I was talking about a company of just twenty people, including the boss and me. So not 20 IT people, but 19 administrative people and 1 full time programmer. NOT an IT staff of twenty people.
We used a multiuser minicomputer, and we wrote and maintained our own custom software.
If a company has 75 people, then they surely can hire one full-time IT staffer. A company of 75 people is complex enough to have someone permanently on-site who knows the whereabouts of the company and can make things work smoothly for everyone.
I think you can consider a business with only one person a small business, but where do you draw the line ? 5 people ? 10 people ? 20 people ?
I ask, because I worked for a business of twenty people as the full-time IT staff, from 1997 to 1998.
We had a WANG VS system, running our own custom software, based upon the PACE RDBMS.
The support costs every year where about 25000EUR/year I think, but this computer system never failed.
Peripherals, like line printers and terminals needed some replacements and service every year, but that was included in the support costs.
The database consisted of about 350 tables for the operational work, 180 tables for financial reporting, and in addition to that the bookkeeping software.
I could spend about 95% of my time programming and enhancing the system.
Why do I tell all this ?
Because I think that a system like SBS, with all its different features, cannot be optimally used by a company which does not have a good IT staff.
What I mean is that from a certain size you should be able to also hire a good programmer, which is able to service the SBS and start making use of features of SBS specifically tailored to the business.
If you cannot afford such a person, then SBS is no use to a business (except maybe in a bragging 'me too' way), because only the easiest and simplest features will be used.
almost all of these language comparison sites seem to stick to under 100 line of code benchmarks
I have been busy doing comparative benchmarking between languages, and it is much work to write benchmarks a) which do the same and b) which are then optimised for each language.
All of my benchmarks are currently less than 50 lines.
I would like to have something longer, but then I need to have a problem which can be easily designed, and should be, let's say, between 100 and 500 lines.
After that the applications should be written in each language to benchmark, together with scripts for building and running automatically, and to extract meaningful data from them.
I did some work in comparing Common Lisp compilers with C, and wrote some small benchmarks, and SBCL and CMUCL are capable of generating code that runs as fast or even faster than code which does the same in C.
Afterwards (using 'Common Lisp' by Paul Graham) I discovered some other tricks with which it should be possible to align the Common Lisp and C benchmark code more, for getting to the most out of them. I haven't found time yet to do that.
I should also find some larger benchmarks to write, to have a better comparison about optimisation of larger chunks of code.
I think the real sting is that, probably, in whole Europe, on the news (radio, TV), you could hear Neelie Kroes say that "Nobody is above the law" in regard to the way Microsoft behaved.
If you mean professional printing, I agree. However, printing for the ordinary user tends to be OK, with many WinPrinters supported.
My fathers main applications are OpenOffice, QCad, and GIMP, and he can print perfectly from them.
It is much more troublesome to find a scanner that is supported, especially here in Belgium, where computer shops only tend to stock what is most popular and cheap.
Perl does have closures. Probably the only thing missing are iterators, but then no Scheme or Common Lisp has iterators either.
The only reason why I use Perl is its abundant supply of libraries. If I had the same libraries and possibilities as Perl in Common Lisp, I would only use Common Lisp. SBCL and CMUCL have damn fine optimising compilers, which are able to get near C-speeds from Common Lisp code.
Otherwise, I like Perl, because I can almost do the same things with Perl as with Common Lisp. Only macros are more difficult.
And for object-oriented principles : Paul Graham has shown in his book, ANSI Common Lisp, that with a language like Lisp, it is rather trivial to implement a small OO layer which can solve most of your problems.
That is what happens in Perl, the basic power of the language makes it possible to implement OO in it, without additional syntax.
As a European, I think that liberalism normally has no connotation to left or right.
Examples of three liberal parties in Europe : Belgium, Holland and UK.
The belgian liberals are somewhat conservative, and consist mostly of lawyers, business types, economists, but there is also a liberal union (10% of all union working).
In Holland, there is a (relatively) large right-wing liberal party, but there is also a smaller left-wing liberal party.
The UK liberals are less conservative than the conservative, but certainly not as left wing as Labour.
I think that liberals should be there to show right- and left-wingers that there is more to politics than two polarising views.
Slashdot Mirror
You haven't read my mail very well.
I was talking about a company of just twenty people, including the boss and me. So not 20 IT people, but 19 administrative people and 1 full time programmer. NOT an IT staff of twenty people.
We used a multiuser minicomputer, and we wrote and maintained our own custom software.
If a company has 75 people, then they surely can hire one full-time IT staffer. A company of 75 people is complex enough to have someone permanently on-site who knows the whereabouts of the company and can make things work smoothly for everyone.
How do you define a small business ?
I think you can consider a business with only one person a small business, but where do you draw the line ? 5 people ? 10 people ? 20 people ?
I ask, because I worked for a business of twenty people as the full-time IT staff, from 1997 to 1998.
We had a WANG VS system, running our own custom software, based upon the PACE RDBMS.
The support costs every year where about 25000EUR/year I think, but this computer system never failed.
Peripherals, like line printers and terminals needed some replacements and service every year, but that was included in the support costs.
The database consisted of about 350 tables for the operational work, 180 tables for financial reporting, and in addition to that the bookkeeping software.
I could spend about 95% of my time programming and enhancing the system.
Why do I tell all this ?
Because I think that a system like SBS, with all its different features, cannot be optimally used by a company which does not have a good IT staff.
What I mean is that from a certain size you should be able to also hire a good programmer, which is able to service the SBS and start making use of features of SBS specifically tailored to the business.
If you cannot afford such a person, then SBS is no use to a business (except maybe in a bragging 'me too' way), because only the easiest and simplest features will be used.
Microsoft mice are dirt collectors. They need to be cleaned every few weeks. I have Logitech mice at home, and they never need cleaning.
And their keyboards ? I don't know, I pick Cherries every day, for fifteen years already.
Electronic Numeric Integrator And Computer
almost all of these language comparison sites seem to stick to under 100 line of code benchmarks
I have been busy doing comparative benchmarking between languages, and it is much work to write benchmarks a) which do the same and b) which are then optimised for each language.
All of my benchmarks are currently less than 50 lines.
I would like to have something longer, but then I need to have a problem which can be easily designed, and should be, let's say, between 100 and 500 lines.
After that the applications should be written in each language to benchmark, together with scripts for building and running automatically, and to extract meaningful data from them.
So, much more work than one would probably think.
I did some work in comparing Common Lisp compilers with C, and wrote some small benchmarks, and SBCL and CMUCL are capable of generating code that runs as fast or even faster than code which does the same in C.
Afterwards (using 'Common Lisp' by Paul Graham) I discovered some other tricks with which it should be possible to align the Common Lisp and C benchmark code more, for getting to the most out of them. I haven't found time yet to do that.
I should also find some larger benchmarks to write, to have a better comparison about optimisation of larger chunks of code.
I think the real sting is that, probably, in whole Europe, on the news (radio, TV), you could hear Neelie Kroes say that "Nobody is above the law" in regard to the way Microsoft behaved.
Maybe hate is too strong a word. I think detest sums it up better.
If you mean professional printing, I agree. However, printing for the ordinary user tends to be OK, with many WinPrinters supported.
My fathers main applications are OpenOffice, QCad, and GIMP, and he can print perfectly from them.
It is much more troublesome to find a scanner that is supported, especially here in Belgium, where computer shops only tend to stock what is most popular and cheap.
Well, I don't think Bernie Ecclestone has had many nightmares about his anti-competitive practices.
Literate programming
Hm, methinks that this was already implemented in typewriters.
I think Digital Research had a multi-user version of DOS, supporting up to 16 users on one machine.
Anybody care to elaborate/supply more information ?
Then you should include the Germans too, because they share a longer border with Holland than Belgium.
Perl does have closures. Probably the only thing missing are iterators, but then no Scheme or Common Lisp has iterators either.
The only reason why I use Perl is its abundant supply of libraries. If I had the same libraries and possibilities as Perl in Common Lisp, I would only use Common Lisp. SBCL and CMUCL have damn fine optimising compilers, which are able to get near C-speeds from Common Lisp code.
Otherwise, I like Perl, because I can almost do the same things with Perl as with Common Lisp. Only macros are more difficult.
And for object-oriented principles : Paul Graham has shown in his book, ANSI Common Lisp, that with a language like Lisp, it is rather trivial to implement a small OO layer which can solve most of your problems.
That is what happens in Perl, the basic power of the language makes it possible to implement OO in it, without additional syntax.
There is another language called Arc with the same deficiency. Much talk and no shipping.
As a European, I think that liberalism normally has no connotation to left or right.
Examples of three liberal parties in Europe : Belgium, Holland and UK.
The belgian liberals are somewhat conservative, and consist mostly of lawyers, business types, economists, but there is also a liberal union (10% of all union working).
In Holland, there is a (relatively) large right-wing liberal party, but there is also a smaller left-wing liberal party.
The UK liberals are less conservative than the conservative, but certainly not as left wing as Labour.
I think that liberals should be there to show right- and left-wingers that there is more to politics than two polarising views.
A popular weekly magazine here in Belgium (Humo), had a couple of years ago, a series of articles about the stockmarket.
They also did a running test between analysts, and a bunch of chimpansees which probably were doing some random selections.
Well, the chimpansees did better than the analysts.
So, I think that indeed, you can better go to Vegas, or create random numbers and use these to buy and sell.
An updated version of the Z80
Yes, lightyears ahead of code which is talked about, but still not publicly available : Arc.
It depends upon the compiler.
CLISP ignores such statements, because it only compiles to bytecode anyway.
CMUCL and SBCL do generate compiler warnings, and sometimes even errors. Your static typechecking will not go unnoticed.
I think that to be good, the Python compiler should do the same, but that may mean introducing new statements in Python, like in Lisp :
(declaim (optimize (compilation-speed 0) (speed 3)))
tripe = cured entrails
I think User Mode Linux has been used for such setups.
I finally found it at EmacsWiki.
All my previous gripes are based upon CPerl mode.