IS: wHEN IS COMPLEXITY A GOOD? WAS: Windows Resource Monitor

[Nick Thompson]

Doug,

 

Ah!  Now this is the sort of topic we used to discuss:  when does complexity lead to stability and when does it lead to chaos?

 

One of the remarkable things we discovered in the EVO DEVO group that met a couple of years back is how the genome has been designed to be stable under change.  It’s a bit mysterious to imagine how such a  design might have come about through natural selection.  A bit like wondering how the air traffic control system could have come about through competition among airlines.  It was apparently accomplished more than a billion years ago because the basic structure of the genome is very ancient.   If I were an “intelligent design” freak, this would be my candidate for evidence. 

 

But please don’t bend my Resource Monitor thread.  I am learning a heluva lot, and I am very happy with it. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 8:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Windows Resource Monitor

 

You say that like complexity is a bad thing.

 

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just an observation: Things are Getting More Complicated .. when it
comes to computing.

I have two friends, both quite bright in terms of computing.  One a
PC, the other a Mac user.  Both have what I call Rotten System Syndrom
(RSS).  It is NOT a PC vs Mac issue.  Its just that things are getting
way too complex.  The cloud, backups, sluggish systems, how to
uninstall apps, knowing what's on the computer, knowing whether or not
there is a problem.  It goes on and on.  The same for Linux, Mac,
Windows.

I'd love to say: Oh, just get a Mac.  Or Ubuntu.  Or Windows 8.

Nope.  It all boils down to systems being so complicated that even
experts have problems.

My solution has been along the lines I mentioned to Nick earlier: in a
phrase -- System Hygiene.

So how do you keep your system clean and nice .. and not even need to
do a clean install?

There are several things that contribute to your system being healthy.

The most important is: know what is on your system and being able to
remove it when no longer needed.  Nick hit one one right away: a
system utility like the Task/System monitor he found.  So rather than
being a noob, Nick turned out to hit on the right issue right away.

On my system, I always have the "Activity Monitor" running, and yes,
as Josh mentioned, run "purge" often.  So I can see visually what's up
with the system.  All the Big 3 have these, just look for performance
monitor etc and you'll find it.

Next: after understanding how your system is running, look at your
disk.  Again, all the Big 3 have something like Omni Disk Sweeper for
the Mac: a program that lets you see, by size, where everything is on
your disk.  I had to scrape my Mini clean recently so that Time
Machine (the incremental backup system) wouldn't fill up immediately.
I found over (blush) 40GB! that I no longer needed!  That's a lot of
cruft.  And I'm supposed to be hip.  But no, cruft happens.

So after (2 days believe it or not) of figuring out what needed to be
done, I applied yet another tool available on all of the Big 3: an
un-installer programmer.  There were several available.  I deleted a
large amount of the 40GB blush that way.  Amazing just how much TeX
takes up on legacy systems.

What next?  Well, I still had WAY too much on my system to have a sane
backup/TimeMachine strategy.  DiskSweeper again.  Man did I have a LOT
of stuff I no longer needed.  What to do?  I chose a mixed strategy:
- All working docs were put in the cloud. How? Dropbox for a lot of
it.  Music?  Both Google Drive and iTunes Match.  Again available for
the B3.  Whew, that was a lot.  I had over 80GB music, and now it's
all in the cloud, multiply backed up.  Next photos.  As mentioned
earlier, Arc and Amazon storage helps there.  Mail: IMAP/gmail ..
that's solved (and now with 2-factor authentication).  Movies?  again,
not too difficult.  A larger dropbox might help but I decided on
simply finding .torrent files, so that I can get lost movies in a few
hours if needed, the rest on local storage (redundant, via a NAS, but
really not needed)
- Loose a lot of apps I really don't use.  AppZapper was seriously
busy for quite a while.  And even then, I had to find out how to keep
my /usr/local clean due to the mixed strategies of Linux/Unix systems
for package management.

So, no Nick, you are not odd having to figure out what to do.  And you
hit almost immediately on the important issue: how to monitor your
system.  What's running now and what's it doing?  Check the net for
what causes these odd daemons/services running.  See if you can get by
without that option.  Find the cruft.  Buy a disk or two for backup
and pushing data not needed 24/7.

It really is that simple: Things have gotten really complex as my two
friends, Mac & PC know.  Decide on a strategy.  Don't worry if its the
best.  It just has to satisfy your requirements.  Follow a plan after
deciding on the strategy.  Don't be in a hurry, its not easy nor
obvious.  Do NOT think you are odd, noob, ignorant, weird, and so on.
As I say, my two friends are very intelligent yet still struggling
with their two systems.

My recommendation is to think out a Machine Hygiene strategy first,
then a plan that implements it.  You will have to haunt Best Buy for a
couple of disks, and sign up for Dropbox and/or similar systems.
Decide what data is really, really important, likely using a Disk
Sweeper to find out just what you DO have on your system.  Then just
devote a taks a day for a couple of weeks and you'll be fat, dumb and
happy!  And not dumb at all.

   -- Owen

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Nicholas  Thompson
<[hidden email]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>
>
> My Dell Studio (yeah, yeah, save the Mac cracks) has been cranky of late,
> particularly when streaming stuff, and since I am reluctant to put out a
> couple of hundred dollars to have it “tuned up”, I have been trying to see
> what I can do on my own.  This has led me to the resource monitor, a truly
> fascinating little gizmo, a couple of levels down in the Task Manager.
> The help files that are attached to it are pretty lean, and I was wondering
> if someone knew of a “Resource Monitor  for Idiots” source.
>
>
>
> One thing that I immediately learned which was STUNNING was that mac I-tunes
> has a chum that it loads called AppleRemoteDevicesManager.exe which grabs 25
> percent of your resources off the top and doesn’t let go unless you whack it
> over the head with a brick.  It’s purpose is to manage your relationship
> with your mobile devices, but relentlessly demands resources even though you
> don’t have any mobile devices.   I think of it as essentially an Apple
> Trojan.  (Ok, now, you can make Mac-cracks).
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> http://www.cusf.org

============================================================

FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

 

--

Doug Roberts
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

505-455-7333 - Office
505-672-8213 - Mobile

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Douglas Roberts-2]

Bend a thread? Perish the thought. Please, continue on with the complexities of Windows 7 systems administration.

I don't use it myself, so the less I know about it, the better. But that's probably just be me.

It just might be, however, in the grander scheme of things, time for the degenerate M$ genome to expire, no longer able to sustain the instabilities it has spawned.

I believe Darwin probably got most of it right.

--Doug

On Feb 7, 2013 9:08 PM, "Nicholas Thompson" <[hidden email]> wrote:

Doug,

 

Ah!  Now this is the sort of topic we used to discuss:  when does complexity lead to stability and when does it lead to chaos?

 

One of the remarkable things we discovered in the EVO DEVO group that met a couple of years back is how the genome has been designed to be stable under change.  It’s a bit mysterious to imagine how such a  design might have come about through natural selection.  A bit like wondering how the air traffic control system could have come about through competition among airlines.  It was apparently accomplished more than a billion years ago because the basic structure of the genome is very ancient.   If I were an “intelligent design” freak, this would be my candidate for evidence. 

 

But please don’t bend my Resource Monitor thread.  I am learning a heluva lot, and I am very happy with it. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

 

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 8:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Windows Resource Monitor

 

You say that like complexity is a bad thing.

 

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just an observation: Things are Getting More Complicated .. when it
comes to computing.

I have two friends, both quite bright in terms of computing.  One a
PC, the other a Mac user.  Both have what I call Rotten System Syndrom
(RSS).  It is NOT a PC vs Mac issue.  Its just that things are getting
way too complex.  The cloud, backups, sluggish systems, how to
uninstall apps, knowing what's on the computer, knowing whether or not
there is a problem.  It goes on and on.  The same for Linux, Mac,
Windows.

I'd love to say: Oh, just get a Mac.  Or Ubuntu.  Or Windows 8.

Nope.  It all boils down to systems being so complicated that even
experts have problems.

My solution has been along the lines I mentioned to Nick earlier: in a
phrase -- System Hygiene.

So how do you keep your system clean and nice .. and not even need to
do a clean install?

There are several things that contribute to your system being healthy.

The most important is: know what is on your system and being able to
remove it when no longer needed.  Nick hit one one right away: a
system utility like the Task/System monitor he found.  So rather than
being a noob, Nick turned out to hit on the right issue right away.

On my system, I always have the "Activity Monitor" running, and yes,
as Josh mentioned, run "purge" often.  So I can see visually what's up
with the system.  All the Big 3 have these, just look for performance
monitor etc and you'll find it.

Next: after understanding how your system is running, look at your
disk.  Again, all the Big 3 have something like Omni Disk Sweeper for
the Mac: a program that lets you see, by size, where everything is on
your disk.  I had to scrape my Mini clean recently so that Time
Machine (the incremental backup system) wouldn't fill up immediately.
I found over (blush) 40GB! that I no longer needed!  That's a lot of
cruft.  And I'm supposed to be hip.  But no, cruft happens.

So after (2 days believe it or not) of figuring out what needed to be
done, I applied yet another tool available on all of the Big 3: an
un-installer programmer.  There were several available.  I deleted a
large amount of the 40GB blush that way.  Amazing just how much TeX
takes up on legacy systems.

What next?  Well, I still had WAY too much on my system to have a sane
backup/TimeMachine strategy.  DiskSweeper again.  Man did I have a LOT
of stuff I no longer needed.  What to do?  I chose a mixed strategy:
- All working docs were put in the cloud. How? Dropbox for a lot of
it.  Music?  Both Google Drive and iTunes Match.  Again available for
the B3.  Whew, that was a lot.  I had over 80GB music, and now it's
all in the cloud, multiply backed up.  Next photos.  As mentioned
earlier, Arc and Amazon storage helps there.  Mail: IMAP/gmail ..
that's solved (and now with 2-factor authentication).  Movies?  again,
not too difficult.  A larger dropbox might help but I decided on
simply finding .torrent files, so that I can get lost movies in a few
hours if needed, the rest on local storage (redundant, via a NAS, but
really not needed)
- Loose a lot of apps I really don't use.  AppZapper was seriously
busy for quite a while.  And even then, I had to find out how to keep
my /usr/local clean due to the mixed strategies of Linux/Unix systems
for package management.

So, no Nick, you are not odd having to figure out what to do.  And you
hit almost immediately on the important issue: how to monitor your
system.  What's running now and what's it doing?  Check the net for
what causes these odd daemons/services running.  See if you can get by
without that option.  Find the cruft.  Buy a disk or two for backup
and pushing data not needed 24/7.

It really is that simple: Things have gotten really complex as my two
friends, Mac & PC know.  Decide on a strategy.  Don't worry if its the
best.  It just has to satisfy your requirements.  Follow a plan after
deciding on the strategy.  Don't be in a hurry, its not easy nor
obvious.  Do NOT think you are odd, noob, ignorant, weird, and so on.
As I say, my two friends are very intelligent yet still struggling
with their two systems.

My recommendation is to think out a Machine Hygiene strategy first,
then a plan that implements it.  You will have to haunt Best Buy for a
couple of disks, and sign up for Dropbox and/or similar systems.
Decide what data is really, really important, likely using a Disk
Sweeper to find out just what you DO have on your system.  Then just
devote a taks a day for a couple of weeks and you'll be fat, dumb and
happy!  And not dumb at all.

   -- Owen

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Nicholas  Thompson
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
>
> My Dell Studio (yeah, yeah, save the Mac cracks) has been cranky of late,
> particularly when streaming stuff, and since I am reluctant to put out a
> couple of hundred dollars to have it “tuned up”, I have been trying to see
> what I can do on my own.  This has led me to the resource monitor, a truly
> fascinating little gizmo, a couple of levels down in the Task Manager.
> The help files that are attached to it are pretty lean, and I was wondering
> if someone knew of a “Resource Monitor  for Idiots” source.
>
>
>
> One thing that I immediately learned which was STUNNING was that mac I-tunes
> has a chum that it loads called AppleRemoteDevicesManager.exe which grabs 25
> percent of your resources off the top and doesn’t let go unless you whack it
> over the head with a brick.  It’s purpose is to manage your relationship
> with your mobile devices, but relentlessly demands resources even though you
> don’t have any mobile devices.   I think of it as essentially an Apple
> Trojan.  (Ok, now, you can make Mac-cracks).

>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> http://www.cusf.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

 

--

Doug Roberts
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">505-455-7333 - Office
<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">505-672-8213 - Mobile

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Bruce Sherwood]

To repeat, Windows for my 3D graphics development purposes has been far more stable than either Mac or Ubuntu Linux.

Bruce

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 9:22 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:

It just might be, however, in the grander scheme of things, time for the degenerate M$ genome to expire, no longer able to sustain the instabilities it has spawned.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Douglas Roberts-2]

Windows what: XP? If so, it had better be stable. It's been around since 2001!

On Feb 7, 2013 10:55 PM, "Bruce Sherwood" <[hidden email]> wrote:

To repeat, Windows for my 3D graphics development purposes has been far more stable than either Mac or Ubuntu Linux.

Bruce

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 9:22 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:

It just might be, however, in the grander scheme of things, time for the degenerate M$ genome to expire, no longer able to sustain the instabilities it has spawned.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Steve Smith]

Nick -

I recently read (probably in Russell's work or in one of the references it took me to (Tegmark?)) a quote that "complexity is a quality, not a quantity" (attributed to whom?).

As for robust genotype/phenotype, I think a key is that evolution doesn't throw things away or even invent new things as much as turn them on and off (up and down regulate)...

Among other things, if a "tail" or an "appendix" or even "gills" becomes valuable in the fitness metric for humans, we still have everything needed to light those things back up without having to invent them again.

This might be a tie-in to the Windows Resource Manager thread in the sense that my wife's instinct (learned 20-25 years ago in her early MacOS experiences) is to go "uninstall" everything she doesn't know what it is ...   which of course, if I were to give in to that instinct, would mean *re-installing* the many things she simply *didn't know* she was needing/using.   

- Steve

Doug,

 

Ah!  Now this is the sort of topic we used to discuss:  when does complexity lead to stability and when does it lead to chaos?

 

One of the remarkable things we discovered in the EVO DEVO group that met a couple of years back is how the genome has been designed to be stable under change.  It’s a bit mysterious to imagine how such a  design might have come about through natural selection.  A bit like wondering how the air traffic control system could have come about through competition among airlines.  It was apparently accomplished more than a billion years ago because the basic structure of the genome is very ancient.   If I were an “intelligent design” freak, this would be my candidate for evidence. 

 

But please don’t bend my Resource Monitor thread.  I am learning a heluva lot, and I am very happy with it. 

 

Nick

 

 

 

 

 

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Douglas Roberts
Sent: Thursday, February 07, 2013 8:31 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Windows Resource Monitor

 

You say that like complexity is a bad thing.

 

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 8:29 PM, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:

Just an observation: Things are Getting More Complicated .. when it
comes to computing.

I have two friends, both quite bright in terms of computing.  One a
PC, the other a Mac user.  Both have what I call Rotten System Syndrom
(RSS).  It is NOT a PC vs Mac issue.  Its just that things are getting
way too complex.  The cloud, backups, sluggish systems, how to
uninstall apps, knowing what's on the computer, knowing whether or not
there is a problem.  It goes on and on.  The same for Linux, Mac,
Windows.

I'd love to say: Oh, just get a Mac.  Or Ubuntu.  Or Windows 8.

Nope.  It all boils down to systems being so complicated that even
experts have problems.

My solution has been along the lines I mentioned to Nick earlier: in a
phrase -- System Hygiene.

So how do you keep your system clean and nice .. and not even need to
do a clean install?

There are several things that contribute to your system being healthy.

The most important is: know what is on your system and being able to
remove it when no longer needed.  Nick hit one one right away: a
system utility like the Task/System monitor he found.  So rather than
being a noob, Nick turned out to hit on the right issue right away.

On my system, I always have the "Activity Monitor" running, and yes,
as Josh mentioned, run "purge" often.  So I can see visually what's up
with the system.  All the Big 3 have these, just look for performance
monitor etc and you'll find it.

Next: after understanding how your system is running, look at your
disk.  Again, all the Big 3 have something like Omni Disk Sweeper for
the Mac: a program that lets you see, by size, where everything is on
your disk.  I had to scrape my Mini clean recently so that Time
Machine (the incremental backup system) wouldn't fill up immediately.
I found over (blush) 40GB! that I no longer needed!  That's a lot of
cruft.  And I'm supposed to be hip.  But no, cruft happens.

So after (2 days believe it or not) of figuring out what needed to be
done, I applied yet another tool available on all of the Big 3: an
un-installer programmer.  There were several available.  I deleted a
large amount of the 40GB blush that way.  Amazing just how much TeX
takes up on legacy systems.

What next?  Well, I still had WAY too much on my system to have a sane
backup/TimeMachine strategy.  DiskSweeper again.  Man did I have a LOT
of stuff I no longer needed.  What to do?  I chose a mixed strategy:
- All working docs were put in the cloud. How? Dropbox for a lot of
it.  Music?  Both Google Drive and iTunes Match.  Again available for
the B3.  Whew, that was a lot.  I had over 80GB music, and now it's
all in the cloud, multiply backed up.  Next photos.  As mentioned
earlier, Arc and Amazon storage helps there.  Mail: IMAP/gmail ..
that's solved (and now with 2-factor authentication).  Movies?  again,
not too difficult.  A larger dropbox might help but I decided on
simply finding .torrent files, so that I can get lost movies in a few
hours if needed, the rest on local storage (redundant, via a NAS, but
really not needed)
- Loose a lot of apps I really don't use.  AppZapper was seriously
busy for quite a while.  And even then, I had to find out how to keep
my /usr/local clean due to the mixed strategies of Linux/Unix systems
for package management.

So, no Nick, you are not odd having to figure out what to do.  And you
hit almost immediately on the important issue: how to monitor your
system.  What's running now and what's it doing?  Check the net for
what causes these odd daemons/services running.  See if you can get by
without that option.  Find the cruft.  Buy a disk or two for backup
and pushing data not needed 24/7.

It really is that simple: Things have gotten really complex as my two
friends, Mac & PC know.  Decide on a strategy.  Don't worry if its the
best.  It just has to satisfy your requirements.  Follow a plan after
deciding on the strategy.  Don't be in a hurry, its not easy nor
obvious.  Do NOT think you are odd, noob, ignorant, weird, and so on.
As I say, my two friends are very intelligent yet still struggling
with their two systems.

My recommendation is to think out a Machine Hygiene strategy first,
then a plan that implements it.  You will have to haunt Best Buy for a
couple of disks, and sign up for Dropbox and/or similar systems.
Decide what data is really, really important, likely using a Disk
Sweeper to find out just what you DO have on your system.  Then just
devote a taks a day for a couple of weeks and you'll be fat, dumb and
happy!  And not dumb at all.

   -- Owen

On Wed, Feb 6, 2013 at 8:33 PM, Nicholas  Thompson
<[hidden email]> wrote:
> Hi,
>
>
>
> My Dell Studio (yeah, yeah, save the Mac cracks) has been cranky of late,
> particularly when streaming stuff, and since I am reluctant to put out a
> couple of hundred dollars to have it “tuned up”, I have been trying to see
> what I can do on my own.  This has led me to the resource monitor, a truly
> fascinating little gizmo, a couple of levels down in the Task Manager.
> The help files that are attached to it are pretty lean, and I was wondering
> if someone knew of a “Resource Monitor  for Idiots” source.
>
>
>
> One thing that I immediately learned which was STUNNING was that mac I-tunes
> has a chum that it loads called AppleRemoteDevicesManager.exe which grabs 25
> percent of your resources off the top and doesn’t let go unless you whack it
> over the head with a brick.  It’s purpose is to manage your relationship
> with your mobile devices, but relentlessly demands resources even though you
> don’t have any mobile devices.   I think of it as essentially an Apple
> Trojan.  (Ok, now, you can make Mac-cracks).
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas S. Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
>
> Clark University
>
> http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
>
> http://www.cusf.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

 

--

Doug Roberts
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

505-455-7333 - Office
505-672-8213 - Mobile

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Bruce Sherwood]

The VPython history is Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, XP, Vista, Windows 7. I haven't yet tried Windows 8. VPython got started in 2000, but at the time there were still machines around running OS versions as old as Windows 95.

Bruce

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 11:01 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:

Windows what: XP? If so, it had better be stable. It's been around since 2001!

On Feb 7, 2013 10:55 PM, "Bruce Sherwood" <[hidden email]> wrote:

To repeat, Windows for my 3D graphics development purposes has been far more stable than either Mac or Ubuntu Linux.

Bruce

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 9:22 PM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:

It just might be, however, in the grander scheme of things, time for the degenerate M$ genome to expire, no longer able to sustain the instabilities it has spawned.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 2/7/13 10:54 PM, Bruce Sherwood wrote:
> To repeat, Windows for my 3D graphics development purposes has been
> far more stable than either Mac or Ubuntu Linux.
Windows is the biggest market for gamers.  3D innovation has
historically always been first on WIndows.
If all you want a computer to do is a fixed set of 2d and 3d graphics
APIs, then, sure, use Windows.  But performance and stability are only
two dimensions.

I care much more about flexibility than stability or graphics
performance.   For example, I want to use GPUs for accelerated
computation.  It is inappropriate in my situation to code using
unportable (CUDA) or crudely simple APIs like OpenCL.   That's no way to
write complex, long-lived,  maintainable software.   It could be a way
to write simple, static, scientific codes that perform on particular
cards, if that's all you need to do.   I want the possibility of *some*
acceleration over generations of cards, not peak performance for one
generation.

AMD GPUs on Linux now have the driver bits (in Mesa, a free OpenGL) and
compiler bits in LLVM (a free compiler).   Together there's now the
possibility of integrating real compilers with accelerator technology.  
On Windows, this kind of integration and experimentation is not possible.

Now fast forward to the day this all just works.   Someone writes a code
using these compiler tools, but, oops there's a strange anomaly in a
particular calculation.   How do you fix it?   Get your favorite
bloggers to complain in a public setting?    No thanks, I want direct
control.   That means source code.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Russell Standish]

On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 11:06:36PM -0700, Steve Smith wrote:
> Nick -
>
> I recently read (probably in Russell's work or in one of the
> references it took me to (Tegmark?)) a quote that "complexity is a
> quality, not a quantity" (attributed to whom?).
>

Could be me, but if so its been misquoted. I distinguish complexity as
a quality versus complexity as a quantity in the paper "Concept and
Definition of Complexity"*, which I originally wrote for an
encyclopedia article, which was eventually canned when the editor gave
up due to time pressures, and was later revived as a book chapter.

*Almost all my papers are available in full text, linked from my
website (see below).

--

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish                  Phone [phone] (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics      [hidden email]
University of New South Wales          http://www.hpcoders.com.au
----------------------------------------------------------------------------

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Bruce Sherwood]

I'm not claiming that Windows has all the answers for all possible goals. What I am pointing out is that in the case of a quite non-trivial application there has been remarkable stability that has been missing from both Mac and Linux environments. I haven't seen Microsoft being given credit for this, and it's not unimportant. Clearly someone at Microsoft has thought it important that applications continue to work.

Concerning graphics, with each new release of Ubuntu I find it easy or difficult to install a proprietary graphics driver without which even simple 3D can fail. As for the Mac, a couple years ago World of Warcraft was broken on the Macbook Pro for something like a year and a half because the graphics driver had been tweaked to cater to some iProgram, and there was no way to upgrade the driver, given the closed Mac environment.

What I'm objecting to is the facile assumption in computer-savvy circles that "obviously" Windows and Microsoft are hopeless (roll the eyes). That's not the whole story.

Bruce

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 2/7/13 10:54 PM, Bruce Sherwood wrote:

To repeat, Windows for my 3D graphics development purposes has been far more stable than either Mac or Ubuntu Linux.

Windows is the biggest market for gamers.  3D innovation has historically always been first on WIndows.
If all you want a computer to do is a fixed set of 2d and 3d graphics APIs, then, sure, use Windows.  But performance and stability are only two dimensions.

I care much more about flexibility than stability or graphics performance.   For example, I want to use GPUs for accelerated computation.  It is inappropriate in my situation to code using unportable (CUDA) or crudely simple APIs like OpenCL.   That's no way to write complex, long-lived,  maintainable software.   It could be a way to write simple, static, scientific codes that perform on particular cards, if that's all you need to do.   I want the possibility of *some* acceleration over generations of cards, not peak performance for one generation.

AMD GPUs on Linux now have the driver bits (in Mesa, a free OpenGL) and compiler bits in LLVM (a free compiler).   Together there's now the possibility of integrating real compilers with accelerator technology.   On Windows, this kind of integration and experimentation is not possible.

Now fast forward to the day this all just works.   Someone writes a code using these compiler tools, but, oops there's a strange anomaly in a particular calculation.   How do you fix it?   Get your favorite bloggers to complain in a public setting?    No thanks, I want direct control.   That means source code.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Marcus G. Daniels]

On 2/8/13 8:32 AM, Bruce Sherwood wrote:
> What I'm objecting to is the facile assumption in computer-savvy
> circles that "obviously" Windows and Microsoft are hopeless (roll the
> eyes). That's not the whole story.
>
>
I agree with that.   The operating system is solid, and the development
tools are first rate.  It's even possible to do functional programming
on Windows with F#.   I don't want to function in that world, but I can
appreciate it is possible to.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Edward Angel]

Although it might seem that I would have a similar view as Bruce since we both support 3D graphics for educational purposes, my experience is exactly the opposite of Bruce's. I have to support thousands of mostly CS students and various professionals every year. Windows is an absolute nightmare for me to support with somewhat linux behind that. I have never had a problem on a Mac that wasn't my own error.

Maybe the difference is that the majority of my users use C/C++. Incompatible versions of DirectX, changes in Visual Studio, coupled with driver issues from third party graphics boards and dealing with 32 and 64 bit architectures makes it almost impossible to give a single set of instructions on how to get an OpenGL program running. If I get someone going on a 32 bit build, that may not work for 64 bits on the same machine. We even had to add a line in one of our libraries that sets a single element of a small array to 0.0 because of a driver bug in an AMD driver.

The problems with linux have usually been simpler to deal with, usually involving where each one puts the "standard" libraries or how they are named.

I used to recommend and do my own development using linux under Windows but that got worse with problems of dealing with dynamic vs dynamic libraries.

If I didn't have to do so much support for my textbook and was only doing my own work, then there would be some attraction to Windows such as the ability to access the latest hardware. Apple sometimes infuriates me by its slowness hand secrettness in keeping up with graphics standards but when they do upgrade, the software is correct and works across their hardware and versions of OSX..

Ed

__________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Feb 8, 2013, at 8:32 AM, Bruce Sherwood wrote:

I'm not claiming that Windows has all the answers for all possible goals. What I am pointing out is that in the case of a quite non-trivial application there has been remarkable stability that has been missing from both Mac and Linux environments. I haven't seen Microsoft being given credit for this, and it's not unimportant. Clearly someone at Microsoft has thought it important that applications continue to work.

Concerning graphics, with each new release of Ubuntu I find it easy or difficult to install a proprietary graphics driver without which even simple 3D can fail. As for the Mac, a couple years ago World of Warcraft was broken on the Macbook Pro for something like a year and a half because the graphics driver had been tweaked to cater to some iProgram, and there was no way to upgrade the driver, given the closed Mac environment.

What I'm objecting to is the facile assumption in computer-savvy circles that "obviously" Windows and Microsoft are hopeless (roll the eyes). That's not the whole story.

Bruce

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 2/7/13 10:54 PM, Bruce Sherwood wrote:

To repeat, Windows for my 3D graphics development purposes has been far more stable than either Mac or Ubuntu Linux.

Windows is the biggest market for gamers.  3D innovation has historically always been first on WIndows.
If all you want a computer to do is a fixed set of 2d and 3d graphics APIs, then, sure, use Windows.  But performance and stability are only two dimensions.

I care much more about flexibility than stability or graphics performance.   For example, I want to use GPUs for accelerated computation.  It is inappropriate in my situation to code using unportable (CUDA) or crudely simple APIs like OpenCL.   That's no way to write complex, long-lived,  maintainable software.   It could be a way to write simple, static, scientific codes that perform on particular cards, if that's all you need to do.   I want the possibility of *some* acceleration over generations of cards, not peak performance for one generation.

AMD GPUs on Linux now have the driver bits (in Mesa, a free OpenGL) and compiler bits in LLVM (a free compiler).   Together there's now the possibility of integrating real compilers with accelerator technology.   On Windows, this kind of integration and experimentation is not possible.

Now fast forward to the day this all just works.   Someone writes a code using these compiler tools, but, oops there's a strange anomaly in a particular calculation.   How do you fix it?   Get your favorite bloggers to complain in a public setting?    No thanks, I want direct control.   That means source code.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Bruce Sherwood]

The difference is indeed that users of VPython (not me!) have no involvement with C/C++, and no involvement with any kind of compiling. Almost all of the VPython C++ code is platform-independent, thanks to use of OpenGL, with no use of DirectX, and as I've said, the platform-dependent code (make a window, handle events) has been rock-solid for 12 years on all versions of Windows (7 of them). During that time there were repeated problems with Mac and Linux. Maybe another difference is that in your textbook, Ed,  handling events is a rather minor issue, so that for example Carbon/Cocoa issues probably haven't mattered?

Changes in the Visual Studio compiler have not been a problem until just a couple of months ago, when I had to do quite a bit of work to keep going. The problem is that one has to compile a C++ module for Python X.Y using the same compiler that was used to build that version of Python. In the case of 64-bit Python on Windows, that compiler is a rather old version of Visual Studio which required arcane edits of various Visual Studio configuration files on my machine.

Bruce

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 9:02 AM, Edward Angel <[hidden email]> wrote:

Although it might seem that I would have a similar view as Bruce since we both support 3D graphics for educational purposes, my experience is exactly the opposite of Bruce's. I have to support thousands of mostly CS students and various professionals every year. Windows is an absolute nightmare for me to support with somewhat linux behind that. I have never had a problem on a Mac that wasn't my own error.

Maybe the difference is that the majority of my users use C/C++. Incompatible versions of DirectX, changes in Visual Studio, coupled with driver issues from third party graphics boards and dealing with 32 and 64 bit architectures makes it almost impossible to give a single set of instructions on how to get an OpenGL program running. If I get someone going on a 32 bit build, that may not work for 64 bits on the same machine. We even had to add a line in one of our libraries that sets a single element of a small array to 0.0 because of a driver bug in an AMD driver.

The problems with linux have usually been simpler to deal with, usually involving where each one puts the "standard" libraries or how they are named.

I used to recommend and do my own development using linux under Windows but that got worse with problems of dealing with dynamic vs dynamic libraries.

If I didn't have to do so much support for my textbook and was only doing my own work, then there would be some attraction to Windows such as the ability to access the latest hardware. Apple sometimes infuriates me by its slowness hand secrettness in keeping up with graphics standards but when they do upgrade, the software is correct and works across their hardware and versions of OSX..

Ed

__________

Ed Angel

Founding Director, Art, Research, Technology and Science Laboratory (ARTS Lab)
Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of New Mexico

1017 Sierra Pinon

Santa Fe, NM 87501
<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">505-984-0136 (home)   [hidden email]

<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">505-453-4944 (cell)  http://www.cs.unm.edu/~angel

On Feb 8, 2013, at 8:32 AM, Bruce Sherwood wrote:

I'm not claiming that Windows has all the answers for all possible goals. What I am pointing out is that in the case of a quite non-trivial application there has been remarkable stability that has been missing from both Mac and Linux environments. I haven't seen Microsoft being given credit for this, and it's not unimportant. Clearly someone at Microsoft has thought it important that applications continue to work.

Concerning graphics, with each new release of Ubuntu I find it easy or difficult to install a proprietary graphics driver without which even simple 3D can fail. As for the Mac, a couple years ago World of Warcraft was broken on the Macbook Pro for something like a year and a half because the graphics driver had been tweaked to cater to some iProgram, and there was no way to upgrade the driver, given the closed Mac environment.

What I'm objecting to is the facile assumption in computer-savvy circles that "obviously" Windows and Microsoft are hopeless (roll the eyes). That's not the whole story.

Bruce

On Thu, Feb 7, 2013 at 11:22 PM, Marcus G. Daniels <[hidden email]> wrote:

On 2/7/13 10:54 PM, Bruce Sherwood wrote:

To repeat, Windows for my 3D graphics development purposes has been far more stable than either Mac or Ubuntu Linux.

Windows is the biggest market for gamers.  3D innovation has historically always been first on WIndows.
If all you want a computer to do is a fixed set of 2d and 3d graphics APIs, then, sure, use Windows.  But performance and stability are only two dimensions.

I care much more about flexibility than stability or graphics performance.   For example, I want to use GPUs for accelerated computation.  It is inappropriate in my situation to code using unportable (CUDA) or crudely simple APIs like OpenCL.   That's no way to write complex, long-lived,  maintainable software.   It could be a way to write simple, static, scientific codes that perform on particular cards, if that's all you need to do.   I want the possibility of *some* acceleration over generations of cards, not peak performance for one generation.

AMD GPUs on Linux now have the driver bits (in Mesa, a free OpenGL) and compiler bits in LLVM (a free compiler).   Together there's now the possibility of integrating real compilers with accelerator technology.   On Windows, this kind of integration and experimentation is not possible.

Now fast forward to the day this all just works.   Someone writes a code using these compiler tools, but, oops there's a strange anomaly in a particular calculation.   How do you fix it?   Get your favorite bloggers to complain in a public setting?    No thanks, I want direct control.   That means source code.

Marcus

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Douglas Roberts-2]

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Bruce Sherwood <[hidden email]> wrote:

In the case of 64-bit Python on Windows, that compiler is a rather old version of Visual Studio which required arcane edits of various Visual Studio configuration files on my machine.

Bruce

<rolls eyes>

--

Doug Roberts
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

505-455-7333 - Office
505-672-8213 - Mobile

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[glen ep ropella]

Edward Angel wrote at 02/08/2013 08:02 AM:
> Although it might seem that I would have a similar view as Bruce
> since we both support 3D graphics for educational purposes, my
> experience is exactly the opposite of Bruce's. [...]

Perhaps it's my own abstraction run amok, but this whole discussion
reminds me of the recent one about Doug's friends Dick and Bart:

glen wrote at 01/15/2013 03:37 PM:
> I suspect Dick had methods he invented for his astrophysics and Bart
> invented methods for ... billing people. 8^)  And I suspect they
> were competent with those tools.  But I also suspect those tools did
> not translate well to non-astrophysicists or non-lawyers ... or
> perhaps even very many astrophysicists or very many lawyers.

Forget complexity (kind or degree), the metric is universality.  The
more expressive a tool, the less likely any particular use case for the
tool will apply across a large cohort.  The less expressive a tool, the
more likely a particular use case will translate, at least between
commonly structured individuals.

This discussion ranges over a very limited set of highly expressive
tools.  It makes complete sense that a particular use case for, say, a
Mac would not translate between even very similar users.

The beauty of on OS, a GUI, or a tightly coupled monolithically
integrated toolchain is that it _limits_ the universality of the tool,
thereby making it easier to translate any particular use case amongst
the members of a cohort.  If you're not in that cohort, well, tough luck
for you ... You have to puncture the monolithic toolchain, the GUI, or
the OS to get what you want.  (E.g. Marcus' description of analyzing to
the bottom.)  You need a more expressive tool in order to formulate and
satisfy your use case.

If you're belligerent and want to retain the monolith, but coerce it
into a suboptimal satisficing for your compromised use case, then you
have to continually react to the slight changes in the toolchain. Your
compromised use case (and its generating machinery) is _fragile_ to
changes in context.


--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Steve Smith]

I do agree with Glen's analysis (Complexity/Universality/Expressivity)
as far as I can follow it.

  I also agree with Marcus' (and Doug's) bottom line that when
developing mission-critical applications (where understanding the
details of the roundoff and other errors introduced at the
language/compiler/OS/Machine level is significant) to run on
uber-clusters or other big-iron (maybe hybrid CPU/GPU/CELL/???
clusters),  Linux is the most obvious of choices (only?).

Bruce's experience supporting a relatively small but significant toolset
for a broad audience is also valid.  The broadest audience for his type
of work is naturally the largest installed base (Windows by a factor of
4?).   I take him at his word when he says the toolset he cares about is
more stable and/or easier for him to support on Windows.  It seems
plausable.

I love my Macs because they demand very little of me as my own tech
support.  Mostly I just go through the list of things it wants to update
for me and make a fairly uninformed guess as to which things I'm willing
to risk being updated at any given time. 99% of the time that works out
fine.  When I need something outside the standard toolset, I find it  
Linux is somewhat more demanding of my attention to these details and
Windows is a total mystery for me regarding what/when/how to update on a
less granular basis than major OS releases.

I deal with computers at several (roughly) hierarchical levels:

Most of my time is spent with Applications via a Window-Mouse-Keyboard
GUI.  Those developed on/for/by religious adherents to various schools
are generally identifiable as such... e.g. iTunes running on Windows
looks a bit familiar to Mac folks and not so much to Winderz folks.
AutoDesk products on *whatever* OS/Desktop have a distinctly Windows
feel.  Archaic UIs developed under Java or X/Motif, or with other
old-school GUIs are also fairly recognizeable.  This is not only in
their visual motifs but also choices about system interface (how to
browse and choose a file, etc.)   I find this irritating and distracting
but not overwhelming (usually).   There is nothing in the universe I
hate more than the single character '\' !

When it comes time to deal directly with the desktop manager and
semi-opaquely the OS itself, things get a little hinkier.   When I'm on
Winderz (XP, 7, but not yet 8), I get bamboozled pretty easily trying to
remember the assumptions and standard idioms for doing things.  Whether
it is running and understanding the Resource/Task manager or resetting
the network or finding executable programs, I feel like a fish out of
water.  It is literally embarrassing for me to try to do *anything* on
Windows with someone else watching.

My first OS was not Unix but it was my first significant one.  I learned
it pretty well all the way from the bottom (scheduler, daemons, drivers,
file system) to the top (shells) back in the BSD days.   This means I
tend to think in Unix when I deal with Winderz or OSuX (to be equally
derisive on principle).  It means when I run the GUI Winderz Resource
Manager or the Apple Activity Manager I think of it in terms of "%ps
-eal | grep <regex>" or "%ps -ealx | sort <field#>".     As *proud* as I
am of my native language I *sure* don't expect others who didn't grow up
in my homeland to learn these arcane utterances...  for example, while I
think Nick might be capable of understanding (and maybe even enjoy the
elegance of) regular expressions, expecting him to do so to solve (what
was the original problem?) feels a bit like taking him on a snipe hunt
just for the fun of it.

I have *no* experience developing for Winderz, all that .Net stuff, C#,
etc.   If using the OS/WM interface is painful, I find the system
interface idioms equally painful and mistakes more expensive.  If it
weren't for tools like Java, JavaScript/HTML5/Flash, Processing, and
best of all (for me) QT, then nothing I did would ever be seen on a
Windows box.  It is just too painful for me to contort my
mind/touchtype-fingers, etc. to the alternate paradigm(s).

This makes me *want* to say it is all *just wrong*...  but that is a bit
like being born into a fundamentally Christian culture (with or without
overt/formal Christian beliefs) and therefore feeling (maybe in order of
foreignness?) that Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/Jainist/Zoroastarian cultures are
just wrong!   OF COURSE they feel wrong, and in some cases, the more
familiar, the more wrong... like the Uncanny Valley in CG special
effects.   It may be what drives Doug up the wall about Mormons. If they
were further afield from the culture (if not the religion) he grew up
in, they might not irritate him so much?

I'm sure that all the Mac-heads out there who learned the ins and outs
of MacOS before OSX were the wizards they claimed (postured) to be, and
I suspect they had a bit of a time and pain retooling for OSX.   I know
a lot of people who grew up in Winderz who jumped when Linux came out,
and I suspect they too are relatively "bilingual" or more to the point,
"bicultural".  Some (many?) here grew up (got their computer chops)
after Windowed Desktops, cross-platform libraries and applications , Web
Browsers, etc. normalized the user experience and to some extent the
developers experience to the point that they *really* don't care which
platform they are on.  I would speculate that if I'd been in my teens or
even 20's when all this became de-riguer, I too would be much more
multi-cultural.

But the fact is, I'm an old dog and new tricks aren't as easy or
entertaining for me as they once were.   I love to hate Winderz partly
because it is the *most* foreign of the extant systems I have to use,
but maybe more because it is sooo successful (popular) amongst the
Muggles and the "English Majors" (as we techs like to say dismissively)
and the Lawyers and the MBAs and ... all those I like to pretend to be
better than (until I need some help from *their* specialties, of course)!

- Old Dog

> Edward Angel wrote at 02/08/2013 08:02 AM:
>> Although it might seem that I would have a similar view as Bruce
>> since we both support 3D graphics for educational purposes, my
>> experience is exactly the opposite of Bruce's. [...]
> Perhaps it's my own abstraction run amok, but this whole discussion
> reminds me of the recent one about Doug's friends Dick and Bart:
>
> glen wrote at 01/15/2013 03:37 PM:
>> I suspect Dick had methods he invented for his astrophysics and Bart
>> invented methods for ... billing people. 8^)  And I suspect they
>> were competent with those tools.  But I also suspect those tools did
>> not translate well to non-astrophysicists or non-lawyers ... or
>> perhaps even very many astrophysicists or very many lawyers.
> Forget complexity (kind or degree), the metric is universality.  The
> more expressive a tool, the less likely any particular use case for the
> tool will apply across a large cohort.  The less expressive a tool, the
> more likely a particular use case will translate, at least between
> commonly structured individuals.
>
> This discussion ranges over a very limited set of highly expressive
> tools.  It makes complete sense that a particular use case for, say, a
> Mac would not translate between even very similar users.
>
> The beauty of on OS, a GUI, or a tightly coupled monolithically
> integrated toolchain is that it _limits_ the universality of the tool,
> thereby making it easier to translate any particular use case amongst
> the members of a cohort.  If you're not in that cohort, well, tough luck
> for you ... You have to puncture the monolithic toolchain, the GUI, or
> the OS to get what you want.  (E.g. Marcus' description of analyzing to
> the bottom.)  You need a more expressive tool in order to formulate and
> satisfy your use case.
>
> If you're belligerent and want to retain the monolith, but coerce it
> into a suboptimal satisficing for your compromised use case, then you
> have to continually react to the slight changes in the toolchain. Your
> compromised use case (and its generating machinery) is _fragile_ to
> changes in context.
>
>

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Douglas Roberts-2]

I'm getting worried about myself, because I am not only starting to enjoy these wordy expostulations, I'm even beginning to look forward to them with a small degree of anticipation.  Is FRIAM contagious?

On to the fluffing (or larding, depending on your gender/preference):

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

   There is nothing in the universe I hate more than the single character '\' !

 

Every time you say "forward slash", a little bit of me dies. XKCD.

 

  It may be what drives Doug up the wall about Mormons. If they were further afield from the culture (if not the religion) he grew up in, they might not irritate him so much?

Nope.  I can, and do find practitioners of  any and all religious skivvy cults objectionable, regardless of proximity, cultural or otherwise.  Additional negative points for proselytizing tendencies.  Pin-headed, slavish closed-mindedness is universally unappealing.  Throw in religious skivvies, and it is even more so. Yuk.

 

I'm sure that all the Mac-heads out there who learned the ins and outs of MacOS before OSX were the wizards they claimed (postured) to be, and I suspect they had a bit of a time and pain retooling for OSX.   I know a lot of people who grew up in Winderz who jumped when Linux came out, and I suspect they too are relatively "bilingual" or more to the point, "bicultural".  Some (many?) here grew up (got their computer chops) after Windowed Desktops, cross-platform libraries and applications , Web Browsers, etc. normalized the user experience and to some extent the developers experience to the point that they *really* don't care which platform they are on.  I would speculate that if I'd been in my teens or even 20's when all this became de-riguer, I too would be much more multi-cultural.

But the fact is, I'm an old dog and new tricks aren't as easy or entertaining for me as they once were.   I love to hate Winderz partly because it is the *most* foreign of the extant systems I have to use, but maybe more because it is sooo successful (popular) amongst the Muggles and the "English Majors" (as we techs like to say dismissively) and the Lawyers and the MBAs and ... all those I like to pretend to be better than (until I need some help from *their* specialties, of course)!

My primary objection to M$ is their long, well-earned history of monopolistic business practice, and their "embrace, devour, and kill", in that order methodology of taking out competition as part of their attempt to maintain market dominance.  Plus, their advertising sucks.

Oh, and that's the primary reason that I dislike "The Other Evil Empire" as well.  The marketing approach, I mean, not the advertising.  Also, I just don't like the Mac interface.  Never have.

 

- Old Dog

I'm older than you, Stevie...

 

Edward Angel wrote at 02/08/2013 08:02 AM:

Although it might seem that I would have a similar view as Bruce
since we both support 3D graphics for educational purposes, my
experience is exactly the opposite of Bruce's. [...]

Perhaps it's my own abstraction run amok, but this whole discussion
reminds me of the recent one about Doug's friends Dick and Bart:

glen wrote at 01/15/2013 03:37 PM:

I suspect Dick had methods he invented for his astrophysics and Bart
invented methods for ... billing people. 8^)  And I suspect they
were competent with those tools.  But I also suspect those tools did
not translate well to non-astrophysicists or non-lawyers ... or
perhaps even very many astrophysicists or very many lawyers.

Forget complexity (kind or degree), the metric is universality.  The
more expressive a tool, the less likely any particular use case for the
tool will apply across a large cohort.  The less expressive a tool, the
more likely a particular use case will translate, at least between
commonly structured individuals.

This discussion ranges over a very limited set of highly expressive
tools.  It makes complete sense that a particular use case for, say, a
Mac would not translate between even very similar users.

The beauty of on OS, a GUI, or a tightly coupled monolithically
integrated toolchain is that it _limits_ the universality of the tool,
thereby making it easier to translate any particular use case amongst
the members of a cohort.  If you're not in that cohort, well, tough luck
for you ... You have to puncture the monolithic toolchain, the GUI, or
the OS to get what you want.  (E.g. Marcus' description of analyzing to
the bottom.)  You need a more expressive tool in order to formulate and
satisfy your use case.

If you're belligerent and want to retain the monolith, but coerce it
into a suboptimal satisficing for your compromised use case, then you
have to continually react to the slight changes in the toolchain. Your
compromised use case (and its generating machinery) is _fragile_ to
changes in context.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

--

Doug Roberts
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

505-455-7333 - Office
505-672-8213 - Mobile

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[glen ep ropella]

Steve Smith wrote at 02/08/2013 10:49 AM:
> There is nothing in the universe I
> hate more than the single character '\' !

Hate is a strong word.  But I feel it when I have to SCP files with
spaces in them ... which Microsoft and Apple people seem to be fond of.

I think the most irritating thing to me is the assumption that a GUI is
always more usable than the command line.  Again, it comes down to
expressiveness, I suppose.  With the command line, I can go anywhere and
do anything I want from anywhere.  A GUI traps me in these little occult
scopes from which escape is awkward, if even possible.

Random access is good.  If I want to be scoped, I'll do it myself, thank
you very much. 8^)

Which takes me back to the conversation we were having before.  The
command line (and tools like vbox) allows me to "tunnel" between
subcultures quite nicely.  I am very happy WINE exists.  But it irks me
in a way I can't describe.  Reflectively, however, I should like WINE
better than VBox... I guess I'm just confused.

--
glen e. p. ropella, 971-255-2847, http://tempusdictum.com


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Roger Critchlow-2]

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 11:49 AM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Bruce's experience supporting a relatively small but significant toolset for a broad audience is also valid.  The broadest audience for his type of work is naturally the largest installed base (Windows by a factor of 4?).   I take him at his word when he says the toolset he cares about is more stable and/or easier for him to support on Windows.  It seems plausable.

VPython is an OpenGL based package.  If VPython runs stably on Windows, it's no thanks to Microsoft, Microsoft has been doing its best to embrace, devour, and kill OpenGL since 1995.

-- rec --

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Bruce Sherwood]

It is indeed an eye-roller. But it's more a Python eye-roller than a Microsoft or Windows eye-roller. If I remember correctly, it was Owen who some months ago pointed out some unfortunate aspects of the Python ecology. On the one hand, Python is very open to adding modules written in compiled languages such as C++. However, for such foreign modules you have to use the same compiler that was used to build the target Python (and you have to prepare different versions for different versions of Python); you mostly don't have such problems with modules written in Python. I could in principle build Python myself from source, using any compiler I liked on Windows, but there are lots of downsides to that, especially that other people's compiled modules wouldn't work with my Python. For lots of reasons, VPython is built to go with official python.org releases.

An additional complication is the break between Python 2.x and Python 3.x, which in order to clean up some stuff is deliberately (though mildly) incompatible with the 2.x series. For 64-bit Python built on wxPython I have to use the older Python 2.7 at the moment, because wxPython for Python 3.x hasn't yet been released -- a general annoying problem in the Python world, that modules lag Python. I guess for historical reasons, both the 32-bit and 64-bit Python 2.7 are built with the old 2008 version of Visual Studio, for which 64-bitness apparently wasn't fully developed, especially in the free version of the compiler that I use.

So the Python module situation is Not Good.

Bruce

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:09 AM, Douglas Roberts <[hidden email]> wrote:

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 10:06 AM, Bruce Sherwood <[hidden email]> wrote:

In the case of 64-bit Python on Windows, that compiler is a rather old version of Visual Studio which required arcane edits of various Visual Studio configuration files on my machine.

Bruce

<rolls eyes>

--

Doug Roberts
[hidden email]

http://parrot-farm.net/Second-Cousins

<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">505-455-7333 - Office
<a href="tel:[phone]" value="[phone]" target="_blank">505-672-8213 - Mobile

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

[Marcus G. Daniels]

Roger wrote:

"VPython is an OpenGL based package.  If VPython runs stably on Windows,
it's no thanks to Microsoft, Microsoft has been doing its best to embrace,
devour, and kill OpenGL since 1995."

The kind of freedom OpenGL (or OpenCL) gives is the kind I don't want.
It's the "tunnel between worlds" stuff that Glen talks about.  I this
sense, I applaud Microsoft for making it painful to do so.  Those
technologies make us the frog in the heating kettle.  I want the one good
world, not a dozen crappy ones.

Marcus

--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web.com - Microsoft® Exchange solutions from a leading provider -
http://link.mail2web.com/Business/Exchange



============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com