Posts by Admiral Grace Hopper
295 posts • joined Tuesday 7th October 2008 11:26 GMT
Posted in Bing uncloaks Klingon translator
I'd rather have a Klingon Clippit. "It look like you're declaring war on a neighbouring star system. Would you like help?".
Claim to fame
I was on TISWAS when I was 11.
(Closest to a Phantom Flan Flinger icon that I could find).
Re: Not out of the woods yet...
@Eadon - you seem to have been deafened by the whooshing noise of the point as it went flying past you. As someone who actively avoids MS where possible, I still seriously considered the WinPhone as it's a good piece of kit that actually works.
I use MS when I'm paid to and the only MS software that I haven't found a workable alternative for in the corporate environment is Exchange. If someone so instinctively averse to MS can look at WinPhone and see see it as a worthwhile tool then they're doing something right. Give yourself a break, take the blinkers off and look around you, there's some good things happening in some surprising places.
Beer, as it's the most chilled icon. Stay frosty.
Re: Not out of the woods yet...
I can see where @1Rafayal is coming from. When my iPhone died I was this -><- close to letting MS back into my life with a WinPhone, it was only a marginally better deal on the day that saw me walk out with a Samsung. I wouldn't buy MS lightly, as I have developed an instinctive preference for anything but MS where possible, but the Nokia kit is lovely and on a phone the OS works just dandy.
Posted in Galaxy S4 radiant, but has black holes
Exacttly so. Having just made the move back from iOS to Android I enjoy being able to control things a bit more, but on the other hand I have to control things more to fix things that don't need fixing (for my personal taste) under iOS. Swings and roundabouts.
If we are to have a similar link-up between Samsung and Ford can we get the name re-spelled as 'Galaxie' rather than 'Galaxy' please? I'm happy to use the phone of that name, but not the motor vehicle.
"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.". Bill Bryson.
Posted in The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
Re: an interesting selection
Sexy? Well, we thought that the updates to VME that came with the Series 39 were sexy but I've always thought of the ICL boxes as looking more purposeful than sexy. The Trimetras are too redolent of missed opportunities these days; lovely looking boxes, but all replaced by nondescript racked servers. Those Cray boxes, however, are still pure filth. Mmmmmmmm ....
Re: Crush? or a light fondling.
We've got senior execs making decisions informed by Gartner research.
I can send them about two dozen redundant file servers that were all called "Gandalf" by a seemingly never-ending series of Middle Earth obsessed developers.
(I congratulated the devs that called their servers Kimball, Worsel, Tregonsee and Nadreck - it made a refreshing change to inhabit a different universe).
Re: Good on 'em
A long time ago in a different lifetime I spent a few interesting months working in an abattoir. While I didn't witness or perform Kosher or HalAl slaughter, I do know from my experience on the killing floor that if it wasn't quick, efficient and painless then the practice wouldn't have survived for several thousand years. Any killing method that is neither quick, efficient nor painless tends to have an inconveniently high rate of failure which, when you're killing a cow, can quickly result in 3/4 of a ton of Very Pissed Off Indeed. This a sufficiently sub-optimal result to ruin a whole day. There has been a lot of work done on de-stressing animals prior to slaughter not only for the sake of the animals, but because it makes slaughtering much more efficient. I recommend a quick google on Temple Grandin, she's the go-to-girl for cattle management.
Sheep are less of a problem, but once you're killing for the wider population then pigs can be a nightmare. Get them stressed and you've got to get them calmed down again and flush the adrenaline from their bloodstream otherwise the meat tastes awful.
I may print this article off several times and distribute it to friends, family and neighbours.
Eh?
They're loud, but they're not that loud. In my personal experience, Napalm, Death are quite loud, Motörhead are loud, My Bloody Valentine louder, Swans loudest.
Re: Not necessarily COBOL, but the way COBOL was used.
@Tasmanian God - I quite agree. It was writing COBOL that made me the C++ programmer I am today. That also makes me old and embittered, by that is also probably more down to the environment than the language.
Stack overflow
A difficult list to fault. I peronally would have dropped Zardoz and Star Trek, but I would have been left trying to fit Silent Running, Dark Star and Moon into those two slots.
Not necessarily COBOL, but the way COBOL was used.
There's a reason why COBOL is still running many important parts of our lives. Simply, for many tasks, COBOL is still the ideal tool. The languages which came and flourished later have their own ideal applications, but when large amounts of hierarchical data are to be handled then COBOL is an efficient, clear, easily written and maintained way of modelling that data and the associated processes. I still maintain a lot of affection for COBOL, even though I haven't used it in anger for a long while now. I would be happy to return to coding in it for reasons above and beyond that affection though; for a lot of jobs it's just the best way to do it.
I wonder though if the professors are thinking more of the mindset that cam with COBOL programming rather than the language itself. COBOL programmers in a mainframe environment had to learn how to write code that worked with the hardware and knew that there were great rewards in doing so. Shaving a few clock cycles from a database query could take an hour off the run-time of the overnight batch or bring TP response times down to something more more acceptable to the user. There was no option of throwing more hardware at it to speed thing up, or rather it was prohibitively expensive.
I smile when I get an odd look when I ask if things could be made more efficient by moving initial read/tests outside the loop to save a couple of processing steps ("Why bother? If it's slow we'll double the processor ...") or alternatively suggest defensive checkpointing ("Nah ... those boxes never crash ..."). I know they'll learn, even if it's at 2:00 a.m. with a big hairy live support bod looming threateningly over them.
That being said, there is part of me that likes the idea of a boot camp in the basics with COBOL being used as the assault course.
I will add in a further salute to my namesake. The language that she framed still has things to teach us.
An excellent article, thank you. She's long been a personal heroine. (Thumbs Up in the absence of a US Naval salute icon).
Re: FAIL felt as far as Oregon
I was considering the Co-op, but onpy after this year's major upgrade has settled down.
Outstanding work
Thank you, travel well.
Posted in Twenty classic arcade games
It's all a matter of taste, of course
But I would have found room for Gorf, Moon Cresta and Bomb Jack before some of the later games. Good, thought-provoking choices though.thank you.
Posted in Twenty classic arcade games
Re: Space invaders, yes, of course
+1 for Gorf. I didn't stare at a screen so intently or for so long until I my first truly mission-critical database restore.
Alan Moore got there first.
Re: but puzzling nonetheless
@Paul Shirley "It's seriously bizarre shipping even a demo/early preview with so few apps compiled for it.:
Not at all, that's precisely how Microsoft used to operate in the 80s. Every bug-ridden partially-implemented application was a warning shot across the bows of everyone else that while they might be developing something, Microsoft have plans to do just that. All developers knew that somehow (gosh! how do they do that?) MS always got more performance out of DOS and/or WIndows than anyone else then the competition would be fierce and not necessarily fair.
Not quite sure why Shuttleworth is doing this, that is odd, but there is precedent for the actual practice.
Re: Mail
@eadon Yes, I got the email, then I read our customers' security requirements and replied that a fully cloudy solution would be incompatible with them, so an internally managed solution was needed. Cross-portablity matter, yes, but whole heap less than pissing on your customer's chips.
Re: Mail
Yes, that and the dead weight of the business logic encapsulated in the VBA and macros embedded in more Excel spreadsheets and Word templates than I would care to count, analyse, debug and re-implement.
For corporation-wide email nothing is as integrated or effective as Exchange. For everything else there is a viable no-Microsoft alternative, but not for Exchange. As soon as there is, then Microsoft is hosed.
What an excellent development.
Admiral Grace Hopper
Programmer Analyst Software Engineer Development Specialist Software Delivery Champion Systems Architect
Re: ELOP FAIL
Mmmmm, pho. I was wondering what to have for lunch, that's an excellent suggestion.
Re: I've upvoted for the comments about local independents,
+1 for Ottaker's, but the tale of Ottaker's is also proof that being an excellent retailer with a true passion for what you're doing and selling is still not enough to prevent being Borged by a larger, less responsive and utlimately less good competitor.
Re: uk.gov
Tsk. We should abandon all domestic X-Wing development and just buy whatever X-Wings the Yanks throw together, even if we're disbarred from accessing or modifying any software components.
Re: NO problems with old Samsungs
There's a firmware update for the S7800 that fixes that problem. It's on Samsung's website.
And if you talk to the people working on it,
They are immensely knowledgable and keen to share that knowledge.
The gentleman ("I know valves, not computers") who took time out to explain the machine and how it worked to my niece last year, then got her to step it through to demonstrate how it processed a calculation deserves my thanks. If there's been a bar handy, I'd have offered him a pint. Thank you Sir!
If the entire Reg readership were laid end-to-end
I, for one, would be very surprised indeed.
Council Of Boskone
Is he located on Jarnevon?
I'm intrigued to see that it's only iOS users who are thought to need this app.
Re: NO
I always treat the word "automagically" as a signal to stop listening to the presenter. I will now add. "envisioneering" to the list.
Re: Penrith Motorway Services... IN SPACE!
I'd have thought that Forton Services was a closer visual match.
You beat me to it. Metaspy wiled away a few otherwise empty hours on a quiet nightshift. There were some spectacularly odd searches initiated a few time zones to the West of the UK.
Re: Not this again!
@chika - you make a very good point. At the time your choice of desktop GUI was Windows 3, Mac or, if you afford the hardware, X-Windows. We ran X-Windows on the workstations but they were way too expensive to dish out to grunts, Mac was an utter bitch to code for compared to Windows (yes! really!), so Windows 3 it was and we felt damned lucky to have it. When you got 3.11 there was much less messing around with Trumpet and the like and we thought that we were in clover. It was Windows 3 that really put a PC on every desktop.
MS did a really good piece of work with the Win95 interface - it basically saw them through until now - but with Win8 they seem intent on anatagonising with that PC on their desktop. Yes, things have moved on, but when there are still so many desktops sporting PCs this does seem rather inept.
Not sure about the math
But the claim about the mathematics seem to hold up.
No icon because there isn't a "Bloody Yanks, over-sexed, over-paid and over here" one.
Re: Ark Of The Covenant unboxing FAIL!
Bet Reg Hardware gives it 75%.
My niece was taken through the workings of this machine earlier this year by a member of the restoration team who took the trouble to explain clearly and simply to her and her friend how the accumulator worked and got her to use the stepper to drive the process so that she coudl follow it through. Seeing her understanding grow filled me with joy. It is still an excellent educational tool as everything is right there in front of you.
I nearly clocked her one, mind, when she asked if I used to write programmes for that sort of machine. Kids these days, eh?
Posted in Why do Smart TV UIs suck?
To answer your question:
"Or would it be better to have industry agreed open standards that let ‘companion devices’ such as tablets and smartphones interact with our displays, reliably and consitently?"
Yes.
Anyhting involving PowerPoint is best left undone.
Re: OO and O
You make crippling PowerPoint sound like a bad thing. Personally I would hit PowerPoint with big sticks until it broke. If you can't present an idea on an OHP slide then it probably isn't worth dressing up with prepackaged themes and animations and inflicting it on an audience.
Re: Boldon James E-Mail
@Ben Holmes
I can't lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies.
Re: Windows 8
You never used Boldon James E-Mail.
Re: A WHAT??
Perhaps she means the A-Class. Mine was like driving a haunted house. If you turned right with brio, the left hand window lowered itself and the alarm triggered. If it rained the alarm triggered. The cabin light came on by itself with so many random inputs that I don't think I exhausted the full list. I got so sick of paying to have electrical faults traced I got rid of it and bought something that was actually reliable.
Re: Hmmm
"Those that are prepared to adapt to the changes will find that the process is easier; those that refuse to change will suddenly find that they are being forced to change and that is when it gets very painful."
This is exactly what happened when folk started to bring their Apple ][ personal computers in to work to do the sort of data crunching that they weren't allowed to do using the company mainframe (even if they could have - there were no spreadsheets on the mainframe). The PC's were borged into the enterprise eventually, as the new shiny boxes will be, but there's going to be the same period of tension between the wishes of the employee to do things their way and the IT managers wanting to trammel those desires. Both, of course, are right in their own way and neither will accept the merits of the other's arguments. Should be fun.
Quite so, although it was a lot easier to enforce it in the mainframe environment.
I sometimes wonder whether when we've fully transferred user interactions to the browser we'll have completed the circle and gone back to the punter being given what's effectively a dumb terminal with all the functionality in a big shed a long way away we'll have recreated the old model, but with an array of boxes from different manufacturers in the computer hall rather the monoculture IBM/Amdahl/DEC/Unisys/ICL sheds of old.
