World: r3wp

... and preinstalled in all internet cafés ...

Henrik - very strange, really. In our company, USB drives (flash 
drives) are really a boom. We can see problems VERY sporadically, 
if ever. I would definitely refuse to call them unreliable - much 
more reliable than anything else - floppies, cds/dvds

I have seen a few laptops that has broken USB ports due to overused 
of USB drives. I still think it is great though.

pekr, the drives themselves are OK, but the OS'es handle them badly. 
If I under MacOSX store some files on the drive and eject the drive 
as I properly should, the files are just not present on the drive 
according to WinXP, as if the ejection procedure didn't sync files 
to disk. Half the time, they don't work under Linux without hours 
of fiddling and most win98 machines won't handle them at all. Data 
transfer between machines is probably successful about 50% of the 
time.

An internet connection is, for me, a much more reliable way to get 
data onto a machine. It's probably the syncing aspect that makes 
them so unreliable.

Could UNIX commands sync and touch help you? You have them under 
MacOS, and maybe under Windows too with cygwin. A little script could 
run through the dirs and sync or touch (or both) the files.

I don't waste any more time on USB drives :-)

oh :)

Cut the crap and move on
 is a good idea.

Henrik - don't blame USB drives for your problems then :-)

as far as my experience goes, WXP was never problem - plug-and-play, 
never lost single file. The problem is valid for W2K, but it is how 
they did it .... one of my friends told me (not sure it is true), 
that W2K first caches files, and unless of some size, it is not being 
written to target USB device. So, if you unplug it and not by using 
OS disconnecting facility, such files are not there ....

maybe there is some setting for that, dunno .... Windows denerves 
me sometimes with so called - rought czech translation - delayed 
write was not successfull. Not sure how it happens, but somewhere 
deep in your profile there is a dir for such a feature, and if there 
is some file, you can see annoying messages each time Windows starts.

Henrik - did you do your homework this time, really? Win98 needs 
drivers, so what? 1) throw away PC using W98 :-) 2) Install your 
driver once, and it works like WXP next time, that is all. Had no 
problem with my old Fedora Core 1 and my 2 USBs, never hear of that 
"works half the time under Linux"

well, anyway, there is not easier way how to carry your files around 
then USB flash drives, so :-)

pekr, I can't just ask a customer to throw away 10 win98 machines 
and go spend thousand of dollars on XP licenses because my little 
pen drive does not work on them. the fact is that I work in too many 
different OS'es that USB drives can work reliably across. had I been 
working in XP alone, there may not have been a problem, but this 
is not the case.

some machines don't even have USB ports...

but they have TCP/IP stacks :-)

and I've also seen XP machines that flat out refuse to mount USB 
drives. this is a stupid problem.

well, this week, having PC shop, one customer buys two new PCs. I 
don't understand one thing - czech republic is far from being rich, 
yet ppl listen to suggestions. W98 is security thread and unnecessary 
complication in your network. Then carry floppy with your usb pen 
driver - always worked for me, the driver is tiny ...

well, or just small cd-rw should work for you as well :-)

thread=threat

sorry, I just can't be bothered. fetching what I need off a website 
is way more reliable for me.

so, here you go with your solution for usb driver :-) That sounds 
like real luxury, as for W98 archaic machines I would expect dial-up 
connection, not fast Internet line :-)

the "strange" fact is that the machines are always accessible on 
a LAN, which is why I prefer using the internet to transfer data 
between machines at home and customers.

anyhow, back to work :-)

Hi Henrik, 

I've had some really nice experiences with Qtask. Just upload a zip 
of all the files you might need, and download only those ones you 
actually need in a given situation. Real sweet.

Qtask has Filesharing. My kids use them instead of USB drives.

Another Windows Vista feature bites the dust - http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,1973620,00.asp

The http://www.bluishcoder.co.nz/2006/06/unenterprisey-languages-meeting.html
meeting was mildly interesting.  Robert Strandh showed how he reimplemented 
metafont in common lisp with the main aim that he could provide print 
services for his G# music score editor.  This was implemented as 
a DSL, and printing done by converting the DSL to postscript.  Familiar??

The Erlang talk was also interesting .. to learn about a language 
designed for failure .. pity the demo was not well done.  Io - bit 
boring for me.  And Chris Double talked about javascript with continuations, 
and threads.

have you held your Rebol presentation? :-)

their Mnesia product is pretty impressive http://www.erlang.se/doc/doc-5.0.1/lib/mnesia-3.9.2/doc/

Interesting - something like that we wanted for IOS, right?

not just IOS

As of May 2006 The Encyclopedia of Computer Languages by Murdoch 
University, Australia lists 8512 computer languages.

somehow Rebol made it on this shootout.. http://dada.perl.it/shootout/craps.html

FreeBasic - completly free variant of BASIC with surprising level 
of features - http://www.freebasic.net/index.php/about

http://www.potix.com/zkdemo/userguide/

nice, but really lagging, they should improve blitting a bit ...

looking at source- it is like VID, just an xml

maybe nice for the first look, but I don't like it

The page or component you request is no longer available. This is 
normally caused by timeout, or opening too many Web pages. 
Continue cruising ZK Demo .  
Failed to invoke zkBox.init
zkBox is not defined

Cannot imagine making some bigger project in it

it is really slow on my 1.8Athlon, Mozilla 1.8b

so slow, that using it as a rich client environment would denerve 
me after some short period of time :-) Give me plug-in :-)

They need 10 not cached javascripts to display just the two lines 
of error message from above:-)

potix.com states, that they don't use java-script at all? :-)

Hm, from http://zk1.sourceforge.net/release/rn-2.0.0.html- All events 
are processed at the server. No JavaScript required. 
so it must be slow

hmm, that is really "clever"

and what is this:

<script type="text/javascript" src="/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/ext/prototype/prototype.js" 
charset="UTF-8"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/ext/aculo/effects.js" 
charset="UTF-8"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/ext/aculo/dragdrop.js" 
charset="UTF-8"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/html/boot.js" 
charset="UTF-8"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/html/lang/mesg.js" 
charset="UTF-8"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/html/common.js" 
charset="UTF-8"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/html/au.js" 
charset="UTF-8"></script>

<script type="text/javascript" src="/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/datelabel.js.dsp" 
charset="UTF-8">

and why they have dynamic images? src="/zkdemo/zkau/web/zul/img/tree/root-open.gif;jsessionid=51580CB61B89633DED498444EB959AED"

>> s: 0 t: now/time/precise foreach js [
[    "/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/ext/prototype/prototype.js"
[    "/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/ext/aculo/effects.js"
[    "/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/ext/aculo/dragdrop.js"
[    "/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/html/boot.js"
[    "/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/html/lang/mesg.js"
[    "/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/html/common.js"
[    "/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/html/au.js"
[    "/zkdemo/zkau/web/js/zk/datelabel.js.dsp"
[    ][s: s + length? read join http://www.potix.comjs]
== 144313

>> print ["total js size:" s "downloaded in:" now/time/precise - 
t]
total js size: 144313 downloaded in: 0:00:07.406