Since end 2003, I have an AMD based system with 2 Gb RAM. You know, even when my wife and I where logged in together (1 console X-session, 1 X-terminal, both KDE), I have never seen the active memory rise above 512 Mb (caching can of course use the rest).
Taking into account the bottle-neck memory is now already, 1 Tb is only really usable by systems with multiple processors and advanced controllers and multiple caching.
What about someone who used vi for 5 years, then transitioned to (X)Emacs out of curiosity ?
vim is nice, but for the things I do, XEmacs is more powerful. It is easier to add buffers and switch between them. I can setup several shell buffers to run and log application output. I have org-mode, which is unbelievably powerful in helping me planning and tracking my daily tasks, problems and ideas. I can run clisp and sbcl repls using SLIME. I do not have to switch between modes for editing. Integrated help is much easier to use.
Best of all, after using vi(m) for five years, I can still edit using vi when I need to.
Somewhere in the beginning of the nineties, I copied two games : Civilisation and SimCity 2000.
With Civ, there was a kind of playing protection. If you could not answer some questions, for which you could obtain the answers if you had the manual, your built units deserted somewhere around 2000 BC, and you had to rebuild them. Luckily, I had also a copy of the relevant pages in the manual. In SimCity there was not even such a thing, but it was difficult to play without manual.
I learned to play Civ without manual, but I bought SimCity 2000 very quickly, because I needed the manual. A couple of years later, I wanted to purchase Civ, not because of the manual, but because I wanted to have an original copy, just to make sure that I had the means to play it whenever I wanted. I was lucky, MicroProse had bundled them with Railroad Tycoon Deluxe, Pirates II and Colonisation.
I had the same experience with A-Train from Maxis, first copied it and played it, then later bought a genuine copy.
I did not do it out of remorse or something like that, but if you can first know a game by playing with it, then you know also if you like it enough to shell out some dough for it. If you really like the game, then you can budget for it and buy it afterwards. If I really like a game, and play a lot with it, I feel like something is missing if I do not have an original copy with all the manuals and the box.
I wrote a small CAD(rafting) program on my Spectrum (in 1986 or 1987). It used an array to hold a list of objects, and you had to position the pointer using the cursor keys, and there were commands to begin or stop lines, and you created polygons by issuing a key press which made the last point of the previous line the starting point of the next line.
I did never really use it, because I had no possibilities to print or plot my results, and frankly drawing on a 256x192 screen is very coarse. But it was a nice programming exercise.
Every time I want to install Ubuntu on some random machine, it fails. I always have to go back to Debian.
I have Debian currently installed for my father and my sister. Spares me the headaches of Windows problems. The only support I need to deliver to them is giving information about performing tasks.
All these things are installed once, and when you have a problem, you get an electrician or a plumber. This is called outsourcing.
IT the infrastructure is about cabling, PC's and delivered software. No reason why you would not or could not outsource this either. However, from a certain company size you might need someone who is able to design and plan your IT infrastructure and hand this out to a contractor for implementation and maintenance.
Someone should come up with figures how basic IT improves productivity, e.g. how does the introduction of word processing enhance productivity ? Spreadsheet ? e-mail and other communication software ? If a company has these tools, how much would it cost them if they where completely removed, or how much less work would they be able to do if these where missing ?
A level higher is the introduction of a programmer in the company. A good programmer can add to or multiply the above productivity improvements. Again, you should ask the question : what would it cost me in time and personnel to perform the same amount of work, or how much work would we have only done with only this number of personnel ?
My experience up 'till now leads me to think that the single most important piece of software to make the most of a programmer, to enter ideas and follow up projects, to instill an ongoing process of improvement by software through the company, is the installation of bug/problem/idea tracking software. I personally find trac ideal for such a situation, because it is easy and fast to set up and use. If people have ideas, questions or problems, they should be able to enter them without much problems, difficulty or loss of time. This also makes it much easier to classify what is solved, i.e. does the programmer need to do much bug fixes, and of which kind, or can he concentrate on problem solving ? What is the turnaround time between entry and deployment, etc...
I think the answer should be : if you remove all this stuff, how much would it cost you to do the same amount of work that is now being done ?
Re:Reading... actually reading
on
Reading Comics
·
· Score: 1
When reading about the X-Men you mention, the ones written by Chris Claremont, I have several times encountered the proposition that he used too much words.
I both like the old stories, but of course they have evolved. I am now collecting the original X-Men in the Marvel Masterworks format, and the translations of the Uncanny X-Men in Dutch. You see them evolve very much. The originals where nicely drawn, but had rather simple scenarios, while the Claremont era has a lot of human factor, the X-Man are very much human with their doubts and problems. After Claremont, new writers seemed to emphasise the action more, but that evolved too, with slower stories in between. Have a read on the original X-Men issues written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Neal Adams, you will see a whole lot of drawings standing on their own.
My brother has a band, and is able to make himself known via YouTube. I am sure that if he plays it smart he can sell his music for additional income.
I think it is much easier now, with something like YouTube, to become known. Exploiting this fact will still take some work, to organise and play performances. But at least, with this way of working, you already know that there are people who like your music and you can choose the spots to perform with a higher rate of success upfront.
I would have liked to buy the 2-CD set. Unfortunately, the shipping was more than $13, to Europe. Well, guess I will have to wait until it is in the shops here. The last couple of years, Reznor seems to bring out his albums around my birthday, which is nice of course:).
Plasma TV's have one big problem : burn-in of the screen from static pictures on the channels. That is the real reason why LCD has taken over. Plasma got a real bad press about this. I work for a competitor of Sony which produces high-end (expensive) LCD and plasma TV's.
This use of the word Christians in the US bothers me, because there are all kinds of them, and the ones in the US which call themselves Christians seem more like Christian sects to me, branches originated in European protestantism, British protestantism and puritanism.
By using the word Christian, they try to push their view upon the world as them being the only true Christians.
I would say that in order of being original Christians, the Orthodox Church has the most credibility, followed by the Catholic Church, then the Protestant Church of Calvin and Luther, and personally I consider everything after that, starting with puritanism (of which there is still too much in the US), as Christian sects.
I have this job, which is called CM, and which requires me to do many things. One of the reasons we do it is that we start and monitor jobs, which can take hours, so you do something else in between. We also provide support for specific issues.
In 2002,2003 things where at a an extreme. I had to do many releases, and in between I also wrote software to automate this. In 2004 I realised something was amiss, because I lost concentration, was tired, didn't feel like working, and carried out mostly routine jobs. This carried on through 2006.
In 2006 I started to stabilise, I could work 4/5 of a week, which helped me rest. In 2007, I have mostly recovered, but I still have some issues which probably won't disappear. My short term memory does weird things, and I can concentrate, but it is mostly so focused that I do not notice other things.
Like I said, I work 6 months in a year now 4/5 of a week, and I started taking fish oil caps, because I found that my eating peanuts and fatty fish always had a positive effect on me.
I have organised my personal and work life more. I use (x)emacs org-mode to have a good view on things that I want to plan, taking care that every idea I have is entered immediately.
As a new user of Microsoft Outlook, after using 7 years of Lotus Notes, I think that MO gave us already more problems in the month that it has been deployed, than Lotus Notes in the past 7 years.
I have a read an explanation over at The Strategy Page. For him, it was a bluffing to win at two fronts. Iraq and everything west of it is Arab, at the east you have Iran. Arabs live in fear of the Persians. This dates back more than three thousand year.
Having his war at the beginning of the eighties with Iran gained him much respect in the Arabic world, because he stood up to them. The bluff with the WMDs was in the same category, it was to scare off the Iranians and give confidence to the Arab world that he would stop them if they would move.
Especially since I discovered this week what MacroVision means. One does then have a collection of Disney videos.
Oh, and it is not as if these videos are of high quality. It is just this year that I set up Peter Pan for my daughter (a video that I owned already a couple of years, but never played before). I think I must have played maybe 20 to 30 times. Two weeks ago, the tape broke, luckily at the beginning. We have repaired it with the goal of recording it on DVD : no go due to Macrovision. Well, I let it play, and I noticed that later on the tape I got already white specks on screen, from wearing out.
I do not know where it could come from, but I remember reading this quote in Elektor/Elektuur in the beginning of the '80s, very shortly after the introduction of the IBM PC. Don't have to time to search the archives of the library of Ostend, though.
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Since end 2003, I have an AMD based system with 2 Gb RAM. You know, even when my wife and I where logged in together (1 console X-session, 1 X-terminal, both KDE), I have never seen the active memory rise above 512 Mb (caching can of course use the rest).
Taking into account the bottle-neck memory is now already, 1 Tb is only really usable by systems with multiple processors and advanced controllers and multiple caching.
What about someone who used vi for 5 years, then transitioned to (X)Emacs out of curiosity ?
vim is nice, but for the things I do, XEmacs is more powerful. It is easier to add buffers and switch between them. I can setup several shell buffers to run and log application output. I have org-mode, which is unbelievably powerful in helping me planning and tracking my daily tasks, problems and ideas. I can run clisp and sbcl repls using SLIME. I do not have to switch between modes for editing. Integrated help is much easier to use.
Best of all, after using vi(m) for five years, I can still edit using vi when I need to.
I am glad you said presumably.
Somewhere in the beginning of the nineties, I copied two games : Civilisation and SimCity 2000.
With Civ, there was a kind of playing protection. If you could not answer some questions, for which you could obtain the answers if you had the manual, your built units deserted somewhere around 2000 BC, and you had to rebuild them. Luckily, I had also a copy of the relevant pages in the manual. In SimCity there was not even such a thing, but it was difficult to play without manual.
I learned to play Civ without manual, but I bought SimCity 2000 very quickly, because I needed the manual. A couple of years later, I wanted to purchase Civ, not because of the manual, but because I wanted to have an original copy, just to make sure that I had the means to play it whenever I wanted. I was lucky, MicroProse had bundled them with Railroad Tycoon Deluxe, Pirates II and Colonisation.
I had the same experience with A-Train from Maxis, first copied it and played it, then later bought a genuine copy.
I did not do it out of remorse or something like that, but if you can first know a game by playing with it, then you know also if you like it enough to shell out some dough for it. If you really like the game, then you can budget for it and buy it afterwards. If I really like a game, and play a lot with it, I feel like something is missing if I do not have an original copy with all the manuals and the box.
I wrote a small CAD(rafting) program on my Spectrum (in 1986 or 1987). It used an array to hold a list of objects, and you had to position the pointer using the cursor keys, and there were commands to begin or stop lines, and you created polygons by issuing a key press which made the last point of the previous line the starting point of the next line.
I did never really use it, because I had no possibilities to print or plot my results, and frankly drawing on a 256x192 screen is very coarse. But it was a nice programming exercise.
For Perl, Python and Tcl, you can go to ActiveState.
Portable GPS exists, 10 years ?
Humanity exists, 50000 years ?
People did not need GPS for such things in the past, why should they do now ?
Every time I want to install Ubuntu on some random machine, it fails. I always have to go back to Debian.
I have Debian currently installed for my father and my sister. Spares me the headaches of Windows problems. The only support I need to deliver to them is giving information about performing tasks.
All these things are installed once, and when you have a problem, you get an electrician or a plumber. This is called outsourcing.
IT the infrastructure is about cabling, PC's and delivered software. No reason why you would not or could not outsource this either. However, from a certain company size you might need someone who is able to design and plan your IT infrastructure and hand this out to a contractor for implementation and maintenance.
Someone should come up with figures how basic IT improves productivity, e.g. how does the introduction of word processing enhance productivity ? Spreadsheet ? e-mail and other communication software ? If a company has these tools, how much would it cost them if they where completely removed, or how much less work would they be able to do if these where missing ?
A level higher is the introduction of a programmer in the company. A good programmer can add to or multiply the above productivity improvements. Again, you should ask the question : what would it cost me in time and personnel to perform the same amount of work, or how much work would we have only done with only this number of personnel ?
My experience up 'till now leads me to think that the single most important piece of software to make the most of a programmer, to enter ideas and follow up projects, to instill an ongoing process of improvement by software through the company, is the installation of bug/problem/idea tracking software. I personally find trac ideal for such a situation, because it is easy and fast to set up and use. If people have ideas, questions or problems, they should be able to enter them without much problems, difficulty or loss of time. This also makes it much easier to classify what is solved, i.e. does the programmer need to do much bug fixes, and of which kind, or can he concentrate on problem solving ? What is the turnaround time between entry and deployment, etc...
I think the answer should be : if you remove all this stuff, how much would it cost you to do the same amount of work that is now being done ?
When reading about the X-Men you mention, the ones written by Chris Claremont, I have several times encountered the proposition that he used too much words.
I both like the old stories, but of course they have evolved. I am now collecting the original X-Men in the Marvel Masterworks format, and the translations of the Uncanny X-Men in Dutch. You see them evolve very much. The originals where nicely drawn, but had rather simple scenarios, while the Claremont era has a lot of human factor, the X-Man are very much human with their doubts and problems. After Claremont, new writers seemed to emphasise the action more, but that evolved too, with slower stories in between. Have a read on the original X-Men issues written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Neal Adams, you will see a whole lot of drawings standing on their own.
My brother has a band, and is able to make himself known via YouTube. I am sure that if he plays it smart he can sell his music for additional income.
I think it is much easier now, with something like YouTube, to become known. Exploiting this fact will still take some work, to organise and play performances. But at least, with this way of working, you already know that there are people who like your music and you can choose the spots to perform with a higher rate of success upfront.
I would have liked to buy the 2-CD set. Unfortunately, the shipping was more than $13, to Europe. Well, guess I will have to wait until it is in the shops here. The last couple of years, Reznor seems to bring out his albums around my birthday, which is nice of course :).
In the first case, I would even say the safer system won. You are much more likely to be electrocuted to death by low-voltage DC, than by AC.
Plasma TV's have one big problem : burn-in of the screen from static pictures on the channels. That is the real reason why LCD has taken over. Plasma got a real bad press about this. I work for a competitor of Sony which produces high-end (expensive) LCD and plasma TV's.
If all you want to do is easy editing and not have any problems with computers, you better buy a Mac then.
Because it is not part of the standard PC architecture ?
This use of the word Christians in the US bothers me, because there are all kinds of them, and the ones in the US which call themselves Christians seem more like Christian sects to me, branches originated in European protestantism, British protestantism and puritanism.
By using the word Christian, they try to push their view upon the world as them being the only true Christians.
I would say that in order of being original Christians, the Orthodox Church has the most credibility, followed by the Catholic Church, then the Protestant Church of Calvin and Luther, and personally I consider everything after that, starting with puritanism (of which there is still too much in the US), as Christian sects.
Do not forget bazaar...
Both. We have server problems and client program problems.
I have this job, which is called CM, and which requires me to do many things. One of the reasons we do it is that we start and monitor jobs, which can take hours, so you do something else in between. We also provide support for specific issues.
In 2002,2003 things where at a an extreme. I had to do many releases, and in between I also wrote software to automate this. In 2004 I realised something was amiss, because I lost concentration, was tired, didn't feel like working, and carried out mostly routine jobs. This carried on through 2006.
In 2006 I started to stabilise, I could work 4/5 of a week, which helped me rest. In 2007, I have mostly recovered, but I still have some issues which probably won't disappear. My short term memory does weird things, and I can concentrate, but it is mostly so focused that I do not notice other things.
Like I said, I work 6 months in a year now 4/5 of a week, and I started taking fish oil caps, because I found that my eating peanuts and fatty fish always had a positive effect on me.
I have organised my personal and work life more. I use (x)emacs org-mode to have a good view on things that I want to plan, taking care that every idea I have is entered immediately.
Regards, another victim of too much multitasking.
As a new user of Microsoft Outlook, after using 7 years of Lotus Notes, I think that MO gave us already more problems in the month that it has been deployed, than Lotus Notes in the past 7 years.
I have a read an explanation over at The Strategy Page. For him, it was a bluffing to win at two fronts. Iraq and everything west of it is Arab, at the east you have Iran. Arabs live in fear of the Persians. This dates back more than three thousand year.
Having his war at the beginning of the eighties with Iran gained him much respect in the Arabic world, because he stood up to them. The bluff with the WMDs was in the same category, it was to scare off the Iranians and give confidence to the Arab world that he would stop them if they would move.
Especially since I discovered this week what MacroVision means. One does then have a collection of Disney videos.
Oh, and it is not as if these videos are of high quality. It is just this year that I set up Peter Pan for my daughter (a video that I owned already a couple of years, but never played before). I think I must have played maybe 20 to 30 times. Two weeks ago, the tape broke, luckily at the beginning. We have repaired it with the goal of recording it on DVD : no go due to Macrovision. Well, I let it play, and I noticed that later on the tape I got already white specks on screen, from wearing out.
Nah, this is the first step to the SoulSucker 3000.
I do not know where it could come from, but I remember reading this quote in Elektor/Elektuur in the beginning of the '80s, very shortly after the introduction of the IBM PC. Don't have to time to search the archives of the library of Ostend, though.