What does "straw man" mean in this context?

[David Howard]

In the macintosh newsgroups, someone objected to my use of the word
"data" instead of "documents" (where I store all sorts of data, including
documents).

The said:
"So the name is more important than the function..."
To which, I replied:
"Do you store your tax documents in a folder called 'socks'?"
They just now replied back:
"No. But that's a straw man."

What does 'straw man' mean in this situation?

[Tony Cooper]

The person felt you were attempting to divert the argument to some
point you could win instead of staying on point with the argument he
wanted to pursue.

--
Tony Cooper - Orlando FL

[Dr Nick]

There are two, overlapping, meanings of straw man. This one, and the
one I tend to use, which means a rough-and-ready idea exposed with the
intention that people will pull it apart but, in so doing, we'll learn a
lot.

Discussing what the next computer upgrade should be: "So for a straw-man
argument, why don't we just run the entire business using abacuses?".

[Mike Barnes]

I've never come across "straw man" used in that positive way. I'd be
more likely to say that I was "playing devil's advocate".

--
Mike Barnes
Cheshire, England

[Steve Hayes]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2014 05:04:21 +0000 (UTC), David Howard <dsho...@microsoft.com>
wrote:

Not much.

What you gave was an analogy, which may have been a good or a bad analogy,
depending on what you and your interloqutor meant by "data" and "documents",
and what Apple meant by them.

I haven't used an Appple computer for 20 years or more (last was an Apple ][)
but I do know that computer software makers produce weird terms for things,
like calling a computer screen a "desktop" so my desktop sits on my desktop
which sits on my desktop. And so what Apple mean by "data" and "documents" is
anybody's guess.




--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

[Peter Percival]

A straw man is a claim made that can be easily proved or refuted(*), as
appropriate, thus creating the illusion that the person making the claim
is winning an argument, whereas, actually, the person being argued
against has neither denied nor made the claim so it is irrelevant to the
dispute.

Your protagonist readily agrees that they do not store their tax
documents in a folder called 'socks', but they thinks it irrelevant to
the matter you and they are arguing about.

(*) By refuted I mean refuted and not just denied.

--
[Dancing is] a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.
G.B. Shaw quoted in /New Statesman/, 23 March 1962

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

David Howard skrev:

> What does 'straw man' mean in this situation?

Maybe a simple example will make it clear:

Politician 1:
I think that taxes ought to be raised so we can bring down our
country's debts faster.

Politician 2:
So you would be happy paying 90 % of your income as tax?

The purpose of a strawman is to make the opponent look
ridiculous, and it is done by pretending that he has put forward
a ridiculous statement which he hasn't. However, the negatvie
impression may be the one that sticks in people's mind.
Politicians do this all the time.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[FromTheRafters]

David Howard brought next idea :

I read it as he is accusing you of restating his point in a manner
which can be easily refuted, as if that were his argument. See "logical
fallacies".

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/strawman

[Mark Brader]

Nick Atty:

>> There are two, overlapping, meanings of straw man. This one, and the
>> one I tend to use, which means a rough-and-ready idea exposed with the
>> intention that people will pull it apart but, in so doing, we'll learn a
>> lot.
>>
>> Discussing what the next computer upgrade should be: "So for a straw-man
>> argument, why don't we just run the entire business using abacuses?".

Mike Barnes:

> I've never come across "straw man" used in that positive way.

My first reaction was that I hadn't either, but then I remembered
the development of Ada (before it was named Ada). Rather than the
successive drafts of the standard as it evolved being identified by
dates or numbers, they were successively named Strawman, Woodman,
Tinman, Ironman, and Steelman. (At least, I think I have those
right, but I'm doing it from memory. Ironman was the only draft
that I actually read.)

> I'd be more likely to say that I was "playing devil's advocate".

That doesn't sound quite like what Nick said. You play devil's
advocate if a decision has already been at least tentatively made,
and you want to make sure that the argument you're about to advance
against it can be refuted. I take Nick to be talking about an earlier
stage of such a process.
--
Mark Brader | I rise to speak ... well, actually, I don't rise,
Toronto | nor do I speak, but I lounge to type in his defense.
m...@vex.net | -- Bob Lipton

My text in this article is in the public domain.

[David Howard]

Dr Nick wrote, on Wed, 08 Oct 2014 07:26:17 +0100:

> There are two, overlapping, meanings of straw man. This one, and the
> one I tend to use, which means a rough-and-ready idea

I'm familiar with the rough-and-ready idea.
That's why the use of 'straw man' in the context given, was obscure to me.

[Don Phillipson]

"Steve Hayes" <haye...@telkomsa.net> wrote in message
news:p7s93alvvf2tihpcf...@4ax.com...

> . . . computer software makers produce weird terms for things,

> like calling a computer screen a "desktop" so my desktop sits on my
> desktop
> which sits on my desktop.

Desktop computer : desktop : : television receiver : TV.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

[Peter Duncanson [BrE]]

On Wed, 08 Oct 2014 10:15:50 +0200, Steve Hayes <haye...@telkomsa.net>
wrote:

>On Wed, 8 Oct 2014 05:04:21 +0000 (UTC), David Howard <dsho...@microsoft.com>
>wrote:
>
>>In the macintosh newsgroups, someone objected to my use of the word
>>"data" instead of "documents" (where I store all sorts of data, including
>>documents).
>>
>>The said:
>> "So the name is more important than the function..."
>>To which, I replied:
>> "Do you store your tax documents in a folder called 'socks'?"
>>They just now replied back:
>> "No. But that's a straw man."
>>
>>What does 'straw man' mean in this situation?
>
>Not much.
>
>What you gave was an analogy, which may have been a good or a bad analogy,
>depending on what you and your interloqutor meant by "data" and "documents",
>and what Apple meant by them.
>
>I haven't used an Appple computer for 20 years or more (last was an Apple ][)
>but I do know that computer software makers produce weird terms for things,
>like calling a computer screen a "desktop"

The physical screen isn't called a "desktop". It is the intial content
displayed there that is called the "desktop": the background image and
program icons. When programs are run their windows cover all or part of
the desktop in the same way that papers and documents obscure the
surface of an actual desk.

> so my desktop sits on my desktop
>which sits on my desktop. And so what Apple mean by "data" and "documents" is
>anybody's guess.

--

Peter Duncanson, UK
(in alt.usage.english)

[Mike L]

There's a third, in the form "man of straw", used by the legal
profession for one who isn't worth suing, because even if you win, he
won't be able to pay.

--
Mike.

[Jerry Friedman]

Hm. I've heard it used as for a proposal that may have flaws but is
proposed to have something definite to talk about. It may be pulled
apart, but it may also be refined into a real plan.

http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_84.htm

I'm surprised to see that no version of the "rough-and-ready"
meaning is in the OED, M-W, or AHD.

--
Jerry Friedman

[John Varela]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2014 16:31:28 UTC, m...@vex.net (Mark Brader) wrote:

> Nick Atty:
> >> There are two, overlapping, meanings of straw man. This one, and the
> >> one I tend to use, which means a rough-and-ready idea exposed with the
> >> intention that people will pull it apart but, in so doing, we'll learn a
> >> lot.
> >>
> >> Discussing what the next computer upgrade should be: "So for a straw-man
> >> argument, why don't we just run the entire business using abacuses?".
>
> Mike Barnes:
> > I've never come across "straw man" used in that positive way.
>
> My first reaction was that I hadn't either, but then I remembered
> the development of Ada (before it was named Ada). Rather than the
> successive drafts of the standard as it evolved being identified by
> dates or numbers, they were successively named Strawman, Woodman,
> Tinman, Ironman, and Steelman. (At least, I think I have those
> right, but I'm doing it from memory. Ironman was the only draft
> that I actually read.)
>
>
> > I'd be more likely to say that I was "playing devil's advocate".
>
> That doesn't sound quite like what Nick said. You play devil's
> advocate if a decision has already been at least tentatively made,
> and you want to make sure that the argument you're about to advance
> against it can be refuted. I take Nick to be talking about an earlier
> stage of such a process.

The term "devil's advocate" comes from the RC Church's process for
canonization.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate

--
John Varela

[John Varela]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2014 08:30:25 UTC, Peter Percival
<peterxp...@hotmail.com> wrote:

> David Howard wrote:
> > In the macintosh newsgroups, someone objected to my use of the word
> > "data" instead of "documents" (where I store all sorts of data, including
> > documents).
> >
> > The said:
> > "So the name is more important than the function..."
> > To which, I replied:
> > "Do you store your tax documents in a folder called 'socks'?"
> > They just now replied back:
> > "No. But that's a straw man."
> >
> > What does 'straw man' mean in this situation?
>
> A straw man is a claim made that can be easily proved or refuted(*), as
> appropriate, thus creating the illusion that the person making the claim
> is winning an argument, whereas, actually, the person being argued
> against has neither denied nor made the claim so it is irrelevant to the
> dispute.

This is the meaning that I'm familiar with. To clarify a little, if
I may: person A advances a straw man argument, which A asserts is a
presentation of B's argument, in which the straw man is easily
refuted. But the straw man is NOT a representation of B's argument.

To the OP: Your opponent has accused you of sophistry. Be insulted.
I am familiar with the news group to which you refer, and with the
arguments you have raised, and frankly, I think you're trolling.

A straw man is a cousin of a red herring.

> Your protagonist readily agrees that they do not store their tax
> documents in a folder called 'socks', but they thinks it irrelevant to
> the matter you and they are arguing about.
>
> (*) By refuted I mean refuted and not just denied.

--

John Varela

[John Varela]

Good example.

--
John Varela

[Steve Hayes]

An analogy whose meaning I only discovered a couple of months ago, after
taking out a book from the library.

Pogue, David. 2006. Windows XP for starters: the missing manual.
Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly.
ISBN: 0-596-01155-4
How to use Windows XP. The sub-title "The
missing manual" is right -- I wish I'd had
this book when I started using Windows XP
about 10 years ago.

I'd always regarded the "desktop" as a kind of graphical menu, and couldn't
see the point of calling it a desktop when it appeared on a screen that sat on
top of my desk (my "desktop" computer actually sits on the floor beside my
desk, and its predecessor sat on a shelf above my desk, but the terminology
makes sense in the contexct of "laptop").

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, October 8, 2014 9:42:52 PM UTC-7, Steve Hayes wrote:

> I'd always regarded the "desktop" as a kind of graphical menu, and couldn't
> see the point of calling it a desktop when it appeared on a screen that sat on
> top of my desk (my "desktop" computer actually sits on the floor beside my
> desk, and its predecessor sat on a shelf above my desk, but the terminology
> makes sense in the contexct of "laptop").

It's a Metty Four. Rather like your bishop referring to sheep and a flock.

And, pardon me, I'm pretty sure that when the Lisa came out, even though I had
little contact with it, that I wasn't confused by the metty four, nor the one
of putting items into folders. And this was despite using different metty
fours during my previous computer experience. I'm sure that I've met (in
person) someone who has told me they were confused by it, but I can't think
of who.

One of the things I thought was neat on the Lisa, that got dropped in the
simplified world of the Mac, and never made it into Windders, was the pad of
paper metty four that was used for new documents. Clicking on the turned down
corner of the paper icon "pulled" off a sheet that became your new document.

We had to wait another 20 years for ebooks to simulate the flip of turning
pages in a physical book.

/dps

[Steve Hayes]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2014 22:27:02 -0700 (PDT), snide...@gmail.com wrote:

>On Wednesday, October 8, 2014 9:42:52 PM UTC-7, Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> I'd always regarded the "desktop" as a kind of graphical menu, and couldn't
>> see the point of calling it a desktop when it appeared on a screen that sat on
>> top of my desk (my "desktop" computer actually sits on the floor beside my
>> desk, and its predecessor sat on a shelf above my desk, but the terminology
>> makes sense in the contexct of "laptop").
>
>It's a Metty Four. Rather like your bishop referring to sheep and a flock.

Well for me it was a misle.

>
>And, pardon me, I'm pretty sure that when the Lisa came out, even though I had
>little contact with it, that I wasn't confused by the metty four, nor the one
>of putting items into folders. And this was despite using different metty
>fours during my previous computer experience. I'm sure that I've met (in
>person) someone who has told me they were confused by it, but I can't think
>of who.

>One of the things I thought was neat on the Lisa, that got dropped in the
>simplified world of the Mac, and never made it into Windders, was the pad of
>paper metty four that was used for new documents. Clicking on the turned down
>corner of the paper icon "pulled" off a sheet that became your new document.
>
>We had to wait another 20 years for ebooks to simulate the flip of turning
>pages in a physical book.

How long will we have to wait for the whip socket to be restored in cars?

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Wednesday, October 8, 2014 2:26:17 AM UTC-4, Dr Nick wrote:
> Tony Cooper <tonyco...@gmail.com> writes:
> > On Wed, 8 Oct 2014 05:04:21 +0000 (UTC), David Howard
> > <dsho...@microsoft.com> wrote:

> >>What does 'straw man' mean in this situation?
> > The person felt you were attempting to divert the argument to some
> > point you could win instead of staying on point with the argument he
> > wanted to pursue.
>
> There are two, overlapping, meanings of straw man. This one, and the
> one I tend to use, which means a rough-and-ready idea exposed with the
> intention that people will pull it apart but, in so doing, we'll learn a
> lot.

That's a "trial balloon." (Not "devil's advocate," because that's someone
arguing whatever position is contrary to the correct or preferred one.)
Also, "Let's run it up the flagpole and see who salutes" (very dated).

[Peter Moylan]

On 09/10/14 16:27, snide...@gmail.com wrote:

> One of the things I thought was neat on the Lisa, that got dropped in the
> simplified world of the Mac, and never made it into Windders, was the pad of
> paper metty four that was used for new documents. Clicking on the turned down
> corner of the paper icon "pulled" off a sheet that became your new document.

OS/2 comes with a folder on your desktop called "Templates"; by default
there are about 60 of them. You can create a new word processor document
by dragging from a document template to somewhere. For a new
spreadsheet, you drag a spreadsheet template. For a new printer, you
drag a printer template to your folder of printers. Likewise for a
colour palette, or a URL object, or a program object, and so on. Power
users can create their own templates.

I've found, though, that I rarely do it that way. An object-oriented
desktop is an interesting concept, but in practice I find that much of
what I want to do is most efficiently done from the command line. I do
often use the "folder" paradigm for simple things like copying or moving
files, but even then I think of the folder as a directory. And I do have
a left-click desktop menu that lists my most-used programs, so to that
extent I am a GUI user, but I dislike models that take me too far from
how the machine actually works.

When Windows first came out I tried it for a while, but then went back
to MS-DOS. When the first Macintoshes appeared I got one, but got rid of
it eventually because it didn't let me work the way I like to work. (I
gather that Macs have matured a lot since then.) What I see happening
with Windows, and with toy computers like iPads, is a steady move
towards having lots of bells and whistles, but fewer and fewer wheels
and gearboxes and motors. As computers have moved into being consumer
devices, they are becoming less convenient for real work.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Steve Hayes skrev:

>>We had to wait another 20 years for ebooks to simulate the flip of turning
>>pages in a physical book.

> How long will we have to wait for the whip socket to be restored in cars?

There's a Metty four you.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[Charles Bishop]

In article <8j9c3ah163k1d1rbp...@4ax.com>,

Was it ever part of a car?

--
charles, but yes, I understood your point

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Thursday, October 9, 2014 3:41:24 AM UTC-4, Peter Moylan wrote:

> As computers have moved into being consumer
> devices, they are becoming less convenient for real work.

What's "real work"?

[Steve Hayes]

On Thu, 09 Oct 2014 18:41:24 +1100, Peter Moylan <pe...@pmoylan.org> wrote:

>On 09/10/14 16:27, snide...@gmail.com wrote:
>
>> One of the things I thought was neat on the Lisa, that got dropped in the
>> simplified world of the Mac, and never made it into Windders, was the pad of
>> paper metty four that was used for new documents. Clicking on the turned down
>> corner of the paper icon "pulled" off a sheet that became your new document.
>
>OS/2 comes with a folder on your desktop called "Templates"; by default
>there are about 60 of them. You can create a new word processor document
>by dragging from a document template to somewhere. For a new
>spreadsheet, you drag a spreadsheet template. For a new printer, you
>drag a printer template to your folder of printers. Likewise for a
>colour palette, or a URL object, or a program object, and so on. Power
>users can create their own templates.

>I've found, though, that I rarely do it that way. An object-oriented
>desktop is an interesting concept, but in practice I find that much of
>what I want to do is most efficiently done from the command line. I do
>often use the "folder" paradigm for simple things like copying or moving
>files, but even then I think of the folder as a directory. And I do have
>a left-click desktop menu that lists my most-used programs, so to that
>extent I am a GUI user, but I dislike models that take me too far from
>how the machine actually works.

Yes, indeed. I find that the analogies with obsolete things makes it harder to
work with computers. When I used MS-DOS I copied files with a thing called
Norton Commander, and now I use a thing called File Commander, with the same
look and feel.

After using Windows XP for ten years I discovered that what I had thought was
"Windows Explorer" was actually something called "My Computer" (whose name I
had long ago changed to "This Computer".

A more appropriate metaphor than "desktop" would be "bottomless well".
Internet web sites often seem to think I want to download things to the
desktop or upload them from the desktop, but it is a bottomless well. It seems
to have no directory, and to exist in no place, until I discovered that it did
have a directory but so masny levels deep that one could never find it. And if
you try to copy something to or from it useing the much-vaunted "drag and
drop" method, you discover that all you have copied is a shortcut to a file
that is down the bottomless well somewhere.

>When Windows first came out I tried it for a while, but then went back
>to MS-DOS. When the first Macintoshes appeared I got one, but got rid of
>it eventually because it didn't let me work the way I like to work. (I
>gather that Macs have matured a lot since then.) What I see happening
>with Windows, and with toy computers like iPads, is a steady move
>towards having lots of bells and whistles, but fewer and fewer wheels
>and gearboxes and motors. As computers have moved into being consumer
>devices, they are becoming less convenient for real work.

Exactly.

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> On Thursday, Peter Moylan wrote:

> > As computers have moved into being consumer
> > devices, they are becoming less convenient for real work.
>
> What's "real work"?

I'm not sure.

I do a bunch of different things with a bunch of different computers,
some of it for pay,
but none of it would be published in a journal.

/dps "your post has a clue that you may be home again"

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, October 9, 2014 12:54:50 PM UTC-7, Steve Hayes wrote:

> A more appropriate metaphor than "desktop" would be "bottomless well".

I'm sorry. It's never been that for me. I started with OS/8 on a box the size
of commercial refrigerator, and connected to an Teletype ASR-33 (Teletype was a brand, owned by ITT I think), and only briefly worked on an IBM 1130 that got
fed keypunchings, so maybe I don't go back far enough to sympathize with your
paradigm change.

(My contact with CP/M was limited, mainly as demo'ed by a class mate who was already getting big bucks for his programs at about age 20. When I started
working on development systems, Intel provided something called ISIS-II
(no relation to a group in the Middle East)
that was somewhat derivative of Gary Kildall's work; he might even have
contracted for some of it. They also had a user shell on iRMX-86 that was influenced by GK, by TOPS-20, and by BSD's C-Shell.)

> Internet web sites often seem to think I want to download things to the
> desktop or upload them from the desktop, but it is a bottomless well. It seems
> to have no directory, and to exist in no place, until I discovered that it did
> have a directory but so masny levels deep that one could never find it. And if
> you try to copy something to or from it useing the much-vaunted "drag and
> drop" method,

From should work perfectly in moving a desktop item to a folder. So should
clicking on an icon and using the keyboard shortcuts ^C or ^X.

And for the last several versions of Windows, "dir /users/<username>/Desktop"
has worked pretty well for me.

> you discover that all you have copied is a shortcut to a file
> that is down the bottomless well somewhere.

In my experience, a document will be copied in corpus unless you specifically
ask for a shortcut (right-click to get a context menu), but an executable will
default to copying a shortcut. YMMV, I guess.

/dps

[Adam Funk]

On 2014-10-09, Steve Hayes wrote:

> On Thu, 09 Oct 2014 18:41:24 +1100, Peter Moylan <pe...@pmoylan.org> wrote:

>>I've found, though, that I rarely do it that way. An object-oriented
>>desktop is an interesting concept, but in practice I find that much of
>>what I want to do is most efficiently done from the command line. I do
>>often use the "folder" paradigm for simple things like copying or moving
>>files, but even then I think of the folder as a directory. And I do have
>>a left-click desktop menu that lists my most-used programs, so to that
>>extent I am a GUI user, but I dislike models that take me too far from
>>how the machine actually works.
>
> Yes, indeed. I find that the analogies with obsolete things makes it harder to
> work with computers.

"The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don't
make sense anymore"

<http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx>

Maybe I'm a (slightly) premature old fart, but spanners, clipboards, &
folders make perfect sense to me. Never mind the radio buttons, I
remember 8-tracks!


--
The three-martini lunch is the epitome of American efficiency.
Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful and a snootful at
the same time? [Gerald Ford, 1978]

[Adam Funk]

On 2014-10-09, Peter Moylan wrote:

> I've found, though, that I rarely do it that way. An object-oriented
> desktop is an interesting concept, but in practice I find that much of
> what I want to do is most efficiently done from the command line.

+1 right there, dude

(The sig below was ironically & automatically generated.)


--
I have a natural revulsion to any operating system that shows so
little planning as to have to named all of its commands after
digestive noises (awk, grep, fsck, nroff).
[The UNIX-HATERS Handbook]

[Tony Cooper]

On Thu, 09 Oct 2014 21:11:41 +0100, Adam Funk <a24...@ducksburg.com>
wrote:

>On 2014-10-09, Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 09 Oct 2014 18:41:24 +1100, Peter Moylan <pe...@pmoylan.org> wrote:
>
>>>I've found, though, that I rarely do it that way. An object-oriented
>>>desktop is an interesting concept, but in practice I find that much of
>>>what I want to do is most efficiently done from the command line. I do
>>>often use the "folder" paradigm for simple things like copying or moving
>>>files, but even then I think of the folder as a directory. And I do have
>>>a left-click desktop menu that lists my most-used programs, so to that
>>>extent I am a GUI user, but I dislike models that take me too far from
>>>how the machine actually works.
>>
>> Yes, indeed. I find that the analogies with obsolete things makes it harder to
>> work with computers.
>
>"The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that don't
>make sense anymore"
>
><http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx>
>
>Maybe I'm a (slightly) premature old fart, but spanners, clipboards, &
>folders make perfect sense to me. Never mind the radio buttons, I
>remember 8-tracks!

Quit modern, those 8-track players. Music was played on wire or tape
machines in my day.

--
Tony Cooper - Orlando FL

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

snide...@gmail.com skrev:

> In my experience, a document will be copied in corpus unless
> you specifically ask for a shortcut (right-click to get a
> context menu), but an executable will default to copying a
> shortcut. YMMV, I guess.

I can never remember what does what, so I always right-click and
choose from the menu.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Adam Funk skrev:

> "The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that
> don't make sense anymore"

> <http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx>

> Maybe I'm a (slightly) premature old fart, but spanners,
> clipboards, & folders make perfect sense to me. Never mind
> the radio buttons, I remember 8-tracks!

I had a period when I began with Windows where I had a problem
with the folder concept and icon. I was used to call it a dir.

But I see no problem in the fact that outdated concepts lie
behind the icons. The only thing that matters, is that they are
used consistently.

Apart from that I also remember radio buttons. I made a sport out
of having several pressed simultaneously. At one time I did it
with a friends radio, and contrary to every previous experiment,
pressing one of them afterwards did not make them pop out again.
It was most embarrasing.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[David Kleinecke]

Loaded question.

Assuming we limit it to interactive computing I think the list
is rather short if we form it at the level of

1. Entering and editing content
2. Developing programs

But the one everyone is fixated on today is

3. Browsing content

TV and the internet are due to merge any moment now and
that will intensify 3.

I think that Skype, for instance, is a combination of 1
and 3. I think 2 is almost forgotten.

I admit that I do not know what programmers who work for
big corporations are actually programming these days.

[Peter Moylan]

I don't know what they're doing in the big corporations, but I can tell
you what the software people in engineering firms are doing.

The big growth area is in embedded processors. Powerful processors are
now small enough and cheap enough that they become just one more
component on a printed circuit board, and go into products that you
might never guess had a computer inside. The processors vary from fairly
simple (the sort of thing they used to put inside calculators) to so
powerful that they leave an IBM-PC behind in the dust.

As an example, a project I was working on a couple of years ago was to
build a smarter circuit breaker. A circuit breaker is just a thing to
remove the power from an electrical circuit when a dangerous condition
is detected. Years ago they were all electro-mechanical. They probably
still are inside your house, but the serious industrial ones have a
processor inside them. The trigger for my project was the fact that
modern variable-speed drives -- those huge motors used for things like
longwall mining -- inject a lot of high-frequency noise into the power
supply, so we wanted to look at a wide spectrum rather than just the
50Hz or 60Hz fundamental frequency. The final product samples a bunch of
input signals at about 20,000 samples/second, and then does Fourier
transforms on the incoming data, as well as a lot of other calculations.
The "trip" decision has to be made within about 10-20 milliseconds from
the occurrence of the fault, so those calculations have to be *fast*. It
possibly couldn't have been done ten years ago, but now there are
processors that are powerful enough.

The final box, by the way, is very much smaller than the typical desktop
PC. The thing that gives you a clue that there's a computer inside is
the small graphics display rather than the traditional one or two LEDs.

A project like that takes a lot of software development and testing.
That's what software engineers are doing these days.

Of course there's also work in the electronics design and even the
mechanical design (the box has to be flameproof), so such projects are
done by a team of people rather than a single developer.

That was just one example, but if you search around you'll find embedded
applications all over the place.

[Steve Hayes]

Yes, the "desktop" is easier to find in Windows 7, but I've got so used to
using it as a menu without a directory associated with it that the only things
I ever put there are shortcuts to the programs I use most frequently. For me,
the menu analogy works better than the desktop one, perhaps because that's the
way I got used to doing things in MS DOS.

I would have things like

1. Word Processor

2. Spreadsheet

3. Family History

3, for example, would call 3.BAT, which changed to the family history
directory and display another menu, thus:

F A M I L Y H I S T O R Y

1 Letters: XYWRITE
2 Text files: WORDSTAR
3 Text files: WORDPERFECT
4 Archives indexes - Paradox
5 Family History Program
6 Family Edge
7 Personal Ancestral File
8 Addresses - family & friends
9 GED - Genealogical Event Database

Press: <Alt-F7> for help
<Alt-F9> to return to Main Menu

And pressing 1 would then invoce another 1.BAT, as follows:

@ECHO OFF
CLS
FU LOG d:\textfile\log\usage.log Beginning to write family letters now
d:
cd \textfiles\letters\family
EDITOR
C:
FU LOG d:\textfile\log\usage.log Leaving family letters now
diskmap d:
c:
cd \family
cls
type menu.mnu

and 2.BAT was

@ECHO OFF
CLS
c:
cd \ws
WS
c:
cd \family
menu

and so on.

It all seemed very simple to me, and I found the "desktop" analogy difficult
to grasp (because of the lack of documentation for windows it was never
adequately explained), and it didn't really fit in with my way of working
anyway.

People who were new to computers and whose first experience of computers was
Windows might find it easier, but, like Peter Moylan, I find it easier to work
from the command line, and one of the first things I do when I get a new
computer is hunt for where they've hidden the command line and put a shortcut
to it on the "desktop", which then performs the same function as my batch
files.

[Peter Moylan]

On 10/10/14 15:13, Steve Hayes wrote:
> Yes, the "desktop" is easier to find in Windows 7, but I've got so used to
> using it as a menu without a directory associated with it that the only things
> I ever put there are shortcuts to the programs I use most frequently. For me,
> the menu analogy works better than the desktop one, perhaps because that's the
> way I got used to doing things in MS DOS.
>
> I would have things like
>
> 1. Word Processor
>
> 2. Spreadsheet
>
> 3. Family History

I do something similar, although in my case I have a customised menu
that pops up when I click on a blank space in the desktop. It looks like
this:

ftp://pmoylan.org/misc/Captured.png

I also have a bar (not shown in that picture) that pops up when I move
the cursor to the top edge of the screen, and it too has shortcuts for
the _very_ commonly used things.

One catch with having a configurable menu is that I never get around to
removing obsolete entries. Notice all the references to zip drives; I
needed a quick way to do those operations once, but now I no longer have
a zip drive. Tidying up the menus has a low priority.

My actual desktop is rather cluttered, as are the two wooden desks in my
study. I have a tendency to leave notes to myself all over the desktop,
and those too are tidied up too rarely.

On my laptop computer, which runs Windows 8.1, getting access to the
programs and documents I need is slower, so there I usually have lots of
open windows. I almost never log out, because logging in is very slow
when the internet is slow. I have not yet figured out how to run that
computer as a private machine, with no access to the cloud or the
Microsoft Apps store and so on. I keep documents off the cloud, because
I have no interest in having then browsed by US spy agencies, but
Microsoft still requires me to keep my login password on its system
rather than mine.

[Adam Funk]

On 2014-10-09, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:

> Adam Funk skrev:
>
>> "The Floppy Disk means Save, and 14 other old people Icons that
>> don't make sense anymore"
>
>> <http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheFloppyDiskMeansSaveAnd14OtherOldPeopleIconsThatDontMakeSenseAnymore.aspx>
>
>> Maybe I'm a (slightly) premature old fart, but spanners,
>> clipboards, & folders make perfect sense to me. Never mind
>> the radio buttons, I remember 8-tracks!
>
> I had a period when I began with Windows where I had a problem
> with the folder concept and icon. I was used to call it a dir.
>
> But I see no problem in the fact that outdated concepts lie
> behind the icons. The only thing that matters, is that they are
> used consistently.

True.

> Apart from that I also remember radio buttons. I made a sport out
> of having several pressed simultaneously. At one time I did it
> with a friends radio, and contrary to every previous experiment,
> pressing one of them afterwards did not make them pop out again.
> It was most embarrasing.

You can't do that with the "modern" kind of radio buttons.
;-)


--
Disagreeing with Donald Rumsfeld about bombing anybody who gets in our
way is not a crime in this country. It is a wise and honorable idea
that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin risked their lives for.
--- Hunter S Thompson

[Steve Hayes]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2014 17:45:52 +1100, Peter Moylan <pe...@pmoylan.org> wrote:

>On 10/10/14 15:13, Steve Hayes wrote:
>> Yes, the "desktop" is easier to find in Windows 7, but I've got so used to
>> using it as a menu without a directory associated with it that the only things
>> I ever put there are shortcuts to the programs I use most frequently. For me,
>> the menu analogy works better than the desktop one, perhaps because that's the
>> way I got used to doing things in MS DOS.
>>
>> I would have things like
>>
>> 1. Word Processor
>>
>> 2. Spreadsheet
>>
>> 3. Family History
>
>I do something similar, although in my case I have a customised menu
>that pops up when I click on a blank space in the desktop. It looks like
>this:
>
> ftp://pmoylan.org/misc/Captured.png

Looks useful.

>I also have a bar (not shown in that picture) that pops up when I move
>the cursor to the top edge of the screen, and it too has shortcuts for
>the _very_ commonly used things.
>
>One catch with having a configurable menu is that I never get around to
>removing obsolete entries. Notice all the references to zip drives; I
>needed a quick way to do those operations once, but now I no longer have
>a zip drive. Tidying up the menus has a low priority.

Quite, same with mine, and for all those DOS word processors I now have a
couple of desktop icons to call them.

The XyWrite one worked well because it had a STARTUP.INT file which gave it
initial settings -- fonts, line lengths, similar to an MS Word template. It
would load whichever STARTUP.INT file it found in the directory you called it
from, and so if I had a directory for letters, the STARTUP.INT file came up
with a letterhead with date, and all I had to do was enter the dalutation and
the text of the letter.

That no longer works, however, since Windows won't print from DOS files, and
to print I have to convert/save the file as RTF and import into MS Word.

>My actual desktop is rather cluttered, as are the two wooden desks in my
>study. I have a tendency to leave notes to myself all over the desktop,
>and those too are tidied up too rarely.

A man after my own heart.

Wjen I was first shown a Mac Lisa I told the salesman it wouldn't work for me
because there was no room on my desktop for a mouse.

>On my laptop computer, which runs Windows 8.1, getting access to the
>programs and documents I need is slower, so there I usually have lots of
>open windows. I almost never log out, because logging in is very slow
>when the internet is slow. I have not yet figured out how to run that
>computer as a private machine, with no access to the cloud or the
>Microsoft Apps store and so on. I keep documents off the cloud, because
>I have no interest in having then browsed by US spy agencies, but
>Microsoft still requires me to keep my login password on its system
>rather than mine.

And what happens if your internet link is broken, or if, as one sometimes does
with a laptop, one travels to a place where there is none?

My wife has a Windows 8 machine, and I don't recall her being unable to use it
when the Internet is down.

[Peter Moylan]

I haven't yet worked out how this works. Logically, it should fall back
to local working when the internet is down, so I suppose it does. My
internet fails only intermittently, as the rainwater soaks into the
cables in the street.

Windows has a game called Spider Solitaire, and I have the habit of
playing it while waiting for a slow operation to complete. (Which
happens far too often.) I'll have to try to track down the XP version,
though, because with Windows 8.1 it is the Solitaire that takes forever
to start up. (And it gets slower the longer you run it. Microsoft never
really got the hang of multitasking.) Every so often when I'm running I
see a popup "Connection lost to XBox". That's really annoying. I didn't
want a connection to anyone's XBox in the first place. The local version
of the game has been working since many versions of Windows ago, so why
is it suddenly necessary to use a networked version?

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Steve Hayes skrev:

> The XyWrite one worked well because it had a STARTUP.INT file
> which gave it initial settings -- fonts, line lengths, similar
> to an MS Word template. It would load whichever STARTUP.INT
> file it found in the directory you called it from, and so if I
> had a directory for letters, the STARTUP.INT file came up with
> a letterhead with date, and all I had to do was enter the
> dalutation and the text of the letter.

> That no longer works, however, since Windows won't print from
> DOS files, and to print I have to convert/save the file as RTF
> and import into MS Word.

Why? You can enter raw textfiles into e.g. EditpadLite. It has a
nice GUI where you can se the result before actually printing.

http://www.editpadlite.com/

--
Bertel, Denmark

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Lewis skrev:

> I am always surprised at the number o Windows users I see with
> more than 50 icons on their desktop, and it is not infrequent
> to see the entire desktop filled with icons.

I think it has to do with the 'feature' that that is where
Windows places them by default.

> When I see this sort of "organization" on a Mac, it is invariably
> someone who switched from Windows. There's someone about Microsoft
> Windows that makes people feel like apps and documents are difficult to
> find. The only thing that I can think of is that Windows hides the hard
> drive while the Mac has always put the hard drive right at the top of
> the right side, where it is least likely to be obscured.

Until Windows 7 The hard drive(s) was no more than 1 click away.
"This computer" was put at the top left corner of the desktop.
After 7 you have to change the setup to get the old icons back on
the desktop.

I have 35 icons on my desktop - well organized. The most
frequently used programs have an icon on the task bar because it
is always visible. There are 23. They are not placed in the
ordinary bar, but in a specific folder set up for that purpose
and made visible as a task bar. This has the advantage that it is
unchanged by operations on the C-drive.

I have easy acces to a command box, but once the system is
properly set up, I rarely use it. My 'command lines' tend to be
bat-files.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, October 9, 2014, Steve Hayes wrote:

> People who were new to computers and whose first experience of computers was
> Windows might find it easier,

That clearly excludes me, but I find it easy enough to switch back and forth.

> but, like Peter Moylan, I find it easier to work
> from the command line, and one of the first things I do when I get a new
> computer is hunt for where they've hidden the command line and put a shortcut
> to it on the "desktop", which then performs the same function as my batch
> files.

Start button, search button, "cmd". Works on 2K, XP, W7, W8.1, Server 2K8, and
Serve 2K12. On W8 there's no Start button, but you can use the Search Charm.

I do have a bunch of icons on the Desktop, just like I have folders and
penholders on the surface of the physical furniture I sit at. Oh, and a little
windup widget my daughter gave me, and coasters for my mugs.

And while I have a bunch of batch files around (as well as bash files), almost
none of them implement a "text menu" ... if I'm working from the command line,
then it's all about the arguments, man. All about the arguments.

/dps "or parameters. Parameters are good."

[Wayne Brown]

On Wed, 08 Oct 2014 19:40:28 in article <51W5y0sPNk52-pn2-eRFdqPvFZ8xE@localhost> John Varela <newl...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Oct 2014 10:09:41 UTC, Bertel Lund Hansen
> <kanon...@lundhansen.dk> wrote:
>
>> David Howard skrev:

>>
>> > What does 'straw man' mean in this situation?
>>

>> Maybe a simple example will make it clear:
>>
>> Politician 1:
>> I think that taxes ought to be raised so we can bring down our
>> country's debts faster.
>>
>> Politician 2:
>> So you would be happy paying 90 % of your income as tax?
>>
>> The purpose of a strawman is to make the opponent look
>> ridiculous, and it is done by pretending that he has put forward
>> a ridiculous statement which he hasn't. However, the negatvie
>> impression may be the one that sticks in people's mind.
>> Politicians do this all the time.
>
> Good example.

Here's another example, from "The Screwtape Letters" by C.S. Lewis.
(Screwtape is a demon who is giving another demon advice on how to tempt
his human "patient" and advocates the use of a strawman argument to hide
his own existence from the patient.)

"I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient
in the dark. The fact that "devils" are predominantly comic figures
in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of
your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture
of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot
believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them)
he therefore cannot believe in you."

--
F. Wayne Brown <fwb...@bellsouth.net>

Þæs ofereode, ðisses swa mæg. ("That passed away, this also can.")
from "Deor," in the Exeter Book (folios 100r-100v)

[Mike L]

On Wed, 8 Oct 2014 22:27:02 -0700 (PDT), snide...@gmail.com wrote:

>On Wednesday, October 8, 2014 9:42:52 PM UTC-7, Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> I'd always regarded the "desktop" as a kind of graphical menu, and couldn't
>> see the point of calling it a desktop when it appeared on a screen that sat on
>> top of my desk (my "desktop" computer actually sits on the floor beside my
>> desk, and its predecessor sat on a shelf above my desk, but the terminology
>> makes sense in the contexct of "laptop").
>
>It's a Metty Four. Rather like your bishop referring to sheep and a flock.
>

>And, pardon me, I'm pretty sure that when the Lisa came out, even though I had
>little contact with it, that I wasn't confused by the metty four, nor the one
>of putting items into folders. And this was despite using different metty
>fours during my previous computer experience. I'm sure that I've met (in
>person) someone who has told me they were confused by it, but I can't think
>of who.
>

>One of the things I thought was neat on the Lisa, that got dropped in the
>simplified world of the Mac, and never made it into Windders, was the pad of
>paper metty four that was used for new documents. Clicking on the turned down
>corner of the paper icon "pulled" off a sheet that became your new document.
>

>We had to wait another 20 years for ebooks to simulate the flip of turning
>pages in a physical book.
>

Oh, please no page curls on websites! That was daft.

--
Mike.

[David Kleinecke]

On Thursday, October 9, 2014 7:55:19 PM UTC-7, Peter Moylan wrote:
> On 10/10/14 11:10, David Kleinecke wrote:
>
> > I admit that I do not know what programmers who work for
> > big corporations are actually programming these days.
>
> I don't know what they're doing in the big corporations, but I can tell
> you what the software people in engineering firms are doing.
>

> The big growth area is in embedded processors. ...

That is what I assumed and I understand it (and listed
it as #2). But everybody talks corporate computing as the
money-maker and I know the big corporations hire
programmers. I just can't figure out what they hire them
to do.

Perhaps it's all what we used to call maintenance - changing
web pages, designing forms, etc. - not REAL work which is
happening in the embedded field.

Or is database management so hard only programmers can do it?

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Friday, October 10, 2014, David Kleinecke wrote:

> On Thursday, October 9, 2014, Peter Moylan wrote:
> > On 10/10/14 11:10, David Kleinecke wrote:

> > > I admit that I do not know what programmers who work for
> > > big corporations are actually programming these days.
> >
> > I don't know what they're doing in the big corporations, but I can tell
> > you what the software people in engineering firms are doing.
> >
> > The big growth area is in embedded processors. ...

Well, that's /one/ of the big growth areas. Large-scale data mining
is another one, and doing big numerical processing is still popular
for weather, aerodynamics, nuclear bombs (stockpile testing is being
done virtually, these days), sucking data from the LHC
(the number of computers it takes to prepare a dataset for analysis
is massive, let alone doing the actual analysis),
drug design, genome/proteome cataloging, protein folding,
synapse modeling, and choosing the color of paint for your walls.

> That is what I assumed and I understand it (and listed
> it as #2). But everybody talks corporate computing as the
> money-maker and I know the big corporations hire
> programmers. I just can't figure out what they hire them
> to do.

Pretty much the same thing small corporations hire programmers to do,
although some of the context changes. Content distribution,
putting data in front the person on the phone bank,
verifying banking transactions, processing text, processing video,
writing task-specific applications, integrating task-specific applications
into corporate frameworks, calculating football pools,
scheduling deliveries, scheduling service calls,
writing tests to verify that the service call fixed the problem,
integrating BYOD into the secure data environment of the company,
writing tests to limit personal tweets by the CTO on the corporate Twitter account, etc.

> Perhaps it's all what we used to call maintenance - changing
> web pages, designing forms, etc. - not REAL work which is
> happening in the embedded field.

There's that, too, but remember what web sites looked like in 1992? in 2002?
Someone has to rip out all those multi-colored fonts and replace them
with the ones Steve Jobs selected.

>
> Or is database management so hard only programmers can do it?

Management,yes. Queries? That's what you use your smartphone for.

/dps

[Steve Hayes]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2014 21:26:50 +1100, Peter Moylan <pe...@pmoylan.org> wrote:

>Windows has a game called Spider Solitaire, and I have the habit of
>playing it while waiting for a slow operation to complete. (Which
>happens far too often.) I'll have to try to track down the XP version,
>though, because with Windows 8.1 it is the Solitaire that takes forever
>to start up. (And it gets slower the longer you run it. Microsoft never
>really got the hang of multitasking.) Every so often when I'm running I
>see a popup "Connection lost to XBox". That's really annoying. I didn't
>want a connection to anyone's XBox in the first place. The local version
>of the game has been working since many versions of Windows ago, so why
>is it suddenly necessary to use a networked version?

U'd never played games on my Windows 7 laptop when I bought in 3 years ago,
and rthen a few weeks ago I decided to try to play the Solitaire game my wife
plays. It sdaid my games needed to be updated and so after waiting for them to
be updated, there was no Solitaire there, just a bunch of different games that
didn't look at all interesting, so I removed them,

[Steve Hayes]

I can enter raw textfiles into RoughDraft with the same effect, but if I tried
to print XyWrite files from it, it would show all the formatting commands as
text.

[Steve Hayes]

On Fri, 10 Oct 2014 22:57:16 +0000 (UTC), Lewis
<g.k...@gmail.com.dontsendmecopies> wrote:

>Okay, so one time? In band camp? Bertel Lund Hansen <kanon...@lundhansen.dk> was all, like:

>> I have 35 icons on my desktop - well organized. The most
>> frequently used programs have an icon on the task bar because it
>> is always visible. There are 23. They are not placed in the
>> ordinary bar, but in a specific folder set up for that purpose
>> and made visible as a task bar. This has the advantage that it is
>> unchanged by operations on the C-drive.
>
>> I have easy acces to a command box, but once the system is
>> properly set up, I rarely use it. My 'command lines' tend to be
>> bat-files.
>

>Have you never seen someone with dozens and dozens of icons on the
>desktop? For example, today I was at a client's office and his desktop
>(a 1920x1080 screen) was covered in icons, mostly sort of piled in
>various clusters around the screen.
>
>I look at my Mac and I have between 0 and 40 icons lined up on the right
>side (I use the desktop for temporary items). I have many ways to get to
>documents or applications very quickly (mostly Launchbar).
>
>I don't understand the messy desktop that seems so common to Windows
>users. I understand the cluttered desktop that my computer is ON, that's
>entirely different.

I have 103 icons on my Windows desktop, and another 50 in a bar across the top
of the screen -- a useful gadget that came with MS Office 97, which lets me
have my most often-used programs available at one click.

I never use the WinDesktop for temporary items, because of the difficulty in
finding them again. I usually put temporary items on a rewritable DVD. Then
they are always at H:\ instead of at the bottom of a well whose bottom I
cannot see.

[Steve Hayes]

And why would one want them on an e-book anyway?

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Lewis skrev:

>> I think it has to do with the 'feature' that that is where
>> Windows places them by default.

> I thought Windows at least defaulted Documents to the Document folder.

It does, but lots of other things are just dumped on the desktop.

> You had to open up this computer and THEN open up the hard drive.

Yes, okay.

> And many of the folders there were folders you couldn't use.
> Your own data was hidden down in some rat maze path.

Only on the C-drive which I rarely open. But many Windows-users
have nothing else.

> Have you never seen someone with dozens and dozens of icons on the
> desktop? For example, today I was at a client's office and his desktop
> (a 1920x1080 screen) was covered in icons, mostly sort of piled in
> various clusters around the screen.

Oh yes, and many of them have them automatically placed
sequentially with no logic at all.

> I don't understand the messy desktop that seems so common to
> Windows users. I understand the cluttered desktop that my
> computer is ON, that's entirely different.

I understand it, and I tried to explain it. That is the default
behaviour, and many people do not know that it can be different.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Steve Hayes skrev:

> I have 103 icons on my Windows desktop, and another 50 in a bar
> across the top of the screen -- a useful gadget that came with
> MS Office 97, which lets me have my most often-used programs
> available at one click.

How is that different from the taskbar (which can be placed at
the top)?

--
Bertel, Denmark

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Mike L skrev:

> Oh, please no page curls on websites! That was daft.

No page curls anywhere, please.

I had hoped that wrinkled corners would disappear together with
the electronic books, but damn if some fools haven't programmed
them right back again - together with a delay when turning the
page.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Bertel Lund Hansen skrev:

> I had hoped that wrinkled corners would disappear together with
> the electronic books

Not quite what I meant. The wrinkles would disappear because we
got electronic books.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Thursday, October 9, 2014 3:57:03 PM UTC-4, snide...@gmail.com wrote:
> On Thursday, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

> > On Thursday, Peter Moylan wrote:

> > > As computers have moved into being consumer
> > > devices, they are becoming less convenient for real work.
> > What's "real work"?
>

> I'm not sure.
> I do a bunch of different things with a bunch of different computers,
> some of it for pay,
> but none of it would be published in a journal.
>
> /dps "your post has a clue that you may be home again"

Nope, not till Friday night, when I didn't come here at all.

[Peter T. Daniels]

Just about every academic in the world does (1). It _is_ our work.
It's (2) that is properly the province of a very few professionals
who are supposed to be making things that are either useful for (1),
(3) is because people don't have hobbies or pastimes any more.

Those corporate employees are probably making games. Apparently very
profitable.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Friday, October 10, 2014 2:45:52 AM UTC-4, Peter Moylan wrote:

> On my laptop computer, which runs Windows 8.1, getting access to the
> programs and documents I need is slower, so there I usually have lots of
> open windows. I almost never log out, because logging in is very slow
> when the internet is slow. I have not yet figured out how to run that
> computer as a private machine, with no access to the cloud or the
> Microsoft Apps store and so on. I keep documents off the cloud, because
> I have no interest in having then browsed by US spy agencies, but
> Microsoft still requires me to keep my login password on its system
> rather than mine.

Unless "log on" has some sort of arcane meaning here, what does internet
have to do with turning on a Windows 8.1 computer? I'm not yet using it,
because I don't particularly want to buy a new copy of Office, but I've
been using it to print documents from, and it works just fine when there's
no connection.

Nor do I see the Windows 8 opening screen with the multicolord squares
that apparently do things.

[Peter T. Daniels]

On Friday, October 10, 2014 9:32:26 AM UTC-4, Lewis wrote:

> I am always surprised at the number o Windows users I see with more than
> 50 icons on their desktop, and it is not infrequent to see the entire
> desktop filled with icons.

> When I see this sort of "organization" on a Mac, it is invariably
> someone who switched from Windows. There's someone about Microsoft
> Windows that makes people feel like apps and documents are difficult t

> find. The only thing that I can think of is that Windows hides the hard
> drive while the Mac has always put the hard drive right at the top of
> the right side, where it is least likely to be obscured.

They're there because programs put them there when they install themselves.
I for one _use_ desktop icons only for things like Barmes & Noble coupons
that I print to pdf. It's much easier to open either existing documents
or programs from the Start menu, and given the outcry when they took away
the Start menu in Windows 8, I suspect lots of users do it that way.

[David Kleinecke]

On Friday, October 10, 2014 5:39:29 PM UTC-7, snide...@gmail.com wrote:
>
> Pretty much the same thing small corporations hire programmers to do,
> although some of the context changes.

1 Content distribution,
2 putting data in front the person on the phone bank,
3 verifying banking transactions,
4 processing text,
5 processing video,
6 writing task-specific applications,
7 integrating task-specific applications into corporate frameworks,
8 calculating football pools,
9 scheduling deliveries, scheduling service calls,
10 writing tests to verify that the service call fixed the problem,
11 integrating BYOD into the secure data environment of the company,
12 writing tests to limit personal tweets by the CTO on the corporate Twitter account,
13 etc.

This is mostly a list of things that are done by computers.
6, 7, 10, 12 and probably 11 are human tasks, but writing
tests is looked down on by most programmers. I don't know
enough about BYOD problems to comment on that.

The problem with
6 writing task-specific applications,
7 integrating task-specific applications into corporate frameworks,
is: What task-specific tasks are they being asked to
handle? Why are they more then a are event?

And ..

I indeed did overlook scientific programming which should
be on my list as #4. I wonder what the relative amounts of
money spent on scientific PROGRAMMING as opposed to embedded
programming is.

I think the amount of money spent annually on running
embedded code is beyond estimation.

[Steve Hayes]

It doesn't squiggle up and hide its icons, and the moment you click on the
unhide thingy and try to move to one of the previously hidden ones, it hides
them again before you can click on it.

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, October 11, 2014 4:18:21 PM UTC-7, David Kleinecke wrote:

> but writing
> tests is looked down on by most programmers.

only the ones with an ego problem.

Java and Python are languages where the culture highly favors writing tests,
and both provide frameworks for writing unit tests.
The Mercurial project will often reject contributions that only update
core code and don't update test code.

> The problem with
> 6 writing task-specific applications,
> 7 integrating task-specific applications into corporate frameworks,
> is: What task-specific tasks are they being asked to
> handle? Why are they more then a are event?

(s/b "than", no?)

"Business logic". Lot's of processes relating to business activities
have a significant degree of customization for a particular business.

/dps

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Saturday, October 11, 2014 4:18:21 PM UTC-7, David Kleinecke wrote:

> This is mostly a list of things that are done by computers.

In ways that are customized for a particular business.

/dps

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Steve Hayes skrev:

>>How is that different from the taskbar (which can be placed at
>>the top)?

> It doesn't squiggle up and hide its icons, and the moment you
> click on the unhide thingy and try to move to one of the
> previously hidden ones, it hides them again before you can
> click on it.

I have never seen that behaviour from my taskbar. I have tried
all Windows versions until and including Windows 7.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[David Kleinecke]

In my day we would call that maintenance (and not consider it
real programming).

I spend a lot of my working days doing what I called
Computerization - bringing in computers to do tasks not done
before by computers. By the time I stopped we had more or
less computerized everything. And some of the early
computerizations desperately needed re-implementation. But there
was massive resistance to re-implementation - management would
insist on maintenance instead.

That was a long time ago. I am curious how the story has
evolved. Is there any literature on the life of a programmer
in a big corporation? Even a novel.

[Jack Campin]

> I spend a lot of my working days doing what I called
> Computerization - bringing in computers to do tasks not done
> before by computers. By the time I stopped we had more or
> less computerized everything. And some of the early
> computerizations desperately needed re-implementation. But there
> was massive resistance to re-implementation - management would
> insist on maintenance instead.
> That was a long time ago. I am curious how the story has
> evolved. Is there any literature on the life of a programmer
> in a big corporation? Even a novel.

You might try looking through back issues of "Processed World"
magazine. (Dilbert with more politics and less jokes). I don't
recall them doing programmers but I haven't looked at it for a
very long time.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
e m a i l : j a c k @ c a m p i n . m e . u k
Jack Campin, 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
mobile 07800 739 557 <http://www.campin.me.uk> Twitter: JackCampin

[David Kleinecke]

On Sunday, October 12, 2014 5:32:16 PM UTC-7, Jack Campin wrote:
> > I spend a lot of my working days doing what I called
>
> > Computerization - bringing in computers to do tasks not done
>
> > before by computers. By the time I stopped we had more or
>
> > less computerized everything. And some of the early
>
> > computerizations desperately needed re-implementation. But there
>
> > was massive resistance to re-implementation - management would
>
> > insist on maintenance instead.
>
> > That was a long time ago. I am curious how the story has
>
> > evolved. Is there any literature on the life of a programmer
>
> > in a big corporation? Even a novel.
>
>
>
> You might try looking through back issues of "Processed World"
>
> magazine. (Dilbert with more politics and less jokes). I don't
>
> recall them doing programmers but I haven't looked at it for a
>
> very long time.

Processed World Magazine is in the process of stopping. Their
last issue (online) has an article
processedworld.com/Issues/issue2005/bleedingedge.html
about life as a programmer in business - small business -
with only one mention of life in big business.

The author is a DBA and most of the article is more-or-less
standard bitching about working conditions (you might call it
dilberting).

The one mention of the people in bigger business is that they
like to put MSCE after their names (a sneer I hope everybody
recognizes).

I don't want to imply that being a DBA is sub-professional but
I don't think of it as a real programming job.

[Steve Hayes]

My taksbar also has a Bluetooth icon that doesn't appear on my Windows
desktop, and a few others that don't as well.

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, October 12, 2014 6:08:59 PM UTC-7, David Kleinecke wrote:

> I don't want to imply that being a DBA is sub-professional but
> I don't think of it as a real programming job.

Right. It's a mathematics job to do database normalization.

/dps

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, October 12, 2014, Steve Hayes wrote:

> My taksbar also has a Bluetooth icon that doesn't appear on my Windows
> desktop, and a few others that don't as well.

It's normal for the systray portion of the Taskbar to have status icons, for checking network (or Bluetooth) status, and getting to the Remove Devices helper.
Although on this machine, I usually have enough open activities that the status icons are hidden behind a little caret-like up-tick arrow.

/dps

[snide...@gmail.com]

On Sunday, October 12, 2014 5:19:02 PM UTC-7, David Kleinecke wrote:
> On Sunday, October 12, 2014 3:17:14 PM UTC-7, snide...@gmail.com wrote:

> > In ways that are customized for a particular business.
>
> In my day we would call that maintenance (and not consider it
> real programming).

That depends on the scale of the work. If you're just installing installing
Sharepoint, that's localization. If you're hacking at a plug-in for Sharepoint,
that's maintenance. If' you're developing a plug-in to allow Sharepoint
to provide a service unique to your business, that's development.

> I spend a lot of my working days doing what I called
> Computerization - bringing in computers to do tasks not done
> before by computers. By the time I stopped we had more or
> less computerized everything.

What "everything" encompasses changes with time.

> And some of the early
> computerizations desperately needed re-implementation. But there
> was massive resistance to re-implementation - management would
> insist on maintenance instead.

Some management is still like that, and it was a factor in the Y2K excitement.

But there are also managements that understand that the cost of maintenance can
exceed the cost of re-implementation at some point. "Re-factoring" is the
current descriptive phrase that's popular, although it only covers the case
where some of the old code can still be salvaged. ("Re-factoring" also applies
to relatively new code where you need to increase re-usability.)

/dps

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

snide...@gmail.com skrev:

> It's normal for the systray portion of the Taskbar to have
> status icons, for checking network (or Bluetooth) status, and
> getting to the Remove Devices helper. Although on this
> machine, I usually have enough open activities that the status
> icons are hidden behind a little caret-like up-tick arrow.

You don't have to have many activities to achieve that. You can
click on the arrow and choose "Adjust" (or what the English word
is), and then hide unwanted icons.

--
Bertel, Denmark

[Snidely]

Lo, on the 11th of October, 2014, Bertel Lund Hansen did proclaim ...

> Lewis skrev:
>
>>> I think it has to do with the 'feature' that that is where
>>> Windows places them by default.
>
>> I thought Windows at least defaulted Documents to the Document folder.
>
> It does, but lots of other things are just dumped on the desktop.

Installers have a habit of putting shortcut icons on the desktop.

This computer has 4 rows of 7 icons on the left side of the screen, and
half of them I wouldn't miss but I haven't removed them yet.

My work computer has a bigger screen, so it's 4 rows of >7 icons, some
of which were important to the user before me, and after 2 years I find
them more irritating, but haven't removed them yet (well, I did thin a
few from the herd).

Somewhere along the line, I read a column on one of the PC (Potentially
Computable) sites, suggesting that it was more useful to show the
background picture than all the icons. However, my browser and the
newsreader do a pretty good job of obscuring both.

/dps

--
There's nothing inherently wrong with Big Data. What matters, as it
does for Arnold Lund in California or Richard Rothman in Baltimore, are
the questions -- old and new, good and bad -- this newest tool lets us
ask. (R. Lerhman, CSMonitor.com)

[Peter Moylan]

On 11/10/14 01:41, Bertel Lund Hansen wrote:
> Steve Hayes skrev:
>
>> The XyWrite one worked well because it had a STARTUP.INT file
>> which gave it initial settings -- fonts, line lengths, similar
>> to an MS Word template. It would load whichever STARTUP.INT
>> file it found in the directory you called it from, and so if I
>> had a directory for letters, the STARTUP.INT file came up with
>> a letterhead with date, and all I had to do was enter the
>> dalutation and the text of the letter.
>
>> That no longer works, however, since Windows won't print from
>> DOS files, and to print I have to convert/save the file as RTF
>> and import into MS Word.
>
> Why? You can enter raw textfiles into e.g. EditpadLite. It has a
> nice GUI where you can se the result before actually printing.
>
> http://www.editpadlite.com/

I'm coming back to this subthread a little late, but it has just
occurred to me that what Steve needs is a (free) program called
Notepad++. It's a "plain text" kind of program, without all the overhead
of a word processor, but it's not quite as brain-dead as the standard
Windows program called Notepad.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org

[Bertel Lund Hansen]

Peter Moylan skrev:

>> Why? You can enter raw textfiles into e.g. EditpadLite. It has a
>> nice GUI where you can se the result before actually printing.

>> http://www.editpadlite.com/

> I'm coming back to this subthread a little late, but it has just
> occurred to me that what Steve needs is a (free) program called
> Notepad++. It's a "plain text" kind of program, without all the overhead
> of a word processor, but it's not quite as brain-dead as the standard
> Windows program called Notepad.

I have both Notepad++ and Editpad Lite. They are both excellent
programs, but I tend to use only Editpad Lite for printing simple
text files. I do all my editing in a different program, MED:

http://www.utopia-planitia.de/

but Editpad Lite has a printing interface that is superior to
that of MED.

--
Bertel, Denmark