One thing one must consider that the data set itself might need debugging, if that is part of the testing.

Also, you can get 'data-bashers' who will feed all sorts of things into a program, equivalent to doing things like putting cd-roms into toasters. Part of the process here is things like 'industrial design', where things are meant to be consistant and give the user the understanding of what to do next. Searching for songs on apple's itune is an example: you would expect a search link in the window, but it's unusually in the frame.

It's not well enough to document it in the manual, since (a) it becomes the manual writer's problem, and (b) the manual writer might miss clues too. For example, the obnoxious 'and press enter' one sees, was left out, and the end result was a call support about a program sitting at the prompt for want of words in the manual. You can't suppose every one is computer literate.

In the day, it had very press reviews, in that users were not really prepared for what the NT world was going to do.

People were still used to the DOS idiom, and the idea that some sort of program protection might be implemented, and the other supprises that ME brought were not someone like a home user was ready to adjust to. The lack of a DOS boot, and even that there were multiple IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM programs to wrangle with, just made doing things that were simple in Win98SE and earlier, just that much harder to do.

Any of the windows were susceptable to 'drag and drop' the windows directory somewhere else, but you could boot into a DOS prompt (sort of), and fix it. The DOS was also moved, but IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM were still in the root directory.

ME did fix a few bugs, such as in scandisk, but it was pretty good at introducing many more. The P!us pack was rolled into the distro, and I got it to work somewhat better if you removed IExplorer from the base install, and installed it as a separate application (98Lite).

It's called Open Shell these days, Bew developers. But if you are acustomed to a particular kind of menu, you can tell CS to use that form, eg classic, xp, 7, whatever. PinMenu is good too for lesser or always available menu options.

Tip. Put a link to opening 'open shell', somewhere accessable from the desktop (even in a folder under there). It's handy restarting it.

The Windows calculator is only an algebraic one. It does not handle RPN notation, In my younger days, I wrote a program in 8bit rombasic that emulated something like a HP15, but you could set the operation in 'base by', eg "base 73 by 10's". You could set your own degrees and logs as well, independently of the base (eg 28 sto T would set the circle to 28 degrees.)

The calculator on the desktop is not really all that useful, unless you can edit the calculation history. For plain dos and Windows, i used to use a thing called 'acalc' from PC-DOS 7, but i wrote a rather cute calculator in REXX, which does much of the same thing. (It supports trig functions in circles too).

Of course, we see reactos has a nice calculator that looks pretty much like the windows one. They had the thing set up so you could run the winxp type version under w2000. Microsoft forced you through a large DLL for this activity. Nothing like what you need to run the norton desktop for windows one though. It uses quite a large slab of the application.

The runs on the LU are too short to do staff-changes in this way. It's easier to just have the new crew take over at some station. Most suburbab trains here don't have staff-cars. Staff who are travelling to a point do so in the passenger cars.

In Australia, there are runs from Melbourne to Darwin, or Sydney to Perth, which are handled by sets of on-board crew, these change at various places where there is no staff-room or even town. Because there are a lot of companies operating, each company would provide its own facilities, and as such one would have a coach behind the engines, where the off-duty crew would ride on.

The Inlander is a main-line passenger train from Townsville to Mt Isa, of some 600 miles. Mount Isa is the terminus, is an unstaffed halt, so the train-crew do things there too. The journey used to be 24 hours when I travelled on it, and they don't have staff-points along the way.

The Pilbara routes are short enough to do the trip in a day. But runs typically in the 600 mile run get staff-cars. The Westlander and Inlander in Qld run staff-rooms in the van. The main reasons for putting on staff-cars are to be able to close remote engine-sheds, like Charleville and Cloncurry.

My brother worked coal trains, and they would depending on the company, work to Mooronbah (where quarters were provided), or crew change at points halfway between depots, so in and out of copperbella.,

It's interesting that AC says that 'decisions about the control of the train are done in real time on the train' and then says 'these trains operate without any people on them'. This sounds like some kind of on-board computer is in place, so what are the people in Perth who oversee all this do?

The trains are being drive remotely, rather like the London Tube trains have been for years. There's still someone at the controls, but no one on the footplate. This means you can change staff half-way through a trip, without requiring a staff-car attached.

Given that in the news too, is where BHP derailed a train that ran away from the driver (who was inspecting the train), they used remote signalling control to throw a set of points and run it into a passing loop with no escape, it would be interesting. But this is a run-away train, the sort that has happened many times before on suburban networks.

I imagine that to forfill the full function of the driver, one needs to deal with the likes of hot axle boxes, cracked and broken tyres, and all sorts of other things before it would be fully remote.

The problem, I think, is that the overall model is lost. That programing has become something different to doing things on the computer.

In younger days, I could program Lotus for DOS, even doing clever things like programmically hiding lines in print, or adding one's own menu to a spreadsheet. Then Windows came along, and it was all hidden in things like VBA. It no longer was a copy of the commands with logic.

When you could get into files, and see what was needed, you could program for it. I used an RTF file as a batch for a rexx processor, that created documents based on the user input file, and checking the file you could produce good copies of letters. It's a lot harder to do this with a binary file.

I still use REXX. It's a simple language, and IBM envisaged it as the glue of the OS. But they did not lock it up like visual basic. The thing is an extension of the command prompt, and you can write neat filters for things, or fiddle with INI and registry, and create desktop icons from a batch. The current install on my computer is to copy a directory structure, and run the batch file to create links to lots of programs.

The thing with using paragraphs, sentences, etc, is that it allows one to bite off bits of information. We already use em-dashes to mark off particular clauses we wish to emphersise -- to this point -- but now argue about spaces. White-space helps the reader catch the large-scale of the text. Setting a sentence off in double-space is one devise that does this. Even in the font i type here, it is easier to pick sentences off.

Paragraphs are likewise set off by a blank line, or first-line indent. Where first-line indent is not permitted, then one should use blank line separation. Quotes and examples should be set in an indented paragraph, where the quote is the paragraph.

Bold text is appropriate if one wants the text to stand out on the page at first glance. Highlighted text that is meant to be emphersised in context should be in italic.

Over here, the bald eagle has a facination for removing drones from the sky. I suppose we have to add yet another dangerous wildlife to the list: ravenous cockies eating the bandwidth!

As they say: Gawd help all of us.

It would have been nice if the original post had expanded VPN at least once, so people who have not encounted it could understand it.

It would seem that the IBM plug-issue as a method of regulating third-party trade might rear its ugly head here. The purpose of some of Apple's 'innovations' are not new ideas, but to prevent an aftermarket of things.

I wonder what role the doctorine of first sale applies. That is, does apple's rules apply to what happens to the bits and pieces after sale?

Or putting an incomming call through the facs machine. Done that a few times. It works!

I thought programmers still do this. I recently bummed some code that accelerated ten days' run into a couple of hours, if not less.