, I've got him loading a Linux, and we are doing the basics of UNIX, mixed in with some computing history. He doesn't know it yet, but the day he owns OSS, I'm giving him that nice dual Xeon server with 12GB RAM. I want it to matter and do him some real good, so I'll just mentor, nag, suggest and sometimes show 'n tell to keep him interested and improving. Same thing was done with me on IRIX, and I got the box I mastered too. Was an O2, and I loved that machine, because it was MINE. Loved the Mandrake machine I eventually setup extra sweet too. Was an old e-machines Pentium 200 or something. Ran that darn thing for YEARS.
I told him two years. Same as I am here. This guy is sharp, and I'll bet he comes in well under that. And when he does, he will be computing, not just a user of some operating system or other that works until it doesn't.
You can too. Just do it. It's not like you gotta abandon your Windows machine, or Mac, if that's your thing. Just start picking up the fine Open Source Software out there and use it. The more you use it, the more you save and the more capable you are and the more options you have.
I remember the angst I felt when Win 2K was being retired. Man, I really got good on Win 2K. Never again. Ever. When I saw this XP announcement, I pulled the network off that old box and I won't look back on it. 7 can do what I want it to, and I like to run a Windows machine for simple time savings. Since I'm on one frequently that other people pay for, that's fine. If I want a Linux, I can get it, or put it in a VM, or whatever I want to do.
This is what you want. Rather than continue to kludge toward an increasingly dead end, get some cross-platform skills brewing and then you will have choices, not costs and ends of things to face in life.
One more thing: For a lot of people, this stuff is like religion. No joke! Heck, I was there for years myself. Still am to a degree. I use a Windows box, but I won't buy one, and I really don't trust it much. I never really know what the damn thing is doing! Nor do I always know what it's going to do differently after one of those updates either. Unless, I spend a very large amount of my time and head space keeping track of that stuff, and who really wants to do that? I sure don't. If I'm being paid to do sysadmin, sure! That's the gig. But in life apart from that? Run. Just avoid it. Let the stuff run, and settle in on a Linux you can pick and choose on, and just network what you need to and ignore the rest. Life is very simple that way, and you spend more time writing, building, doing, exploring, learning too.
Did I mention it's often cheap? Just two years. Do it, and you can pick and choose a lot of your computing instead of having it dictated to you, and the best part?
You can share what you know and the tools unabashedly, and they can too, meaning where you do this among friends, it multiplies. Couple this with virtual machines, understanding file systems and disks, and your options go way up. Running XP as a virtual machine rocks hard! Say you do need to do it. In a virtual environment, you just snapshot and get it done. If it goes bad, roll back and deal. no worries, never, ever install an OS again kind of no worries.
Oh, and no house calls. If they are running Windows, let them deal with it. The only reason it's a good deal is often there are some of us subsidizing that mess with our time. Get them a Linux, or a Mac, and you will save a lot of time in the future. No more Hijack this, ComboFix, Malware, Windows Update, Symantec, dances you don't enjoy just so somebody else can continue on to the next brutal event. And they will too. Over and over and over. Your time is a freebie to them, until it isn't. Funny how that works.
So there you go. That's what I think about Windows XP and operating systems in general. I jump on one, use it, move on. It's all nearly entirely opportunistic, and it only takes a little while to break out of the zone and just get yourself good to go.
This event isn't a problem. It's an opportunity! Now is the time. Get some VM software, virtualize that XP machine, and then get yourself a Linux, or step up for a Mac, whatever makes sense, and run it there when you need to, no worries, problems just a snapshot away. Host only networking means being able to share devices, drives and such, making the whole thing a lot easier than it sounds. And a Mac is a GREAT place to run VMs. I do it all the time, and OS X is just fun and it works well. Recommended, but only if you aren't up to getting good on a Linux, or the pretty gets you excited. (which is fair, I like it too)
Only took a coupla years, and I was jamming long before that time. You will go through many of the teething pains you will moving to a newer Windows OS. But when you go through that on OSS, you get portability, that awesome software freedom, cost savings, and every other benefit I put here, and you largely do it ONCE.
BTW: This is precisely why the GCC guys and others working on Open Code are doing it. Seems like religion, and it sort of is, but the truth is they want you to have the same awesome set of, "do what I want on what I want when I want" choices they have. And it's just not that hard.
Should you need another Windows, run it plain Vanilla, use the Microsoft AV tools, and don't invest one bit more than you strictly need to, so that when the day comes to give it up, you've got as few worries as you can. All those little programs, tool bars, etc... add up. Sure, they are spiffy, and they can save time. That can make some sense too. But the stock OS is powerful, and investing in that carries you a lot farther than a pile of programs that all work, until they don't.
And if you are not having fun, you are doing it wrong. Seek friends or a mentor, and have a good time owning your computers instead of them owning you. I had a damn spiffy time. You will too. Just do it.
Magnificent post. That one took two large mugs of breakfast tea to get through!
I have been saying such things since I discovered Linux and more importantly Free and Open Source Software in 1996.
I also started with that nice box of RedHat CDs. It was a eye opener. I could see, at that moment, that there was now a possibility to end the long dark days of proprietary software, of lock in, of abandonments. Which in my mind was an aberration. Free and Open Source were the new words for this kind of software distribution but really, that was the default method of distribution and development of software during the early days of computer science.
Even in '96 I had grown frustrated with software lock in, and the subsequent stranding when the company lost interest in the product or went out of business. The software is expensive to buy but that is nothing to finding, some years later, that you have products developed with that software that can no longer be supported. In the embedded software world this kind of lock-in/stranding cycle happened a lot already by the late '90s. That is why there has been such a big take up of Linux in embedded space.
It's still going on in desktop land as we see. Want XP? Sorry you can't have it. It's amazing to find how many people call for the Adobe FLASH player on the Raspberry Pi, they have invested huge amounts of time creating with FLASH, oblivious of the fact that it is a dead end and all their work is about to become unusable as FLASH disappears. FLASH is not supported on ARM and Adobe has said it's an end of life product. There are hundreds, thousands, of other examples.
But when one says all this one is looked at like some religious nut job. Few will listen, they just look forward to spending on the next great Windows version that they "know" will fix all their problems. Whilst all the time relying on a network of friends and family that can fix those problems day to day, for free!. I swear that if MS and others paid for all the free time spent my myself and millions of others supporting and fixing peoples machines they would not have on cent in the bank.
These views we express are not a "religious" thing. They are born out of solid practical experience. And a desire not to be "owned" or taken for a ride, yet again.
Bottom line. As you say. Put that XP in a virtual machine. Keep known good working snapshots of it around. And move on. Eventually you will forget all about it.
As if on cue for this XP/Windows debate and just to make everyone who has been pouring their hard earned cash into Microsoft for three decades feel confident in their next MS solution we get this news: Internet Explorer vulnerabilities increase 100% - http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=17158
What does MS actually do with all that cash they collect?
When I bought that RH box, I had downloaded a version prior. Still remember that benchmark. You didn't have real Internet access, until getting a Linux was reasonable. IMHO, it's still true, though one could very easily say the same about a movie, or some other big thing today.
With that post, I tried to communicate choices and how one gets to a place where they can really make them. IMHO, the biggest difficulty, often triggering the "nut job" perception, is the idea that one must go whole hog, all OSS, all the time. Not true at all, though I do feel it is an extremely good experience to try. That is what I did, and I got there, but for 3D mechanical CAD, and some niche things. Like Prop Tool, as a relevant example.
One of the very best UNIX things is the X Window System, which is currently under development. Kind of a mess, but I think it will come out OK. I'm liking a lot of what I see, but I'm not liking how people are trying to push network transparent, multi-user display systems off the table, as if they are no good. Truth is, that rules, and it's one of the best kept secrets of UNIX land, and it puts the "multi" into multi-user computing, just as SUN claimed to put the dot in ".com" (Loved that era in ADS, BTW)
At one point, I had decided I really didn't want a Windows desktop as primary. Wanted to get that experience, get over the hump and do what I knew how to do on IRIX anywhere. So, I setup a nice Mandrake machine with a good graphics sub-system, and networked in all the toys I needed. Then I did the reverse for a while, and I stayed there until 2004. Man, that rocked! Both did. The KDE desktop, or something fun like Enlightenment, coupled with the 3D CAD running on IRIX, and a virtualized PC, got me everything on a network transparent desktop. Amazing, and I used to pipe the whole bunker over the Internet, through my home DSL, to whatever machine I was running at the time, so long as I had an X Server for it. I bought a copy of X Win 32 for that purpose, and if you want a really good X Server for a PC, the Exceed product by Hummingbird is top notch, and it supports it all, capable of the best of what IRIX would do...
But I digress.
It's not necessary to go whole hog. And to me, that was the big realization. For a time, I struggled. Once I got some mastery of OSS, I could pull a machine out of the dumpster, get a Linux on it and then max it out, doing whatever I wanted to with it. And that's true!! I actually have pulled actual machines out of dumpsters. And if you've got a friend or two, I cannot recommend that experience highly enough. We had a blast! Get stuff, Linux it, then go and build whatever. At one point, I had most of a company infrastructure built up with a good friend. We used BSD for mail and some basic services, Linux for sharing files and some application serving, and more Linux for firewalls, and some hacker type learning with what we called the NSA box.
That one was setup to pass ethernet traffic through without being detected. It had two network devices in it, and traffic would go into one, and out the other. Learned a lot with that thing.
But it was all just fine to start with applications too. For a while, after I got rid of the home bunker of machines and networked stuff, (And I don't miss it anymore, but for the cool hardware experiences) I only had Windows machines, because the majority of my computing time was professional, and in 3D CAD Windows is where it's at, sadly. So I helped a local school get the kids running the popular and productive OSS applications via something called "The Open CD", which was a CD all setup with the goodies, free to copy, use, and get stuff done with.
Since I grew up a poor kid, no regrets there honestly as I learned way more than I would have had otherwise, I saw the school locking kids into Microsoft. And something in me didn't sit well with that. When I was in school, if I could get there, pencil in hand, I was good to go. And one can always find a pencil. So I got a couple kids going, and they could get the work done, and they could copy share, and do the OSS thing to which the school went nuts! COPYING SOFTWARE IS BAD.
Well, no. It's just not. And some software is meant to be shared, used, improved. Took a long while, but I got that message through, and at one point the school had a Linux lab all setup. What they didn't do was invest in the educators, who eventually tore it down for a Microsoft some years later.
So today, I just tell people what they can do. Need to do some art? Get Inkscape, for example. No, it's not Adobe Illustrator (and I really hate that program due to it's GUI always giving me fits), and it's almost Corel Draw. So why use it?
Because it can do vector art and manipulate Scalable Vector Graphics, SVG files, and it can do it very well. So here is what you have to ask yourself. "Do I want a career based on knowing and keeping up on what Adobe does, or do I want to have a career or career skill involving art and graphics?"
The latter is timeless. The former is a niche and you end up a wage slave, your chain yanked this way and that. If I get stuck doing art, and maybe saying that is unfair... I like art, so when I have to do art, I can download a few OSS tools, and do the art. Some small number of cases really do require Adobe or some similar "pro" program for various reasons and or a few niche features. But the vast majority simply do not, and that is the magic of OSS.
And that's why I let other people buy licenses professionally. I'll do learning, and I'll build skills, and I'll map them to the OSS I know isn't going anywhere. From there, it's never a big jump to use a closed software package, and so I will, no worries. That's the key to really getting the benefit of OSS.
Operating systems are the same way. I love Mac OS. It's a great UNIX environment which reminds me a lot of IRIX in some ways. Good UNIX, with some extras on top. And I get to love that one because I spent the time on basic operating system skills needed to make various environments approachable.
So that's what I'm trying to say here. If this XP business is annoying, or you are feeling angst over it, begin to channel that into Open Source Software. Doesn't matter what, just do it. One piece at a time, and soon you will have a very considerable degree of freedom in how and on what you do things on, and that is what you want for the long haul.
One of the very best UNIX things is the X Window System, which is currently under development. Kind of a mess, but I think it will come out OK. I'm liking a lot of what I see, but I'm not liking how people are trying to push network transparent, multi-user display systems off the table, as if they are no good.
I totally love the way you can run a program on one machine and see it's GUI on another with X. We were doing that with electronic CAD systems running on Unix and viewed on PC's a couple of decades ago. From time to time it is still useful.
BUT, it's not workable in general have you tried it recently? Slow as hell. Unless you have some super fast network I guess. Also it's not something you want to use over the internet. For security and/or performance reasons.
The current day equivalent of X is that every app is a web server and the browser is the equivalent of an X server. Look at the CUPS printing system for an example.
I cannot export accelerated 3D graphics over a network connection with X. But I can do it with HTML and webgl.
...locking kids into Microsoft.
No worries there. Now a days schools are locking kids into Apple:)
I really marvel at this idea that providing every kid with an iPad is some how a great educational advancement.
It's hopeless to comment on such things. Even Parallax is on the Apple band wagon.
Well, that's what I meant about X being taken in some borked up directions right now. If you run X11 / XGL compliant applications, it's workable over a reasonable network, and yes you can send accelerated GL over the wire. I did it for years.
SGI Pioneered that with Iris GL, and it became OpenGL, and the XGL extensions need to be supported by the X Server you are using at the time. On Windows, something like XWin32 may not do that, but Hummingbird Exceed actually did support it entirely. Maybe still does, I don't know. Exceed supported the 3D spaceball over the wire too.
3D CAD needs the OpenGL over X components to work well. Few vendors really support it today. In fact, it's hard to find a CAD application that performs well. There are a couple, but it appears this largely got forgotten.
"browser as X" today
Well, yes and no. X11 is superior in capability overall to what we get in browsers today. The big difference is multi-user, multi-head (input keyboard mouse, etc...), multi-display. One can build up a wall of screens with X, configure them as one display, and get this huge display area that operates across all of them, and application graphics from multiple users may appear on that display. Or, one can take that same pile of displays, configure them as individual displays, each with keyboards and mice, and then have a pile of users log on, and of course any users display may contain graphics from any of the other users.
Truth is, this capability set is awesome. Truth also is, few people really exploited it. I got good at a lot of it from being on the SGI machines, where that was documented, examples provided, and vendor supported. A common configuration was something like an Onyx, with 4 displays, multi-CPU, everybody jamming on one IRIX box for running Maya, or some other type of application. I got to do some CAD this way too.
I'm not entirely happy with the mess at present. And I'm not sure we will get back to where X11 was. Part of it boils down to some different philosophies in play today, a big part of it comes down to a lot of people never really understanding what X11 did and why network transparent mattered. Heck, there are a pile of us who really don't get what multi-user computing really means either. Could be ugly times, and it could be X goes entirely away in favor of these lame screen scraper type things being emphasized lately.
Think Windows Terminal Server as opposed to a UNIX machine running X11 displaying graphics on other networked machines regardless of OS. Big differences there. I could write a short book, and I'm not gonna.
The browser is interesting. WEBGL + Javascript + "cloud" computing services is gonna be able to deliver 3D CAD very soon, with interactivity on par with the late 90's. Impressive! (and yes, I've already run it)
Really, it's the same concept of being able to centralize computing resources and or expensive, or difficult to maintain software or data that needs to be managed. X was one way to do that. The browser today is a very different way.
Users will not generally appreciate the lower level differences, IMHO. They will just log on and use things. But there is really no direct comparison between browser stuff and what X11 is all about. Or was...
BUT, it's not workable in general have you tried it recently? Slow as hell. Unless you have some super fast network I guess. Also it's not something you want to use over the internet. For security and/or performance reasons.
???
ssh hostname.org -X and life is good. In a well configured environment, running apps that are actually written well, or at least with some consideration given to networked displays, this is perfectly fine.
Sadly, yes. That's why I think it's borked right now. I still hope it turns out OK. Maybe it won't. The X guys really had a solid vision. I don't see that kind of thinking going on right now, but I do see a lot of arguing... we shall see.
The good times were really good times. The stuff I built! Pure awesome, and when I tell IT people today, they often respond in sheer wonder. "When?", "you did WHAT?" Heck, those IRIX machines were offering up video conferencing and networked OGL in the mid 90's. We would play games with the camera image in the corner for taunts! Lots of our future has been squandered for antiquated business models, shady deals, content protection, and willful ignorance, if you ask me.
Well, I'm of two minds about those things. As a reference, content consumption tool, and to some degree an interactive, collaboration / messaging tool, I like iPads. Yes they are closed appliance things, but for those two tasks, I'm not opposed to any of it. Personally, I would never, ever go there. Gimme the data in an open format, and I'll pay top dollar and treat it right. But I want to use that data on whatever device, OS, etc... makes sense for me. Also personally, if I get the shaft on any of that, I'll crack it, transcode it to open in a second, maybe even buying more, and potentially sharing with others, just on principle. (I know, not nice, but I'll make no apologies for that. I give the respect and consideration I see given to me)
As a learning tool, no. Unless the class is on how to crack it open and make it do what we want, the kids would be much better off with some Droid Tablets, or Single Board computers or even basic laptops.
If they can't open it up, break things, and peek inside, they don't own it, and what they get from it may well own them. Not OK with me, at all.
What this comes down to is work. It's more work to give the kids things they can actually do stuff with. And it's work because those kids WILL do stuff! And that's exactly what they are supposed to be doing too. It's also about overly aggressive liability management. If the kids can't do much, there aren't so many liabilities, and that just gets sad quick. Sure glad I grew up a free range kid. Sure, there were risks, but there were awesome rewards too.
So the schools like the nice, sexy package because it's cheap and it compartmentalizes the problem. This isn't a device issue at all. iPads absolutely nail some tasks, and don't even address many other tasks. Fine by me. Other devices vary, and for those sweet spot use cases, Apple does a great job. I'm a fan, just not for the reasons I see so many people confusing.
Just because it's cool, doesn't mean it's a good idea to learn on. Might be something to learn with, like a text book is, but it's absolutely not something to learn ON. Most people don't get that right now, IMHO.
Really, this is a human problem. We can very easily make things people can learn on. Start with that stuff you find in the dumpster for starters. No Joke. But, the human problem in this comes down to the trouble we have contemplating what it all means when people get networked and can do what they want on their devices. Most of us don't care, but some established businesses and political figures care very much, and so there you go.
An iPad is "politically correct" and or maybe just "compliant" across the board, and so it's an easy target.
Here's the ugly implication: If people can actually make an iPad work in the way we like to do things here, "it must be OK to do right?" and that bothers me even more than the other stuff does. It's OK to learn how the world works, it's OK to know stuff, it's OK to make things, and it's OK to share that with others.
...or at least it was when I was a kid. Now? I think it's a fight, flat out.
All of which rolls up into why it makes a heck of a lot of sense to get people learning OSS. It pays off no matter what the skill level is. Could be somebody just knows to visit SourceForge and install a couple of applications they would otherwise do without or pay for. Wonderful! They can share with their friends and work together to get things done and it's beautiful.
Could be somebody wants to write code too. OSS is awesome. Find something, load a Linux on it, and write whatever the heck you want, unless that thing has a binary BLOB sitting in the way, but even then, the tools are there to hack at it anyway. Also beautiful.
Maybe they want to make something! How about their very own media player? Perfectly fine thing to do, and once done, it can be made to play that media all sorts of ways, like skipping previews, or maybe through some display or sound system not intended or preferred. So what? That was the beauty of OGLE back then. Got the whole family hooked on just watching the movie. When we actually did get a DVD player, the user restrictions annoyed the Smile out of people. Best advocacy I've ever done. They don't know a lot about this stuff, but they sure as heck know what OSS is and what it means, and they also know devices that are "trusted" do what the creator of the device intended, not what they would rather it do too.
This stuff either owns us, or we own it. Or we don't care, and move off into luddite land somewhere happy.
...and yes you can send accelerated GL over the wire...
I'm not sure I believe you. It may have worked some time some place but I find it hard to believe that if I take my Quake3 for linux I can watch it run on a remote X server. This calls for an experiment....
One of the weirdest set ups I ever did went like this:
Take a Windows application, good old WIN32 API stuff, and compile it for Linux against libwine.
From a remote Linux machine, use ssh to login to the machine with the Windows app and export the X session over the connection. Both ends of this connection were in different countries.
Run the Windows app.
At the time this broke all the rules in the book. What, a Windows app running on Linux? What, a Windows app running in one place but presenting its GUI in another? And what, how the hell did yo get through our firewall?:)
Now a days this is common place with, remote desktop or whatever they call it, or VNC etc.
For example: Having studied arithmetics and mathematics all the way from kinder garden to graduating university I never had a need for a calculator. Mathematics education is not about crunching numbers. It's about understanding the maths, be it multiplication, calculus, set theory, whatever.
Where a calculator may have been of use was in crunching on the results of the physics lab experiments. But hey, there you have to be careful of the accuracy you are claiming for measurements and results. No need for a zillion digit calculator, just do it in your head. That's enough accuracy to get an idea of the mass of an electron or the distance between the atoms in a crystal of salt. Etc.
How it came about that a calculator was essential for passing examinations at school or university level is beyond me. Why?
And so it continues...
Kids don't need iPads exactly. They need access to information. We used to have books. Now we have the internet. We used to have teachers, now we have educational "apps". Blech.
Man Heater. You and I gotta SKYPE one of these days. Here we are sucked in, borking up the thread Bruce made. Sorry Bruce. No ill intent here, just some chatter.
Yeah, that's a good setup! A well known CAD application was setup that way, because it was a UNIX port, and at the time the NT GUI work wasn't done, so that is exactly what they did too. Funny, I ran that application on Windows NT, multi-user, with a couple of X desktops, one Linux, one PC, etc... all on the Windows platform sometime about 96?
I used Hummingbird Exceed for that one, and it did Open GL over the wire then.
The thing with Quake is the textures and how the program was written. Not sure that one would run well, though trying it with real X11 with the GL extensions is the way to go. Just get an older distribution that has those packages and give it a go. Kind of wish I had the time for that myself.
A well written application will very easily do shaded geometry over the wire. The CAD application I did this with pushed solid models over a 100T connection, and did so just fine. They were careful to use the GL properly though. Things like sorted display lists, and sending over the geometry and transforms in the right order matter a lot. The X server has to get that stuff, then forward it onto the graphics system, and if it's not done right, performance is really crappy, because latency is really high. One needs to render a scene, ship it over, then ask the X server to manipulate it. From there, it's just UI events and some minor display list shuffling, etc...
I don't know enough to comment on how this would work with Quake. What I do know is this:
I wrote a STL file viewer a while back, and I made some rookie mistakes in how the GL calls were done. On good graphics systems, local, it really didn't matter. Run it over X, and it DID! Some graphics systems would slow down to software render speeds too. One mistake I made was sending over a transform for each polygon. Some drivers would simplify that, or see it as the same, or do some other magic and it ran fast anyway. Others would slow to a crawl, and X showed this brutally to me.
Send over one transform, and once it's sent, then do the triangles. Works a treat, and it will spin around on the screen just as fast as the graphics system can deliver it. That will also go over the wire. The only real difference will be in screen redraw time. This is what I observed:
1. parse data
2. setup scene, lights, and other goodies
3. compute object extents
4. compute scene transforms to place object in front of camera
5. make transform calls
6. send over the triangles
7. etc....
Step 5 sends over some data to be used by the graphics system. When done locally, this happens over whatever bus that system is on. Under X, it happens over the network. Same for steps 6, etc....
When redrawing, or drawing a scene for the first time, the network delay consists of how long it takes to get a million or so triangles over the wire so that the X server on that end can then send them to the graphics system. Otherwise, it's not changed much at all. From there, rotating it consists of just sending over new transform data, so long as the scene isn't changed. That's fast over X too.
That latency is what kills things off. If an app counts on that transaction taking a while, or it tends to iterate a lot, render this, respond to that, render this other thing, etc... The network delays add up, and it can be very crappy.
It's been a long time since I went down those roads. Take the above with a big grain of salt. I would have to go dig all that stuff out to get anymore detail.
Edit: Just looked it up, which I should have done. http://www.opengl.org/resources/libraries/ GLX, GLU and DRI are what does over the wire 3D. I'll leave the post, but really that's the detail being discussed here.
When I did this, I was running IRIX 6.5, gcc and or the SGI mipsPRO compiler, and I started with the O'Rielly OGL demos. Type one in, learn stuff, build, etc... I would routinely build on a machine that had one compiler, and another that had the other compiler, often displaying on a third SGI, all of which did support 3D over the wire, "in the box" Whether or not a Linux does this, or a PC for that matter, depends entirely on the X Server and whether or not it's got the stuff needed for it to happen. The only one I can confirm, and this is really dated, is Exceed. Did it all perfectly on a PC. Probably still does. That's a serious X Server for Windows.
Linuxes are gonna be all over the place, depending. Some configuration and head scratching very likely required, and if it's a Linux running the newer "experiments", all bets are off. I just can't remember too much about the Linux software I used then... I do remember running Linux X servers in the early to mid-2000's and having it work there too.
Re: RDP and VNC
Well, that's not really the same thing at all. X is smart. You can send over primitives, and GL, and do it across many displays, many users, many input devices, and on any network pipe you want. Obviously a modem will take a good two minutes to display a "continue or cancel?" type dialog, but it will do it. That has some nice advantages! Truth is, you can assemble a desktop from machines all over the place with X11.
Fonts from the font server, computing the application from the compute server, application storage from the storage server, user data storage from the user data storage server, window manager from the window manager server (and yes I routinely did this to get the spiffy IRIX window manager on Linux, just put one in the corner and let it manage windows all day long), your eyes get served graphics by the local X server running your graphics device, etc... Logging in could light up 10 machines, if you want it to, with X taking bits from all over the place and UNIX handling the other bits.
That's networked, concurrent, multi-user, multi-processor computing. I don't recommend a mess like that, but I've done it just to explore all the pieces in detail.
VNC? It's a laugh by comparison. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE VNC, but it's just a screen scraper with some clever compression and a little ability to handle basic UI events over the wire. All the thing really does is read the screen or a window, package it up and stuff it down the wire to be unpacked and displayed. Works, but it just isn't even the same kind of thing. RDP is a little smarter, but still essentially a screen scraper, but the screen being scraped is stored in RAM, not even associated with a graphics device at all!
I love screen scraper type tools because I can see what another user is doing. That is actually hard to do in X, and it's one use case not addressed by network transparent display tech, though it is possible for one user to push a display to another one, or with some software extensions, clone it so it renders in both places.... Nobody really did much with that, beyond some fun games some people would play.
My favorite is the IRC trick. Get a user to set a display equal to your machine, have them launch an xterm window, which appears on your desktop, to which you proceed to delete their /usr directory or some other fun thing they will get edumacated by. Laughs all around. (not, but I have seen this happen. Owned. You can bet they didn't do it again)
Well. I largely agree with you Heater, but I do absolutely see the iPad as a great book replacement. I prefer books, because I don't have to worry about downtime or network issues, but having reference data on some tablet thing, or iPad is kind of awesome too. This case has clear merits, though we can agree the DRM / closed nature of it sucks and isn't really necessary.
Calculators...
Yeah, me too. Understanding the math doesn't require one. Computation can be helped along by one, but then again, for somebody very skilled, they can express and factor their equations into something easy to compute / estimate too.
But, we don't teach math that way here in the US as much as we should. Big emphasis on computation, less on what math actually is.
I struggle with the reality of being able to deliver kids a perfectly fine education with a white or black board, paper, etc... and a nice room to learn in, with all the stuff we've got today. I also struggle with the avoidence of critical thinking overall. We don't take stuff apart, we don't learn about money, we don't learn much about civics, etc... Seems to me more about compliance and job focused education and I have basic issues with all of that, and on that basis, completely agree with you. Don't even put the iPad in there. They are better off without the darn thing, partially due to it's closed nature, and a lot to do with the expectations going along for the ride.
And with some dim hope of looping back to something relevant, I suppose it is on US to convey these things. Our society may or may not actually do it.
Personally, I think school is about building better, capable, responsible people. That's our future. We all get old, and the education we gave is going to come back to haunt us in our old age... I would much prefer critical thinkers who have learned how to learn and who have the humanities education needed to be solid, respectable, worthy people far more than I would technically inclined in any particular way.
If we get that done, the hard truth is they can take right off and go learn any technical thing they want to, and they can often do it with the garbage they find laying around the neighborhood too, though doing that is no requirement. But, it's what I did. No worries. Good times.
Better still, get those basics done, and carve out enough time for them to specialize in various ways. You know, try stuff! Learn things. That's what I got to do in school and it was awesome. After leaving just High School, I could do a ton of stuff. A very large number of kids today know a lot of stuff they were told they had to know, but they can't always do a lot of things, and for sure they didn't get a wide body of experiences sufficient for them to understand who they are, what talent they may have and what will get them out of bed each day.
iPads won't help with any of that. People do, and it comes down to seat time and face time and some freedom to actually educate without so many legal worries lingering about.
Oh, and here's the iPad dilemma in a nutshell!
You said, "Educational app"
Yeah, the very first one I ran was on an Apple ][ Some of us figured out what CTRL-C was, and we quickly inserted some "jokes" and saved them back onto the floppy disks. Those got shuffled around, so another student would get the joke laden one. Great education!! I really didn't learn much from the "app", but it sure was educational to break it and realize the computer would do stuff I wanted it to do.
Back then, that educator took a few of us off to the side, and we got after learning computing. No worries, and it did that group a lot of good, with all of us doing just fine today. A quick look at my peers today, and let's just say there is a very strong correlation between having been an AOL user and being one of those kids who just did what the disk said to do.
Today, that iPad is a much stronger vehicle for that kind of "education", and that's why the schools like 'em. It takes work to actually engage smart kids, and sometimes that doesn't always go according to the planned outcomes either. But, what do we do? People are who they are and we either maximize that, or we don't, and if we don't, then we are suppressing it to our mutual demise. Nobody planned on us getting good at the computers, but we got a good education. What is a good education?
If we measure it based on our performance on the canned stuff, that group back then would have gotten low grades. I don't think any of us even finished the thing. Mind numblingly boring. But we did write some games, we did learn assembly language, binary, file systems, cracked a couple of games for fun and some of us taught language classes LOGO and such for projects too. On that metric, we did well. Learned stuff, figured out some of who we are, and got things done.
The latter is where the work is and the risk and the reward. The former is a set piece, low risk, low work, low reward, and our society will reap the benefits in like kind according to the investment made.
That's what I find wrong with that iPad, put in a really basic, core way.
Re: iPad
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If they can't open it up, break things, and peek inside, they don't own it, and what they get from it may well own them. Not OK with me, at all.
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This stuff either owns us, or we own it. Or we don't care, and move off into luddite land somewhere happy.
It seems to me that things in computer land are just like the rest of the world. There are Orthodox and there are Reformed and a whole bunch of sects in between. Each has their liberals and each has their conservatives.
I like the idea of having something that works and that I can work on. Cars and trucks are lost to me because of that. The only thing left is to be a retro crumdugeon.
Comments
Also, you can certainly branch on condition codes after an instruction in PASM.
Do find the Propeller Manual. It's free!
For our main attraction, we have a twelve round bout. In one corner we have Ttailspin Tommy representing Windows 8.1 and in the other we have Loopy Byteloose representing Linux. The referee for the bout will be the Super Moderator - Publison.
DING DING
As a late addition, on the same card, we have the heavy weight Juan Core "The Interrupter" versus the unorthodox soft-fighting styles of Octavio Cog "The Spin Master" for a good old fashioned rasslin' match!
OK, I'll chime in Windows.
I was, and still am an XP user. I still have two computers that I rely on that use XP.
I did buy Windows 7 when it was half price, I was in beta testing. I like it as much as XP.
I will keep my two XP machines running for as long as possible, because they just work. AV AntiVirus is a must!
Bruce, I'll be watching the bout as long as I don't have to give my credit card for a pay per view channel.
Much more interesting than XP.
The Windows vs Linux match is pointless. It seems people can get by with a totally dysfunctional operating system without it worrying them. I'll leave it to the reader to decide to which OS I am referring.
One they targeted specifically was the Opera web browser...
Their response was the 7.01 "Bork" edition, which 'translated' specific MSN pages to... well... if you ever saw the Muppet Show, you can guess...
It's still available for download...
http://arc.opera.com/pub/opera/win/bork/std/
http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/desktop/opera-releases-bork-edition
Do you mean supporters as in "Two, four, six, eightpointone, who do we appriciatepointone! Go Windows, ra, ra, ra" whilst doing the can-can?
I'm all ready to see that expo:)
Or is more like "Meh, it works"?
After years of struggling with other Microsoft stuff, I purchased a complete new ASUS Tualitin, XP Professional in English, and Microsoft Office in English in hope of putting all the junky problems behind me. I also purchased annual subscriptions the System Mechanic for AV and Registry clean up.
+++++++++++
I had to special order the English versions in Taiwan and pay top dollar as Microsoft was very upset about the piracy in Asia. I had to register ownership via telephone with Singapore.
And then................ I could access Microsoft XP support directly on line.
Not so great. MIcrosoft in all its wisdom would ONLY provide me Chinese language support for my English language Windows Professional XP. I had to complain vigorously and wait years before English language support for my software was provided.
Meanwhile, System Mechanic and the free Norton AV went to battle with each other. And Apple was battling with Microsoft over whether Media Player or Real Player should be installed. Together... all these turf wars made XP unpleasant and unstable. I wanted both Media Player and Real Player at the time for my English teaching course (BBC was only Real Player, textbooks and local publishers were Media Player).
It is just that Kafkaesque. I finally gave up and got a 64 bit Vista computer, but that is another saga of stupidity.... Vista came free with the computer, but ONLY with the Chinese. MS wanted a top bilingual OS upgrade to switch to English at about $900 USD.
So I moved to Linux. Greed in the software industry abuses the end-users mightily.
If you download this program, here are a few things to keep in mind:
- When you first run the program and display the main window, by left clicking the system tray icon, a new directory named "QuickLinks" will be created in your favorites folder.
- To fill this main window with internet shortcuts, simply browse to your favorite locations, and add each location to the QuickLinks directory within the favorites folder, and the main window will automatically update to include your new shortcut. When adding items to this folder, keep the names at a maximum of about 15 characters, to keep it nice looking
- QuickLinks is a top window application, meaning it stays on top of all other windows. When you select a website, from the main application window, the window will disappear. Visibilty of this window can be toggled by left clicking the system tray icon.
- Until I get around to doing some more work on this program, the list style view or detail view provides the best looking appearance of the main window.
- In addition to being a top window application, the main window has a fixed size and location. The location of the window will be the lower right hand corner of your screen.
I hope you like it, because I know I do.Bruce
P.S. It may work on more recent versions of Windows, but it has only been tested on XP.
Publison,
Sorry about the thread drift and thanks for your forbearance.
Sometimes a voice crying in the wilderness does get an answer.
The manual is now in a newly started 'propeller' thumb drive of its' own for future reference.
Thanks again,
Tim
I don't know what the first global economic implosion is going to look like exactly, but whatever it is, I'm sure it will be alit by the cheerless glow of a Blue Screen of Death.
LOL!
AVG-Free
MalWareBytes (Free version does not automatically update)
SpyBot
ZoneAlarm (Firewall only version)
AVG has a rescue CD that you can download from their site which is good if your system is badly infected.
More and more programs
I just aborted the latest installation of AVG-Free this week because it was about to install a permanent toolbar into my browser IIRC.
Hate those toolbars, BING!
But the latest free Malwarebytes did an amazing job of resurrecting an old Vista drive with the US Courts virus. I plugged that drive as a slave into my Win8 machine and cleaned it.
Superantispyware and CCleaner are also free and very good.
It does that by default but you can uninstall it or if I remember there is window where you can uncheck it's installation.
I can't stand toolbars myself and I especially hate when there is no option to not install it.
This thread is worth a post.
RANT MODE = 1
I've got one XP laptop. It is my original Propeller development machine. Really, it made the best sense to take it off the network. Once in a while, there is something on it, or I want to run something, and I do. Win 7 actually will run OK on that one, and I may well upgrade it. Maybe not. It's an old laptop now. I won't get another one, and I will begin to forget XP, just as I did lots of other stuff. I just about don't need it, mostly nostalgia now. I may virtualize it. Probably not.
Time to move on. Ditch that XP. Yesterday. You might not need a newer OS, but you may well need to network, or maybe you need to get things done instead of fight what others did to you, but that's just me.
My current machines are Win 7 and Mac OS, with various Linuxes on live boot media when I need them.
Back in the late 90's, I jumped on Red Hat 5.2 Still got the cool box somewhere. At the time, I had left windows for SGI IRIX. (real computers as opposed to toys, which I thought then, and still do --it's just that IRIX got trapped by MIPS and some ugly business deals and I had to move on from those too)
The combination of IRIX and Linux was great for me. I got to learn the X Window system, compile code, write cross platform C, and learn a ton about filesystems, operating systems, kernels, ports, and countless other things. Back then, OSS was just starting to rock, and I decided to make an investment to get myself boot strapped onto Linux. IRIX was a very sweet, and to a degree, futuristic OS. It had things then we didn't get elsewhere for years. Sort of Amiga like, if that makes any sense, but with some real serious computing power under the hood. Despite it being the very best computing experience I've ever had, I knew that one was doomed too.
They all are, but not Linux.
Also back then, the state of OSS was mixed! We were starting to get some good programs, but real productivity was still a ways away. But I invested anyway, and here is why:
When you sink it all into some closed OS, you map your skills onto something that somebody else is going to kill off or change when they think it makes the best sense. That's not ever really going to match up with your needs, and so you will absolutely lose on that investment. Your skills may be relevant, but without some mapping done onto relevant operating systems, those skills grow antiquated, unproductive, isolated and increasingly useless over time.
Why do that?
Since I came up during the 8 bit era, it was rather ordinary to deal with very different machines. What mattered most was common data. Different programs could be written or used, depending on what one chooses to do or is able to do, and those uses can get stuff done on lots of machines in lots of different ways.
This is why a whole pile of people really like plain old ASCII text. You can stuff anything into text form, push it about, and then use it on most anything you can compile software for. Similar arguments exist for most basic open data formats, pictures, whatever.
As the body of OSS grew and matured, it didn't take but a couple of years to get skilled enough to use machines running most anything. Only a couple of years. That's all it will really take to pry yourself from some operating system lock in.
The other decision I made back then was I really only run Windows software that somebody else pays for. If my skills are good, truth is somebody will buy a license, and I'm good. And that all works, until it doesn't too. And I've held to that over the years with few worries. Doing it sorts out the professional lock in that can occur. Microsoft Office and other specific programs tend to center on Windows and that keeps a lot of people from really exploring other environments. Windows will work, until it doesn't, and as long as it works, that's easier than building up something else and so we see it done.
Today, lots of people are fat 'n happy on XP, or some other Windows OS, and they've bought their software, often with node lock or machine lock licenses that are painful to get away from. This is understandable, but very, very expensive!
And often one pays over and over, or they pay in terms of keeping older environments around, and all that comes with doing things like that. It's just tedious.
That two years saw me run Mandrake, Gentoo, various Red Hats, and it all kind of worked out. Soon, the OSS applications made sense, and I could build up environments that just boot on most any box when I want them and I did. Quit paying for image software, illustrations, word processing, development tools, file system tools, and a ton of other things out there. I think it saves me $1000 / year overall. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
Ever notice how you sort of know Windows? Things get moved around, but the basics are ingrained enough to stumble and fumble around when you need to? Getting going on Open Source Software is the same way. Once you make that initial investment and "get there" you can step away, much like running Win 7 for a while, then getting stuck with a Vista or XP box. The core is done, meaning it's not too tough to figure out from there at any one time.
Linux and OSS is like this. Just the other day, some guy I'm working with was struggling with Adobe and their expensive stuff. In the time it took for them to get licenses sorted and software installed, I had put Inkscape and GIMP on a machine, output the art needed and moved on gratis! That's keeping skills mapped to things we can count on. Versions vary, but not too much. I can jump on a version of most of the better OSS out there and just go. You can too.
There are people still compiling all those things for IRIX boxes! If I want to, I can go and get an older machine of Ebay, go and find the folks and the toys and get setup on one of those in a day, just as I can pull some machine out of the corner and do the same thing using Linux.
Today many (and increasingly so) of the skills I need to make money with exist in OSS land. Sometimes I run windows and just get software. Other times, I'll put a Linux on something and do that too. Mac OS? Just another Unix with some extras, etc...
I very strongly recommend strengthening your familiarity with a UNIX. Just do one. Once you do, it's like knowing what word processing or image manipulation is, not just what Microsoft Word or Photoshop does specifically. Both are nice programs, and both are not needed for an extremely large number of use cases too.
Over time, this dynamic has turned Windows into a painful place, unless one is very careful and I am. I typically run plain, generic, with good protection-ware, and I strip away all the little utility programs that just increase dependencies I don't need, and get good at the rest. Result? I can jump on a Mac, Linux, Windows, whatever box and get things done when I need them done.
Still thinking about getting an Android machine, just because some basic operating system skill building pays off so darn well.
I very highly recommend you invest in operating systems. You don't have to be an expert. Heck, at my peak on these things, I probably knew half of UNIX. Today, I recall and use maybe a third of that, looking the rest up here and there, but... It's enough. More than plenty in most cases.
Your time here is short. Not making good choices, or being limited in your choices due to closed operating systems can be very expensive, limiting and mentally frustrating. And change is good.
Once I gave away my IRIX bunker. It was cheaper to do that and move on to other things of interest, one of which was the Propeller. At one point, that collection of stuff could easily hit $100K. Some guy packed it into his Suburu and I'm sure had one heck of a time living the 90's over again on great hardware! (some very expensive programs too) I didn't spend $100K on the stuff. Some was given to me, some was ebay, etc... And the software was a part of the deal in many cases But it was cheaper in the sense of my time, head space, etc... Honestly, I may have kept a machine, maybe that O2 I like, and an Indy, but there were few to no open Propeller tools, so I parked all of that on XP at the time. Today, I can do Mac and Linux! (Sweet)
The first time you do this, it's hard. That Red Hat 5.2 experience was pretty rough. Loaded it on an Intergraph Pentium 90 machine, with a spiffy Matrox G400 graphics card. I think it took a couple of days to get the X Window system on that one working well. Funny thing about UNIX though. While I was learning how to do that, I just used an IRIX box for a display, until the native one was running proper...
Almost gave up, until I found one killer app. That was the DVD player OGLE. Great little program which used the Matrox hardware decode engine very well. Once I got that setup on a good screen, being able to play movies on it with no user restrictions, forced previews, etc... proved high value. That machine entertained my wife and I for a few years. Was all nearly free, even the old Intergraph, which really wasn't a good Windows NT machine, despite it being a perfectly capable machine otherwise. Played a mean DVD at 90Mhz though.
Each experience will be a little like that. Running Open Office, or one of the forked versions is a bit odd compared to MS Word. Sort of like Word Perfect, if you've ever run that. But it sticks after you use it, and you just keep doing it. Soon, you will find a ton gets done, and those expensive licenses can be something other people can buy, or you can rent, borrow, ignore, whatever. The more the better. Put your dollars into retirement, or new toys, and not into constant changes in versions, and other madness we don't like.
When I boot up that XP machine, it's kind of funny! Familiar, but limited. So many things are better now, and for the few that aren't, I can plug a little USB flash drive in and have my favorite Ubuntu (10) environment up and running in half a minute, maybe one minute tops? And Ubuntu is off on a crappy lark right now. Maybe I'll load another one, or back to the core Debian. Doesn't matter much in Linux land, once you have the basic skills you need.
Notably, some of the contracting I do involves operating systems. An expensive program needs sales and service support, and I've got that program down cold. It's more money than I would personally ever pay, but I don't have to, because I get to run it as part of that work. Nearly all of my peers today have no idea about operating systems. If it's not Windows, they sort of shut down, and those calls and deals end up on my desk, and I make a lot of money when they do.
Right now, the systems admin at the company I work for is being mentored into some of this stuff. He's a good Windows guy, but when the Microsoft tools don't work, he's kind of wondering what does. Somebody gave me a server that got retired due to it's services being delivered via the Internet. "Cloud" style. Rather than setup yet another Windows server 'test lab" to better understand what won't work or will be broken with the next round of changes, I've got him loading a Linux, and we are doing the basics of UNIX, mixed in with some computing history. He doesn't know it yet, but the day he owns OSS, I'm giving him that nice dual Xeon server with 12GB RAM.
I told him two years. Same as I am here. This guy is sharp, and I'll bet he comes in well under that. And when he does, he will be computing, not just a user of some operating system or other that works until it doesn't.
You can too. Just do it. It's not like you gotta abandon your Windows machine, or Mac, if that's your thing. Just start picking up the fine Open Source Software out there and use it. The more you use it, the more you save and the more capable you are and the more options you have.
I remember the angst I felt when Win 2K was being retired. Man, I really got good on Win 2K. Never again. Ever. When I saw this XP announcement, I pulled the network off that old box and I won't look back on it. 7 can do what I want it to, and I like to run a Windows machine for simple time savings. Since I'm on one frequently that other people pay for, that's fine. If I want a Linux, I can get it, or put it in a VM, or whatever I want to do.
This is what you want. Rather than continue to kludge toward an increasingly dead end, get some cross-platform skills brewing and then you will have choices, not costs and ends of things to face in life.
One more thing: For a lot of people, this stuff is like religion. No joke! Heck, I was there for years myself. Still am to a degree. I use a Windows box, but I won't buy one, and I really don't trust it much. I never really know what the damn thing is doing! Nor do I always know what it's going to do differently after one of those updates either. Unless, I spend a very large amount of my time and head space keeping track of that stuff, and who really wants to do that? I sure don't. If I'm being paid to do sysadmin, sure! That's the gig. But in life apart from that? Run. Just avoid it. Let the stuff run, and settle in on a Linux you can pick and choose on, and just network what you need to and ignore the rest. Life is very simple that way, and you spend more time writing, building, doing, exploring, learning too.
Did I mention it's often cheap? Just two years. Do it, and you can pick and choose a lot of your computing instead of having it dictated to you, and the best part?
You can share what you know and the tools unabashedly, and they can too, meaning where you do this among friends, it multiplies. Couple this with virtual machines, understanding file systems and disks, and your options go way up. Running XP as a virtual machine rocks hard! Say you do need to do it. In a virtual environment, you just snapshot and get it done. If it goes bad, roll back and deal. no worries, never, ever install an OS again kind of no worries.
Oh, and no house calls. If they are running Windows, let them deal with it. The only reason it's a good deal is often there are some of us subsidizing that mess with our time. Get them a Linux, or a Mac, and you will save a lot of time in the future. No more Hijack this, ComboFix, Malware, Windows Update, Symantec, dances you don't enjoy just so somebody else can continue on to the next brutal event. And they will too. Over and over and over. Your time is a freebie to them, until it isn't. Funny how that works.
So there you go. That's what I think about Windows XP and operating systems in general. I jump on one, use it, move on. It's all nearly entirely opportunistic, and it only takes a little while to break out of the zone and just get yourself good to go.
This event isn't a problem. It's an opportunity! Now is the time. Get some VM software, virtualize that XP machine, and then get yourself a Linux, or step up for a Mac, whatever makes sense, and run it there when you need to, no worries, problems just a snapshot away. Host only networking means being able to share devices, drives and such, making the whole thing a lot easier than it sounds. And a Mac is a GREAT place to run VMs. I do it all the time, and OS X is just fun and it works well. Recommended, but only if you aren't up to getting good on a Linux, or the pretty gets you excited. (which is fair, I like it too)
Only took a coupla years, and I was jamming long before that time. You will go through many of the teething pains you will moving to a newer Windows OS. But when you go through that on OSS, you get portability, that awesome software freedom, cost savings, and every other benefit I put here, and you largely do it ONCE.
BTW: This is precisely why the GCC guys and others working on Open Code are doing it. Seems like religion, and it sort of is, but the truth is they want you to have the same awesome set of, "do what I want on what I want when I want" choices they have. And it's just not that hard.
Should you need another Windows, run it plain Vanilla, use the Microsoft AV tools, and don't invest one bit more than you strictly need to, so that when the day comes to give it up, you've got as few worries as you can. All those little programs, tool bars, etc... add up. Sure, they are spiffy, and they can save time. That can make some sense too. But the stock OS is powerful, and investing in that carries you a lot farther than a pile of programs that all work, until they don't.
And if you are not having fun, you are doing it wrong. Seek friends or a mentor, and have a good time owning your computers instead of them owning you. I had a damn spiffy time. You will too. Just do it.
(h/t Paul Ferris)
RANT MODE = 0
I was wondering where you had gotten to.
Magnificent post. That one took two large mugs of breakfast tea to get through!
I have been saying such things since I discovered Linux and more importantly Free and Open Source Software in 1996.
I also started with that nice box of RedHat CDs. It was a eye opener. I could see, at that moment, that there was now a possibility to end the long dark days of proprietary software, of lock in, of abandonments. Which in my mind was an aberration. Free and Open Source were the new words for this kind of software distribution but really, that was the default method of distribution and development of software during the early days of computer science.
Even in '96 I had grown frustrated with software lock in, and the subsequent stranding when the company lost interest in the product or went out of business. The software is expensive to buy but that is nothing to finding, some years later, that you have products developed with that software that can no longer be supported. In the embedded software world this kind of lock-in/stranding cycle happened a lot already by the late '90s. That is why there has been such a big take up of Linux in embedded space.
It's still going on in desktop land as we see. Want XP? Sorry you can't have it. It's amazing to find how many people call for the Adobe FLASH player on the Raspberry Pi, they have invested huge amounts of time creating with FLASH, oblivious of the fact that it is a dead end and all their work is about to become unusable as FLASH disappears. FLASH is not supported on ARM and Adobe has said it's an end of life product. There are hundreds, thousands, of other examples.
But when one says all this one is looked at like some religious nut job. Few will listen, they just look forward to spending on the next great Windows version that they "know" will fix all their problems. Whilst all the time relying on a network of friends and family that can fix those problems day to day, for free!. I swear that if MS and others paid for all the free time spent my myself and millions of others supporting and fixing peoples machines they would not have on cent in the bank.
These views we express are not a "religious" thing. They are born out of solid practical experience. And a desire not to be "owned" or taken for a ride, yet again.
Bottom line. As you say. Put that XP in a virtual machine. Keep known good working snapshots of it around. And move on. Eventually you will forget all about it.
What does MS actually do with all that cash they collect?
When I bought that RH box, I had downloaded a version prior. Still remember that benchmark. You didn't have real Internet access, until getting a Linux was reasonable. IMHO, it's still true, though one could very easily say the same about a movie, or some other big thing today.
With that post, I tried to communicate choices and how one gets to a place where they can really make them. IMHO, the biggest difficulty, often triggering the "nut job" perception, is the idea that one must go whole hog, all OSS, all the time. Not true at all, though I do feel it is an extremely good experience to try. That is what I did, and I got there, but for 3D mechanical CAD, and some niche things. Like Prop Tool, as a relevant example.
One of the very best UNIX things is the X Window System, which is currently under development. Kind of a mess, but I think it will come out OK. I'm liking a lot of what I see, but I'm not liking how people are trying to push network transparent, multi-user display systems off the table, as if they are no good. Truth is, that rules, and it's one of the best kept secrets of UNIX land, and it puts the "multi" into multi-user computing, just as SUN claimed to put the dot in ".com" (Loved that era in ADS, BTW)
At one point, I had decided I really didn't want a Windows desktop as primary. Wanted to get that experience, get over the hump and do what I knew how to do on IRIX anywhere. So, I setup a nice Mandrake machine with a good graphics sub-system, and networked in all the toys I needed. Then I did the reverse for a while, and I stayed there until 2004. Man, that rocked! Both did. The KDE desktop, or something fun like Enlightenment, coupled with the 3D CAD running on IRIX, and a virtualized PC, got me everything on a network transparent desktop. Amazing, and I used to pipe the whole bunker over the Internet, through my home DSL, to whatever machine I was running at the time, so long as I had an X Server for it. I bought a copy of X Win 32 for that purpose, and if you want a really good X Server for a PC, the Exceed product by Hummingbird is top notch, and it supports it all, capable of the best of what IRIX would do...
But I digress.
It's not necessary to go whole hog. And to me, that was the big realization. For a time, I struggled. Once I got some mastery of OSS, I could pull a machine out of the dumpster, get a Linux on it and then max it out, doing whatever I wanted to with it. And that's true!! I actually have pulled actual machines out of dumpsters. And if you've got a friend or two, I cannot recommend that experience highly enough. We had a blast! Get stuff, Linux it, then go and build whatever. At one point, I had most of a company infrastructure built up with a good friend. We used BSD for mail and some basic services, Linux for sharing files and some application serving, and more Linux for firewalls, and some hacker type learning with what we called the NSA box.
That one was setup to pass ethernet traffic through without being detected. It had two network devices in it, and traffic would go into one, and out the other. Learned a lot with that thing.
But it was all just fine to start with applications too. For a while, after I got rid of the home bunker of machines and networked stuff, (And I don't miss it anymore, but for the cool hardware experiences) I only had Windows machines, because the majority of my computing time was professional, and in 3D CAD Windows is where it's at, sadly. So I helped a local school get the kids running the popular and productive OSS applications via something called "The Open CD", which was a CD all setup with the goodies, free to copy, use, and get stuff done with.
Since I grew up a poor kid, no regrets there honestly as I learned way more than I would have had otherwise, I saw the school locking kids into Microsoft. And something in me didn't sit well with that. When I was in school, if I could get there, pencil in hand, I was good to go. And one can always find a pencil. So I got a couple kids going, and they could get the work done, and they could copy share, and do the OSS thing to which the school went nuts! COPYING SOFTWARE IS BAD.
Well, no. It's just not. And some software is meant to be shared, used, improved. Took a long while, but I got that message through, and at one point the school had a Linux lab all setup. What they didn't do was invest in the educators, who eventually tore it down for a Microsoft some years later.
So today, I just tell people what they can do. Need to do some art? Get Inkscape, for example. No, it's not Adobe Illustrator (and I really hate that program due to it's GUI always giving me fits), and it's almost Corel Draw. So why use it?
Because it can do vector art and manipulate Scalable Vector Graphics, SVG files, and it can do it very well. So here is what you have to ask yourself. "Do I want a career based on knowing and keeping up on what Adobe does, or do I want to have a career or career skill involving art and graphics?"
The latter is timeless. The former is a niche and you end up a wage slave, your chain yanked this way and that. If I get stuck doing art, and maybe saying that is unfair... I like art, so when I have to do art, I can download a few OSS tools, and do the art. Some small number of cases really do require Adobe or some similar "pro" program for various reasons and or a few niche features. But the vast majority simply do not, and that is the magic of OSS.
And that's why I let other people buy licenses professionally. I'll do learning, and I'll build skills, and I'll map them to the OSS I know isn't going anywhere. From there, it's never a big jump to use a closed software package, and so I will, no worries. That's the key to really getting the benefit of OSS.
Operating systems are the same way. I love Mac OS. It's a great UNIX environment which reminds me a lot of IRIX in some ways. Good UNIX, with some extras on top. And I get to love that one because I spent the time on basic operating system skills needed to make various environments approachable.
So that's what I'm trying to say here. If this XP business is annoying, or you are feeling angst over it, begin to channel that into Open Source Software. Doesn't matter what, just do it. One piece at a time, and soon you will have a very considerable degree of freedom in how and on what you do things on, and that is what you want for the long haul.
A couple of things: I totally love the way you can run a program on one machine and see it's GUI on another with X. We were doing that with electronic CAD systems running on Unix and viewed on PC's a couple of decades ago. From time to time it is still useful.
BUT, it's not workable in general have you tried it recently? Slow as hell. Unless you have some super fast network I guess. Also it's not something you want to use over the internet. For security and/or performance reasons.
The current day equivalent of X is that every app is a web server and the browser is the equivalent of an X server. Look at the CUPS printing system for an example.
I cannot export accelerated 3D graphics over a network connection with X. But I can do it with HTML and webgl. No worries there. Now a days schools are locking kids into Apple:)
I really marvel at this idea that providing every kid with an iPad is some how a great educational advancement.
It's hopeless to comment on such things. Even Parallax is on the Apple band wagon.
SGI Pioneered that with Iris GL, and it became OpenGL, and the XGL extensions need to be supported by the X Server you are using at the time. On Windows, something like XWin32 may not do that, but Hummingbird Exceed actually did support it entirely. Maybe still does, I don't know. Exceed supported the 3D spaceball over the wire too.
3D CAD needs the OpenGL over X components to work well. Few vendors really support it today. In fact, it's hard to find a CAD application that performs well. There are a couple, but it appears this largely got forgotten.
"browser as X" today
Well, yes and no. X11 is superior in capability overall to what we get in browsers today. The big difference is multi-user, multi-head (input keyboard mouse, etc...), multi-display. One can build up a wall of screens with X, configure them as one display, and get this huge display area that operates across all of them, and application graphics from multiple users may appear on that display. Or, one can take that same pile of displays, configure them as individual displays, each with keyboards and mice, and then have a pile of users log on, and of course any users display may contain graphics from any of the other users.
Truth is, this capability set is awesome. Truth also is, few people really exploited it. I got good at a lot of it from being on the SGI machines, where that was documented, examples provided, and vendor supported. A common configuration was something like an Onyx, with 4 displays, multi-CPU, everybody jamming on one IRIX box for running Maya, or some other type of application. I got to do some CAD this way too.
I'm not entirely happy with the mess at present. And I'm not sure we will get back to where X11 was. Part of it boils down to some different philosophies in play today, a big part of it comes down to a lot of people never really understanding what X11 did and why network transparent mattered. Heck, there are a pile of us who really don't get what multi-user computing really means either. Could be ugly times, and it could be X goes entirely away in favor of these lame screen scraper type things being emphasized lately.
Think Windows Terminal Server as opposed to a UNIX machine running X11 displaying graphics on other networked machines regardless of OS. Big differences there. I could write a short book, and I'm not gonna.
The browser is interesting. WEBGL + Javascript + "cloud" computing services is gonna be able to deliver 3D CAD very soon, with interactivity on par with the late 90's. Impressive! (and yes, I've already run it)
Really, it's the same concept of being able to centralize computing resources and or expensive, or difficult to maintain software or data that needs to be managed. X was one way to do that. The browser today is a very different way.
Users will not generally appreciate the lower level differences, IMHO. They will just log on and use things. But there is really no direct comparison between browser stuff and what X11 is all about. Or was...
???
ssh hostname.org -X and life is good. In a well configured environment, running apps that are actually written well, or at least with some consideration given to networked displays, this is perfectly fine.
Sadly, yes. That's why I think it's borked right now. I still hope it turns out OK. Maybe it won't. The X guys really had a solid vision. I don't see that kind of thinking going on right now, but I do see a lot of arguing... we shall see.
The good times were really good times. The stuff I built! Pure awesome, and when I tell IT people today, they often respond in sheer wonder. "When?", "you did WHAT?"
Well, I'm of two minds about those things. As a reference, content consumption tool, and to some degree an interactive, collaboration / messaging tool, I like iPads. Yes they are closed appliance things, but for those two tasks, I'm not opposed to any of it. Personally, I would never, ever go there. Gimme the data in an open format, and I'll pay top dollar and treat it right. But I want to use that data on whatever device, OS, etc... makes sense for me. Also personally, if I get the shaft on any of that, I'll crack it, transcode it to open in a second, maybe even buying more, and potentially sharing with others, just on principle. (I know, not nice, but I'll make no apologies for that. I give the respect and consideration I see given to me)
As a learning tool, no. Unless the class is on how to crack it open and make it do what we want, the kids would be much better off with some Droid Tablets, or Single Board computers or even basic laptops.
If they can't open it up, break things, and peek inside, they don't own it, and what they get from it may well own them. Not OK with me, at all.
What this comes down to is work. It's more work to give the kids things they can actually do stuff with. And it's work because those kids WILL do stuff! And that's exactly what they are supposed to be doing too. It's also about overly aggressive liability management. If the kids can't do much, there aren't so many liabilities, and that just gets sad quick. Sure glad I grew up a free range kid. Sure, there were risks, but there were awesome rewards too.
So the schools like the nice, sexy package because it's cheap and it compartmentalizes the problem. This isn't a device issue at all. iPads absolutely nail some tasks, and don't even address many other tasks. Fine by me. Other devices vary, and for those sweet spot use cases, Apple does a great job. I'm a fan, just not for the reasons I see so many people confusing.
Just because it's cool, doesn't mean it's a good idea to learn on. Might be something to learn with, like a text book is, but it's absolutely not something to learn ON. Most people don't get that right now, IMHO.
Really, this is a human problem. We can very easily make things people can learn on. Start with that stuff you find in the dumpster for starters. No Joke. But, the human problem in this comes down to the trouble we have contemplating what it all means when people get networked and can do what they want on their devices. Most of us don't care, but some established businesses and political figures care very much, and so there you go.
An iPad is "politically correct" and or maybe just "compliant" across the board, and so it's an easy target.
Here's the ugly implication: If people can actually make an iPad work in the way we like to do things here, "it must be OK to do right?" and that bothers me even more than the other stuff does. It's OK to learn how the world works, it's OK to know stuff, it's OK to make things, and it's OK to share that with others.
...or at least it was when I was a kid. Now? I think it's a fight, flat out.
All of which rolls up into why it makes a heck of a lot of sense to get people learning OSS. It pays off no matter what the skill level is. Could be somebody just knows to visit SourceForge and install a couple of applications they would otherwise do without or pay for. Wonderful! They can share with their friends and work together to get things done and it's beautiful.
Could be somebody wants to write code too. OSS is awesome. Find something, load a Linux on it, and write whatever the heck you want, unless that thing has a binary BLOB sitting in the way, but even then, the tools are there to hack at it anyway. Also beautiful.
Maybe they want to make something! How about their very own media player? Perfectly fine thing to do, and once done, it can be made to play that media all sorts of ways, like skipping previews, or maybe through some display or sound system not intended or preferred. So what? That was the beauty of OGLE back then. Got the whole family hooked on just watching the movie. When we actually did get a DVD player, the user restrictions annoyed the Smile out of people. Best advocacy I've ever done. They don't know a lot about this stuff, but they sure as heck know what OSS is and what it means, and they also know devices that are "trusted" do what the creator of the device intended, not what they would rather it do too.
This stuff either owns us, or we own it. Or we don't care, and move off into luddite land somewhere happy.
One of the weirdest set ups I ever did went like this:
Take a Windows application, good old WIN32 API stuff, and compile it for Linux against libwine.
From a remote Linux machine, use ssh to login to the machine with the Windows app and export the X session over the connection. Both ends of this connection were in different countries.
Run the Windows app.
At the time this broke all the rules in the book. What, a Windows app running on Linux? What, a Windows app running in one place but presenting its GUI in another? And what, how the hell did yo get through our firewall?:)
Now a days this is common place with, remote desktop or whatever they call it, or VNC etc.
It's all nonsense.
For example: Having studied arithmetics and mathematics all the way from kinder garden to graduating university I never had a need for a calculator. Mathematics education is not about crunching numbers. It's about understanding the maths, be it multiplication, calculus, set theory, whatever.
Where a calculator may have been of use was in crunching on the results of the physics lab experiments. But hey, there you have to be careful of the accuracy you are claiming for measurements and results. No need for a zillion digit calculator, just do it in your head. That's enough accuracy to get an idea of the mass of an electron or the distance between the atoms in a crystal of salt. Etc.
How it came about that a calculator was essential for passing examinations at school or university level is beyond me. Why?
And so it continues...
Kids don't need iPads exactly. They need access to information. We used to have books. Now we have the internet. We used to have teachers, now we have educational "apps". Blech.
Yeah, that's a good setup! A well known CAD application was setup that way, because it was a UNIX port, and at the time the NT GUI work wasn't done, so that is exactly what they did too. Funny, I ran that application on Windows NT, multi-user, with a couple of X desktops, one Linux, one PC, etc... all on the Windows platform sometime about 96?
I used Hummingbird Exceed for that one, and it did Open GL over the wire then.
The thing with Quake is the textures and how the program was written. Not sure that one would run well, though trying it with real X11 with the GL extensions is the way to go. Just get an older distribution that has those packages and give it a go. Kind of wish I had the time for that myself.
A well written application will very easily do shaded geometry over the wire. The CAD application I did this with pushed solid models over a 100T connection, and did so just fine. They were careful to use the GL properly though. Things like sorted display lists, and sending over the geometry and transforms in the right order matter a lot. The X server has to get that stuff, then forward it onto the graphics system, and if it's not done right, performance is really crappy, because latency is really high. One needs to render a scene, ship it over, then ask the X server to manipulate it. From there, it's just UI events and some minor display list shuffling, etc...
I don't know enough to comment on how this would work with Quake. What I do know is this:
I wrote a STL file viewer a while back, and I made some rookie mistakes in how the GL calls were done. On good graphics systems, local, it really didn't matter. Run it over X, and it DID! Some graphics systems would slow down to software render speeds too. One mistake I made was sending over a transform for each polygon. Some drivers would simplify that, or see it as the same, or do some other magic and it ran fast anyway. Others would slow to a crawl, and X showed this brutally to me.
Send over one transform, and once it's sent, then do the triangles. Works a treat, and it will spin around on the screen just as fast as the graphics system can deliver it. That will also go over the wire. The only real difference will be in screen redraw time. This is what I observed:
1. parse data
2. setup scene, lights, and other goodies
3. compute object extents
4. compute scene transforms to place object in front of camera
5. make transform calls
6. send over the triangles
7. etc....
Step 5 sends over some data to be used by the graphics system. When done locally, this happens over whatever bus that system is on. Under X, it happens over the network. Same for steps 6, etc....
When redrawing, or drawing a scene for the first time, the network delay consists of how long it takes to get a million or so triangles over the wire so that the X server on that end can then send them to the graphics system. Otherwise, it's not changed much at all. From there, rotating it consists of just sending over new transform data, so long as the scene isn't changed. That's fast over X too.
That latency is what kills things off. If an app counts on that transaction taking a while, or it tends to iterate a lot, render this, respond to that, render this other thing, etc... The network delays add up, and it can be very crappy.
It's been a long time since I went down those roads. Take the above with a big grain of salt. I would have to go dig all that stuff out to get anymore detail.
Edit: Just looked it up, which I should have done. http://www.opengl.org/resources/libraries/ GLX, GLU and DRI are what does over the wire 3D. I'll leave the post, but really that's the detail being discussed here.
When I did this, I was running IRIX 6.5, gcc and or the SGI mipsPRO compiler, and I started with the O'Rielly OGL demos. Type one in, learn stuff, build, etc... I would routinely build on a machine that had one compiler, and another that had the other compiler, often displaying on a third SGI, all of which did support 3D over the wire, "in the box" Whether or not a Linux does this, or a PC for that matter, depends entirely on the X Server and whether or not it's got the stuff needed for it to happen. The only one I can confirm, and this is really dated, is Exceed. Did it all perfectly on a PC. Probably still does. That's a serious X Server for Windows.
Linuxes are gonna be all over the place, depending. Some configuration and head scratching very likely required, and if it's a Linux running the newer "experiments", all bets are off. I just can't remember too much about the Linux software I used then... I do remember running Linux X servers in the early to mid-2000's and having it work there too.
Re: RDP and VNC
Well, that's not really the same thing at all. X is smart. You can send over primitives, and GL, and do it across many displays, many users, many input devices, and on any network pipe you want. Obviously a modem will take a good two minutes to display a "continue or cancel?" type dialog, but it will do it. That has some nice advantages! Truth is, you can assemble a desktop from machines all over the place with X11.
Fonts from the font server, computing the application from the compute server, application storage from the storage server, user data storage from the user data storage server, window manager from the window manager server (and yes I routinely did this to get the spiffy IRIX window manager on Linux, just put one in the corner and let it manage windows all day long), your eyes get served graphics by the local X server running your graphics device, etc... Logging in could light up 10 machines, if you want it to, with X taking bits from all over the place and UNIX handling the other bits.
That's networked, concurrent, multi-user, multi-processor computing.
VNC? It's a laugh by comparison. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE VNC, but it's just a screen scraper with some clever compression and a little ability to handle basic UI events over the wire. All the thing really does is read the screen or a window, package it up and stuff it down the wire to be unpacked and displayed. Works, but it just isn't even the same kind of thing. RDP is a little smarter, but still essentially a screen scraper, but the screen being scraped is stored in RAM, not even associated with a graphics device at all!
I love screen scraper type tools because I can see what another user is doing. That is actually hard to do in X, and it's one use case not addressed by network transparent display tech, though it is possible for one user to push a display to another one, or with some software extensions, clone it so it renders in both places.... Nobody really did much with that, beyond some fun games some people would play.
My favorite is the IRC trick. Get a user to set a display equal to your machine, have them launch an xterm window, which appears on your desktop, to which you proceed to delete their /usr directory or some other fun thing they will get edumacated by. Laughs all around. (not, but I have seen this happen. Owned. You can bet they didn't do it again)
Well. I largely agree with you Heater, but I do absolutely see the iPad as a great book replacement. I prefer books, because I don't have to worry about downtime or network issues, but having reference data on some tablet thing, or iPad is kind of awesome too. This case has clear merits, though we can agree the DRM / closed nature of it sucks and isn't really necessary.
Calculators...
Yeah, me too. Understanding the math doesn't require one. Computation can be helped along by one, but then again, for somebody very skilled, they can express and factor their equations into something easy to compute / estimate too.
But, we don't teach math that way here in the US as much as we should. Big emphasis on computation, less on what math actually is.
I struggle with the reality of being able to deliver kids a perfectly fine education with a white or black board, paper, etc... and a nice room to learn in, with all the stuff we've got today. I also struggle with the avoidence of critical thinking overall. We don't take stuff apart, we don't learn about money, we don't learn much about civics, etc... Seems to me more about compliance and job focused education and I have basic issues with all of that, and on that basis, completely agree with you. Don't even put the iPad in there. They are better off without the darn thing, partially due to it's closed nature, and a lot to do with the expectations going along for the ride.
And with some dim hope of looping back to something relevant, I suppose it is on US to convey these things. Our society may or may not actually do it.
Personally, I think school is about building better, capable, responsible people. That's our future. We all get old, and the education we gave is going to come back to haunt us in our old age... I would much prefer critical thinkers who have learned how to learn and who have the humanities education needed to be solid, respectable, worthy people far more than I would technically inclined in any particular way.
If we get that done, the hard truth is they can take right off and go learn any technical thing they want to, and they can often do it with the garbage they find laying around the neighborhood too, though doing that is no requirement. But, it's what I did. No worries. Good times.
Better still, get those basics done, and carve out enough time for them to specialize in various ways. You know, try stuff! Learn things. That's what I got to do in school and it was awesome. After leaving just High School, I could do a ton of stuff. A very large number of kids today know a lot of stuff they were told they had to know, but they can't always do a lot of things, and for sure they didn't get a wide body of experiences sufficient for them to understand who they are, what talent they may have and what will get them out of bed each day.
iPads won't help with any of that. People do, and it comes down to seat time and face time and some freedom to actually educate without so many legal worries lingering about.
Oh, and here's the iPad dilemma in a nutshell!
You said, "Educational app"
Yeah, the very first one I ran was on an Apple ][ Some of us figured out what CTRL-C was, and we quickly inserted some "jokes" and saved them back onto the floppy disks. Those got shuffled around, so another student would get the joke laden one. Great education!! I really didn't learn much from the "app", but it sure was educational to break it and realize the computer would do stuff I wanted it to do.
Back then, that educator took a few of us off to the side, and we got after learning computing. No worries, and it did that group a lot of good, with all of us doing just fine today. A quick look at my peers today, and let's just say there is a very strong correlation between having been an AOL user and being one of those kids who just did what the disk said to do.
Today, that iPad is a much stronger vehicle for that kind of "education", and that's why the schools like 'em. It takes work to actually engage smart kids, and sometimes that doesn't always go according to the planned outcomes either. But, what do we do? People are who they are and we either maximize that, or we don't, and if we don't, then we are suppressing it to our mutual demise. Nobody planned on us getting good at the computers, but we got a good education. What is a good education?
If we measure it based on our performance on the canned stuff, that group back then would have gotten low grades. I don't think any of us even finished the thing. Mind numblingly boring. But we did write some games, we did learn assembly language, binary, file systems, cracked a couple of games for fun and some of us taught language classes LOGO and such for projects too. On that metric, we did well. Learned stuff, figured out some of who we are, and got things done.
The latter is where the work is and the risk and the reward. The former is a set piece, low risk, low work, low reward, and our society will reap the benefits in like kind according to the investment made.
That's what I find wrong with that iPad, put in a really basic, core way.
It seems to me that things in computer land are just like the rest of the world. There are Orthodox and there are Reformed and a whole bunch of sects in between. Each has their liberals and each has their conservatives.
I like the idea of having something that works and that I can work on. Cars and trucks are lost to me because of that. The only thing left is to be a retro crumdugeon.