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Sometimes the true reward for completing a task is not the money, but instead the satisfaction of a job well done. But it's usually the money.
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The only spell that I need is Televisor Disintegratum
:evil laugh:
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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In whatever way you wholly observe, or, Holy observe, this winter solstice liminal season ... may you, and your family, and friends, enjoy all the blessings of a calm heart, and clear mind.
I am celebrating an apparently excellent recovery for cancer (skin, squamous cell carcinoma) surgery on the back of my neck. Looking forward to a new right-eye (cataracts/lens replacement) on January 10th., if the body says "all systems go."
The only thing that haunts me is that the cost of the treatment is exactly the same as the current negotiating price for a magnificent rock-crystal encased in gilded bronze figure of Maha Kali in (one of) the classic styles (Buddhamarga, Sivamarga: a fusion of Tantric/Vajrayana Buddhist, and Tantric/Sivaite Hinduism, iconography) associated with the remarkable culture and craftsmanship of the Kathmandu Valley Newari artists.
Of course, I feel exquisite guilt at not being able to pull an oar in the strangely bobbing craft of our QA forums 
cheers, Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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All the best to you also. And I hope that after January 10th you will be able to see the world afresh.
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how in a way to see the world again
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And a very merry "Keep a Tree Indoors" season to you and yours, my friend!
Good luck with the eye op - you've waited long enough for it - I'll be thinking of you.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Also to you and yours, Bill. Get yourself well, and don't worry too much about QA - its not likely to change a lot while you're away.
Cheers,
Mick
------------------------------------------------
It doesn't matter how often or hard you fall on your arse, eventually you'll roll over and land on your feet.
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Thanks! Please allow me to reciprocate your season's greetings.
I too have been warned that I am starting to develop cataracts in both eyes, but the need for surgery is still a year or so away. My wife already had the surgery in both eyes, and it made a world of difference for her.
Get me coffee and no one gets hurt!
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Thank you and best wishes to you. Recently went through some (successful) cancer surgery. Had cataracts removed from both eyes, and lens installed. Amazing difference in my sight. One eye now does close and the other does distance.
Alas, the dollarectomy is always a challenge. 
Lou
An intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger.
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Excellent read, I remember a lot of them!
New version: WinHeist Version 2.2.2 Beta I told my psychiatrist that I was hearing voices in my head. He said you don't have a psychiatrist!
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Excellent read. I thought that they might mention the DEC Alpha[^] chip, which was big news in the early 1990s before they went bankrupt (ok ok they were almost insolvent and got bought out by Compaq, who were bought out by HP). It was the first mainstream 64 bit chip, and had numerous multiprocessing capabilities. If it was built today, it would still be close to state of the art.
DEC products were a big part of my career. Sniff.
I'm retired. There's a nap for that...
- Harvey
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I guess the Alpha was designed to shake the world, but I wouldn't say that it did.
I was a college lecturer when we tried to establish a Unix (/Ultrix) environment for the students, buying a brand new Alpha-based machine. In an attempt to get past the performance requirements of the acceptance criteria, the vendor had to double the amount of RAM (at no cost to the college), yet we demanded (and I believe: was granted) a price reduction. The CPU was great for the students to heat their lunch on I read somewhere that the first Alpha model required a 3-phase power supply; I believe that was before "volume" deliveres were made.
There may have been interesting aspects of the chip, yet Alpha was a market flop.
Going even further back, to the VAX CPU, or rather one of its competitors, the ND-500: It had a floating point arithmetic unit requiring 0.5 square meters of circuit boards (4 boards, each about A3 size (which, for you inch guys, means twice of A4, regular typewriter/printer paper). It did FP division by table lookup for the first 11 bits, followed by a newton iteration, two rounds for single precision, three for double precision. The FP unit was so fast that integer division was done by converting the values to FP and converting the result back to integer. -- The ND-500 certainly was no flop, but the manufacturer was small, not sized to take over the world.
Another chip that the academic in the back of my head wish had had more success (and then it would have rocked the world) was a truly object oriented machine: The Intel 432. Certainly not a RISC: It had capability based addressing and hardware (/µcoded) IPC, object oriented to the extent that if you sent an object to another process, the sending process lost it completely. It was way ahead of its time, and at that time Intel didn't have the expertise to get it fast enough (but the project gave them the experise to make the 386 MMS, which was very fast, considering its complexity). Today, they have both the experise and the technology to make it fast.
One of my dreams is that they start a new (research?) project based on the high-flying ideas of the 432, scaling it to the needs of today, adjusting the architectural details to fit what they know can be implemented with speed, but fully honor the extremely good data protection and strict programming dicipline that must be honored in a machine with capability based addressing in hardware.
Of course I know that my dream will never come true. And even with Intel's expertise, they could not make "432 Mark II" run any faster than the top range x64 chips. But it could demonstrate a machine with very strong protection against unwanted intrusion, and it could give some of the OO guys a good kick in the rear, showing what real OO should be like!
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Do pickled cucumbers bring glad tidings to you and gherkin?
Final Christmas one for the year, so: To all those who read and appear to enjoy these, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and hope to chat with you all again in the new year. (I'll be here next week, but I suspect a lot of others won't - TotD will continue as normal)
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: TotD will continue as normal
This is normal?
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Well, as close to normal as I get. 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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I'd say you're in a bit of a pickle there
Sin tack ear lol
Pressing the any key may be continuate
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Duncan Edwards Jones wrote: ThisWhat is normal?
Cheers,
Mick
------------------------------------------------
It doesn't matter how often or hard you fall on your arse, eventually you'll roll over and land on your feet.
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This post violates the Lounge Posting rules in that it implies a sexual activity.
 I'm reporting this post to the CoPS...(Code [o] Project Security). 
No, really, *this* post, not the OP... 
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