text:
User talk:RayTomes

I have added some articles on cycles, economic cycles, Edward R Dewey who formed The Foundation for the Study of Cycles. I put links from a bunch of existing articles on cycles and fixed one typo. I plan to add further articles about cycles in the near future - lots of loose links on the pages I added. I see that one or two things that I intended to add already exist under different names, so a bit of tidying up is needed.

Hi! Welcome to Wikipedia. Hope you like it here and decide to stay. When you get a chance, drop us a note at New user log to introduce yourself.

When uploading images, make sure you follow the guidelines at Images, especially with respect to copyright.

You can sign your name on talk pages by using " " for your username and " ~ " for your username and a timestamp.

 * Welcome is a good place to start.
 * How does one edit a page gives editing help.
 * Manual of Style gives formatting info.
 * Policies and guidelines tell about the principles we operate on. It's important, but don't try to read it all now.
 * Help covers a broad range of useful topics.
 * Village pump is a place to ask questions. *Show preview explains how to double-check your edits before saving.

You should also feel free to drop me a question on my talk page. I'll answer if I'm here.

Happy editing, Isomorphic 21:52, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I have replied at Talk:Cycle. Dori | Talk 22:47, Mar 17, 2004 (UTC)

Just to draw your attention: I've made a fairly major rewrite, pending your agreement, for Cycle. - Details at Talk:Cycle. IMSoP 04:14, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hi. I saw you listed at this Wikipedia page as someone interested in physics. I wonder if you can provide any help with this page: Why 10 dimensions? I am interested in Ramanujan Modular Functions and how they are used in String Theory. JWSchmidt 19:37, 31 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Image tag
Hi! Thanks for uploading the following image:

 * Image:Ed-Dewey.jpg

I notice it currently doesn't have an image copyright tag. Could you add one to let us know its copyright status?

You can use   if you wish to release your own work under the GNU Free Documentation License,    if you wish to release your own work to the public domain,    if you claim fair use of someone else's work, and so on. Click here for a list of the various tags.

If you don't know what any of this means, just let me know at my talk page where you got the image from, and I'll tag it for you. (And if you know exactly what this means and are really tired of the constant reminders, please excuse me. They will stop once the tagging project is complete.) Thanks so much. Denni ☯ 03:47, 2004 Dec 16 (UTC)

P.S. You can help tag other images at Untagged_Images. Thanks again.

Time-Space Conversion Ratio
Hi there - what do you make of Time-Space Conversion Ratio ?

Is it just me, or is it rubbish. Jeff Knaggs 16:30, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Discuss; not down the Memory Hole
Omegatron, the guy who posted the Harmonics_Theory page sent me an email poimnting out your comments about memory holes and pseudo science. Well said! If you wish to discuss the harmonics theory with me here or by email, you are most welcome. As a result of a 10+ year old list I have been called a crackpot by a number of physicists, and I always invite them to put forward scientific arguments. Two have done that the rest declined. The two that did both ended up agreeing that what I was doing was scientific, just well outside there previous area of knowledge. One was a particle physicist who agreed that I could have and did predict a new particle at 35 Mev which was subsequently found at KARMEN but is ignored by particle physicists. Best wishes User:RayTomes

 * Are you worried? It's not even on Votes for deletion yet!  :-)
 * Although, yes, I am in favor of keeping most such articles instead of deleting them, I'm also really skeptical. The article, frankly, gives me a vibe of crackpottery.  But my philosophy is just to present the facts (and the majority opinion!) in as unbiased a way as possible, and let the reader decide.  So for instance, things like the particle prediction and redshift should have more details and references to papers, other sites, etc., and if there are notable detractors they should be mentioned in an objective way.  "Mr. X of the Y Institute claims that this theory is rubbish and proposes Z alternative".  Or something.
 * Also, you're rather intimately related to the theory, so read through Vanity page and Autobiography, as well, and be careful to remain as objective as possible. :-)  The more objective and acknowledging of criticism, the less likely people will want to delete it. - Omegatron 02:46, Apr 11, 2005 (UTC)

 * No problems. I look forward to answering any questions and producing a tidy and balanced article. Thanks for your attention. RayTomes May 16

 * On the VFD page you have all your comments listed at the bottom. It would be easier to read if you moved responses to individual comments directly under those comments. - Omegatron 14:00, May 19, 2005 (UTC)

Nanocycles and varves
Hi Ray. Thanks for your work on the varve and geochronology articles. However, I've a few doubts as to the veracity or application of the 'nanocycles method' as you've described. I've made some comments at Talk:Nanocycles method, but here are a few more.

There's a long standing and comprehensive peer-reviewed literature of research in sedimentary cycles. Rhythmically layered sediments may or may not reflect cyclicity of a known or regular period. Varves, probably the best known type of rhythmite, can indicate supra-annual cyclicity (time-series analysis of varve thickness variations), and less commonly sub-annual cyclicity (less commonly because they're often so thin it's difficult to study sub-annual events). Tidal rhythmites are also common in the geological record, however it is important to note that these are not varves, although the two can sometimes be confused. It is vital to realise that the thickness of varves can reflect the operation of many different hydrometeorological processes. Numerous studies have shown that while there can be a link between varve thickness (i.e. deposition rate) and parameters such as rainfall, discharge, temperature etc.. the relationship is not always present, and not always related to one variable. There's been a lot of work in this area because of the obvious application of using annual records as palaeoclimate proxies. Hope all this makes some kind of sense! NickW 09:22, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

Sockpuppet
I don't think anyone took the comment seriously. A lot of people vote with similar comments on VFD because it's a boring job. Unless he's actually got a sockpuppet check or diffs to back up the claim, he's nowhere. The page is archived and probably won't be looked at for ages. If you're really confident those other people aren't your sockpuppets, and other attempts to get him to drop the accusation, I suggest you ask a sockpuppet check from a developer or request an RFC if this person fails to discuss with you.

Also, note that his failure to reply could simply be due to being absent. Did he edit anything else since you posted the request? - Mgm|(talk) 19:31, Jun 15, 2005 (UTC)
 * Deletion isn't the end. You could still appeal at Votes for undeletion, just be sure you've got some evidence to sway the people.

 * Also, while the person you asked to comment may be an expert, there's unfortunately no way for us to verify this. We don't know if a newly registered user or anon has the best interests of wikipedia at heart or are just trying to destroy our efforts. They could just as easily be an impostor trying to further an agenda. That's why anon and newbie votes are often discounted in the final decision to be safe (especially when they don't provide a rationale as often happens.

 * I hope this hasn't put you off contributing. - Mgm|(talk) 12:07, Jun 18, 2005 (UTC)

Category:Wikipedians in New Zealand
Hi, You might want to consider adding User NZ res to the top of your user page, which will add you to this category automatically and also add a nice graphic. Onco_p53 07:41, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Image copyright problem with Image:StonesThom.gif
Thanks for uploading Image:StonesThom.gif. However, the image may soon be deleted unless we can determine the copyright holder and copyright status. The Wikimedia Foundation is very careful about the images included in Wikipedia because of copyright law (see Wikipedia's Copyright policy).

The copyright holder is usually the creator, the creator's employer, or the last person who was transferred ownership rights. Copyright information on images is signified using copyright templates. The three basic license types on Wikipedia are open content, public domain, and fair use. Find the appropriate template in Image copyright tags and place it on the image page like this:.

Please signify the copyright information on any other images you have uploaded or will upload. Remember that images without this important information can be deleted by an administrator. If you have any questions, feel free to contact Carnildo or ask for help at Wikipedia talk:Image copyright tags. Thank you.

Deletion of The Foundation for the Study of Cycles
You write in the page Articles_for_deletion/The_Foundation_for_the_Study_of_Cycles: 'Note that both "Cycles Research Institute" and "Foundation for the Study of Cycles" were apparently founded by Tomes, although it is not clear whether they really consist of more than a website (the only information seems to come from members of these organizations'

This displays your shocking ignorance on these matters. The FSC was formed by Edward R Dewey in 1941, 6 years before I was born. The date of its creation was in the articles that you attacked. The FSC has employed many people with various directors and staff in real offices. It is very easy for an ignorant person to make up a story and then believe their own story and use that as a reason to remove material - which others have laboured hard to create. Do you not think that there is some onus on a person to at least try to learn the facts before acting? Dewey was a highly respected man who had audience with leaders in many fields and as a result many thousands of people subscribed to journals and magazines which he headed up.

Would you expect articles on nuclear physics to be written by postmen? If not, why would you expect articles on Cycles organisations and topics to not be written by cycles researchers who belong to these organisations - they are in the best position to know are they not? User:RayTomes

 * Ray, I don't know what you expected to gain from leaving the above message on my talk page, which I moved here. I have no interest in continuing to debate the demerits of deleted articles with you.  The AfDs are over and the verdicts of the WP community were clear. ---CH 16:19, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

 * I write this to point out to you that your slurs and misinformation are just that. You need to take a lot more care with the accuracy of what you post. Ray Tomes 08:47, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Statistical Analysis of cycles
Hi Ray. Ive been looking round the CRI website and the one this I can't seem to find is some good statistical analysis, comparing the null hypothesis (that there is no cycle) with the hypothesis that there are cycles. Is there any good work on this subject? --Salix alba (talk) 20:46, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

 * Yes, there is a test called Bartel's test and I do have a scan of an old article that describes this. I intend to convert to a proper document some time. If you want I can email you the rough form. Ray Tomes 22:13, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

 * Yes that would be great. --Salix alba (talk) 08:35, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Categories
is a subcategory of. It is unnecessary and undesirable to include both on the same article.

 * Thank you. I assume that american_economists is the correct one then. Can you explain why he is listed under E rather than D? Ray Tomes 22:53, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Deleting sourced material is deprecated; your blankings will be reverted as often as necessary. If you find the phrasing undesirable, the solution is to tweak it; not remove it. Septentrionalis 06:31, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

 * How can you tweak something that should not be there? The material about Ball's book is entirely irrelevant to the article. Ball was not a contemporary of Dewey and never mentions Dewey in his book. The connection is so tenuous that you could argue for having anything in any article and it would be as valid. Ray Tomes 22:53, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Cycle studies
This deletion was hardly spurious. It went through a 5-day deletion debate at Articles for deletion/Cycle studies. The debate established the subject wasn't encyclopedic, if you wish to appeal that decision, you want Deletion review. - Mgm|(talk) 09:21, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
 * Hillman only posted an afd tag and a POV tag. Nowhere did he remove or alter material as the word 'butcher' implies. I doubt the latest version of the article is inferior to whatever you posted up yourself, because that version was a repost of the deleted article entirely written by you. - Mgm|(talk) 11:26, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
 * You have mail. - Mgm|(talk) 22:34, 20 December 2006 (UTC)

Category:Cycle nominated for deletion
I have nominated the above category for deletion. The discussion is linked from the category page. Tim Shuba 14:36, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

9.6 year cycle of lynx abundance nominated for deletion
I have nominated the above article for deletion. The discussion is linked from the article page. Tim Shuba 19:10, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Association of Members' Advocates/Requests/February 2007/RayTomes
Hi Ray. I'm taking a look at your request. Would you be able to direct me to what is currently bothering you? I had a look at the link you provided and that took me to a deletion that took place in 2005. Though there is another deletion for the same category that took place this year: It appears you have an interest in cyclic events that is not shared by many others on the Wiki community. Are you looking for best advice on how to develop articles on cyclic matters? Regards SilkTork 14:43, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

You can contact me on my talkpage, or by email. SilkTork 14:44, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi SilkTork. I haven't seen anything in a while. Are you still planning to do something? Ray Tomes 23:28, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

Sorry. I thought I had dropped a message on your page. But, yes, I have been distracted recently. I was going to speak to a few people about setting up a new category for cycles, but when I looked at the List of cycles I got bogged down in an internal debate on the value of a category over a list. I'd like to hear your explanation of what advantage a category has over a list, and why there should be both, so that I am armed with appropriate explanations if someone challenges me. Regards SilkTork 18:31, 4 March 2007 (UTC)

 * Hi SilkTork. I hope that you find this note, because I have been blocked from editing pages ion wikipedia. The person responsible is Ruud Koot (seems to be well named). Are you able to do something about this please. He (or someone else) has also removed the category cycles, undoing many hours of my work. This is the typical situation that is faced in everything that I try to do. You now have first hand experience of it in action. Ray Tomes 21:45, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Hi Ray. I have left a message with Ruud. I suspect he didn't realise you were acting under my guidance, and he will soon unblock you. Stay cool. My suggestion now will be that we hold any action on the Category:Cycles until The Foundation for the Study of Cycles and List of cycles have both been through a discussion and survived. With support and credibility from consensus we will better able to proceed. SilkTork 18:26, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

 * He is off in his imagination to a large extent with his stuff about physics articles in the category cycle. He is arguing about the old category cycles (with an s) whereas the work I have done is on the later category cycle which was much more limited. It does not include double slit experiment or anything like it. All the articles put in category cycle by me recently are quite clearly about a cycle or several cycles. I do wish that people would actually look at things before taking extreme measures like deleting categories and blocking people. What right does he have to do block me and how did he get it? Ray Tomes 21:18, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

He is an Admin. Admins are voted in after discussion and investigation on Requests for adminship (worth having a look at to see what process editors go through before being accepted as an Admin). He has left a message on my talk page indicating he will unblock you User_talk:SilkTork, and it's worth reading his conditions. If you object to anything, then please say so before being unblocked. When Ruud next logs on he should check messages and remove the block. SilkTork 09:31, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

 * Well I am happy with the answers that you gave to him on your user talk page, thank you. It is fair to point out that this whole thing arose from my complaint about an invalid deletion of a category when the vote was in favour of keep and the person counting made multiple mistakes - the count, the accusations of cheating on my part, and the wrong decision to delete. I do not accept that count and decision and do not accept being banned for not accepting it. In the community of people that deal with cycles (I have known many of them for many years) we refer to something as a cycle and not a periodic phenomena, so I don't accept that it more clearly named. I had already added the bulk of articles before discovering that category and did the proper thing in putting a not that resolution is required. That resolution should not be at the point of a gun, but by discussion. I have not behaved in manner that deserved banning. Ray Tomes 12:00, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

 * A furtherv thought. Ruud talks about over-riding community consensus. The fact is there never was a consensus to delete the cycles category. There was a consensus to keep it. Ray Tomes 12:03, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

For your information, a discussion is taking place regarding Ruud's block on you. It's not going well. Added to which, the List of cycles is losing out on the discussion to delete it. I have requested assistance from senior Advocates, and I will let you know their advice. I fear I have handled this badly for you, and may have made matters worse. I'll keep in touch via this talk page - and you may also email me if you wish. Regards SilkTork 19:23, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

 * As you say, it is not going well. I do not accept that you have handled it badly for me or for wikipedia. Your motives have always been pure. You have told me to calm down when needed and given good guidance. I am encouraged by comments by Wikiwoohoo on your talk page. It is nice just sometimes to see a voice of reason among the silly reactions. Ray Tomes 21:28, 20 March 2007 (UTC)

Ruud has said he will unblock you. Be aware that I have said you will not attempt to recreate the Category:Cycle/s, and that I said I would not encourage you to do so. I have said that your past behaviour has not been disruptive - rather, that you have always sought out and followed advise. We need to talk carefully about what you now need to do. Your first step, however, would be to add your comments to the discussion at Articles for deletion/List of cycles. Regards SilkTork 22:49, 18 March 2007 (UTC)

Please refrain from altering my archives. You made it clear back in 2005 that you didn't like my rewrite of the HT article; there's no need to vent about it again. If the article is ever recreated, the place to discuss its contents is on the recreated article's talk page. For the article to be recreated, it would have to pass deletion review, and you'd have to convince Wikipedia that it was a scholarly work in line with WP:RS, and had enough support in the community to be notable. All of this was explained to you in 2005. --Christopher Thomas 21:14, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Dated cleanup tags
Hi, thanks for your message, SmackBot does not generally add tags, but merely dates those that are already there. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 13:22 20 March 2007 (GMT).

Please do not linjk to your own website
Per our external linking policy, do not link to your own website. If it really is useful someone else will add it eventually. —Ruud 17:56, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

Withdrawing from AMA
Hi Ray. There has been a discussion recently on AMA Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Wikipedia:Association of Members' Advocates which I found very interesting. It has led to me questioning my involvement in AMA. This is not to say I will stop being involved, but for the time being I am not taking on any more cases, and I am taking a break while I consider the issues. In the meantime I will be exploring other areas of Wiki where I may be useful. I am closing my involvement in your case, and you may wish to seek another advocate. It has been interesting working with you - and I wish you well for the future. Warm regards SilkTork 19:08, 14 April 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for your message
Hi Ray. I was not unhappy to be working with you. My withdrawal relates entirely to the nature of AMA. I recognise many of the criticisms of the project, and feel that it can sometimes be damaging. I am considering the new scheme of Editor assistance. You may wish to leave a request for assistance there. Warm regards SilkTork 17:50, 21 April 2007 (UTC)

Your assistance request
I will be willing to assist you as you go along with this. I would need a more detailed overview of the situation to give you more specific advice, can you please tell me what articles it is which are in question? (I am an administrator here, so I can view deleted articles.) The main distinction we make with scientific articles is that they must not be original research, for example, a theory or experiment which has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in a reliable journal. On the other hand, if such source material from journals or the like is available, it may certainly be used as a source. Please contact me with some details and I'll have a look at your situation. Seraphimblade Talk to me 10:07, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
 * Actually, the The Foundation for the Study of Cycles article wasn't deleted, just redirected. You can go into the page history, and grab a copy of the article. You could just restart the article that way, since it never was deleted, but that may just cause more trouble. What you may wish to do is grab a copy of the last version of the article before it was changed to a redirect, and work on it in your userspace for a bit, citing the source material you've stated, and then get it put that way. (To create a userspace subpage, you can just do something like User:RayTomes/temp.) Seraphimblade Talk to me 02:43, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Nope, still there! You can see the history and old revisions here. The AfD on the article was closed as no consensus, redirection was later done as an editorial decision. Given that, you need no special permission to restore or work on the article. Seraphimblade Talk to me 03:15, 12 May 2007 (UTC)
 * It has been noted, and I believe fairly so, that your behavior in the past on this subject has been somewhat problematic. Please do remember that, if any article on this subject is done, it must be neutral, and must include well-sourced criticisms of the organization or its philosophies (or, at very minimum, other editors must be permitted to add such). Please do keep that in mind as you go along. Seraphimblade Talk to me 15:27, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Following discussion in User:Seraphimblade page it was proposed by User:Rood_Koot that the FSC article be set up in my User space which I have done - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RayTomes/Foundation_for_the_Study_of_Cycles and please note that I have made the name without "The" on the front as I consider that correct. Anyone with an interest in this article should please discuss it in the associated talk page, thanks. Ray Tomes 20:03, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

Orphaned non-free image (Image:Wheat-54yearcycle.gif)
Thanks for uploading Image:Wheat-54yearcycle.gif. The image description page currently specifies that the image is non-free and may only be used on Wikipedia under a claim of fair use. However, the image is currently orphaned, meaning that it is not used in any articles on Wikipedia. If the image was previously in an article, please go to the article and see why it was removed. You may add it back if you think that that will be useful. However, please note that images for which a replacement could be created are not acceptable for use on Wikipedia (see our policy for non-free media).

If you have uploaded other unlicensed media, please check whether they're used in any articles or not. You can find a list of 'image' pages you have edited by clicking on the "my contributions" link (it is located at the very top of any Wikipedia page when you are logged in), and then selecting "Image" from the dropdown box. Note that any non-free images not used in any articles will be deleted after seven days, as described on criteria for speedy deletion. Thank you. BetacommandBot 08:32, 21 June 2007 (UTC)

compliment
you are cool. be bold at 'category: periodic phenomena'... and elsewhere-   Spencerk 04:01, 1 November 2007 (UTC)

Need help with regard to cycles articles
There has been a history of pages related to the study of cycles being deleted from wikipedia. This has been in part due to one or two people deciding that they were somehow numerology or something (with no basis in fact) and in part to articles being too biased in favour of a particular view. I am trying to get some articles reinstated with them in a form that is acceptable. The worst offender in deleting these articles has now left wikipedia so hopefully battles will not result.

A while back I asked for some help in restoring an article that was deleted in contravention of policy (the votes were counted wrongly and false accusations of sock puppets made). At that time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Seraphimblade assisted me for a while and gave good advice. As a result a new article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RayTomes/Foundation_for_the_Study_of_Cycles was set up and got almost ready for reinstatement. However for reasons unrelated to this Seraphimblade stopped working on this, although said that I should persist and that the article should be reinstated (and he calls himself a deletist).

More recently, a fellow cycles researcer pointed out that an article on W D Gann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._D._Gann was deleted. When I go to this it mentions the delete log but I cannot find the entry for Gann there. So the first help needed is how to find out why that article was deleted. There are a number of other articles that refer to this article. There is no doubt that W D Gann is an important historical character (e.g. google "W D Gann" gives 54,600 links). He may have been a fraud or a clever man, I cannot say, both views being expressed by some. However there should be an article on him. Second question is how to go about making a new unbiased article and reinstating it.

I am being cautious here, because when the FSC article referred to above was reinstated after I sought advice from wiki experts, I was temporarily banned by someone shooting from the hip. I would prefer to avoid this sort of thing. I am not a person who vandalizes wikipedia and wish to be treated respectfully. Ideally I would like someone to do more than answer the immediate questions, but to also work as an advisor for a period so that certain other articles (like the FSC one mentioned) can be reinstated.

It is important for anyone taking on this larger role of advise to understand that there are people that study cycles in an interdisciplinary manner. There are solid and accepted mathematical tools for cycles analysis (FFT and MESA and others). The mere fact that most people who think they got a solid science education were not exposed to this stuff is not reason to treat it as wrong. And yet this is what happens when votes for deletion are made. This is a serious problem in wikipedia.

Ray Tomes (talk) 01:09, 5 December 2008 (UTC)
 * tl;dr, dunno why this calls for help. Ten Pound Hammer  and his otters • (Broken clamshells • Otter chirps • HELP) 01:17, 5 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I made two sentences bold to make the requested help clearer. However I do not need help from someone who is not willing to read a few paragraphs. I need help from someone who is willing to get involved. Thanks. Ray Tomes (talk) 04:40, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I think the user that previously helped me was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SilkTork not who I mentioned above. You can see his comments on this page. Ray Tomes (talk) 04:43, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

cycles stuff (again)
Hi SilkTork, as a result of a request from a friend, I have put this request for help on my user page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:RayTomes#Need_help_with_regard_to_cycles_articles I thought that I would let you know as you previously gave some help. Ray Tomes (talk) 04:50, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
 * I will assist you in creating an article on William Delbert Gann in your userspace and then transferring it into mainspace when completed. The reason the article was deleted was because there were concerns about copyright violation as some editors had simply cut and pasted chunks of text from other sources.  SilkTork  *YES! 12:35, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
 * You may work and build the article here. I will give you some assistance, and will check on your progress. If you have any doubts about if some material may be allowed, please get in touch with me to look at it. Don't cut and paste any material from anywhere, but take the information and write it up in your own words. Don't make any attempt to move this into mainspace, but let me know when you are ready and I will do it in such a way that preserves the history of both this article and the one that was deleted.  SilkTork  *YES! 12:52, 7 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks SilkTork. It is likely that someone else will actually do the edits. I am not a great fan of Gann, but do think there should be an article on him because he is still popular among traders who use cycles.
 * I'm just about to archive my talkpage and so will lose sight of our discussion on William Delbert Gann. I have noticed that you haven't done any editing on it, and note that you don't intend to. My intention in that case is to work a bit more on the article myself and then move it into mainspace. At the moment I'm fairly occupied with George Harrison and may forget. I'd appreciate you giving me a nudge in the New year to remind me to do the work! Regards  SilkTork  *YES! 16:57, 27 December 2008 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
Hi, You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 22:16, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

title: User talk:RayTomes


text:
Haiphong

Haiphong (Hải Phòng) is the third-largest city in Vietnam and is the principal port city of the Red River Delta. The municipality has an area of 1526.52 km2, consisting of 8 urban districts and 7 rural districts. Two of the rural districts cover islands in the South China Sea: Bạch Long Vĩ and Cát Hải. It has a population of 2,359,000 in 2021. The city's economy has strength in manufacturing, as evident by large industrial parks and numerous smaller traditional handicraft villages. Historically, Haiphong is the first place in Vietnam and Mainland Southeast Asia to get electricity.

In the imperial era of Đại Việt, the Bạch Đằng River in Haiphong was a place of many legendary victories, led by now-legendary commanders Ngô Quyền and Trần Hưng Đạo. In the 16th century, Mạc dynasty has promoted the coastal settlement as a secondary capital, growing to become an important port town of Đàng Ngoài. After the French conquest of Vietnam, in 1888, the president of the French Third Republic, Sadi Carnot, promulgated a decree to establish Haiphong as one of the principal cities of the French Indochina. From 1954 to 1975, Haiphong served as the most important maritime city of North Vietnam. It was one of directly controlled municipalities of a reunified Vietnam with Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City in 1976. In the 21st century, Haiphong is under active land reclamation, the most recent effort being the construction of South Đình Vũ dike in 2022.

Haiphong is a popular seaside vacation spot and known for biological reservations in Cát Bà Island. For its extensive port, the city hosts the headquarter of Vietnam People's Navy. Royal poinciana are commonly associated with Haiphong in Vietnamese culture.

Dynastic Vietnam
Mordern-day Haiphong was the home of Lê Chân, one of the female generals under the command of the Trưng Sisters who rose against Chinese domination in 40 AD and ruled until their defeat in 43 AD. Lê Chân was known to have established the Hải tần Phòng thủ (“Defenced Sea-coast”) during the war against general Ma Yuan of the Han dynasty. Centuries later under the reign of Nguyễn Emperor Tự Đức, the area earned the appellation: Hải-Dương thương-chính quan-phòng ("The trading defensive area of Hải Dương Province").

By the 19th century, at the end of Tự Đức's reign, the Hang Kenh Communal House in what is now the city's Le Chan District was made the administrative seat of An Dương District, restoring its regional importance. The area by then had developed into a sizable commercial port.

At the eve of the French conquest in 1881, a typhoon ravaged the area, killing about 3,000 people in and around Haiphong. Despite the damages, Haiphong was developed by the French to serve as Indochina's main naval base over the ensuing decades.

Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the Vietnam War
Following the defeat of Japan in World War II, Vietnamese nationalists agitated for independence against French return. French forces landed in Haiphong and encountered resistance which resulted in the deaths of three French soldiers. In retaliation, the French ships, among them the cruiser Suffren, shelled the city, setting it ablaze and precipitating the First Indochina War. French infantry forces under the command of Jean-Étienne Valluy entered the city, fighting house to house with the support of armored units and airplanes.

Late in the Vietnam War, Haiphong was subjected to heavy bombing by US Navy and Air Force strike aircraft because it was North Vietnam's only major port. U.S. Admiral Thomas H. Moorer ordered the mining of Haiphong harbor on 8 May 1972, effectively sealing the port. Until it was lifted, the mining caused no casualty. Despite being targeted, the physical structure of the city was mostly unaffected by the war as the US had a self-imposed prohibition zone for the city. After the war, the city recovered its role as a significant industrial center.

Geography
Haiphong is a coastal city located at the mouth of the Cấm River, in Vietnam's north-eastern coastal area, 120 km east of Hanoi. The Bính Bridge crosses the Cam and connects the city with Thủy Nguyên District. It has a total natural area of 152,318.49 ha (2001). It borders Quảng Ninh Province to the north, Hải Dương Province to the west, Thái Bình Province to the south, and the Gulf of Tonkin to the east. Bach Long Vi island, Cat Ba Island and the Long Châu islands, located in the Gulf, are also administered as part of the city. Tidal flat ecosystems occur adjacent to the city, however, many have been reclaimed for agriculture or development purposes.

Climate
Haiphong features a humid subtropical climate (Koppen: Cwa) with hot, humid summers and warm, dry winters. The city is noticeably wetter from April through October; roughly 90% of the city's annual rainfall (which totals approximately 1700 mm) typically falls during these months. There is a noticeable difference in temperatures between the city's winters and summers. Haiphong's coolest months, January and February, sees average high temperatures reach 20 C and average low temperatures at around 14 C. Its warmest months, June and July, sees average high temperatures hover around 33 C and average low temperatures at around 26 C. Sea temperatures range from a low of 21 °C in February to a high of 30 °C during the months of July and August.

Administrative divisions
Haiphong is subdivided into 15 district-level sub-divisions: • 8 rural districts:

• * An Dương

• * An Lão

• * Bạch Long Vĩ

• * Cát Hải

• * Kiến Thụy

• * Tiên Lãng

• * Vĩnh Bảo

• * Thủy Nguyên

• 7 urban districts:

• * Dương Kinh

• * Đồ Sơn

• * Hải An

• * Kiến An

• * Hồng Bàng

• * Ngô Quyền

• * Lê Chân

They are further subdivided into 10 commune-level towns (or townlets), 148 communes, and 72 wards.

Economy
Haiphong is a major economic center of the North in particular and Vietnam in general both. Under French domination, Haiphong was level 1 city, equal to Saigon and Hanoi. The last years of the 19th century, the French had proposed to build Haiphong into the economic capital of Indochina. Today, Haiphong is still one of the most important economic centers of Vietnam. In 2009, Haiphong state budget revenue reached 34,000 billion Vnd. In 2011, budget revenues in the city reached 47,725 billion, increase 19% compared to 2010. In 2015, total revenues of the city reached 56 288 billion. Government plans that to 2020, Haiphong's revenues will be over 80,000 billion and the domestic revenue reach 20.000 billion. In the ranking of the Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI) 2013 of Vietnam, Haiphong city ranked at No. 15/63 provinces. Haiphong has relationship of trading goods with more than 40 countries and territories around the world. Haiphong is striving to become one of the largest commercial centers of the country.

Industry
Industry is a key sector in Haiphong including food processing, light industries and heavy industries. Major products include fish sauce, beer, cigarettes, textiles, paper, plastic pipes, cement, iron, pharmaceuticals, electric fans, motorbikes, steel pipes and ships and out-sourcing software implementation. Most of these industries have been growing significantly between 2000 and 2007, with the exceptions of the cigarette and pharmaceutical industries. Shipbuilding, steel pipes, plastic pipes and textiles are among the industries with the most rapid growth.

There are also growing industries supplying products used by existing industries in the city. PetroVietnam set up a joint-venture PVTex with textile manufacturer Vinatex to build Vietnam's first polyester fiber plant in Haiphong. The factory will use by-products from oil-refining and reduce reliance on imported materials. 270,600 people were employed in Haiphong's industry. 112,600 industrial jobs were created between 2000 and 2007.

Agriculture, forestry and fishery
Despite its status as a city, around one third of Haiphong's area or 52,300 ha (as of 2007) are used for agriculture. Rice is the most important crop, taking up around 80% of the agricultural land with an output of 463,100 tons in 2007. Other agricultural products include maize, sugar and peanuts.

Haiphong has a relatively large fishing sector with an output of 79,705 tons (2007). Gross output has almost doubled between 2000 and 2007, mostly due to fast growth in aquaculture, which made up 60% of gross output in 2007. Despite its coastal location, sea fish contribute relatively little to the sector (around one fourth). Nam Định Province and Thái Bình Province have much larger fishing sectors and even the inland Hải Dương Province has a larger gross output from fishing than Haiphong.

As of 2007, 315,500 were employed in agriculture and fishery, a significant decrease from 396,300 in 2000. However, these sectors still account for almost a third of total employment in Haiphong, a larger share than industry. However, gross output in both agriculture and fishery have been growing significantly between 2000 and 2007.

Demographics
Haiphong is the third most populous city in Vietnam, with a population of 2.103.500 for the metropolitan area (2015), encompassing an area of 1,507.57 km2, 46,1% of population reside in the urban districts. The gender distribution is half female (50.4%).

Population growth
As of the 2009 census, Haiphong's average annual population growth rate was given as 4.0%. Haiphong's crude birth rate was recorded at 18.1 live births per 1000 persons vs the crude death rate of 7.6 per 1000 persons. Life expectancy at birth was estimated at 77.1 years for women and 72.0 years for men, or 74.5 years overall. Infant mortality rate was measured at 11.8 infant deaths per 1000 live births, just over two points above the nation's average for urban areas. In the same census, the city's out-migration was 1.9% vs in-migration of 2.8% and, for a net migration rate of 0.9%.

Education

 * Haiphong Maritime High School
 * Hai Phong Medical University
 * Hai Phong University
 * Tran Phu High School for the gifted
 * Vietnam Maritime University

Roads
Haiphong is located at the junction of two National Highways: Route 5, leading west to Hanoi, and Route 10, leading south to Nam Định and onward to connect with National Route 1 at Ninh Bình. Highway 356 passes west–east from the Route 5/10 junction through Haiphong's city center all the way to the coast. A connecting road from route 5 to route 18 links Haiphong with Quảng Ninh Province. In 2015, the new highway connecting Haiphong with Hanoi was completed; this is the most modern highway in Vietnam and reduces the trip by one hour as compared to the previous route.

Within the city there are several long-distance bus depots: Niem Nghia, Vinh Niem, Thuong Ly.

A new highway route was completed last year 2016 to make the transfer faster and easier. From Hanoi to Haiphong and back, it takes less than 2 hours to reach not so long as 3 hours as before. Also shorten the distance from Haiphong to Thai Binh, Hai Duong, Hung Yen.

Tourists can easily catch a coach from Niem Nghia bus station to Hanoi or Cat Ba island, either Quang Ninh, or South of Vietnam.

Airports
The main airport serving Haiphong is Cat Bi International Airport with three flights daily to Ho Chi Minh city. In April 2011, Vietnam Airlines launched routes to Da Nang with 5 flights a week. An international airport for Haiphong, situated in Tien Lang district, is in the planning stages; if realized it would become the largest airport in northern Vietnam.

Seaports

Haiphong port is one of the largest ports in Vietnam and south-east Asia as a whole. The Port of Haiphong on the Cấm River is divided into three main docks: Hoang Dieu (Central terminal) located near the city's center, Chua Ve, and Dinh Vu both farther downstream to the east. Several ferry terminals connect Haiphong with the neighboring Cát Hải and Cát Bà Islands; Ben Binh Ferry terminal is located near the city center while Dinh Vu Ferry is located on a spit of land on the coast. The government had approved the plans to build an international port in Lach Huyen – 15 kilometers from the current port. Once completed this will be one of the deepest port in Vietnam with draft of 14m, capable of receiving ships up to 100.000 DWT.

Railway
Haiphong station built in 1902 is the eastern terminus of the Kunming–Hai Phong Railway, also known as the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway. Built at by the French during their occupation, the railway once connected Haiphong to the city of Kunming in Yunnan, China, although service along the Chinese portion of the line is currently suspended. Rail travel from Haiphong with connections to the rest of the Vietnamese railway network is via Hanoi.

Passenger trains run daily from 6AM until 6PM from Hai Phong city to the capital Hanoi and back. The travel time between the two cities by rail is approximately 3 hours.

Cuisine
Hai Phong cuisine is known throughout Vietnam for seafood dishes. Seafood restaurants in the Do Son area are known for having very fresh and affordable shrimp, crab, fish, and squid. The style of seafood processing in Hai Phong follows a simple style, emphasizing the essence and freshness of ingredients themselves as opposed to the seasoning.

Dishes such as bánh đa cua (red noodle soup with crab), bún cá (fish rice noodle soup), bánh mỳ que cay (spicy stick-bread), cơm cháy hải sản (crispy rice cracker with seafood), nem cua bể (square crab spring rolls) are notable and popular dishes. These dishes can be found on the streets of other places like Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, but enjoying them on the Red Phoenix Flower City (the other name of Haiphong City) is still the most ideal because of the choice of raw ingredients and cooking secrets of local chefs. Hai Phong cuisine has been promoted to Europe at the Brest Maritime Festival 2008 (France) and resonated greatly.

In addition, Hai Phong also has many other dishes such as mantis shrimp hot pot, bean sprouts salad, sủi dìn, bánh bèo (Haiphong's version, which is different from Hue's version).

Notable people

 * Mạc Đăng Dung (1483–1541) king of Đại Việt country, the founder of the Mạc dynasty
 * Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm (1491–1585) thinker, poet, prophet, Cao Dai religion saint
 * Mai Trung Thu (1906–80) painter
 * Văn Cao (1923–95) musician, poet, painter and composer of the national anthem of Vietnam Tiến Quân Ca
 * Ngọc Sơn (born 1970) singer, songwriter
 * Trà Giang (born 1942) film actress (born in Quảng Ngãi Province, grew up and schooled in Haiphong)
 * Wong Kwok-hing (born 1949) Hong Kong trade unionist and a former member of the Legislative Council of Hong Kong (2004–2016)
 * Phan Thị Hà Thanh (born 1991) artistic gymnast, first gymnast to win a world medal for Vietnam gymnastics (2011)
 * Thu Phương (born 1972) famous pop singer and Haiphong native; she now lives in the U.S.

Twin towns – sister cities

 * Da Nang, Vietnam
 * 🇰🇷 Incheon, South Korea
 * 🇯🇵 Kitakyushu, Japan
 * 🇮🇹 Livorno, Italy
 * 🇨🇳 Nanning, China
 * 🇷🇺 Saint Petersburg, Russia
 * 🇺🇸 Seattle, United States
 * 🇨🇳 Tianjin, China

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Haiphong


text:
Copland (operating system)

Copland is an operating system developed by Apple for Macintosh computers between 1994 and 1996 but never commercially released. It was intended to be released with the name System 8, and later after changing their naming style, Mac OS 8. Planned as a modern successor to the aging System 7, Copland introduced protected memory, preemptive multitasking, and several new underlying operating system features, while retaining compatibility with existing Mac applications. Copland's tentatively planned successor, codenamed Gershwin, was intended to add more advanced features such as application-level multithreading.

Development officially began in March 1994. Over the next several years, previews of Copland garnered much press, introducing the Mac audience to operating system concepts such as object orientation, crash-proofing, and multitasking. In August 1995, David Nagel, a senior vice president, announced at Macworld Expo that Copland would be released in mid-1996. The following May, Gil Amelio stated that Copland was the primary focus of the company, aiming for a late-year release. Internally, however, the development effort was beset with problems due to dysfunctional corporate personnel and project management. Development milestones and developer release dates were missed repeatedly.

Ellen Hancock was hired to get the project back on track, but quickly concluded it could never ship. In August 1996, it was announced that Copland was canceled and Apple would look outside the company for a new operating system. Among many choices, they selected NeXTSTEP and purchased NeXT in 1997 to obtain it. In the interim period, while NeXTSTEP was ported to the Mac, Apple released the much more legacy-oriented Mac OS 8 in 1997 based upon adding components from Copland, and Mac OS 9 in 1999 to transition forward. Mac OS X became Apple's next-generation operating system in 2001.

The Copland development effort has been described as an example of feature creep. In 2008, PC World included Copland on a list of the biggest project failures in information technology (IT) history.

Mac OS legacy
The prehistory of Copland begins with an understanding of the Mac OS legacy, and its architectural problems to be solved.

Launched in 1984, the Macintosh and its operating system were designed from the start as a single-user, single-tasking system, which allowed the hardware development to be greatly simplified. As a side effect of this single application model, the original Mac developers were able to take advantage of several compromising simplifications that allowed great improvements in performance, running even faster than the much more expensive Lisa. But this design also led to several problems for future expansion.

By assuming only one program would be running at a time, the engineers were able to ignore the concept of reentrancy, which is the ability for a program (or code library) to be stopped at any point, asked to do something else, and then return to the original task. To be reentrant, any local data and state has to be stored out when another program calls the code, and if one does not require reentrancy, saving out the state can be skipped. In the case of QuickDraw for example, this means the system can store state information in the library, things like the current location of the window or the line style, knowing it would only change under control of the running program. Taking this one step further, the engineers left most of this state inside the application rather than in QuickDraw, thus eliminating the need to copy these data between the application and library, the program can make changes to these settings to its own internal storage and QuickDraw finds these data by looking for those values in known locations within the applications.

This concept of sharing memory is a significant source of problems and crashes. If an application program writes incorrect data into these shared locations, it could cause QuickDraw to crash, thereby causing the computer to crash. Likewise, any problem in QuickDraw could cause it to overwrite data in the application, once again leading to crashes. In the case of a single-application operating system this was not a fatal limitation, because in that case a problem in either would require the application, or computer, to be restarted anyway.

The other main issue was that early Macs lack a memory management unit (MMU), which precludes the possibility of several fundamental modern features. An MMU provides memory protection to ensure that programs cannot accidentally overwrite other program's memory, and provisions shared memory that allows data to be easily passed among libraries. Lacking shared memory, the API was instead written so the operating system and application shares all memory, which is what allows QuickDraw to examine the application's memory for settings like the line drawing mode or color.

"The Macintosh lacks multitasking but tries to fake it, and it insists on a complicated user interface but leaves much of the work up to the application. These are serious drawbacks, and it is difficult to imagine elegant repairs for them."

- Adam Brooks Webber

These limits meant that supporting the multitasking of more than one program at a time would be difficult, without rewriting all of this operating system and application code. Yet doing so would mean the system would run unacceptably slow on existing hardware. Instead, Apple adopted a system known as MultiFinder in 1987, which keeps the running application in control of the computer, as before, but allows an application to be rapidly switched to another, normally simply by clicking on its window. Programs that are not in the foreground are periodically given short bits of time to run, but as before, the entire process is controlled by the applications, not the operating system.

Because the operating system and applications all share one memory space, it is possible for a bug in any one of them to corrupt the entire operating system, and crash the machine. Under MultiFinder, any crash anywhere will crash all running programs. Running multiple applications potentially increases the chances of a crash, making the system potentially more fragile.

Adding greatly to the severity of the problem is the patching mechanism used to add functions to the operating system, known as CDEVs and INITs or Control Panels and Extensions. Third party developers also make use of this mechanism to add features, including screensavers and a hierarchical Apple menu. Some of these third-party control panels became almost universal, like the popular After Dark screensaver package. Because there was no standard for use of these patches, it is not uncommon for several of these add-ons — including Apple's own additions to the OS — to use the same patches, and interfere with each other, leading to more crashing.

Copland design
Copland was designed to consist of the Mac OS on top of a microkernel named Nukernel, which would handle basic tasks such as application startup and memory management, leaving all other tasks to a series of semi-special programs known as servers. For instance, networking and file services would not be provided by the kernel itself, but by servers that would be sent requests through interapplication communications. The Copland system as a whole consists of the combination of Nukernel, various servers, and a suite of application support libraries to provide implementations of the well-known classic Macintosh programming interface.

Application services are offered through a single program known officially as the Cooperative Program Address Space. Mac programs run much as they do under System 7, as cooperative tasks that use the non-reentrant Toolbox calls. A worst-case scenario is that an application in the CPAS environment crashes, taking down the entire environment with it. This does not result in the system as a whole going down, however, and the Cooperative Program Address Space environment is automatically restarted.

New applications written with Copland in mind, are able to directly communicate with the system servers and thereby gain many advantages in terms of performance and scalability. They can also communicate with the kernel to launch separate applications or threads, which run as separate processes in protected memory, as in most modern operating systems. These separate applications cannot use non-reentrant calls like QuickDraw, however, and thus could have no user interface. Apple suggested that larger programs could place their user interface in a normal Macintosh application, which then start worker threads externally.

Copland is fully PowerPC (PPC) native. System 7 had been ported to the PowerPC with great success; large parts of the system run as PPC code, including both high-level functions, such as most of the user interface toolbox managers, and low-level functions, such as interrupt management. There is enough 68k code left in the system to be run in emulation, and especially user applications, however that the operating system must map some data between the two environments. In particular, every call into the Mac OS requires a mapping between the interrupt systems of the 68k and PPC. Removing these mappings would greatly improve general system performance. At WWDC 1996, engineers claimed that system calls would execute as much as 50% faster.

Copland is also based on the then-recently defined Common Hardware Reference Platform, or CHRP, which standardized the Mac hardware to the point where it could be built by different companies and can run other operating systems (Solaris and AIX were two of many mentioned). This was a common theme at the time; many companies were forming groups to define standardized platforms to offer an alternative to the "Wintel" platform that was rapidly becoming dominant — examples include 88open, Advanced Computing Environment, and the AIM alliance.

The fundamental challenge of Copland's development and adoption was getting all of these functions to fit into an ordinary Mac. System 7.5 already uses up about 2.5 megabytes (MB) of RAM, which is a significant portion of the total RAM in most contemporaneous machines. Copland is a hybrid of two systems, as its native foundation also hosts Blue Box with a complete copy of System 7.5. Copland thus uses a Mach-inspired memory management system and relies extensively on shared libraries, with the goal of being about 50% larger than 7.5.

Pink and Blue
In March 1988, technical middle managers at Apple held an offsite meeting to plan the future course of Mac OS development. Ideas were written on index cards; features that seemed simple enough to implement in the short term (like adding color to the user interface) were written on blue cards; longer-term goals—such as preemptive multitasking—were on pink cards; and long-range ideas like an object-oriented file system were on red cards. Development of the ideas contained on the blue and pink cards was to proceed in parallel, and at first, the two projects were known simply as "blue" and "pink". Apple intended to have the Blue team release an updated version of the existing Macintosh operating system in the 1990–1991 timeframe, and the Pink team to release an all-new OS around 1993.

The Blue team, who came to call themselves the "Blue Meanies" after characters in the film Yellow Submarine, delivered what became known as System 7 on May 13, 1991, but the Pink team's efforts suffered from second-system effect and its release date continued to slip into the indefinite future. Some of the reason for this can be traced to problems that would become widespread at Apple as time went on; as Pink became delayed, its engineers moved to Blue instead. This left the Pink team constantly struggling for staffing, and suffering from the problems associated with high employee turnover. Management ignored these sorts of technical development issues, leading to continual problems delivering working products.

At this same time, the recently released NeXTSTEP was generating intense interest in the developer world. Features that were originally part of Red were folded into Pink, and the Red project (also known as "Raptor") was eventually canceled. This problem was also common at Apple during this period; to chase the "next big thing", middle managers added new features to their projects with little oversight, leading to enormous problems with feature creep. In the case of Pink, development eventually slowed to the point that the project appeared moribund.

Taligent
On April 12, 1991, Apple CEO John Sculley performed a secret demonstration of Pink running on an IBM PS/2 Model 70 to a delegation from IBM. Though the system was not fully functional, it resembled System 7 running on a PC. IBM was extremely interested, and over the next few months, the two companies formed an alliance to further development of the system. These efforts became public in early 1992, under the new name "Taligent". At the time, Sculley summed up his concerns with Apple's own ability to ship Pink when he stated "We want to be a major player in the computer industry, not a niche player. The only way to do that is to work with another major player."

Infighting at the new joint company was legendary, and the problems with Pink within Apple soon appeared to be minor in comparison. Apple employees made T-shirts graphically displaying their prediction that the result would be an IBM-only project. On December 19, 1995, Apple officially pulled out of the project. IBM continued working alone with Taligent, and eventually released its application development portions under the new name "CommonPoint". This saw little interest and the project disappeared from IBM's catalogs within months.

Business as usual
While Taligent efforts continued, very little work addressing the structure of the original OS was carried out. Several new projects started during this time, such as the Star Trek project, a port of System 7 and its basic applications to Intel-compatible x86 machines, which reached internal demo status. But as Taligent was still a concern, it was difficult for new OS projects to gain any traction.

Instead, Apple's Blue team continued adding new features to the same basic OS. During the early 1990s, Apple released a series of major new packages to the system; among them are QuickDraw GX, Open Transport, OpenDoc, PowerTalk, and many others. Most of these were larger than the original operating system. Problems with stability, which had existed even with small patches, grew along with the size and requirements of these packages, and by the mid-1990s the Mac had a reputation for instability and constant crashing.

As the stability of the operating system collapsed, the ready answer was that Taligent would fix this with all its modern foundation of full reentrance, preemptive multitasking, and protected memory. When the Taligent efforts also collapsed, Apple was left with an aging OS and no designated solutions. By 1994, the press buzz surrounding the upcoming release of Windows 95 started to crescendo, often questioning Apple's ability to respond to the challenge it presented. The press turned on the company, often introducing Apple's new projects as failures in the making.

Another try
Given this pressure, the collapse of Taligent, the growing problems with the existing operating system, after the release of System 7.5 in late 1994, Apple management decided that the decade-old operating system had run its course. A new system that did not have these problems was needed, and soon. Since so much of the existing system would be difficult to rewrite, Apple developed a two-stage approach to the problem.

In the first stage, the existing system would be moved on top of a new kernel-based OS with built-in support for multitasking and protected memory. The existing libraries, like QuickDraw, would take too long to be rewritten for the new system and would not be converted to be reentrant. Instead, a single paravirtualized machine, the Blue Box, keeps applications and legacy code such as QuickDraw in a single memory block so they continue to run as they had in the past. Blue Box runs in a distinct Copland memory space, so crashing legacy applications or extensions within Blue Box cannot crash the entire machine.

In the next stage of the plan, once the new kernel was in place and this basic upgrade was released, development would move on to rewriting the older libraries into new forms that could run directly on the new kernel. At that point, applications would gain some added modern features.

In the musical code-naming pattern where System 7.5 is code-named "Mozart", this intended successor is named "Copland" after composer Aaron Copland. In turn, its proposed successor system, Gershwin, would complete the process of moving the entire system to the modern platform, but work on Gershwin would never officially begin.

Development
The Copland project was first announced by David Nagel in May 1994. Parts of Copland, such as an early version of the new file system, were demonstrated at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in May 1995. Apple promised that a beta release of Copland would be ready by the end of the year, for final commercial release in early 1996. Gershwin would follow the next year. Throughout the year, Apple released several mock-ups to various magazines showing what the new system would look like, and commented continually that the company was fully committed to this project. By the end of the year, however, no Developer Release had been produced.

As had happened during the development of Pink, developers within Apple soon started abandoning their own projects in order to work on the new system. Middle management and project leaders fought back by claiming that their project was vital to the success of the system, and moving it into the Copland development stream. Thus, it could not be canceled along with their employees being removed to work on some other part of Copland anyway. This process took on momentum across the next year.

""Anytime they saw something sexy it had to go into the OS." said Jeffrey Tarter, publisher of the software industry newsletter Softletter. "There were little groups all over Apple doing fun things that had no earthly application to Apple's product line." What resulted was a vicious cycle: As the addition of features pushed back deadlines, Apple was compelled to promise still more functions to justify the costly delays. Moreover, this Sisyphean pattern persisted at a time when the company could scarcely afford to miss a step."

Soon the project looked less like a new operating system and more like a huge collection of new technologies; QuickDraw GX, System Object Model (SOM), and OpenDoc became core components of the system, while completely unrelated technologies like a new file management dialog box (the open dialog) and themes support appeared also. The feature list grew much faster than the features could be completed, a classic case of creeping featuritis. An industry executive noted that "The game is to cut it down to the three or four most compelling features as opposed to having hundreds of nice-to-haves, I'm not sure that's happening."

As the "package" grew, testing it became increasingly difficult and engineers were commenting as early as 1995 that Apple's announced 1996 release date was hopelessly optimistic: "There's no way in hell Copland ships next year. I just hope it ships in 1997."

In mid-1996, information was leaked that Copland would have the ability to run applications written for other operating systems, including Windows NT. Simultaneously allegedly being confirmed by Copland engineers while being authoritatively denied by Copland project management, this feature had supposedly been in development for more than three years. One user claimed to have been told about these plans by members of the Copland development team. Some analysts projected that this ability would increase Apple's penetration into the enterprise market, others said it was "game over" and was only a sign of the Mac platform's irrelevancy.

Developer Release
At WWDC 1996, Apple's new CEO, Gil Amelio, used the keynote to talk almost exclusively about Copland, now known as System 8. He repeatedly stated that it was the only focus of Apple engineering and that it would ship to developers in a few months, with a full release planned for late 1996. Very few, if any, demos of the running system were shown at the conference. Instead, various pieces of the technology and user interface that would go into the package (such as a new file management dialog) were demonstrated. Little of the core system's technology was demonstrated and the new file system that had been shown a year earlier was absent.

There was one way to actually use the new operating system – by signing up for time in the developer labs. This did not go well:

"There was a hands-on demo of the current state of OS 8. There were tantalizing glimpses of the goodies to come, but the overall experience was awful. It does not yet support text editing, so you couldn’t actually do anything except open and view documents (any dialog field that needed something typed into it was blank and dead). Also, it was incredibly fragile and crashed repeatedly, often corrupting system files on the disk in the process. The demo staff reformatted and rebuilt the hard disks at regular intervals. It was incredible that they even let us see the beast."

Several people at the show complained about the microkernel's lack of sophistication, notably the lack of symmetric multiprocessing, a feature that would be exceedingly difficult to add to a system due to ship in a few months. After that, Amelio came back on stage and announced that they would be adding that to the feature list.

In August 1996, "Developer Release 0" was sent to a small number of selected partners. Far from demonstrating improved stability, it often crashed after doing nothing at all, and was completely unusable for development. In October, Apple moved the target delivery date to "sometime", hinting that it might be 1997. One of the groups most surprised by the announcement was Apple's own hardware team, who had been waiting for Copland to allow the PowerPC to be natively represented, unburdened of software legacy. Members of Apple's software QA team joked that, given current resources and the number of bugs in the system, they could clear the program for shipping sometime around 2030.

Cancellation
Later in August 1996, the situation was no better. Amelio complained that Copland was "just a collection of separate pieces, each being worked on by a different team ... that were expected to magically come together somehow." Hoping to salvage the situation, Amelio hired Ellen Hancock away from National Semiconductor to take over engineering from Ike Nassi and get Copland development back on track.

After a few months on the job, Hancock came to the conclusion that the situation was hopeless; given current development and engineering, she believed Copland would never ship. Instead, she suggested that the various user-facing technologies in Copland be rolled out in a series of staged releases, instead of a single big release. Apple officially canceled Copland in August 1996, The CD envelopes for the developer's release had been printed, but the discs had not been mastered.

To address the aging infrastructure underneath these technologies, Amelio suggested looking outside the company for an unrelated new operating system. Candidates considered were Sun's Solaris and Windows NT. Hancock reportedly was in favor of going with Solaris, while Amelio preferred Windows. Amelio even reportedly called Bill Gates to discuss the idea, and Gates promised to put Microsoft engineers to work porting QuickDraw to NT.

After lengthy discussions with Be and rumors of a merger with Sun Microsystems, many were surprised at Apple's December 1996 announcement that they were purchasing NeXT and bringing Steve Jobs on in an advisory role. Amelio quipped that they "choose Plan A instead of Plan Be." The project to port NeXTSTEP to the Macintosh platform was named Rhapsody and was to be the core of Apple's cross-platform operating system strategy. This would inherit OpenStep's existing support for PowerPC, Intel x86, and DEC Alpha CPU architectures, and an implementation of the OpenStep libraries running on Windows NT. This would in effect open the Windows application market to Macintosh developers as they could license the library from Apple for distribution with their product, or depend on an existing installation.

Legacy
Following Hancock's plan, development continued with System 7.5 receiving integration of several elements of Copland. System 7 was renamed to Mac OS 7 with the release of 7.6, wherein stability and performance were improved. Many Copland features, including the new multithreaded Finder and support for themes (defaulting to Platinum) were integrated into the unreleased beta of Mac OS 7.7, which was instead rebranded and launched as Mac OS 8.

With the return of Jobs, this rebranding to version 8 also allowed Apple to exploit a legal loophole to terminate third-party manufacturers' licenses to System 7 and effectively shut down the Macintosh clone market. Later, Mac OS 8.1 finally added the new file system and Mac OS 8.6 updated the nanokernel to handle limited support for preemptive tasks. Its interface is Multiprocessing Services 2.x and later, but there is no process separation and the system still uses cooperative multitasking between processes. Even a process that is Multiprocessing Services-aware still has a part that runs in the Blue Box, a task that also runs all single-threaded programs and the only task that can run 68k code.

The Rhapsody project was canceled after several Developer Preview releases, support for running on non-Macintosh platforms was dropped, and it was eventually released as Mac OS X Server 1.0. In 2001 this foundation was coupled to the Carbon library and Aqua user interface to form the modern Mac OS X product. Versions of Mac OS X prior to the Intel release of Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), also use the rootless Blue Box concept in the form of Classic to run applications written for older versions of Mac OS. Several features originally seen in Copland demos, including its advanced Find command, built-in Internet browser, piles of folders, and support for video-conferencing, have reappeared in subsequent releases of Mac OS X as Spotlight, Safari, Stacks, and iChat AV, respectively, although the implementation and user interface for each feature is very different.

Hardware requirements
According to the documentation included in the Developer Release, Copland supports the following hardware configurations:

 * NuBus-based Macintoshes: 6100/60, 6100/60AV (no AV functions), 6100/66, 6100/66 AV (no AV functions), 6100/66 DOS (no DOS functions), 7100/66, 7100/66 AV (no AV functions), 7100/80, 7100/80 AV (no AV functions), 8100/80/ 8100/100/ 8100/100 AV (no AV functions), 8100/110
 * NuBus-based Performas: 6110CD, 6112CD, 6115CD, 6117CD, 6118CD
 * PCI-based Macintoshes: 7200/70, 7200/90, 7500/100, 8500/120, 9500/120, 9500/132
 * Drives formatted with Drive Setup
 * For DR1 and earlier, the installer requires System 7.5 or later on a hard disk of 250MB or greater capacity.
 * Display set to 256 colors (8-bit) or Thousands (16-bit).

title: Copland (operating system)