Hyphens again
James Hogg
PostScript Books. At any rate, there was a message in red letters on the
cover: LAST MINUTE PRE-XMAS ISSUE. The catalogue measures 8 by 10�
inches and has 32 pages, so it can hardly be described as "minute".
Perhaps the company has one minute manager too.
--
James
Eric Walker
[...]
> The catalogue measures 8 by 10½ inches and has 32 pages, so it can
> hardly be described as "minute". . . .
Hah. Wait'll you see the ones that follow . . . .
--
Cordially,
Eric Walker, Owlcroft House
http://owlcroft.com/english/
James Hogg
> On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:17:57 +0100, James Hogg wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> The catalogue measures 8 by 10� inches and has 32 pages, so it can
>> hardly be described as "minute". . . .
>
> Hah. Wait'll you see the ones that follow . . . .
Would you believe that's the first time I've ever seen "wait'll" in
print? I must be reading the wrong blogs. Google claims 101,000,000 hits
for it.
--
James
Eric Walker
Curiously, it may be the first time I've ever typed it. I did actually
pause over it, but finally decided it was basically a rendition of
informal speech. (Jack Nicholson as The Joker: "Wait'll they get a load
of *me*!")
Bertel Lund Hansen
> Would you believe that's the first time I've ever seen "wait'll" in
> print? I must be reading the wrong blogs. Google claims 101,000,000 hits
> for it.
Google is unreliable and has been for some time. But I believe
that you have made a technical mistake.
Googling for
wait'll
is identical to googling for
wait ll
It returns hits where the two elements need not be neighbours.
Try googling for
"wait'll"
or "wait ll" (same search)
I get 62'400 hits.
--
Bertel, Denmark
James Hogg
Don't worry, I didn't take the figure seriously, but I was surprised at
the number of real examples of "wait'll"
Changing the subject, how many people or languages in the world write
thousands the way you just did? I know I've seen usages like 62'400
before, I can't remember where.
--
James
Bertel Lund Hansen
> > I get 62'400 hits.
> Changing the subject, how many people or languages in the world write
> thousands the way you just did?
It's a Swiss standard and has been a Danish one though never much
used. I have adopted it because numbers in Danish and English
standard are directly opposite which leads to difficulties.
da. 62.400,25
en. 62,400.25
Is 1.000 now one thousand in Danish or one in English?
It has one further advantage in both languages: In handwriting an
up character is clearly different from a down one, while a point
or a comma can easily be misread as the opposite character.
--
Bertel, Denmark
James Hogg
> James Hogg skrev:
>
>>> I get 62'400 hits.
>
>> Changing the subject, how many people or languages in the world
>> write thousands the way you just did?
>
> It's a Swiss standard and has been a Danish one though never much
> used. I have adopted it because numbers in Danish and English
> standard are directly opposite which leads to difficulties.
Come to think of it, it's probably in your posts that I've seen it before.
> da. 62.400,25 en. 62,400.25
>
> Is 1.000 now one thousand in Danish or one in English?
Only the context will tell.
> It has one further advantage in both languages: In handwriting an up
> character is clearly different from a down one, while a point or a
> comma can easily be misread as the opposite character.
ISO 31:1992 recommends a thin space between thousands. That has the
advantage of eliminating one of the differences between the English and
the international style. The problem is that many people at keyboards
substitute an ordinary space for the thin space.
--
James
James Silverton
> da. 62.400,25
> en. 62,400.25
I don't always use any separators to separate thousands in numbers. If I
want a separator, I use the compromise that is used in some
international scientific journals, a space, as in "1 234 567"
--
James Silverton
Potomac, Maryland
Email, with obvious alterations: not.jim.silverton.at.verizon.not
Bertel Lund Hansen
> I don't always use any separators to separate thousands in numbers. If I
> want a separator, I use the compromise that is used in some
> international scientific journals, a space, as in "1 234 567"
The space method is also a current standard in Danish. With the
widespread use of spread-sheets I suppose the use is diminishing.
--
Bertel, Denmark
James Silverton
In an email or news group post, the thin space is not always readily
available in plain text. lf you are limited to ASCII, it is probably
best use the "non-breaking space, ASCII 160, as in 123 456 789.
James Hogg
That character, unfortunately, is a stranger to most people.
--
James
James Silverton
I'll admit that I used an ordinary space unthinkingly in one of my two
posts on this topic.
Mark Brader
>> ISO 31:1992 recommends a thin space between thousands. That has the
>> advantage of eliminating one of the differences between the
>> English and the international style. The problem is that many people
>> at keyboards substitute an ordinary space for the thin space.
A bigger problem is that space is how we separate words in English
and most other language.
James Silverton:
> In an email or news group post, the thin space is not always readily
> available in plain text. lf you are limited to ASCII, it is probably
> best use the "non-breaking space, ASCII 160, as in 123 456 789.
There is no such character in ASCII, which is a 7-bit character set.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto "Argh! Hoist by my own canard :-) !"
m...@vex.net -- Steve Summit
James Silverton
> James Hogg:
>>> ISO 31:1992 recommends a thin space between thousands. That has
>>> the advantage of eliminating one of the differences between
>>> the English and the international style. The problem is
>>> that many people at keyboards substitute an ordinary space
>>> for the thin space.
> A bigger problem is that space is how we separate words in
> English and most other language.
> James Silverton:
>> In an email or news group post, the thin space is not always
>> readily available in plain text. lf you are limited to ASCII,
>> it is probably best use the "non-breaking space, ASCII 160,
>> as in 123 456 789.
Oh, Oh. Probably some misunderstanding here. To take an example, use
"Insert Symbol" in Microsoft Word or similar processors, display ASCII
(decimal) and click on the blank space. The number 160 will be
displayed. To insert the non-breaking space in Outlook Express, use
ALT-0160.
Bertel Lund Hansen
> There is no such character in ASCII, which is a 7-bit character set.
James Silverton wrote:
> Oh, Oh. Probably some misunderstanding here.
Yes, but it is yours. ASCII *is* a 7-bit characterset. Highest
code is 127.
You are talking about e.g. ISO-8859-1 which is an 8-bit character
set comprising among other things nbsp (code 160).
> "Insert Symbol" in Microsoft Word or similar processors, display ASCII
> (decimal) and click on the blank space.
There's Microsoft for you (if your description is correct - I
haven't got Word). It is not ASCII.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii
--
Bertel, Denmark
James Silverton
> James Silverton wrote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii
There may be some discrepancy between Microsoft and "standard" ASCII but
I wonder what you would get if you have the CHAR function in a
spreadsheet program? MS Excel does give the space for =CHAR(160). Is
what MS calls "ASCII" some extended form. Anyway, when writing numbers
and avoiding them being broken during formatting, ALT-0160 is useful.
Bertel Lund Hansen
> There may be some discrepancy between Microsoft and "standard" ASCII
Don't get me started.
ASCII is ASCII, an old 7-bit charter set. There are several
extensions that use 8 bit and designate different (very
different) charcters to the extra codes. Some of them are called
codepages (DOS has several).
ISO-8859-1 is an international standard that assigns characters
to codes between 32 and 127 plus between 160 and 255. Some people
erroneously refer to these codes as ASCII.
Windows has all the correct codes/characters in their Western
set, but they have filled out the empty space between 128 and 159
with extra characters. Some people erroneously refer to these
codes as ASCII or ISO-8859-1. The correct designation is
Windows-1252.
> I wonder what you would get if you have the CHAR function in a
> spreadsheet program?
Whatever I get does not change the standard.
> MS Excel does give the space for =CHAR(160).
All programs running under Windows do (all that I have tried).
That is quite correct because the Windows system uses (an
extension of) ISO-8859-1.
> Is what MS calls "ASCII" some extended form. Anyway, when writing numbers
> and avoiding them being broken during formatting, ALT-0160 is useful.
Very. It is also useful when designing HTML-pages. "�" is 1 byte,
" " is 6. I also use code 160 on usenet for keeping company
names together and to glue a hyphen to the previous word where
relevant.
--
Bertel, Denmark
Peter Moylan
> Mark Brader wrote:
>
>> There is no such character in ASCII, which is a 7-bit character
>> set.
>
> James Silverton wrote:
>
>> Oh, Oh. Probably some misunderstanding here.
>
> Yes, but it is yours. ASCII *is* a 7-bit characterset. Highest code
> is 127.
>
> You are talking about e.g. ISO-8859-1 which is an 8-bit character set
> comprising among other things nbsp (code 160).
Actually, it's more complicated than that. The procedure that James
described will use the character set Microsoft-ISO-8859-1, which is not
identical with ISO-8859-1 as specified by the ISO. (Microsoft likes to
pretend that _it_ is the International Standards Organisation, so sees
nothing wrong in misusing the label "ISO".)
On top of that, James sent his non-breaking spaces using the character
set Windows-1252, which is different again. Anyone using an ASCII-only
newsreader would have seen either a question mark or an ordinary space.
The ordinary space is what you get if you take the 8-bit code for 160
and strip out the top bit (giving 32) in order to turn it into an ASCII
character. That's a lucky coincidence for most people, because a
non-breaking space looks a lot like an ordinary space.
--
Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.
Garrett Wollman
Bertel Lund Hansen <splittemi...@lundhansen.dk> wrote:
>James Silverton skrev:
>> MS Excel does give the space for =CHAR(160).
>
>All programs running under Windows do (all that I have tried).
>That is quite correct because the Windows system uses (an
>extension of) ISO-8859-1.
The Windows system uses (a subset of) ISO 10646. It is an intentional
property of ISO 10646 that the first 256 values identify the same
characters as in ISO 8859-1. Windows internally represents (32-bit)
ISO 10646 characters using a botch called "UTF-16", in which the
characters of the "basic multilingual plane" are represented in a
single 16-bit integer, but characters in other "planes" (there are
only two so far, AIUI) are represented as pairs of 16-bit integers.
(Speaking of hyphens, ISO 10646 defines several code points for
various kinds of hyphens, dashes, and other horizontal lines used in
typesetting.)
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
Bertel Lund Hansen
> The ordinary space is what you get if you take the 8-bit code for 160
> and strip out the top bit (giving 32) in order to turn it into an ASCII
> character. That's a lucky coincidence [..]
I'm not so sure about that. I would call it a good idea.
--
Bertel, Denmark
Mark Brader
> ISO-8859-1 is an international standard that assigns characters
> to codes between 32 and 127 plus between 160 and 255. Some people
> erroneously refer to these codes as ASCII.
>
> Windows has all the correct codes/characters in their Western
> set, but they have filled out the empty space between 128 and 159
> with extra characters. Some people erroneously refer to these
> codes as ASCII or ISO-8859-1. The correct designation is
> Windows-1252.
Almost right, except for the "empty space" part. In ISO 8859-1
characters 128 though 159 are actually defined as control characters.
I have no idea why they thought the world needed another 32 control
characters, and I've never heard of any of them being used in practice.
So I'm not surprised that Micros--t thought they had a better use for
the code points. But they weren't vacant.
--
Mark Brader, Toronto | "The three dots '...' here suppress a lot of detail
m...@vex.net | -- maybe I should have used four dots." -- Knuth
My text in this article is in the public domain.
Roland Hutchinson
> Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
>> Mark Brader wrote:
>>
>>> There is no such character in ASCII, which is a 7-bit character set.
>>
>> James Silverton wrote:
>>
>>> Oh, Oh. Probably some misunderstanding here.
>>
>> Yes, but it is yours. ASCII *is* a 7-bit characterset. Highest code is
>> 127.
>>
>> You are talking about e.g. ISO-8859-1 which is an 8-bit character set
>> comprising among other things nbsp (code 160).
>
> Actually, it's more complicated than that. The procedure that James
> described will use the character set Microsoft-ISO-8859-1, which is not
> identical with ISO-8859-1 as specified by the ISO. (Microsoft likes to
> pretend that _it_ is the International Standards Organisation,
officially known as the "International Organization for Standardization",
> so sees
> nothing wrong in misusing the label "ISO".)
"Microsoft-ISO" must stand for something like the "Microsoft-Internal-
Standards-Obfuscation" division.
--
Roland Hutchinson
He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba,"
... comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.
--Newark (NJ) Star Ledger ( http://tinyurl.com/RolandIsNJ )
Garrett Wollman
Mark Brader <m...@vex.net> wrote:
>Almost right, except for the "empty space" part. In ISO 8859-1
>characters 128 though 159 are actually defined as control characters.
>I have no idea why they thought the world needed another 32 control
>characters, and I've never heard of any of them being used in practice.
That's because it follows the character-set structure defined by ISO
2022, with G0, G1, G2, and G3 graphical characters, and C0 and C1
controls. The C1 controls were apparently used in some Videotex
systems. The description at
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C0_and_C1_control_codes> looks
plausible.
John Dunlop
> ISO 31:1992 recommends a thin space between thousands. That has the
> advantage of eliminating one of the differences between the English and
> the international style. The problem is that many people at keyboards
> substitute an ordinary space for the thin space.
If you want to combine a thin space with a non-breaking space, Unicode has
NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F). I have only two typefaces, Helvetica and
Lucida Grande, that have glyphs for this character.
NNBSP test: 123 456 789
--
John
James Hogg
It works. I copied it into Word and tried different fonts. The numbers
stayed together.
--
James
James Silverton
If we are no longer talking about a plain text process like using
Outlook Express but a word processor like Word, that character looks
very useful. Again, using Word, the Autocorrect process could be used to
substitute the "Narrow no-break space" for some keyboard character or
combination of two characters. For standard documents, I use Autocorrect
quite a lot, for example, ~C is automatically replaced by �C. A possible
easily remembered character combination might be ,, (two commas instead
of one).
Of course, if one needed numbers formatted that way very often a "macro"
could be written to replace commas in a number by thin spaces. As a
chemist, I have a macro to convert a chemical formula, written as say
C30H36N2O3, to subscripted numbers. I'm not familiar with the Open
Office and other free word processors but there may be something similar
available.
Bertel Lund Hansen
> C30H36N2O3, to subscripted numbers. I'm not familiar with the Open
> Office and other free word processors but there may be something similar
> available.
For a cursory glance OO Writer appears like Word (the versions I
have seen), and I haven't found a function that I couldn't find.
--
Bertel, Denmark
John Varela
Mac OS X "Special Characters" calls it a NO-BREAK SPACE with Unicode
00A0 and UTF8 C2A0. (Hex A0 = decimal 160.)
--
John Varela
Trade NEWlamps for OLDlamps for email
John Varela
wrote:
Aha. I have it in Helvetica but not in Lucida Grande (Mac OS X
10.6.2). There doesn't appear to be any easy way to tell which
fonts have it, because the font samples are blank whether or not the
character is there.
James Silverton
>> James Hogg:
>>
> >> ISO 31:1992 recommends a thin space between thousands. That has
> >> the advantage of eliminating one of the differences between
> >> the English and the international style. The problem is
> >> that many people at keyboards substitute an ordinary space
> >> for the thin space.
>>
>> If you want to combine a thin space with a non-breaking
>> space, Unicode has NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F). I have
>> only two typefaces, Helvetica and Lucida Grande, that have
>> glyphs for this character.
>>
>> NNBSP test: 123 456 789
> Aha. I have it in Helvetica but not in Lucida Grande (Mac OS
> X 10.6.2). There doesn't appear to be any easy way to tell
> which fonts have it, because the font samples are blank
> whether or not the character is there.
I've been playing with Word and none of the fonts available to me seem
to have the narrow space. Microsoft does give a name for each symbol if
the cursor is placed over it. I guess the best compromise is the
no-break space if one is reduced to using Microsoft. I'm fairly certain
that it would be available in Donald Knuth's TeXt but currently I don't
have a way to use that.
Athel Cornish-Bowden
> Eric Walker wrote:
>> On Tue, 24 Nov 2009 10:17:57 +0100, James Hogg wrote:
>>
>> [...]
>>
>>> The catalogue measures 8 by 10� inches and has 32 pages, so it can
>>> hardly be described as "minute". . . .
>>
>> Hah. Wait'll you see the ones that follow . . . .
>
> Would you believe that's the first time I've ever seen "wait'll" in
> print?
Do you print all the news group postings you receive?
> --
athel
James Hogg
All right, then: "in pixels". Satisfied?
--
James
John Dunlop
> Aha. I have it in Helvetica but not in Lucida Grande (Mac OS X 10.6.2).
> There doesn't appear to be any easy way to tell which fonts have it,
> because the font samples are blank whether or not the character is
> there.
In OS X 10.4, I can tell which fonts have a glyph for a character
by checking the Font Variation section of the Character Palette.
--
John
Nick
I just asked my favourite programming language to output the character
corresponding to 160.
I got a little black blobby thing with a question mark in it. I sent
the output to a file and checked. It contains 160. I tried to cut and
paste it in here, but it turned into a little square.
All the world isn't Microsoft. Let along Microsoft's strange extended
character sets: which /aren't/ ascii.
--
Online waterways route planner: http://canalplan.org.uk
development version: http://canalplan.eu
Nick
FSVO works. John's text had squares in two places in the digits. Your
quote of it had continuous 1-9. When seen here of course.
James Hogg
> James Hogg <Jas....@gOUTmail.com> writes:
>
>> John Dunlop wrote:
>>> James Hogg:
>>>
>>>> ISO 31:1992 recommends a thin space between thousands. That has
>>>> the advantage of eliminating one of the differences between the
>>>> English and the international style. The problem is that many
>>>> people at keyboards substitute an ordinary space for the thin
>>>> space.
>>> If you want to combine a thin space with a non-breaking space,
>>> Unicode has NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE (U+202F). I have only two
>>> typefaces, Helvetica and Lucida Grande, that have glyphs for this
>>> character.
>>>
>>> NNBSP test: 123456789
>> It works. I copied it into Word and tried different fonts. The
>> numbers stayed together.
>
> FSVO works. John's text had squares in two places in the digits.
> Your quote of it had continuous 1-9. When seen here of course.
I meant that it worked in Word, FAVO worked. It was Thunderbird that
converted my reply to John so that his thin spaces disappeared.
--
James
James Silverton
>> Bertel wrote on Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:36:33 +0100:
>>
>>>> There is no such character in ASCII, which is a 7-bit
>>>> character set.
>>
>>> James Silverton wrote:
>>
>>>> Oh, Oh. Probably some misunderstanding here.
>>
>>> Yes, but it is yours. ASCII *is* a 7-bit characterset.
>>> Highest code is 127.
>>
>>> You are talking about e.g. ISO-8859-1 which is an 8-bit
>>> character set comprising among other things nbsp (code 160).
>>
>>>> "Insert Symbol" in Microsoft Word or similar processors,
>>>> display ASCII (decimal) and click on the blank space.
>>
>>> There's Microsoft for you (if your description is correct -
>>> I haven't got Word). It is not ASCII.
>>
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascii
>>
>> There may be some discrepancy between Microsoft and
>> "standard" ASCII but I wonder what you would get if you have
>> the CHAR function in a spreadsheet program? MS Excel does
>> give the space for =CHAR(160). Is what MS calls "ASCII" some
>> extended form. Anyway, when writing numbers and avoiding them
>> being broken during formatting, ALT-0160 is useful.
> I just asked my favourite programming language to output the
> character corresponding to 160.
> All the world isn't Microsoft. Let along Microsoft's strange
> extended character sets: which /aren't/ ascii.
However, at the moment, damnit, it is! 300 million users of Word.
Jerry Friedman
wrote:
[narrow non-breaking spaces]
> I'm fairly certain that it would be available in Donald Knuth's TeXt
In TeX, I think you can use \nobreak\thinspace\nobreak. In math mode,
the \thinspace could be \, instead. If I were going to do that more
than once, I'd define a macro.
> but currently I don't have a way to use that.
On Windows, I'm happy with MiKTeX (free), which I edit with WinEdt
(shareware).
--
Jerry Friedman
Jerry Friedman
> On Nov 25, 11:57 am, "James Silverton" <not.jim.silver...@verizon.net>
> wrote:
> [narrow non-breaking spaces]
>
> > I'm fairly certain that it would be available in Donald Knuth's TeXt
>
> In TeX, I think you can use \nobreak\thinspace\nobreak. In math mode,
> the \thinspace could be \, instead. If I were going to do that more
> than once, I'd define a macro.
Or you can put the non-breaking material, including thin spaces, into
an hbox.
--
Jerry Friedman
John Varela
wrote:
> John Varela:
How so? They are all blank here.
Roland Hutchinson
Not even 5% of humanity. Very far indeed from "all the world".
John Dunlop
> [John Dunlop:]
>
>> In OS X 10.4, I can tell which fonts have a glyph for a character by
>> checking the Font Variation section of the Character Palette.
>
> How so? They are all blank here.
If the Collections option is set to "Containing selected character", all
the fonts that have a glyph for the character are listed.
--
John
Mike Lyle
> On Wed, 25 Nov 2009 18:42:26 -0500, James Silverton wrote:
>
>> Nick wrote on Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:01:46 +0000:
>>
>>> I just asked my favourite programming language to output the
>>> character corresponding to 160.
>>> All the world isn't Microsoft. Let along Microsoft's strange
>>> extended character sets: which /aren't/ ascii.
>>
>> However, at the moment, damnit, it is! 300 million users of Word.
>
> Not even 5% of humanity. Very far indeed from "all the world".
Preseemably Msoft's star will eventually decline. But I don't quite see
what will probably bring it about. Has anybody thought about how it will
happen?
--
Mike.
James Silverton
Admitting all possibilities of Microsoft's decline, I wonder what
fraction 300 million is of current *users of word processors*? After
all, Apple runs MS Word too. I really used to like Word Perfect and not
just the program but the attitude of the company when it was based in
Provo. I guess WP became complacent and fell too far behind to catch up.
MS is complacent too but there doesn't seem anyone else making a word
processor with all their features.
Cheryl
more and more like Word, including doing things that made WP worse - I
seem to recall an extremely annoying revamp of the WP equation editor.
Then I took a job in a place that insisted on MS Office, and eventually
switched to Open Office at home when my WP got too antiquated and my
latest computer a bit better, so I haven't kept up with WP developments
since then.
I still sometimes miss reveal codes. Proper reveal codes, not what Word
sort of does and calls reveal codes.
--
Cheryl
Roland Hutchinson
My wish is that OpenOffice.org will get a decent outliner one of these
days.
Steve Hayes
>I used to be a great WP fan, but it seemed to me that it was becoming
>more and more like Word, including doing things that made WP worse - I
>seem to recall an extremely annoying revamp of the WP equation editor.
>Then I took a job in a place that insisted on MS Office, and eventually
>switched to Open Office at home when my WP got too antiquated and my
>latest computer a bit better, so I haven't kept up with WP developments
>since then.
>
>I still sometimes miss reveal codes. Proper reveal codes, not what Word
>sort of does and calls reveal codes.
And I still use XyWrite, though mainly as a text editor these days, since in
order to print anything one has to convert it to MS Word, and XyWrite could do
things 20 years ago that MS Word still can't do today. And its codes were so
revealable that you could write a fully formatted document, fonts and all,
using COPY CON.
--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://hayesfam.bravehost.com/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://methodius.blogspot.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
I suppose the proper open-source response to that is "Would you care to
design and program a decent outliner?"
--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)
Bertel Lund Hansen
> Provo. I guess WP became complacent and fell too far behind to catch up.
> MS is complacent too but there doesn't seem anyone else making a word
> processor with all their features.
Have you tried Open Office's?
--
Bertel, Denmark
Chuck Riggs
You reckon babies in India, Brazil and China are using computers
already? That's impressive but rather worrisome at the same time.
--
Regards,
Chuck Riggs,
An American who lives near Dublin, Ireland and usually spells in BrE
James Silverton
>> Provo. I guess WP became complacent and fell too far behind
>> to catch up. MS is complacent too but there doesn't seem
>> anyone else making a word processor with all their features.
> Have you tried Open Office's?
I think I already said that I was not really familiar with Open Office
but, good tho' it may be, there is no sign that it is replacing MS
Office.
R H Draney
>
> Bertel wrote on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:49:59 +0100:
>
>>> Provo. I guess WP became complacent and fell too far behind
>>> to catch up. MS is complacent too but there doesn't seem
>>> anyone else making a word processor with all their features.
>
>> Have you tried Open Office's?
>
>I think I already said that I was not really familiar with Open Office
>but, good tho' it may be, there is no sign that it is replacing MS
>Office.
The impression I have is that Open Office exists mainly so that people who
refuse to use MS Office can communicate with those who impose no such
restriction on themselves....r
--
A pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
An optometrist asks whether you see the glass
more full like this?...or like this?
Peter Moylan
> James Silverton filted:
>> Bertel wrote on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:49:59 +0100:
>>
>>>> Provo. I guess WP became complacent and fell too far behind to
>>>> catch up. MS is complacent too but there doesn't seem anyone
>>>> else making a word processor with all their features.
>>> Have you tried Open Office's?
>> I think I already said that I was not really familiar with Open
>> Office but, good tho' it may be, there is no sign that it is
>> replacing MS Office.
>
> The impression I have is that Open Office exists mainly so that
> people who refuse to use MS Office can communicate with those who
> impose no such restriction on themselves....r
Well, of course. The OO developers could have designed a far better word
processor if they weren't working under the self-imposed restriction of
being compatible with MS Office. I would imagine that there are plenty
of people here who do use superior word processors; but they still have
to have something on hand for those cases when they have to send
documents to people who can only handle one vendor's formats.
That's been true even from the time when OO was available only for OS/2.
(It was called StarOffice at the time.) It never was anybody's package
of choice. It existed solely as a workaround for the compatibility problem.
Now that it's available for Windows it might well become some people's
office suite of choice, for cost reasons. After all, the majority of
Windows users have never known anything better.
--
Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org
For an e-mail address, see my web page.
Peter Moylan
> Bertel wrote on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:49:59 +0100:
>
>>> Provo. I guess WP became complacent and fell too far behind to
>>> catch up. MS is complacent too but there doesn't seem anyone else
>>> making a word processor with all their features.
>
>> Have you tried Open Office's?
>
> I think I already said that I was not really familiar with Open
> Office but, good tho' it may be, there is no sign that it is
> replacing MS Office.
The last couple of computers I bought came with Open Office already
installed. Vendors who sell computers with software preloaded - the most
common case, I believe - can cut the price very substantially if they
don't have to pay for MS-Office.
(It was a waste of time in my case. The first thing I do after buying a
computer is delete the operating system. Unfortunately for people like
me, it's very difficult to buy a computer without paying the MS tax.)
John Varela
wrote:
> John Varela:
That's what I was looking at; Lucida Grande is in the list but it
doesn't display the half space, at least not in Text Edit.
Helvetica does. A bunch of fonts display the half space as a full
space. Menlo, for example.
Roland Hutchinson
If I thought I would be capable of that, I'd give it a go.
As it is, I hope to be able to eventually give something back to Lilypond.
Roland Hutchinson
ObPedantry: It's OpenOffice.org (the trademark OpenOffice belongs to
someone else, for a line of office furniture or something) or OOo.
John Dunlop
> [John Dunlop:]
>
>> If the Collections option is set to "Containing selected character",
>> all the fonts that have a glyph for the character are listed.
>
> That's what I was looking at; Lucida Grande is in the list but it
> doesn't display the half space, at least not in Text Edit. Helvetica
> does. A bunch of fonts display the half space as a full space. Menlo,
> for example.
Same here. I wonder why Lucida Grande is in the list.
--
John
Chuck Riggs
Your vindictive, repetitive and inexplicable hatred of Microsoft is
becoming boring to the extreme, Mike. Can your fiddle play a different
tune?
John Varela
wrote:
I have never forgiven Bill Gates for abandoning the TRS-80 and I
never will.
Mike Lyle
Thanks for the music criticism, pal. Get back to me when you have some
evidence.
--
Mike.
Nick
> James Silverton filted:
>>
>> Bertel wrote on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:49:59 +0100:
>>
>>>> Provo. I guess WP became complacent and fell too far behind
>>>> to catch up. MS is complacent too but there doesn't seem
>>>> anyone else making a word processor with all their features.
>>
>>> Have you tried Open Office's?
>>
>>I think I already said that I was not really familiar with Open Office
>>but, good tho' it may be, there is no sign that it is replacing MS
>>Office.
>
> The impression I have is that Open Office exists mainly so that people who
> refuse to use MS Office can communicate with those who impose no such
> restriction on themselves....r
It's actually the other way round. I'd be quite happy to use MS Office
if I could. As I can't (without getting a separate computer just for
the purpose) I'm very glad that Openoffice.org exists, as it
enables people who insist on using MS Office to communicate with me, who
doesn't impose any similar restriction on others.
--
Online waterways route planner: http://canalplan.org.uk
development version: http://canalplan.eu
Robin Bignall
wrote:
>James Silverton wrote:
>> Bertel wrote on Thu, 26 Nov 2009 17:49:59 +0100:
>>
>>>> Provo. I guess WP became complacent and fell too far behind to
>>>> catch up. MS is complacent too but there doesn't seem anyone else
>>>> making a word processor with all their features.
>>
>>> Have you tried Open Office's?
>>
>> I think I already said that I was not really familiar with Open
>> Office but, good tho' it may be, there is no sign that it is
>> replacing MS Office.
>
>The last couple of computers I bought came with Open Office already
>installed. Vendors who sell computers with software preloaded - the most
>common case, I believe - can cut the price very substantially if they
>don't have to pay for MS-Office.
>
>(It was a waste of time in my case. The first thing I do after buying a
>computer is delete the operating system. Unfortunately for people like
>me, it's very difficult to buy a computer without paying the MS tax.)
You're the exception that proves the rule about MS. When somebody
(IBM) sat down and designed an operating system specifically for Intel
architecture from the ground up, most of the world still bought
Windows 95 rather than OS/2. Then they whinge about MS's monopoly and
practices.
--
Robin
(BrE)
Herts, England
Mike Lyle
> On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:57:04 +1100, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep>
> wrote:
>> (It was a waste of time in my case. The first thing I do after
>> buying a computer is delete the operating system. Unfortunately for
>> people like me, it's very difficult to buy a computer without paying
>> the MS tax.)
>
> You're the exception that proves the rule about MS. When somebody
> (IBM) sat down and designed an operating system specifically for Intel
> architecture from the ground up, most of the world still bought
> Windows 95 rather than OS/2. Then they whinge about MS's monopoly and
> practices.
Except that most of the world had to rely on salesmen for information,
and only wanted immediately visible functionality, so can't be blamed. I
started with MSDOS because it was what was there, and in spite of little
DOS shells (like IconShell, was it?), the progression to MS's own shells
was pretty well on autopilot.
--
Mike.
John Varela
<docr...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> When somebody
> (IBM) sat down and designed an operating system specifically for Intel
> architecture from the ground up, most of the world still bought
> Windows 95 rather than OS/2. Then they whinge about MS's monopoly and
> practices.
With DOS, Microsoft had a near monopoly on PC operating systems.
They forced manufacturers to install Win 3.1 if they wanted to have
DOS. Why buy OS/2 when you already have an OS that came with the
computer? OS/2 never got the third-party software development it
needed, for several reasons including the obvious fact that most of
the users were running the OS that came with their computers.
OS/2 was far superior to DOS and Windows, including Win 95 and its
descendents. I switched from DOS/Win 3.1 because I had to access
both the department AIX server using TCP/IP and the corporate server
using Netware. DOS/Win couldn't support two protocols
simultaneously, so I was having to switch config.sys and
autoexec.bat and reboot several times a day. Someone told me that
OS/2 could run both protocols at the same time, so I bought it. It
was a bitch getting it set up -- lots of sensitivity to the sequence
of entries in config.sys, and there was no on-site assistance -- but
once established it worked like a charm. The big bonus was that
suddenly I could run more than one application at a time. That was
when? close to 20 years ago, and I've never had a reason to return
to Windows.
Steve Hayes
>With DOS, Microsoft had a near monopoly on PC operating systems.
>They forced manufacturers to install Win 3.1 if they wanted to have
>DOS. Why buy OS/2 when you already have an OS that came with the
>computer? OS/2 never got the third-party software development it
>needed, for several reasons including the obvious fact that most of
>the users were running the OS that came with their computers.
>
>OS/2 was far superior to DOS and Windows, including Win 95 and its
>descendents. I switched from DOS/Win 3.1 because I had to access
>both the department AIX server using TCP/IP and the corporate server
>using Netware. DOS/Win couldn't support two protocols
>simultaneously, so I was having to switch config.sys and
>autoexec.bat and reboot several times a day. Someone told me that
>OS/2 could run both protocols at the same time, so I bought it. It
>was a bitch getting it set up -- lots of sensitivity to the sequence
>of entries in config.sys, and there was no on-site assistance -- but
>once established it worked like a charm. The big bonus was that
>suddenly I could run more than one application at a time. That was
>when? close to 20 years ago, and I've never had a reason to return
>to Windows.
I found OS/2 ran DOS better than DOS, and Windows 3.1 better than Windows 3.1,
or rather it ran the applications better and simultaneously. It was true
multitasking. Unfortunately it didn't run Windows 95 applications.
Bertel Lund Hansen
> (IBM) sat down and designed an operating system specifically for Intel
> architecture from the ground up, most of the world still bought
> Windows 95 rather than OS/2.
Bought? At that time quite a lot of them used illegal copies.
It's not normal business that founded Bill Gates' fortune and
power. It's illegal copies.
--
Bertel, Denmark
Chuck Riggs
<mike_l...@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk> wrote:
You'll only give yourself an ulcer, but if you prefer to bitch and
moan rather than enjoy your computer, be my guest.
Chuck Riggs
wrote:
>On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:02:14 UTC, Chuck Riggs <chr...@eircom.net>
There were several magazines devoted to the TRS-80, back when they
were selling like hotcakes. BYTE also sold well, which I read avidly.
Instead of buying a TRS-80, which could be programmed, I bought a
couple of ATARI machines. There was little a person could do with
them, as I recall, but play games. Perhaps they were programmable,
too, I don't remember.
James Silverton
My elementary school son and I were enthusiastic about the TRS-80 and I
had a Model-II for some years that I updated to two floppy discs (Wow!).
I even used the Tandy word processor: Scripsit and read the TRS80
magazine, to which I had a subscription. I watched that journal grow to
over 200 pages and then sadly saw it fade and die.
Mike Lyle
You really have convinced yourself that I post more complaints about
Microsoft than other people, haven't you? This is a particularly bizarre
position in view of the message you were responding to, which didn't
contain a syllable of criticism of anything. But amuse yourself as you
please.
--
Mike.
Robin Bignall
wrote:
>On Fri, 27 Nov 2009 21:29:53 UTC, Robin Bignall
Can't argue with that. Gates himself stated that OS/2 was technically
superior to W95. I left IBM in May, 1993, and up to that time, being
an IBMer, had little idea of what was happening in the real world. A
couple of months later I taught a few classes on "Introduction to
Operating Systems" for some consultants, the attendees being corporate
computer users who had used DOS but who had little experience of GUIs.
I gathered that W3.1 was not widely used. The decision to go either
Windows or OS/2 (I taught them both) was taken quite high up in
corporations, but most of these attendees had heard of W95, but not of
OS/2 and from that I gathered that MS had won whatever marketing
campaign(s) that had taken place.
As to the home market, I have no idea of the penetration of PCs into
homes by 1993. Like some here, I'd had a computer at home since the
TRS80, but I was in the business. After a long time in hospital, when
I got around to buying an Internet-capable machine late in 1998, my
choice was dictated by affordability. A Dell with W98 was much
cheaper than an IBM employee-discount-equivalent PC with OS/2.
Roland Hutchinson
> On 28 Nov 2009 01:41:59 GMT, "John Varela" <OLDl...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>>With DOS, Microsoft had a near monopoly on PC operating systems. They
>>forced manufacturers to install Win 3.1 if they wanted to have DOS. Why
>>buy OS/2 when you already have an OS that came with the computer? OS/2
>>never got the third-party software development it needed, for several
>>reasons including the obvious fact that most of the users were running
>>the OS that came with their computers.
>>
>>OS/2 was far superior to DOS and Windows, including Win 95 and its
>>descendents. I switched from DOS/Win 3.1 because I had to access both
>>the department AIX server using TCP/IP and the corporate server using
>>Netware. DOS/Win couldn't support two protocols simultaneously, so I
>>was having to switch config.sys and autoexec.bat and reboot several
>>times a day. Someone told me that OS/2 could run both protocols at the
>>same time, so I bought it. It was a bitch getting it set up -- lots of
>>sensitivity to the sequence of entries in config.sys, and there was no
>>on-site assistance -- but once established it worked like a charm. The
>>big bonus was that suddenly I could run more than one application at a
>>time. That was when? close to 20 years ago, and I've never had a reason
>>to return to Windows.
>
> I found OS/2 ran DOS better than DOS, and Windows 3.1 better than
> Windows 3.1, or rather it ran the applications better and
> simultaneously. It was true multitasking. Unfortunately it didn't run
> Windows 95 applications.
I seem to remember "Better DOS than DOS and better Windows than Windows"
as a promotional slogan for OS/2 in the Win3.1 era.
Peter Moylan
> On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:56:09 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:
>> I found OS/2 ran DOS better than DOS, and Windows 3.1 better than
>> Windows 3.1, or rather it ran the applications better and
>> simultaneously. It was true multitasking. Unfortunately it didn't
>> run Windows 95 applications.
>
> I seem to remember "Better DOS than DOS and better Windows than
> Windows" as a promotional slogan for OS/2 in the Win3.1 era.
To some extent it's still true. The Thunderbird I'm using to read this
newsgroup is, in effect, the Windows version running on OS/2. It is
noticeably faster than Thunderbird running on Windows. Even when the
comparison is with Win-XP, which is a huge improvement over its successors.
There are some DOS and Windows programs that I /must/ run on OS/2,
because my Windows (Vista) laptop snootily refuses to run "obsolete"
Windows software.
John Varela
wrote:
> The Thunderbird I'm using to read this
> newsgroup is, in effect, the Windows version running on OS/2. It is
> noticeably faster than Thunderbird running on Windows.
Is that a current version of Thunderbird? Running under Win-OS/2?
You may have noticed that I'm reading this news group with
ProNews/2. It's obsolete in many ways, but still superior to any of
the Mac news readers that I've tried.
>Even when the
> comparison is with Win-XP, which is a huge improvement over its successors.
ITYM "predecessors".
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
Perhaps he has the gift of prophecy.
--
Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)
Garrett Wollman
John Varela <OLDl...@verizon.net> wrote:
>On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:21:22 UTC, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep>
>wrote:
>>Even when the
>> comparison is with Win-XP, which is a huge improvement over its successors.
>
>ITYM "predecessors".
I think Peter meant exactly what he said.
-GAWollman
--
Garrett A. Wollman | What intellectual phenomenon can be older, or more oft
wol...@bimajority.org| repeated, than the story of a large research program
Opinions not shared by| that impaled itself upon a false central assumption
my employers. | accepted by all practitioners? - S.J. Gould, 1993
John Varela
<not.jim....@verizon.net> wrote:
> My elementary school son and I were enthusiastic about the TRS-80 and I
> had a Model-II for some years that I updated to two floppy discs (Wow!).
> I even used the Tandy word processor: Scripsit
The word processor I ran on the TRS-80 Model-I was called (believe
it or not) Zorlof the Magnificent. It was pretty good for its day.
It was later renamed something like "LeScript" and ported to DOS,
still using the odd multiple-key combinations that had been
necessitated by the TRS-80's lack of function keys. It did not do
well in competition with Word Perfect.
I wrote a few simple games--greatly limited by the crude
graphics--for the Models I and III that were marketed by Creative
Computing magazine. I made a couple of hundred bucks in royalties.
Then Creative Computing went bankrupt owing me some money.
> and read the TRS80 magazine,
80 Microcomputing, if I recall correctly. That was the only
magazine I've ever seen in which continued articles jumped to
earlier pages. I was told that the publisher had long been doing
that in a popular magazine for ham radio hobbyists.
> to which I had a subscription. I watched that journal grow to
> over 200 pages and then sadly saw it fade and die.
The publisher cleverly sold the magazine when it was at its peak,
just before the TRS-80 was crushed by the IBM PC.
John Varela
<docr...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Can't argue with that. Gates himself stated that OS/2 was technically
> superior to W95. I left IBM in May, 1993, and up to that time, being
> an IBMer, had little idea of what was happening in the real world. A
> couple of months later I taught a few classes on "Introduction to
> Operating Systems" for some consultants, the attendees being corporate
> computer users who had used DOS but who had little experience of GUIs.
> I gathered that W3.1 was not widely used. The decision to go either
> Windows or OS/2 (I taught them both) was taken quite high up in
> corporations, but most of these attendees had heard of W95, but not of
> OS/2 and from that I gathered that MS had won whatever marketing
> campaign(s) that had taken place.
Something wrong with your chonology: there was no W95 in 1993. Your
trainees would have known about Windows, which was 3.1 in 1993,
because every non-IBM non-Apple PC that they bought came with it
pre-installed.
> As to the home market, I have no idea of the penetration of PCs into
> homes by 1993. Like some here, I'd had a computer at home since the
> TRS80, but I was in the business. After a long time in hospital, when
> I got around to buying an Internet-capable machine late in 1998, my
> choice was dictated by affordability. A Dell with W98 was much
> cheaper than an IBM employee-discount-equivalent PC with OS/2.
You could have junked Windows and installed OS/2. Why didn't you?
OS/2 came with DOS and Win3.1, which were the then-current versions.
Inertia, most likely, and because there were no compelling
OS/2-only apps. Unless, of course, you wanted to be able to run
multiple apps or multiple Ethernet protocols.
R H Draney
>
>80 Microcomputing, if I recall correctly. That was the only
>magazine I've ever seen in which continued articles jumped to
>earlier pages. I was told that the publisher had long been doing
>that in a popular magazine for ham radio hobbyists.
Omni did it for a while...their "puzzles" feature was always on the last inside
page of the magazine, with the answers placed several pages earlier...those of
us who read magazines sequentially were rather annoyed at the practice....r
--
A pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
An optometrist asks whether you see the glass
more full like this?...or like this?
Roland Hutchinson
> In article <dxizd0mOwXzR-pn2-R1ZXUtddVydC@localhost>, John Varela
> <OLDl...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:21:22 UTC, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep>
>>wrote:
>
>>>Even when the
>>> comparison is with Win-XP, which is a huge improvement over its
>>> successors.
>>
>>ITYM "predecessors".
>
> I think Peter meant exactly what he said.
For anyone unfamiliar with the expression: a Google search on
"improvement over its successors" (including the quotation marks) or
"improvement on its successors" turns up many instances of the phrase
applied to operating systems, computer systems, programming languages,
and other things having to do with computation.
The original may have been C.A.E. Hoare's remark that the programming
language ALGOL 60 was a great improvement on most of its successors.
(The exact wording seems to vary from source to source. Similar remarks
have also been attributed to Dijkstra--but Dijkstra in at least one place
attributes it to Hoare; see:
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD12xx/EWD1284.html )
The phrase is almost always meant to be taken literally, albeit in a ha-
ha-only-serious sort of way.
Peter Moylan
> On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:21:22 UTC, Peter Moylan <gro.nalyomp@retep>
> wrote:
>
>> The Thunderbird I'm using to read this newsgroup is, in effect, the
>> Windows version running on OS/2. It is noticeably faster than
>> Thunderbird running on Windows.
>
> Is that a current version of Thunderbird? Running under Win-OS/2?
It's version 2.0.0.14, which I think is the latest version of
Thunderbird for OS/2. I see that Windows is currently up to version
2.0.0.23, so maybe I should check whether a newer version is available.
I'm still waiting impatiently for a filtering system that can reject
*.cn without rejecting *.cn*.
(In fact, there might be a way with the present system. It just hit me
in the middle of writing that. Now I just need to watch the log to see
whether the spam comes back.)
Win-OS/2 hardly ever gets used these days, since it can run only the
very old Windows programs. The present approach is a wrapper that
intercepts the Windows API calls and translates them into OS/2 API
calls. (This is not hard, because much of the Windows API was derived
from OS/2.) The majority of Windows programs still don't work, thanks in
part to the back-door undocumented calls that Microsoft was supposed
either to document [1] or to remove - that didn't happen because GWB
intervened to override the court decision. Luckily, the Mozilla programs
belong to the group of those that do work, because open-source projects
can't use undocumented calls.
[1] Interesting. The two components of "supposed to" normally bind
tightly, but in this case "supposed either to" would have looked really
clumsy. Another example of where we don't like to "split the
infinitive", with absolutely no appeal to Latin grammar.
> You may have noticed that I'm reading this news group with ProNews/2.
> It's obsolete in many ways, but still superior to any of the Mac news
> readers that I've tried.
I used that for a while, but then switched to slrn, which is still
superior in many ways to any GUI newsreader. But then, wanting better
font support, I moved to Thunderbird. Some of the OS/2 community has
moved back to PMMail, which was abandonware for a while but which was
then revived by the community.
>> Even when the comparison is with Win-XP, which is a huge
>> improvement over its successors.
>
> ITYM "predecessors".
Well, if we're going to quibble: "... a huge improvement over at least
two of its successors".
Steve Hayes
<my.sp...@verizon.net> wrote:
>On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:56:09 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:
>> I found OS/2 ran DOS better than DOS, and Windows 3.1 better than
>> Windows 3.1, or rather it ran the applications better and
>> simultaneously. It was true multitasking. Unfortunately it didn't run
>> Windows 95 applications.
>
>I seem to remember "Better DOS than DOS and better Windows than Windows"
>as a promotional slogan for OS/2 in the Win3.1 era.
If it was, then, unusually for promotional slogans, it would have been true.
ObAUE: There's a past "would have".
Steve Hayes
Vista was a "predecessor"?
Roland Hutchinson
> On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:50:06 +0000 (UTC), Roland Hutchinson
> <my.sp...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>>On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:56:09 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>> I found OS/2 ran DOS better than DOS, and Windows 3.1 better than
>>> Windows 3.1, or rather it ran the applications better and
>>> simultaneously. It was true multitasking. Unfortunately it didn't run
>>> Windows 95 applications.
>>
>>I seem to remember "Better DOS than DOS and better Windows than Windows"
>>as a promotional slogan for OS/2 in the Win3.1 era.
>
> If it was, then, unusually for promotional slogans, it would have been
> true.
>
> ObAUE: There's a past "would have".
OS/2 was exceptional in many ways. Still is, I hear.
Peter Moylan
> On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 06:34:48 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:50:06 +0000 (UTC), Roland Hutchinson
>> <my.sp...@verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 05:56:09 +0200, Steve Hayes wrote:
>>>> I found OS/2 ran DOS better than DOS, and Windows 3.1 better
>>>> than Windows 3.1, or rather it ran the applications better and
>>>> simultaneously. It was true multitasking. Unfortunately it
>>>> didn't run Windows 95 applications.
>>> I seem to remember "Better DOS than DOS and better Windows than
>>> Windows" as a promotional slogan for OS/2 in the Win3.1 era.
>> If it was, then, unusually for promotional slogans, it would have
>> been true.
>>
>> ObAUE: There's a past "would have".
>
> OS/2 was exceptional in many ways. Still is, I hear.
Its main weaknesses these days are a shortage of device drivers, and
inability to display some graphics formats. Windows is still a superior
platform for internet pornography.
The number of native application programs is shrinking. (I've written
some myself, but that covers only a narrow range of needs.) A lot of the
application software that's now run on OS/2 has been ported from Linux,
and unfortunately the concept of "user-friendly" never really took hold
in the Linux world.
IBM was for a time a conservative force that held back the development
of OS/2. (That's not a criticism of the very good OS/2 team that used to
be a part of IBM. It's a criticism of the people who held the purse
strings.) There's more of a can-do feeling now that IBM is less directly
involved. The catch is that IBM won't release any source code to the
current developers, because of agreements with Microsoft, so things like
kernel bugs have to be worked around rather than fixed.
I will probably migrate to Linux once it has something comparable to the
OS/2 Workplace Shell, but so far nobody seems to have tackled the idea
of having an object-oriented shell for Linux, so it's unclear whether a
sufficiently appealing desktop model will ever appear.
On the other hand, the JFS (Journalling File System) did get ported to
Linux, and so did OpenOffice and VirtualBox, so there must be at least
some people who are interested in using the ideas that come out of OS/2.
Garrett Wollman
Steve Hayes <haye...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Vista was a "predecessor"? [of Windows XP]
Well, I suppose there is every reason to believe that XP will far
outlive Vista, just as NT 4.0 far outlived 2000, at least as far as
the desktop is concerned. There were a lot of businesses that didn't
even start to move from NT 4 to XP (skipping 2000) until the latter
was already five years old -- and that was mostly because the dire
support for modern hardware on NT forced them to.
the Omrud
> John Varela filted:
>> 80 Microcomputing, if I recall correctly. That was the only
>> magazine I've ever seen in which continued articles jumped to
>> earlier pages. I was told that the publisher had long been doing
>> that in a popular magazine for ham radio hobbyists.
>
> Omni did it for a while...their "puzzles" feature was always on the last inside
> page of the magazine, with the answers placed several pages earlier...those of
> us who read magazines sequentially were rather annoyed at the practice....r
That's common for puzzles here - the Times colour supplement (on
Saturdays) certainly does it. But the answers are so small and
insignificant-looking that I always find myself turning back to read
them after reaching the puzzles, having skipped over them on first read
through.
--
David
Peter Duncanson (BrE)
Yesterday's Times (Saturday) has the puzzles on the penpenultimate and
penultimate pages of the main section of the paper (pp126,127) The
ultimate (back) page has a full-page iPhone advert. The puzzle solutions
are on the penpenpenultimate page (p125).
This is the regular location of the puzzles. To do to them:
1. pick up newspaper
2. hold it with the back page uppermost
3. open paper by turning back page
4. solve puzzles.
Some newspapers have experimented with printing the solutions upside
down.
Note that not all solutions are printed in the same day's paper.
Chuck Riggs
<mike_l...@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Be enough of a gentleman not to hide behind the skirts of other
members. The difficulty at hand is between you and me, only.
>This is a particularly bizarre
>position in view of the message you were responding to, which didn't
>contain a syllable of criticism of anything. But amuse yourself as you
>please.
You have built up a long record of making what you think are clever
attacks on Microsoft, America, Americans and me. The next time you
feel so inclined, I suggest you stick them in your hat.
Skitt
> "James Silverton" wrote:
>> My elementary school son and I were enthusiastic about the TRS-80
>> and I had a Model-II for some years that I updated to two floppy
>> discs (Wow!). I even used the Tandy word processor: Scripsit
>
> The word processor I ran on the TRS-80 Model-I was called (believe
> it or not) Zorlof the Magnificent. It was pretty good for its day.
> It was later renamed something like "LeScript" and ported to DOS,
> still using the odd multiple-key combinations that had been
> necessitated by the TRS-80's lack of function keys. It did not do
> well in competition with Word Perfect.
Our first word-processing program (in the early '80s) at home was WordStar.
My wife of that era was a word processor by trade, but she used a dedicated
word-processing machine (NBI) at work (Control Data, Amdahl, LLNL).
--
Skitt (AmE)
Mike Lyle
Eh?
> The difficulty at hand is between you and me, only.
No difficulty for me. Your difficulty would be in justifying your remark
with examples.
>
>> This is a particularly bizarre
>> position in view of the message you were responding to, which didn't
>> contain a syllable of criticism of anything. But amuse yourself as
>> you please.
>
> You have built up a long record of making what you think are clever
> attacks on Microsoft, America, Americans and me. The next time you
> feel so inclined, I suggest you stick them in your hat.
How long is this "long record"? You made the claim, you back it up.
I have never attacked you at all, and the last comment I remember in
this group about my attitude to Americans was some Englishman asking me
"how I liked the taste of American arse".
You're making an unfortunate mistake.
--
Mike.
Robin Bignall
wrote:
>On Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:21:16 UTC, Robin Bignall
><docr...@ntlworld.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Can't argue with that. Gates himself stated that OS/2 was technically
>> superior to W95. I left IBM in May, 1993, and up to that time, being
>> an IBMer, had little idea of what was happening in the real world. A
>> couple of months later I taught a few classes on "Introduction to
>> Operating Systems" for some consultants, the attendees being corporate
>> computer users who had used DOS but who had little experience of GUIs.
>> I gathered that W3.1 was not widely used. The decision to go either
>> Windows or OS/2 (I taught them both) was taken quite high up in
>> corporations, but most of these attendees had heard of W95, but not of
>> OS/2 and from that I gathered that MS had won whatever marketing
>> campaign(s) that had taken place.
>
>Something wrong with your chonology: there was no W95 in 1993. Your
>trainees would have known about Windows, which was 3.1 in 1993,
>because every non-IBM non-Apple PC that they bought came with it
>pre-installed.
>
Yes. It was 1995. I spent 18 months on a sort of consultancy training
scheme after retirement and picked up the teaching after that. The
trainees who came to learn about OS/2 were from companies that had
opted for IBM hardware, rather than compatibles.
>> As to the home market, I have no idea of the penetration of PCs into
>> homes by 1993. Like some here, I'd had a computer at home since the
>> TRS80, but I was in the business. After a long time in hospital, when
>> I got around to buying an Internet-capable machine late in 1998, my
>> choice was dictated by affordability. A Dell with W98 was much
>> cheaper than an IBM employee-discount-equivalent PC with OS/2.
>
>You could have junked Windows and installed OS/2. Why didn't you?
Medical reasons. I had good reason at that time to believe that I
would not live very long, and needed something that would work
straight out of the box. Further details at
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/docrobin/Design/tenyears.htm
>OS/2 came with DOS and Win3.1, which were the then-current versions.
> Inertia, most likely, and because there were no compelling
>OS/2-only apps. Unless, of course, you wanted to be able to run
>multiple apps or multiple Ethernet protocols.
--
Robin
(BrE)
Herts, England
Chuck Riggs
<mike_l...@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk> wrote:
For almost as long as I've known you or perhaps as long as I have
known you, but didn't notice you were doing it.
>You made the claim, you back it up.
Even if I knew how to search back through years of files, it would not
be worth my time to find the snide and insulting remarks you've made
in the past ten or fifteen years against America, Americans and
sometimes me. Since you and other members must know the jist of what
you have written in this newsgroup, I don't know why are you asking.
>I have never attacked you at all, and the last comment I remember in
>this group about my attitude to Americans was some Englishman asking me
>"how I liked the taste of American arse".
You have a convenient memory.
>You're making an unfortunate mistake.
Here you go again. Over the years, you've played the innocent on
numerous occasions. Leaving me out of the equation for a moment, have
you or have you not attacked America and Americans repeatedly, and
often unfairly to get a laugh?
Wood Avens
wrote:
I really don't think he has, you know, Chuck. Or at least no more
than he's made fun of any of us occasionally. Are you sure you're not
thinking of another contributor, whose surname also begins with L?
--
Katy Jennison
spamtrap: remove the first two letters after the @
HVS
That's what sprung to my mind, as well.
That other "surname starts with L" fella can certainly be relied
upon for knee-jerk rantings whenever the subject of America
appears, but I don't recall Mike posting anything remotely serious
along those lines.
--
Cheers, Harvey
CanEng and BrEng, indiscriminately mixed
Wood Avens
wrote:
The only counter-indication, of course, is that other-L's posts
usually fail to amuse.
HVS
> On Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:03:07 GMT, HVS
> <use...@REMOVETHISwhhvs.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> On 01 Dec 2009, Wood Avens wrote
>>
>>> On Tue, 01 Dec 2009 15:25:17 +0000, Chuck Riggs
>>> <chr...@eircom.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:42:28 -0000, "Mike Lyle"
>>>> <mike_l...@REMOVETHISyahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>>> You're making an unfortunate mistake.
>>>>
>>>> Here you go again. Over the years, you've played the innocent
>>>> on numerous occasions. Leaving me out of the equation for a
>>>> moment, have you or have you not attacked America and
>>>> Americans repeatedly, and often unfairly to get a laugh?
>>>
>>> I really don't think he has, you know, Chuck. Or at least no
>>> more than he's made fun of any of us occasionally. Are you
>>> sure you're not thinking of another contributor, whose surname
>>> also begins with L?
>>
>> That's what sprung to my mind, as well.
>>
>> That other "surname starts with L" fella can certainly be
>> relied upon for knee-jerk rantings whenever the subject of
>> America appears, but I don't recall Mike posting anything
>> remotely serious along those lines.
>
> The only counter-indication, of course, is that other-L's posts
> usually fail to amuse.
"Usually fail?" More like "invariably fail"; the guy's consistent
and predictable, though...
CDB
>>> Chuck Riggs <chr...@eircom.net> wrote:
>>>> "Mike Lyle" wrote:
>>>
>>>>> You're making an unfortunate mistake.
>>>>
>>>> Here you go again. Over the years, you've played the innocent
>>>> on numerous occasions. Leaving me out of the equation for a
>>>> moment, have you or have you not attacked America and Americans
>>>> repeatedly, and often unfairly to get a laugh?
>>>
>>> I really don't think he has, you know, Chuck. Or at least no
>>> more than he's made fun of any of us occasionally. Are you sure
>>> you're not thinking of another contributor, whose surname also
>>> begins with L?
>>
>> That's what sprung to my mind, as well.
>>
>> That other "surname starts with L" fella can certainly be relied
>> upon for knee-jerk rantings whenever the subject of America
>> appears, but I don't recall Mike posting anything remotely serious
>> along those lines.
>
> The only counter-indication, of course, is that other-L's posts
> usually fail to amuse.
>
fight.