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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Spots who wrote (6161)	2/9/1999 9:18:00 PM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

For all of you younger whippersnappers, I did not mean to fire you up. I am not a programmer..never was. One Fortran class in college. The prof accused me of writing an inefficient program and marked me down. I protested..'I am not a computer major..it's a machine..I do not care if it makes extra loops..are electrons in short supply? if it gets the right answer it works for me.' (he marked my grade back up) How many bits/bytes?? does one use for a date?? two for the day, two for the month and two for the year?? six? If a date is represented by number of days from 1950..six digits = 999999 is equivalent to 999999/360 or 2777 years...just an 'old' whippersnapper asking<g> Zeuspaul

To: Spots who wrote (6161)	2/9/1999 9:32:00 PM
From: Sean W. Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

For all of you younger whippersnappers, let me tell you that not only did it make good sense at the time but we, those of us who were developing software in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, and even the early nineties, would have got our butts fired for wasting resources anticipating problems that would "never come up in the lifetime of this application." I am quoting many managers I have heard personally in unison. Managers are morons. Thats why their in management. I take as much opportunity as possible to givem grief. I usually lose but what the heck. If your not part of the solution you're part of the problem. he he he Short sighted? Well, in 20-20 hindsight, maybe. In foresight? Poop. Actually, the vast majority of these applications have NOT survived. It's not at all clear to me that the y2k costs we are now experiencing would exceed the costs of avoiding it. In fact, I doubt it. Current pundits have no effing idea of the expense of a few bytes per record even 10 or 15 years ago, much less 30. This is why I play Doom while you guys are cloning OSs. Or partly. I admit I've cloned OSs out the wazoo while putting up my new PCs. And I observed that I could have installed the whole damn thing from scratch 20 times over in the time I have spent covering my backside. Same trade off. Figure your costs. Life's uncertain, so you're going to miss it. That's what plans B, C, D, and E are for. End of old fart's diatribe. this young fart agrees. you speak many truths..... as many of you may not realize circa 1982-3 the entire apple OS and the equivalent of Office would run nicely in 64K of ram and fit on one floppy. Mips, Ram, and Storage were not nearly FREE as they are today... Sean