• (disco) in reply to NTN
    NTN:
    can't go wrong

    Ingenious idiots, etc.

  • (disco) in reply to DogsB
    DogsB:
    Also why not just package the dependencies?

    XCode is the full Mac OS X/iOS/WatchOS development environment. It's a >2GB download. Bundling it with anything, even if that would be allowed by Apple's lawyers, would be insane.

    TRWTF is why the developer can't figure out why their app won't run without the entire development environment being installed. They're obviously doing something very wrong, but they seem unable to figure out what.

  • (disco) in reply to David_C

    Pretty difficult to debug without a development environment. Especially if you're the kind of person who develops an app that requires a development environment to run

  • (disco) in reply to ben_lubar
    ben_lubar:
    How about just making a wrapper around the installer that downloads and installs the required libraries if they aren't already installed? You know, like how Java installs the Yahoo toolbar.

    If it was a simple matter of locating a missing shared library or something, that would be great. But if they are trying to install the entire XCode development environment, that's going to be way too big for an auto-installer. Most people aren't going to appreciate a multi-hour download.

    Of course, they probably don't appreciate a >2GB installer for a development environment either.

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    It's a >2GB download.

    So it takes several minutes.

    David_C:
    Bundling it with anything, even if that would be allowed by Apple's lawyers, would be insane.

    Some commercial software (e.g., some databases) is insane.

  • (disco) in reply to Yamikuronue
    Yamikuronue:
    As popularized in the famous Mac Rant video, Macs used to (still do?) make a shortcut when you drag things off a removable drive to your local desktop -- a shortcut that vanishes when you eject the drive. That used to trip me up every time I had to borrow my mom's mac.

    Yeah, that was a long time ago. Early versions of Mac OS (System 6 and earlier - I think this was changed in 7) didn't have a folder representing the desktop. There was simply a bit in a file's info meaning "on desktop", and dragging it there would just set the bit. Ejecting the media would make the icon disappear from the desktop, and re-inserting the media would make it re-appear. But the file's actual location remained in its original folder on its media. A "Put Away" menu item could be used to take it off of the desktop and restore it to its original location. Dragging it to a different folder on its volume would actually move it. Dragging it to a different volume would make a copy.

    In System 7 (I'm pretty sure - if not, definitely in 8), this was eliminated. The Desktop became just another folder on your boot volume. Dragging files there would be a simple move/copy, just like with any other folder. This is also when aliases were created, so you could add an icon that referenced a file in a different location (since actually moving stuff when putting icons on the desktop is not always what you want to do.)

  • (disco) in reply to accalia
    accalia:
    My first computer was a frankenputer. it started life as a 486 and was a PentiumPro by the time i got it.

    Ditto, but older.

    Well, my first computer was a TRS-80, but my parents bought that for me.

    The first one I owned was leased from my college. It was a basic 8088 PC with two 360K floppy drives and no hard drive. We built it as a class activity in the summer before Freshman year.

    Later that year, I started upgrading it. A 286 motherboard, more RAM, a VGA card, a color monitor, etc., etc. Then I realized that the school will want their computer back when I graduate so I bought other essential parts like case and power supply and finally ended up with two computers. The one I didn't return to them continued to evolve for many years. It's last incarnation was a 120MHz 486. I still have it for when I feel nostalgic and want to play old DOS games that don't play anywhere else.

    FWIW, the first hard drive I owned was a Seagate 296N - 80MB SCSI. I still have it and it still works. It's in a closet waiting for the day when I get around to buying a SCSI card for my Apple IIGS, and I'll attach it there.

  • (disco) in reply to Jaloopa
    Jaloopa:
    NTN:
    Pasting a command can't go wrong
    [image] Didn't work. And there's no edit menu where paste is normally found
    Upgrade to Microsoft Windows [Version 6.4.9841] and you can enable `^V`.
  • (disco) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic
    Steve_The_Cynic:
    The very first IDE hard disk I ever used was just 40MB.
    I avoided those new-fangled 40MB disks until we got MS-DOS 5.0, otherwise you had to fiddle around with extended partitions and logical drives. Ugh.
  • (disco) in reply to Jaloopa
    Jaloopa:
    [image] Didn't work. And there's no edit menu where paste is normally found

    Old-style Microsoft/IBM copy/cut/paste keys are Ctrl-Ins, Shift-Del and Shift-Ins, respectively. Interestingly, they still work on modern versions of Windows.

    If I remember correctly, the command-prompt app (even today) should have edit commands on the command-menu (the icon in the upper-left corner, accessible via Alt-Space)

  • (disco) in reply to urkerab
    urkerab:
    Upgrade to Microsoft Windows [Version 6.4.9841] and you can enable ^V.

    Can't on my work PC, because a vital piece of software identifies IIS10 as less than IIS7 and fails to start

  • (disco) in reply to Jaloopa

    By the way, I am aware of how to copy/paste in a console. Y'all are whooshing

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    when I feel nostalgic and want to play old DOS games that don't play anywhere else

    http://www.dosbox.com/

  • (disco) in reply to Quite
    Quite:
    I got a disc drive for my BBC-B back in the mid-1980's. Before then I had been using a tape drive (that's a 1970's-technology machine for playing cassette tapes, a system of storing programs that was as slow as it was unreliable)
    Be glad you didn’t own a Commodore 64, where loading from disk was hardly an improvement on loading from tape, speed-wise — the only real advantage of a disk drive was that you didn’t have to wind it to the starting location of the program first. All my friends who had C64s were amazed at how fast a DISCiPLE loaded things on my Spectrum.
  • (disco) in reply to Gurth
    Gurth:
    Be glad you didn’t own a Commodore 64, where loading from disk was hardly an improvement on loading from tape, speed-wise — the only real advantage of a disk drive was that you didn’t have to wind it to the starting location of the program first. All my friends who had C64s were amazed at how fast a DISCiPLE loaded things on my Spectrum.

    Yeah, that 1541 floppy drive was really slow. An Apple Disk-II was much faster, even with Apple's stock DOS, and became really fast (for its day) with third-party DOS replacements like Beagle Bros'. ProntoDOS.

    There were third-party packages for the C64 which greatly sped up disk access, but it could never get to really high speeds, due to the fact that it attaches via a glorified serial port. But 4KB/s was definitely better than the 300B/s that the default firmware uses.

  • (disco)

    Just following instructions - the role of any well-designed IP register.

  • (disco) in reply to hungrier
    hungrier:
    and there's a paste option in the right click menu.

    what menu? (in quickedit mode, r-click does an immediate paste)

  • (disco) in reply to dcon

    Right click on the title bar.

    I've used better shells than the Windows command prompt. I'm not that impressed, mainly because they're still mimicking ancient technology.

  • (disco) in reply to LB_
    LB_:
    Right click on the title bar.

    whoosh?

    @hungrier already had addressed the window menu. I was being pendantic about r-click behavior in the main window being dependent on how quickedit is set.

  • (disco) in reply to dcon

    Oops, I forgot that the window menu was the same thing as right clicking on the title bar. I'm used to accessing the window menu by left clicking the icon in the title bar (or the very top left corner of the Chrome window). I didn't know they were the same thing until now :facepalm:

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    How else can we make it absolutely obvious that they're not looking at the actual program?

    Watermark the screenshot. You put a big diagonal text saying SCREENSHOT on it.

  • (disco) in reply to FrostCat

    Knowing people, they'd think that the program were supposed to look like that and complcomplain it doesn't match. :p

  • (disco) in reply to brotherelf
    brotherelf:
    That's why I now make sure that my screenshots are always noticeably scaled up (bonus points for doing a consistent zoom factor) to make sure they optically mismatch the other window where the user is trying it out, or worse even, the editing controls of the CMS that you are documenting the CMS in. Yup, learned that the hard way, too.

    Or make 'em in Windows 10, that way it'll be years before people can get confused in that way. :smile:

  • (disco) in reply to David_C

    7 allowed actual files on the desktop, but persisted in the drag and drop behavior by creating an alias on the volume and marking it as "on the desktop".

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Knowing people, they'd think that the program were supposed to look like that and complcomplain it doesn't match.

    Then when they call in for support, you simply say, after listening patiently to their explanation of the problem, "That's just a screenshot. You have to do it in the application." Unless it's someone you've worked with for a while, to whom you can actually say something like "really? it says screenshot on it."

    I have never seen someone do that particular thing before. My users always find other ways to be dumb. Like never remembering, week after week, how to follow a workflow. My bosses aren't mean enough to start charging them for support, which I've found usually focuses the mind (we issue certain end-of-year updates that require you to be on the latest patch level. We have one customer who never calls at all, except once at the end of the year to have me install the patches, and then to call someone else to walk through a "closing out the year" function. We don't bill them for it, even though they do it every damn year, because the time they take up is about 1/15 their annual maintenance bill, and, as I said, they basically never call in except then.)

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    I still have it for when I feel nostalgic and want to play old DOS games that don't play anywhere else.
    DOSBox doesn't work for you? That's how I play all my old DOS games. (Currently: XCOM: Terror from the Deep. Bought a copy of the XCOM remake the other day, but... well, looks like I'm going to have to get a better video card before I can play it properly. Not entirely unexpected.)
  • (disco) in reply to Scarlet_Manuka
    Scarlet_Manuka:
    DOSBox doesn't work for you? That's how I play all my old DOS games. (Currently: XCOM: Terror from the Deep. Bought a copy of the XCOM remake the other day, but... well, looks like I'm going to have to get a better video card before I can play it properly. Not entirely unexpected.)

    I haven't tried using it much yet. There's a lot of settings to tweak, and I haven't yet had the time to learn them all.

    I have tried running DOS in VirtualBox, but the result was very disappointing - no PC speaker and no FM synthesis audio.

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    but the result was very disappointing

    Yeah, I think the Oracle docs specifically say YMMV when trying to emulate ancient machines....

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    I haven't tried using it much yet. There's a lot of settings to tweak, and I haven't yet had the time to learn them all.
    I don't recall having to tweak a lot of settings (the defaults mostly being pretty good), but it's been a while and obviously YMMV. I think the trickiest thing was getting the HDD mounted properly, but the docs were pretty clear on that (and screw you, I'll mount the whole C: drive if I want to, TYVM).

    These days the main thing that trips me up with it is when I want to look at or make a quick change to a file when I'm in DOSBox, and automatically go "edit <file>". Then I get an error message and remember that edit.com isn't there any more, and I have to flip back to Windows and do it from there. Sad that I still haven't unlearned that reflex, I guess.

  • (disco) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    David_C:
    It's a >2GB download.

    So it takes several minutes.

    You should upgrade. Less than a minute.

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    Yeah, that 1541 floppy drive was really slow.
    Curiously, the 1540 that was matched to the VIC-20 was actually faster, by a little bit, because the VIC-20's CPU spent less time locked out of RAM by the video hardware. (Because of the 22 characters per line rather than 40 thing...)

    However, no matter how fragile the 1541's hardware was (it wasn't great), it was less fragile than the 1540's.

  • (disco) in reply to LB_
    LB_:
    mainly because they're still mimicking ancient technology

    called CLI

  • (disco) in reply to obeselymorbid
    obeselymorbid:
    You should upgrade. Less than a minute.

    CBA to write the justification for upgrading the network to my desktop to gigabit. Once you get to the region of 100Mb then you start to find that the bottleneck moves elsewhere, often to the content provider.

    My servers have gigabit networking, of course. For raisins.

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    There were third-party packages for the C64 which greatly sped up disk access
    Tape speed too, if you had a speedloader cartridge, but at the expense of needing to save things through that as well (as I recall — owning an actual C64 is still on my to-do list). With commercial software sold on tape you still had to wait for ages until it loaded.
  • (disco) in reply to Scarlet_Manuka
    Scarlet_Manuka:
    error message and remember that edit.com isn't there any more

    Wait, what? You're not allowed to copy in a copy from MSDOS? Do they have something else, like edlin?

    Filed under: Copywrite, how does it work?

  • SomeName (unregistered)

    Average user is retarded. No offense intended. Assume millions of retards (or monkeys or kids if you don't like that word) are going to use your software and proof it for that.

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