Is Linux Really Worth it?

[Kellemora]

True, but Ancestry is FREE, and anyone can access the data, except living peoples dates are marked private, and in some cases their names also. However, I can give family members full-access which includes the private data not blocked. I can also give some editing privileges too.
Ancestry is happy with my LARGE files, because it gives them more people that might fit the family somewhere.
I get at least three or four inquiries a week from family members so far distant there is no way I could ever know them, since I made my family tree PUBLIC.
The trouble with Ancestry is there is no way to look up a married woman by her married name. Unless of course the users use married names and show the maiden name in a comment area if available. But then you get error messages, hi hi.

[yogi]

Your focus is on getting family information to the people who want and need it. I'm not as interested in the end product as much as I am in how it was created. My understanding of databases is very limited to be honest, but I know enough to see how your work can be simplified and immortalized. The downside is the cost of setting up your private data. After that, it's free for the price of the electricity it needs to stay alive. A service like the Ancestry web site would get a lot more exposure in the wild than would any private site you might decide to host. So I guess that's something even if they do have some shortcomings.

[Kellemora]

I would have never put all of my work on a public site like Ancestry, since I know they make money by selling that data to other members. It costs 90 dollars every 6 months to have access to the names they think may be a match.

But then, after having two heart attacks, and with my COPD and Emphysema, I know my days are numbered.
Also, all of the parents of those my age are now all deceased, which means there is basically no contact with my own generation on the next generation down. Most are not interested yet, but some day they might be, and by putting it on Ancestry, they will be able to find it by doing a simple name search. Then they will find my whole tree, all 600,000+ linked individuals.

In the early days of computing, using DOS, and seeing how the simple chains could be created, I did mess with doing chained data using Basic. It was not a searchable database though. I started with me, and added my mom on one leg, and dad on another leg. Then dad's mom and dad, and mom's mom and dad. Each link in the chain produced a single text page, which could hold a lot of data. I didn't get very far doing this before I bought the Broaderbund Family Tree Maker for DOS.
I studied how they stored the data, and figured out I could add data to the GEDCOM data page, if I was careful. But if I made a mistake somewhere, it would blow the whole database, which is stored as a string.
I'm glad programming methods and the way data is stored has improved over the years, so we do have the types of programs we have now.

OK, I forgot something else I did during the DOS days. I made individual text pages, now they are called Family Work Sheets, hi hi. But I made a text page for each person, that I could access with a little DOS program I wrote in Basic.
It was super simple, but the way I did it, I used some keywords on the text page that could take you to the next page. I don't think we had a way of linking back then, even though one could jump from page to page, they couldn't just pick a name off the page and jump to it, unless that person had their own page already constructed.

[yogi]

I think you have a suitable solution in Ancestry.com - at least it will accessible as long as that site is in business. Creating your own database would mean that somebody would have to maintain it while you are gone. That might mean simply keeping the power switch to the server on, but things happen. If your family site goes down somebody would have to know how to bring it up again.

Ahhhh, yes, Quick Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. I remember that. LOL Oddly enough I didn't learn BASIC programming from Microsoft, although I knew it existed and did tinker with it to see how it was different from HPBasic. All the test equipment we designed at Motorolo was pretty much in partnership with HP. I guess they figured they knew more about BASIC than Microsoft so that they invented their own. They did the same with POSIX where they tried to reinvent Unix along with a few other companies. Arrogant bastards they were.

Things have certainly changed. There are times when I wish I was back in the programming game. It was the kind of mental challenge I liked. It forced me to be logical and precise and I actually ended up with a usable product for my effort. Word on the street is that the salary for the job I left in 2002 has tripled.

[Kellemora]

Things really have changed, and quite a lot, in how programming is done.
I'm sure there is someone out there who still writes in machine code.
They have to in order to create the other programming languages that make life simpler.

Although I have no idea what they are, or what they actually do.
I drop in on computer clubs websites every now and then, and they talk about visual programming.
I've seen names mentioned (went back to see some of them) Luna, Lansa, Embrio, and DG Solution Builder, are just a few of the many names that showed up.
I'm sure each have a specific type of programming parameter, so you need to know what you want to do before you select a program to do it.
The also mention all kinds of programs for Lo T, which I think has to do with Schmartz-Fonz, hi hi.

Way over my head!

But I figure it is like using Website Builders, you will still need to know HTML5 to get the final product working right.
So why not just learn HTML5 instead? Well because you then have to learn JS, php, etc. if you want to do anything fancy.

[yogi]

The people who write compilers are the geniuses of our times. The purely binary people, however, work for the likes of Intel and AMD where bits of data are translated into bits of silicon on sapphire. I saw a documentary once where they were discussing µP architecture. They showed the physical layout of the chips and the engineers were able to recognize memory, address and data registers, and various processing units. They could show where the "logical shift left" instruction was taking place, for example. Say what? Well, that's where you have a bunch (64) of parallel data lines and you shift the bits of data over to the left one space. It gets freaky pretty fast down at that level of programming.

For all the crap that comes out of Microsoft I have to give them credit for trying to make a single development environment for all the possible uses of Windows. In order to allow the guy writing apps for your smartphone to use the same software as the guy creating virtual machines in the cloud, a lot of the tools developers previously owned suddenly became obsolete when Windows 10 became the standard. There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when the new methods were introduced, but it did make things a lot easier when it comes to developing Windows as a service. Standardization used to be unknown in the software development field.

I can't imagine what it takes to develop neural networks and artificial intelligence. What sort of wizardry is that?

[Kellemora]

I learned a little about Arithmetic Shift Left, back when I was playing with the Octal Entry computer. But have long since forgotten all of it, hi hi.

I'm always seeing posts by folks saying, I just created a new app, would someone mind taking a look at it and see how they like it. You can download the app from here.
Sounds to me like the perfect way for hackers to get into your cell phone or laptop.

But my point is, there are now programs that you use graphically to create something that becomes a running program.
But I know there is a whole lot going on under the hood to create the app.

Sorta like when I spent some big bucks to buy the Microsoft Macro Assembler to create exe files.
Honestly, it wasn't what I thought it was and I don't recall ever technically using it for something I needed.

[yogi]

I've written a few .dll files in my days, which seem to be necessary in order to produce an .exe file. But, that was only in a classroom environment. I never did get the hang of it for actual production work. LOL

I know of what you speak regarding visual programming. The popular thing these days is to teach your pre-schooler how to code using exactly such software. My daughter who teaches bi-lingual classes in a grammar school is teaching her 5th graders about perl programming. She is computer illiterate but the graphic teaching software is amazingly effective. The end product would get a real programmer fired for being so inefficient with the code, but none of this graphic stuff is intended to be too serious.

Yeah, the bit shifting equates to multiplying or division or something I forgot about too. I recall spending a lot of time studying how math processors work and it's very simple once you wrap your mind around it. I never had to program on that level, but knowing what is going on at the processor level made certain things more sensible up on the interpreted language level.

[Kellemora]

I wouldn't say it was exactly a programming language, more like playing a game I suppose.
The idea behind it was to build your own game, and it was fairly lucrative, more than just picking elements they had already designed, although they did have several basic shapes to use in the stock bins.
This was about three years ago, and I remember taking some images I had in my own computer and uploading them to use as characters and vehicles. I used design blocks of theirs to create a background image, and build like a racetrack. Then added all kinds of elements to make it look more real, but still more like Mario Bros. in appearance.
The only hard part was making the paths the cars could follow around the oval, and then making it so cars could not crash into each other, hi hi. I designed it so sometime between every 5th and 7th lap, a car would have to make a pit stop for fuel and tires. This is where my uploaded characters and things like tires, jack, and fuel hoses came into play.
You had to dissect your character to make him move and bend, which was a major project I didn't count upon, since I only upload a single image at first.
I did get it far enough to be functional, and basically do what I intended for it to do, but it got to complicated to make it more realistic or do much more than following a pre-set program. It wasn't exactly human interactive at the point I quit messing with it.

I used to have several books on machine language programming, but ended up selling all of them as a set to a friend of my wife's niece who was learning machine programming. I don't think she got very far before moving on to normal programming.

[yogi]

Writing a program is more about the flow than it is about the details of the language code. The language provides tools that are assembled to perform a task. Racing a car around an oval track looks simple until you try to set it all up in logical terms a computer chip would understand. Our brains take so many things for granted that it's hard to appreciate what is really going on in terms of process flow. In the final analysis it's one long string of ones and zeroes. Hard to believe such a thing could do anything useful.

[Kellemora]

My dad, as afraid as he was of electric, even though we are only talking about a 12 volt battery here.
Made this device using on/off toggle switches and little 12 volt lights about the size that fit a flashlight.
He did this back in the late 1940's, and he knew nothing about computers or binary.
But what he built was basically a binary adder, I think.
Now if you consider I wasn't born until 1947, and this box of his sat on his closet shelf for more than a decade before I asked what it was. He got it down and hooked it up to his trolling motor battery to show me. I was probably only around ten or twelve years old at the time.
The only thing I really remember about it was all the rows of switches, ten per column and five or six rows.
It had no electronics inside the box, just the wires to the switches and lights.
And the more I think about it, those on/off switches could possibly have been three or four way type switches.
I say that because if he flipped a second switch in the same column, if one switch turned on the light, another would turn it off. If you picked any row and turned on all the switches, all the lights for that row would be lit.

Many years later, I got to thinking about that box of his, and tried to figure out what it was it did.
And the nearest I can figure it was a way of adding, but how I don't know.
I had a binary clock hanging on the wall in my apartment, and at the time could read what time it was, hi hi.
I knew dad didn't know diddly squat about binary, which got me contemplating about his little box.
For the life of me, I could not figure out how it could do anything but turn lights on and off, with no logic.
There may have been some logic involved, since he knew what the answer was by flipping switches, hi hi.

As an aside: Speaking of logic. Do you remember Logic Puzzles? Lines of text you read then tried to figure out the answer. A quick example, but not necessarily functional.
The old gold smoker owns snails.
The man in the yellow house wears ties.
The blue house is next to the brown house.
The list would go on with enough info to figure out the correct answer.
In any case, Dad used to write these for some small newspapers, like the Des Peres News and Views, and Webster Ways.
Somewhere I have several of these stashed away that he had published.

[yogi]

Memory cells in my brain are being activated, but I can't bring to consciousness exactly what it is I'm remembering. LOL It has to do with a board full of holes and marbles. Moving the marbles around solved some kind of arithmetic problem. I'm thinking Asian or Chinese. I know I read about this somewhere at some point in my distant past, but the memory is vague at the moment. I do believe it was something about a 3000 year old calculator, or something. I guess it could be done with toggle switches and light bulbs too.

Before computers took possession of my mind and soul, I used to spend a lot of time with crossword magazines. A few of them had more than crosswords, the variety of which I enjoyed tremendously. The toughest challenges to my logical mind were those word logic puzzles. Each had something like five characters with five different characteristics. The clues verified maybe six of them and the idea was to reason out from those hints which characters had which traits. I could not solve those puzzles by just using my thoughts. Eventually I read how people go about solving them, which amounts to drawing a table something like a spreadsheet and filling in the blanks with the known quantities. That technique did help a little given it gave me something visual to work with. But, to this very day I've never been able to solve even one of those word puzzles completely.

Each puzzle had a complete description of how to solve it; out of sight, of course. I perused those analyses carefully and got some hints, but never did break the code. It seems easier than it is because it's all logic. The problem is that you have to make some educated guesses along the way, and any wrong guess prevents the solution from being discovered. It's a lot like Sudoku. I can do the easy ones, but after that it involves guessing solutions and I don't have the patience to correct my wrong guesses.

[Kellemora]

Every night after I'm in bed, I work both Crosswords and Sudoku. I prefer the super hard Sudoku puzzles, but hate Crosswords designed after the New York Times style.

The easiest way to solve Logic Puzzles, it to place each clue on a small 1"x1" piece of paper. Then fit the clues together, moving the papers around so they fit the clues locations, colors, people, houses, or whatever.

There is no math involved in Sudoku, the numbers could be replaced with symbols or icons.
On the easy Sudoku puzzles, you can almost visualize blocking columns and rows that have the number you are working on, to find the space that is missing that number.
As they get harder, you may have to go through each number checked the rows, columns, and grid squares, looking for a hole.
When you reach the point that you cannot find a hole for certain, and seem to have come to an impasse, now is the time to take a red pen and start making dots on the board like a tic-tac-toe board in each square. Only place a dot for a possible number that can go in that grid square. If you put a small red dot for number 1 in the top left corner, a 3 in the top right corner, number 2 would be half way between those two number, at the top.
Then in the middle you would place 4 on the left, 6 on the right, and 5 dead center.
Bottom row 7 on the left, 9 on the right, and 8 in the middle of the bottom row.
Look for Pairs of Dots with no extra dots, and check the row and column to see if you find the exact same pair of dots, with no extras. If you do, then any of those two numbers elsewhere in that specific row or column can be blacked out.
For example: In the top row of the Sudoku puzzle you have a dot on 2 and 6 and nothing else in the first box. A 6, 7 and 9 in the middle box, and only a 2 and 6 in the right box. You can safely cross out the 6 in the middle box leaving only the 7 and 9. Then now that you have only a 7 and 9 in the top middle box, you can look down the column to see if you have only a 7 and 9 in another box in that column. If so, you can check for a 7 or 9 in the other box in that column and if you find one, lets say a 7, regardless of how many other numbers are in that box, you can cross off the 7.
On super hard level 8 and 9 puzzles, you may reach a point where there are no single holes to fill in.
There are certain patterns you can memorize, but it is easier just to make a simple guess using a yellow pen to see if you hit a dead end. If you start in a box with only two number and do hit a dead end, then you know the other number is the correct one to work from with the black pen.
I doubt if you will find puzzles harder than level 5 in store bought Sudoku booklets.
It's rare to find a hard Sudoku that cannot be solved using the red dots in booklets.
More often than not, you simply missed the single hole lurking somewhere on the board.

[yogi]

My wife is the Sudoku player. She now has an app for that on her iPad and her smartphone. I doubt that those puzzles extend into the super braniac range, but some are very challenging. It's my wife's interest that got me going one day. I played Sudoku for a few weeks and then decided it was a Japanese plot to destroy the minds of us Americans in revenge for beating them in the last war. Haven't touched one since. When we are on the road my wife will often find a paper version of Sudoku. She uses a ball point pen and refuses to erase anything. There are no dots in her solutions, but any given box will have several numbers in it. I guess that's her equivalent to the colored dots. She knows which numbers are real and which are for testing purposes, but to me it looks like a tangled mess. In the end she is happy to solve the puzzle. There is no way to prove that because there are so many numbers laying around the game boxes.

She does the same thing with crosswords, i.e., uses a pen. I always use pencils so that the puzzle is more or less clean and I'm not distracted by wrong guesses. But, it has been a long time since I did a paper puzzle. It's all pixels now, well Pixel 3 XL to be exact. LOL

I can't imagine what kind of brain it takes to create a Sudoku puzzle. I"d be surprised if computers have not mastered that art by now, but somebody had to program the computer to do it. I have tried to make my own crossword puzzle. Now I know why a lot of them are made by prison inmates who have a lot of time on their hands.

[Kellemora]

I used to write a few Sudoku puzzles and post them on-line. This is back when I tried a WordPress site.
It took me forever to find a Template that the Sudoku grid would work on.
Then after I finally got it up and looking right, about a month later they changed something that messed up the grid.
So I had to find another Template that would work.
About four times of that and I finally gave up on WordPress.
I'm curious if my old page is still up on WordPress, if so it's been abandoned for years.
It took some doings, but I found them.
If you scroll down as far as Apr 3, 2008, and beyond, you will see what they were supposed to look like before they messed up the Templates.
https://lugocupuzzles.wordpress.com/page/3/

After I post this, I'll see if the Link works.

[Kellemora]

It did, and I see I posted the page where they are displayed correctly.
But all the ones after that did not display correctly and we couldn't get them to after days of trying.

[yogi]

Two of the puzzles on that linked page are missing some heavy black borders. All the other puzzles look pretty good.

My total experience with WordPress is under one hour of my time investigating it. It dfidn't look all that complicated but I wasn't interested in blogging at the time. Templates are a good idea, but I'd guess every one of them can be created by anybody with minimal HTML experience. As far as rendering the LUGOCU correctly goes, the first thought in my mind was to make the grid in a spreadsheet then save it as a .gif, or whatever image format you like. My guess is the image would fit into any of those per-formatted templates. Maybe not. As I said I abandoned WordPress pretty quick when I discovered I could do it better myself. LOL

[Kellemora]

You probably couldn't get up to pages 1 and 2 where they have only faint lines.
None of them look like the original perfect squares I used.

Same here, I abandoned WordPress and designed my own html page.
They looked great, and had could have been interactive if I wanted to pay my host at that time to use (forget what it was, javascript maybe) but I didn't know how to do that kind of programming.
So I just posted them in a way if someone wanted they could print out only the grid with starting numbers, and a separate answer sheet if they wanted or needed it. All of the one I posted on that website were level 6 to 9 only.
I looked on wayback machine to see if they had anything about my old host but couldn't find anything.
It was Inlink.com by early e-mail provider, I think. I could have been on something else though, I don't have any log-in or password information for them anymore. Besides, they are out of business, hi hi. There is a possibility I put them on one of the galilei/galileo servers, which is probably where I had them, instead of Inlink. Too long ago to remember.