The final straw was when the mouse driver wouldn’t work, either. I took the same devices home and they worked fine on my Win7 machine. She sold the pc to a friend and bought another one with Win7 installed. Everything worked fine

The problem seems to be that Microsoft designed this system to be a generic tablet for all devices–the home screen looks like my smartphone screen, and the natural tendency, and the expected behavior is to slide the icons around, only guess what–this doesn’t work on your normal desktop pc (no touch screen). And there’s no “desktop” mode to get you back to a normal pre-8 screen.

After doing further reading on the internet, I’ve seen several postings that suggest Win8 is not a big improvement over Win7, so I think I’ll stick with Win7 if I should need a new pc in the near future.

Twitter’s new HTML widget lets you put a fully interactive timeline on your website | The Verge.

It came down to the Samsung Galaxy and the Nexus, but Nexus was the easy choice. They both have 7 inch screens and the Samsung did have the advantage of an SD slot, but I decided 8 gig would be plenty. If I need more storage, I’ll use the cloud. Plus, the Nexus was $50 cheaper (at $200).

Some things I noticed right away–blazing fast boot up speed, more stable wifi connection, much faster page loading. And two big pluses in apps–a Chrome browser, which I already use on my desktop, and the ability to load Zinio magazines.

If you haven’t heard of Zinio, I’m not surprised. It’s not mentioned much when talking about ereaders, because the buzz is all about Kindle and Nook. Both of which have lousy magazine selections–Zinio has a much bigger selection–it’s the “king” of electronic magazines. You have to have high powered hardware to run Zinio–even my smartphone doesn’t have the capability. The Nexus handles it easily.

I did some reading and got some wonderful reference material at a site called SlateDroid. Many people have hacked the Novel, so I took the gamble. All you have to do is download a zip file to an SD card, and boot the machine. Could it be that simple? Yes, indeed, it was. I now have a fully functional eReader, as well as a bona fide Android tablet. I have the Google Market available, and I downloaded my favorite apps tonight, just like I was able to do on my smartphone.

It has a few deficiencies, of course. Response to touching is not as sensitive–it has resistive  technology instead of capacitive, but once you get used to pressing a little harder, it’s not a big deal. You also can’t do the magnify thing with your fingers, but the screen is so large, there’s no real need. It only has wifi capability, but most tablets are that way anyway.

The display is gorgeous, and it’s really nice to see a web page spread over a relatively large area instead of the tiny screen on a smart phone.

All in all, I think it’s a heck of a good deal. I’m having lots of fun playing with it. And I’m glad I took the hacking gamble.

Addendum–as of 12/8, the prices has gone up to $89.95. I guess they realize they’ve got a winner.

But, there is a way to make Cobol do it. It’s not quite as easy to implement, because you have to use several steps, but once you set up the template, it’s very straighforward.

You may have used the Cobol debug option to execute displays and special logic in your program, and displaying a list of all paragraphs executed is an extension of that option. Here are the steps.

003100 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
003300 SOURCE-COMPUTER. IBM-370 WITH DEBUGGING MODE.
003500 INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION.                       

Line 3300 is necessary, the lines before and after are just to show where to place it in your program. Then, right after PROCEDURE DIVISION, place this code. Line 12400 is necessary, as it’s a stopper for the DEBUG section.

011700 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
011800 DECLARATIVES.
011900 DEBUG SECTION.
012000     USE FOR DEBUGGING ON ALL PROCEDURES.
012100 DEBUG-DECLARATIVES-PARAGRAPH.
012200     DISPLAY ‘—PARA: ‘ DEBUG-NAME.
012300 END DECLARATIVES.
012400 MAIN SECTION.                           

Use this parm in your execution JCL:

//PS001   EXEC PGM=UMCCALL,PARM=’/DEBUG’

If you need to pass parms to your program, temporarily hard code it as a literal in your program, as I don’t think there’s an easy way to add them to this required parm.

There are some special compiler options that your shop has to have implemented for the standard Cobol compile–if these code changes don’t work, make sure that you have TEST(NONE,SYM,SEPARATE) in your compiler options.

I’ve used this version of Ready Trace in several different programs at GEICO, so I’m confident it will work for you. You probably won’t use it every day, but for those situations where you’re pulling your hair out trying to solve a problem, this may shed some light on your program logic.