Think about this. You're spending thousands to license JClass. Apparently you're doing some heavy-duty enterprise applications, so you're spending tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands on hardware, bandwidth, etc. Plus you're spending similar amounts on programmer time.
Yet now you want to skimp on the one tool you use to tie all these expensive pieces together. At most this will save you $3K per programmer. Probably a lot less. If using a less effective tool delays your project just one week, you do not come out ahead. Does this strategy make sense?
It seems likely that both of us were zapped by Cliff or some other editor. If that's true, then the mod system isn't broken. (It's a little flaky, of course. Always has been, always will be.) It's just an editor abusing his infinite mod points.
Rob, you listening? What purpose do IMPs serve? Aside from destroying the credibility of the moderation system, that is.
I do want to disagree with Captain Pendantic (hey, I'm sometimes known as Lord of the Nitpicks, I guess we haven't met) on one point. The moderation system is not a system of rewards and punishments. It's a filtering system. Of course, in this case, it failed as a filtering system, by removing extremely relevent comments from the discussion.
Questioning the decisions of your elected government falls under the category of Free Speech. But that's not what we're talking about here. We talking about questions of the form "who has legal liability for...". That comes under the category of Giving Legal Advice.
That might also count as Free Speech. But only because the first amendment protects your right to demonstrate your ignorance and stupidity in public.
You know, you don't need a filesystem to use a disk. The filesystem just makes it a lot easier.
One approach: Use tar to create an archive in the raw partition. This is what tar was originally invented to do, though with tape device files, rather than disk device files. I suppose that's good for archiving stuff, but not much else. Do you mind copying your video files to internal disk before working on them?
Another approach: create a partition the same size as the file you want to put on the disk... Well, that could get weird.
Too strange, too complicated? Probably. Just brainstorming here.
You can create individual files when you need to. But when do you need to? Browsing through them? Printing them out? You don't need them in individual files for that.
It is useful to have individual files to share with other people. But these might not be the same files you originally captured. You'd probably scan in the photos at the highest resolution and color depth your scanner can do. But when you attach an image to an email, you probably need to step it down a bit.
Anyway, you just have to have some kind of organizing software, if you've got so many photos that optimizing scanner time becomes an issue. If I were designing software that did this, I'd use a database, like the biolife example that comes with Delphi and Kylix. But now that I look at what's available, I see that most apps do store images as individual files.
Still, the principles the same. A good organizer can capture new images from your clipboard. So the procedure works out like this:
Set organizer to automatically capture from clipboard.
Place a bunch of images on the scanner.
Scan. (This is the time-consuming part we need to minimize.)
Drag a rectangle around an image, and click "copy".
Repeat previous step for all images we just scanned.
Go to step 2.
I guess that is a little less efficient than software that recognizes all the image boundaries. But the slight extra effort might not be as hard as finding software with the right kind of boundary recognition feature.
I'm getting dangerously close to offering legal advice, but you've infected me with your pissed-offness, and I just thought of a way you might get back part of your unpaid salary.
In New York state, the maximum you can sue for in Small Claims Court is $3K. That's less than half of what you're owed. But in Small Claims, everybody represents themselves -- so there are no legal fees. You pay a fee to file and that's it.
Now, it's gonna do you no good to sue Madster or any of Deep's other shell entities. He'll just pull the "There's no money!" trick one more time. Instead, you should sue Deep himself. Claim that Deep acted deceitfully and never meant to give you your money. Document as much weirdness as you can -- the weird payroll cycle, the nonsense of one part of the business having hardware money when another didn't even have payroll money... There's probably more if you look for it.
At worst, the judge will just shoot down your legal theory, and you'll be out a filing fee and some time. But you'll still have the satisfaction of confronting Deep in person and documenting his dishonesty in a public forum.
Unless, of course, Deep chooses to ignore the proceedings. In which case you win by default!
You know, I have never worked for a company that disbursed my salary two weeks after the end of the pay cycle! Always right at the end of the cycle, or even a couple days before.
It seems very likely that Deep always intended to cheat you out of your last month's salary. That's why he hired a bunch of kids on their first salaried job, so they wouldn't know that his business practices weren't normal.
Is that legal? IANAL, but it wouldn't suprise me if it weren't. Boggles my mind how often shady employers do stupid, illegal stuff to shave a few pennies off their bottom line. If you have the cash for a retainer, you should talk to a lawyer who specializes in labor law.
And if you can verify any of the bookkeeping BS Deep is obviously pulling, you should contact the IRS. They pay commissions for that kind of info!
You're assuming the next step is to split the composite image into individual image files. Not necessarily. If I were doing this, I'd just select the images, one at a time, and copy them into the clipboard.
What? You say your clipboard only holds one image? Not if you're using a clipboard extender. I use Clipmate, though you might prefer one that's specially oriented towards handling graphics.
Well, the same can be said for the software that comes with CD burners. Mine came with some really crudy Adaptec software. But I use it anyway. I'm not a producer of fancy multimedia products, I just need something to copy CDs, create archive disks, and send software to friends who don't have the bandwidth to download it. For these purposes the Adaptec software serves. It's a pain to use, but not enough pain for me to buy a commercial alternative or research an open-source one.
DVDs would be more of the same. Most DVD burner users just want to save their family movies or transfer their VHS collection to a more stable medium.
It's kind of eye-opening when you think about how games that seemed so great so long ago can now be fit on something so small as a card.
Yeah, well the entire surviving literary output of Classical Greece -- a civilization of some small repute -- fits on a single cd. With enough space left over to include all the literature of the Byzantine Empire as well! Someday, somebody will say, "Every line of code written during the Dawn Age of Computing is available on a single nanowarp needle! With enough space left over for that 'Library of Congress' thing. Pretty sobering."
Faster in what sense? Yeah it clocks faster, but do you really do anything that uses those extra CPU cycles?
I shouldn't have made my statement about reliability so sweeping. But the fact remains that replacing the "official" CPU with something outside spec is adding a nasty bit of complexity to the system. Which is to say a new point of failure. Which I used to see a lot of from people trying "upgrade" their 80386-33 boxes.
And for what? Your CPU is only one of several potential bottlenecks in a system. Very rarely is it the bottleneck that slows down your word processor or spreadsheet. Yet people tend to fixate on CPU numbers, and end up paying for cycles they'll never use.
Not mentioned in this article, he developed the Multiplan interface, which a gazillion of CPM based boxes used,
Not just CP/M. Convergent licensed Multiplan to bundle with its 80x86 workstations, which ran a proprietary OS called CTOS. I think there were others licensees of this sort.
I guessing that Simonyi, with his fascination with "notational calculus" was also responsible for Multiplan's elegant address notation. I've always found it much easier to use than the klunky "A1" notation introduced by VisiCalc. Alas the spreadsheet user community was already well established, and simply didn't want to learn macro writing all over.
the first version of Access,
I'll try not to hold that against him! Access is a nasty piece of work. It's a bad attempt at an end-user database tool that's become a painful to use database programmer's tool.
I admit that it often (not always) makes sense to embed type information in a variable name. But HN has always struck me as a very clumsy way to do it. When I was trying to read Petzold, deciphering all those obscure prefixes was very distracting. Of course part of the problem was that Win16 prefixes had to describe not just the data type, but the addressing model with which you accessed it. So szSomething (zero-terminated string) usually wasn't specific enough -- it had to be something like lpszSomething (long pointer to...). And then there are pointers to pointers, arrays of pointers, constant values... Boy, do I not miss segmented architecure!
For my part, I refuse to embed type names unless my code is complicated enough to make it hard to track all the variables or when I have to name two related variables that use different types. And when type information is necessary, I use plain English: MainForm, not fMain. Maybe not a good idea if you're writing huge bodies of C++ code with hundred of global variables. But not all of us do that.
So... what compelling reason is there for me to use any other filesystem? Being more stable or better with data loss is nice, but considering I've only ever had this problem once, doesn't mean that i'll leap up and down going "oo oo! got to have blahFS!" any time soon.
Well, gee, if you don't care about the technology, why not just run Windows? Linux is for pioneers.
Anyway, the big success story for Linux is servers -- and journalling file systems make a lot of sense for servers, because they're more bulletproof. I once worked in a place with a lot of Solaris servers using a non-journaling FS. Now we had fancy UPSs so the servers could go down gracefully. But they were no help when an overloaded power main caught fire (middle of summer), sending out a gigantic surge that took out the UPSs before the power went away. It was days before all the file system repair and restore was complete.
About a year later, I was working at a place with a lot of IRIX servers. Had a power failure there too. No surge this time -- but no UPSs either. So how long before the servers were back up? About ten minutes after the power came back. XFS, like other journalling file systems, doesn't get all inconsistent when it's interrupted.
I doubt if a faster CPU would make AOL run any better. Sure it's a resource hog, but mostly RAM and disk. It's not like they're doing any intentse calculations while waiting for a connection!
You can upgrade that Dell with a CPU from powerleap.com.
Gawd, they still sell those useless CPU upgrades? Those are not profoundly reliable. Anyway, I need more RAM, not a CPU that will idle faster while my swap disk thrashes!
Kind of appropriate that they should come up in this topic though. Which is how people are beginning to get clued in about not needing faster CPUs!
Well, bear in mind that most machines are purchased by businesses -- and they follow some weird rules.
Consider the 3-year-old Dell 450 PII on my desk. High end when I got it, low-end now. I don't need to do any heavy processing, but some of the apps I use consume a lot of RAM, and I'm always short of disk. So I requested an upgrade.
It had almost gone through, when my boss told me that I was making things difficult by not requesting a new machine. Computers are amortized over three years (at least by anybody who pays federal taxes), and our IS department takes the attitude that a fully-amortized computer costs more to support than it's worth.
Of course, as soon as I changed my upgrade request to a new computer request, there was a purchasing freeze....
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Real programmers don't use Java. They don't even use high-level languages!
How is EMACS at form design?
Think about this. You're spending thousands to license JClass. Apparently you're doing some heavy-duty enterprise applications, so you're spending tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands on hardware, bandwidth, etc. Plus you're spending similar amounts on programmer time.
Yet now you want to skimp on the one tool you use to tie all these expensive pieces together. At most this will save you $3K per programmer. Probably a lot less. If using a less effective tool delays your project just one week, you do not come out ahead. Does this strategy make sense?
Rob, you listening? What purpose do IMPs serve? Aside from destroying the credibility of the moderation system, that is.
I do want to disagree with Captain Pendantic (hey, I'm sometimes known as Lord of the Nitpicks, I guess we haven't met) on one point. The moderation system is not a system of rewards and punishments. It's a filtering system. Of course, in this case, it failed as a filtering system, by removing extremely relevent comments from the discussion.
Oh wait! You said 10 billion years! Never mind!
Oops! -1 Offtopic! Oh well.
That might also count as Free Speech. But only because the first amendment protects your right to demonstrate your ignorance and stupidity in public.
One approach: Use tar to create an archive in the raw partition. This is what tar was originally invented to do, though with tape device files, rather than disk device files. I suppose that's good for archiving stuff, but not much else. Do you mind copying your video files to internal disk before working on them?
Another approach: create a partition the same size as the file you want to put on the disk... Well, that could get weird.
Too strange, too complicated? Probably. Just brainstorming here.
Do you hire a law firm to fix your computer?
It is useful to have individual files to share with other people. But these might not be the same files you originally captured. You'd probably scan in the photos at the highest resolution and color depth your scanner can do. But when you attach an image to an email, you probably need to step it down a bit.
Anyway, you just have to have some kind of organizing software, if you've got so many photos that optimizing scanner time becomes an issue. If I were designing software that did this, I'd use a database, like the biolife example that comes with Delphi and Kylix. But now that I look at what's available, I see that most apps do store images as individual files.
Still, the principles the same. A good organizer can capture new images from your clipboard. So the procedure works out like this:
- Set organizer to automatically capture from clipboard.
- Place a bunch of images on the scanner.
- Scan. (This is the time-consuming part we need to minimize.)
- Drag a rectangle around an image, and click "copy".
- Repeat previous step for all images we just scanned.
- Go to step 2.
I guess that is a little less efficient than software that recognizes all the image boundaries. But the slight extra effort might not be as hard as finding software with the right kind of boundary recognition feature.In New York state, the maximum you can sue for in Small Claims Court is $3K. That's less than half of what you're owed. But in Small Claims, everybody represents themselves -- so there are no legal fees. You pay a fee to file and that's it.
Now, it's gonna do you no good to sue Madster or any of Deep's other shell entities. He'll just pull the "There's no money!" trick one more time. Instead, you should sue Deep himself. Claim that Deep acted deceitfully and never meant to give you your money. Document as much weirdness as you can -- the weird payroll cycle, the nonsense of one part of the business having hardware money when another didn't even have payroll money... There's probably more if you look for it.
At worst, the judge will just shoot down your legal theory, and you'll be out a filing fee and some time. But you'll still have the satisfaction of confronting Deep in person and documenting his dishonesty in a public forum.
Unless, of course, Deep chooses to ignore the proceedings. In which case you win by default!
It seems very likely that Deep always intended to cheat you out of your last month's salary. That's why he hired a bunch of kids on their first salaried job, so they wouldn't know that his business practices weren't normal.
Is that legal? IANAL, but it wouldn't suprise me if it weren't. Boggles my mind how often shady employers do stupid, illegal stuff to shave a few pennies off their bottom line. If you have the cash for a retainer, you should talk to a lawyer who specializes in labor law.
And if you can verify any of the bookkeeping BS Deep is obviously pulling, you should contact the IRS. They pay commissions for that kind of info!
What? You say your clipboard only holds one image? Not if you're using a clipboard extender. I use Clipmate, though you might prefer one that's specially oriented towards handling graphics.
DVDs would be more of the same. Most DVD burner users just want to save their family movies or transfer their VHS collection to a more stable medium.
I shouldn't have made my statement about reliability so sweeping. But the fact remains that replacing the "official" CPU with something outside spec is adding a nasty bit of complexity to the system. Which is to say a new point of failure. Which I used to see a lot of from people trying "upgrade" their 80386-33 boxes.
And for what? Your CPU is only one of several potential bottlenecks in a system. Very rarely is it the bottleneck that slows down your word processor or spreadsheet. Yet people tend to fixate on CPU numbers, and end up paying for cycles they'll never use.
I guessing that Simonyi, with his fascination with "notational calculus" was also responsible for Multiplan's elegant address notation. I've always found it much easier to use than the klunky "A1" notation introduced by VisiCalc. Alas the spreadsheet user community was already well established, and simply didn't want to learn macro writing all over.
I'll try not to hold that against him! Access is a nasty piece of work. It's a bad attempt at an end-user database tool that's become a painful to use database programmer's tool.For my part, I refuse to embed type names unless my code is complicated enough to make it hard to track all the variables or when I have to name two related variables that use different types. And when type information is necessary, I use plain English: MainForm, not fMain. Maybe not a good idea if you're writing huge bodies of C++ code with hundred of global variables. But not all of us do that.
I guess you only run basic apps that don't need a lot of processing power. Which makes you like 90% of all computer users.
Anyway, the big success story for Linux is servers -- and journalling file systems make a lot of sense for servers, because they're more bulletproof. I once worked in a place with a lot of Solaris servers using a non-journaling FS. Now we had fancy UPSs so the servers could go down gracefully. But they were no help when an overloaded power main caught fire (middle of summer), sending out a gigantic surge that took out the UPSs before the power went away. It was days before all the file system repair and restore was complete.
About a year later, I was working at a place with a lot of IRIX servers. Had a power failure there too. No surge this time -- but no UPSs either. So how long before the servers were back up? About ten minutes after the power came back. XFS, like other journalling file systems, doesn't get all inconsistent when it's interrupted.
Or are you just stupid?
I doubt if a faster CPU would make AOL run any better. Sure it's a resource hog, but mostly RAM and disk. It's not like they're doing any intentse calculations while waiting for a connection!
Kind of appropriate that they should come up in this topic though. Which is how people are beginning to get clued in about not needing faster CPUs!
But what's the point in taking the RAM with you? By the time you leave, it'll be worthless, and will only work on obsolete machines!
Consider the 3-year-old Dell 450 PII on my desk. High end when I got it, low-end now. I don't need to do any heavy processing, but some of the apps I use consume a lot of RAM, and I'm always short of disk. So I requested an upgrade.
It had almost gone through, when my boss told me that I was making things difficult by not requesting a new machine. Computers are amortized over three years (at least by anybody who pays federal taxes), and our IS department takes the attitude that a fully-amortized computer costs more to support than it's worth.
Of course, as soon as I changed my upgrade request to a new computer request, there was a purchasing freeze....