Posts by John Bridges`

$329 ? AND no processor?

I think I'll stick to ... a beagleboard, or one of my little Buffalo NAS's ... both clock in under $200

Haven't they heard - general purpose CPU's are so much cheaper than custom hardware :-)

Not an apologist but ...

Ok so on the face of it this looks pretty dire. However, without more meaningful data productivity is a hidden variable in this context.

We can see its flat - or marginally negative - what that doesn't tell us is "If we took away IT spending over the period would productivity be strongly negative ?"

i.e. Its easy to draw the conclusion that Govmt IT spending has had no impact, but that conclusion might very well be wrong. The information load on government has gone up dramatically over the past decade and if we were left in the dark-ages of paper and pencil I'd put a pretty strong one way bet that the red line would be massively negative.

Confused dot Com

Has the author even touched VS and Eclipse ?

Using VS is like water torture nowadays and the lack of refactoring (and quick) intellisense makes using it on any large project a nightmare. The debugger can now be called awful - sure it used to be good(ish) 6 years ago but when you have to wait 10minutes for the debugger to show you some variables ... sigh. (and yes its a 2GB dual proc, dual core machine with 7.2k HD).

Eclipse isn't perfect by any means but its positively gleaming compared to VS.

Not entirely true ...

Special Relativity only tells us that it is energetically impossible to travel "AT" the speed of light (energy requirements go to infinity). If you can jump that little hurdle then the physics gets all screwey, but you no longer require infinite energy - just imaginary energy :-) (you start to get solutions which have square roots of negative numbers).

Of course if you look at it from the quantum physics PoV all matter is just one great big probability field - so Douglas Adams probably had it right when he invented the infinite improbability drive.

On that note ... I'm off to experiment with Rich Teas and a nice Darjeeling.