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Every now and then I get the urge to publish a book on the pearls we left behind.
Solutions to problems that we are fighting with today - but ten, twenty or fifty years ago, we did have solutions.
At the time, they may have been rejected because computing resources where not available. Today, they are, yet we haven't picked up the old solutions.
We may have settled on architectures where the old solutions do not fit in. So we can see what would be the solution, but we cannot make use of it.
Some solutions may not have been viable in its day - that's why it was left behind - and maybe not even today. Yet it might represent interesting concepts or approaches, that could be mind stimulating today, even though not necessarily realizable as code.
Often, I see that my own thoughts have spun further: This is a great basic concept, but it could have been expanded so-and-so. That certainly is no discredit to the concept - quite to the contrary, if your ideas to extend it could have made it even stronger.
Some concepts "sort of" exist, mostly in papers and articles, but are not commonly practiced in coding.
I've got a fair number of candidates of my own, but I'd like to hear which other concepts, techniques and models you think that today does not receives the merit that it deserves. What is your favorite forgotten concept, that we really should be aware of today?
If I really sit down to write this book, I probably will not see offhand what makes it valuable anno 2020, so I might need your explanations and references. We could start it here, and move it elsewhere if it grows too large.
Would you think it interesting to start this a "book" as a CP article, that we could develop stepwise together?
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The concept that all data would include semantic meaning and the things you could do with it would be determined by plugins. This was the original vision of the GUI created by the folks at Xerox PARC, and is something I consider forgotten but that we should really be aware of today. Instead, we have monolithic OS's where the semantic nature of information is totally lost in bit streams and meaningless JSON packets. 
And I've already written a variety of articles here on CP to explore the concepts of true semantically aware data. 
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Many of the concepts in my book and articles on this site are more or less in that category. Maybe they haven't been left behind so much as they aren't widely known. If you drew up a list of topics, I'd pitch in if I thought I could contribute something useful.
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Greg Utas wrote: Many of the concepts in my book and articles on this site are more or less in that category.
Grandiosity points awarded.
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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Every month that has passed since a new concept was introduced halves the number of point awarded to any reference to that concept. So a year-old concept is worth 1/2^12, or quarter of a per mille, of a concept developed this month.
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Digital concrete?
Sounds like something I'd add to my kilometre-high "to read" pile.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Member 7989122 wrote: Would you think it interesting to start this a "book" as a CP article, that we could develop stepwise together?
Would I find interesting any further discussion of this rambling, content-free,
Member 7989122 wrote: on the pearls we left behind.
fantasia ?
No.
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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OK, so I understand that you think there is nothing to learn from the past. Anything that has ever been rejected, for whatever reason, under whatever assumptions and circumstances, should forever be forgotten and ignored, and noone should ever suggest that it might have some merit under the new and changed circumstances. A rejection of an idea should always be final and absolute.
Fine. I'd like you think so - that is your right. So I am certainly NOT going to bother you with any stuff about ideas that you have been decleared, for yourself, as rejected and carrying no value. Obviously, I cannot prevent you from looking up, or by accident come across, any such idea that you consider rejected and without value, but I certainly feel no need to force it onto you. You go ahead hunting the freely roaming game, whether it be the web framework of the week, the next programming language to hit the Tiobe index as the fastest growing one, or whatever. Anything else is just soooo 2019, and not worth a dime!
modified 23-Mar-20 21:57pm.
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"Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig enjoys it." --apocryphally attributed to George Bernard Shaw
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Member 7989122 wrote: OK, so I understand that you think there is nothing to learn from the past. Anything that has ever been rejected, for whatever reason, under whatever assumptions and circumstances, should forever be forgotten and ignored, and noone should ever suggest that it might have some merit under the new and changed circumstances. A rejection of an idea should always be final and absolute.
wonderfully entertaining hyperbole, but, you left out the part where I strangle kittens 
«One day it will have to be officially admitted that what we have christened reality is an even greater illusion than the world of dreams.» Salvador Dali
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... "Aisle B, Back".
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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There will be a free public seminar on the topic of "Avoiding crowds during the coronavirus pandemic." Everyone is encouraged to attend. 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Yes, I thought it was a joke, too[^].
And this[^].
And at least a dozen others.
It's reminiscent of what happens if you tell your granny that the format command is used for cleaning discs.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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On win10, with visual studio in order to open forms in a designer on a project you downloaded you have to unblock the corresponding resource file usually using the shell and right clicking on the file and clicking "unblock"
For a project with a lot of resources this gets really tedious.
Does anyone have a trick little utility for this? Something other than maybe powershell (i prefer not to have to fire that up)
Real programmers use butterflies
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Unblock-File[^]
Pipe your folder to the command.
honey the codewitch wrote: Something other than maybe powershell (i prefer not to have to fire that up)
Oh, sorry, didn't see that.
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I don't know if this is applicable in this case, but typically if you extract the content of a zip file that itself got the "downloaded from the internet" attribute, all extracted files will get that attribute as well.
My solution when I get this is to remove that attribute from the .zip file first (right-click in Explorer, Properties, Unblock), then extract. The attribute won't be propagated.
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i didn't know that. thanks very much!
Real programmers use butterflies
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For the details:
The indicator telling that this file was retrieved from the Internet is represented by an alternate data stream (ADS) in the file, named Zone.Identifier. Some software saves only the "ZoneId" in this stream, others save the orgin URL as well.
In a script, you can remove all ASDs from a file using the SysInternals "streams" utility. Or you can use a recent version of PowerShell, which allows you to remove a selected ADS without affecting others.
(I provided this hint, as a solution to issues reported by our customers, to one of our developers who has been set to putting together a tool file for our Windows customers. He sneered back (in an email, so this is a direct quote): "I am fortunately not a windows developer, I hope I will never have to claim that". Maybe he is the wrong man for the job...)
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Member 7989122 wrote: the SysInternals "streams" utility
Jeeze, how many times have I put off and put off looking for a method or tool for fixing some niggling problem, only to find that it's already sitting on my machine in either the SysInternals or the NirSoft directory?
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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I was going to bring that into the conversation but couldn't quite bring myself to writing a few paragraphs about it.
Something else that should work: Copy the downloaded file(s) to a destination that only supports FAT32 (even if just temporarily), then bring it back. Unlike NTFS, FAT32 doesn't support alternate streams, so it effectively drops the attribute.
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How is that with *nix file systems - would they do?
The "beauty" of *nix file systems is that they provide no support whatsoever beyond being the name of a (dynamic length) sequence of octets, of no structure, no semantics. Hooking up several "octet[]" in some semantically meeaningful fashion seem sort of counter-logical to the very idea of *nix files being context free.
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Member 7989122 wrote: How is that with *nix file systems - would they do?
I would imagine that any file system that doesn't support alternate streams the way NTFS does, and make no attempt to replicate the functionality, would work just the same. I just used FAT32 as an example, since in the Windows world, it's probably the lowest common denominator.
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... Home working: It's not for everyone[^]
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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