Windows running Linux Cuda ?

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by xilman

One thing that really bugs me is that many Linux apps do not have any useful help at all. Very often the only thing you get when clicking on the help button is the version name and number of the software.

Help button???

Documentation is often the thing programmers do last... If running the app from a console with the "-h" or "--help" flags doesn't give you at least some useful information, perhaps offer to contribute human language to the project in question. Many projects are very welcoming of new contributions of effort.

This is Open Source. Documentation is programming (in a way) too.

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by chalsall

So running the "man" command (short for "manual" TUI -- *nix geeks like short commands because in the early days we could often type faster than the comms channel could exchange bits).

The current complaints are good problems to have.

Man !@#$% is also colloquially an expression of frustration, and lots of punctuation unpublishable cursing. There used to be plenty of both, back in the days of acoustic coupled modems at 110, 300, or 1200 baud, paper tape readers, teletype consoles, and program editing by rekeying an entire punch card in the thunderous keypunch room. Punching in binary, a punch card approached a kilobit; a 4000 line program was a HEAVY backpack with 2 card boxes full. I computed a while back that the amount of data capacity of an ~8GB micro SD card would have in punch cards weighed as much as 2 adult blue whales. Those old punch cards make great shims for instrument-makers though, and some of the old hands hoard them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler

[xilman]

Originally Posted by kriesel

Those old punch cards make great shims for instrument-makers though, and some of the old hands hoard them.

I have a couple of thousand cards in the loft; some punched, some virgin. Somewhere up there is the complete Ballad of Eskimo Nell on punched cards. I also have paper tape reels and 8" floppies. No card reader or tape reader but two double-sided double-disk drives are in the loft. No idea whether they still work.

Cards are also useful for shopping lists and index files. An old DEC-hand taught me how to convert one into a useful tray for holding small nuts, bolts, screws, clips, etc while working on hardware. Also useful for holding cigarette ash when not working on hardware.

A nice feature of Dartmouth BASIC was that if you dropped the deck there was no need to sort the cards back into order.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by xilman

I have a couple of thousand cards in the loft; some punched, some virgin.

I bet you don't have a total-punched card. In high school we used to take discarded cards and "recycle" them by running through the Jukyes again, and totally punch them, i.e. drill every possible hole. So transformed, they became raw material that was later cut and pasted and lacquered into nice ornaments and lampshades. This activity was totally prohibited, first because it was over-stressing the machines, then second because some of us would not limit themselves to recycling old cards, they would use just brand new cards, with different colors (of course, school's property, we had them in green, blue, pink, yellow etc), and if the teachers could catch us, we could be expelled. We were lucky.

Still have few at home in Ro, somewhere in parent's apartment (which is now more or less a book storage facility, I didn't visit since 2015).

[kriesel]

Originally Posted by xilman

Cards are also useful for shopping lists and index files. An old DEC-hand taught me how to convert one into a useful tray for holding small nuts, bolts, screws, clips, etc while working on hardware. ..
A nice feature of Dartmouth BASIC was that if you dropped the deck there was no need to sort the cards back into order.

Unused paper tape makes good write-on labels for small parts cabinets. Punch cards make good bookmarks and one-page notepads. I converted my punch cards by reading them in at my former employer's computing center before they got rid of their old reader connected to a VAX. Somehow the resulting files found their way to one PC after another.

Fortran had columns 73-80 dedicated for optional sequence numbering. Common practice was short routine name abbreviations and well spaced line numbers for possible later line inserts. Programmers who did not use sequence numbers regretted it after spilling a large deck.

[M344587487]

ffmpeg is great and the man page is detailed, but doing something complicated and unfamiliar is likely to warrant an internet search. The choice is muddling through the man page to find the incantations necessary to bend the streams to your will through trial and error, or save 20 minutes by searching online for the result you want to achieve and learning the commands that way. Good luck bundling all the help (which I argue is different from the documentation that man and --help provide) with the program in a way that is easily searchable and kept updated. You're basically tasked with recreating a chunk of the internet.

[S485122]

Originally Posted by xilman

...
8" floppies
...

If you need one I have a few floppy drives at home : one 8" (a hefty piece from Stratus at about 6 kg, too heavy to weight on my kitchen scale), one 5 1/4" and two 3.5". The only "functional" drive is a 3.5" which has an USB 2.0 connector, I have the corresponding floppies and even some 2.8" floppies that were used by Olivetti amongst others on dedicated typewriter/word processors. I just tried the 3.5" drive on an Ubuntu computer, it is recognised, it sees the floppy is in the drive and I can start the GUI formatting application, but it will not proceed, I suppose the CLI would solve this but the nostalgia of hearing the typical sound was enough, I did not go further ;-)

I have seen working card punchers but never had to use them.

But I digress from the subject of this thread.

Jacob

[xilman]

Originally Posted by LaurV

I bet you don't have a total-punched card.

I really don't know. I'll have to check. I certainly remember seeing them around back in the day.

[xilman]

Originally Posted by S485122

If you need one I have a few floppy drives at home : one 8" (a hefty piece from Stratus at about 6 kg, too heavy to weight on my kitchen scale), one 5 1/4" and two 3.5". The only "functional" drive is a 3.5" which has an USB 2.0 connector, I have the corresponding floppies and even some 2.8" floppies that were used by Olivetti amongst others on dedicated typewriter/word processors. I just tried the 3.5" drive on an Ubuntu computer, it is recognised, it sees the floppy is in the drive and I can start the GUI formatting application, but it will not proceed, I suppose the CLI would solve this but the nostalgia of hearing the typical sound was enough, I did not go further ;-)

I have seen working card punchers but never had to use them.

But I digress from the subject of this thread.

Jacob

Thanks, but no thanks. I've several working 5 1/4" and 3.5" drives. At least, they were still working about 4 years ago and I've no reason to doubt them now. The machines with them installed are also in the loft. One started life as a 386-25 with 4MB RAM and a 40MB disk, subsequently upgraded with a "make-it 486" (a 486sx in a 386-compatible daughter board), 8M RAM and a 80M disk. That system ran Slackware Linux, and still does AFAIK.

Just checked: as I thought, the 386DX chip is in the "make-it 486" box so I can downgrade again if I wish.

I also have an external USB 3.5" floppy. Hardly ever gets used these days.

Some day I really must find a fresh supply of round tuits and ensure that all my old floppy-held data is copied on to hard disk and thence to the backup system.

[chalsall]

Originally Posted by xilman

Most everything I write these days is in Perl, with a slight contamination of SQL.

fork() (mostly; implicit pipes are broken) works under Strawberry Perl! :giggle: