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IMHO, the amount of $ spent on equipment is mostly related to the job(s) one is doing. Salary has nothing to do with it.
FWIW, my average of the last 10 years is 1.2% of my salary on hardware.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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Wind the clock back to, let's say the late 1970s.
We were earning on the order of $10/hr, $20k a year.
Main memory (core in those days, 2.6uS cycle time!) we were celebrating coming down to $1/byte.*
The rule of thumb then was that overheads - office/lab space, equipment, etc - ran at 2 x salary.
One new hire at $20k meant $60k or more in the department budget.
*Explains my empathy for those working with constrained resources, like @code-witch. Old brain-wiring dies hard.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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I got an email this morning...Back in 2005, someone at this email address purchased SpinRite v6.0.
UNSUBSCRIBE: If you never wish to receive additional news of SpinRite improvements or “Beyond Recall”, our forthcoming secure drive wiping utility, or any new freeware, PLEASE click here to instantly UNSUBSCRIBE and this email address will never be used again.
You may upgrade your copy of SpinRite to v6.1 at no cost.
SpinRite has been significantly improved
After 20 years, SpinRite 6.0 has been updated to 6.1, and as a licensed owner of 6.0, you are invited to upgrade your copy of SpinRite at no cost. That's quite a delay between releases and interesting that GRC kept the record of my purchase for so long!
Anyway, I tried writing the image to a USB stick, then a CD, but couldn't get either to boot - SpinRite runs a a version of FreeDOS - so dug out my old USB floppy drive and picked up the first floppy disk to come to hand...
...which turned out to be a boot disk for SpinRite 6.0!
Of course, I then worked out that the reason things wouldn't boot was the BIOS boot mode (EUFI) setting!
FYI...
My stack of laptops is in the back of the garage.
I still have a large stack of unused writable CDs (and DVDs).
I still have a small stack of unused punch cards.
I have 2 slide rules.
modified 11hrs 20mins ago.
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Plyushkin's disorder Seek HELP
Or send the laptops to me after you update them
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Steve Gibson (of GRC, and author of SpinRite) has often mentioned on his weekly podcast (Security Now) that even though it's been 20 years, he doesn't feel justified to ask existing customers to purchase an upgrade - no matter how far back they go. And he actually respects unsubscribe requests. Anyone who listens to his podcast would immediately realize he's a hardcore developer at heart, not marketing or sales. I give him a lot of kudos for that.
And even though he calls it a point upgrade, it's essentially a full rewrite, primarily to take advantage of disk technologies that have evolved over those last 20+ years. I haven't tried it myself, but based on the feedback he's been relaying on his podcast, people are seeing tremendous improvements in processing time, which was needed given that today's drives are so much larger than they used to be.
Unrelated: This week's podcast is #993 (it's in its...18th year?) Turns out security is a big topic, and he's not about to run out of material to discuss.
I never miss an occasion to say that the technically-minded who cares about cybersecurity (as much I hate using the term "cyber"-anything) would do well to listen to his podcast. Very informative, he's a stickler for accuracy, doesn't go for the attention-grabbing headlines and brings it down to earth. All my personal opinion.
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StarNamer@work wrote: I have 2 slide rules.
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StarNamer@work wrote: I have 2 slide rules.
All these recent posts mentioning slide rules makes me wonder whether or not my father still has the one I remember from my youth.
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StarNamer@work wrote: ..which turned out to be a boot disk for SpinRite 6.0!
After doing all that just to find it, do you really need to upgrade that tool?
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![Rose | [Rose]](https://www.codeproject.com/script/Forums/Images/rose.gif)
As sad as that might be, I'll try to make another point.
I never understood these types of headlines. "Star of" [XYZ]. I've never watched Downton Abbey, but I have seen all 8 Harry Potter movies. Yeah, ok, she had a role in all (?) of them. But I think it's fair to say she didn't star in them, in the sense that she did not get top billing, or all that much total screen time, relatively speaking, if that's how you want to measure it. That distinction goes to "the other three" - and I don't even need to name them for everyone to know exactly who I'm talking about.
Is it really the role that made her known? Probably not. The story wasn't about her character. She might have made great contributions to the movies, but they still didn't revolve around her.
I realize it's not the best measure, but her page on IMDB doesn't even show Harry Potter under the "Known For" section (nor does Downton Abbey for that matter).
So placing her role from Harry Potter right in the headline for her obituary and claiming she "starred" in it, as if that was her greatest accomplishment, really does her a disservice IMO. Kinda like saying Judy Dench "starred" in the James Bond series, for her role as M.
Aim a little higher than pointing out the bit parts, is all I'm saying.
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Now, if we're talking about her time as Miss Jean Brodie or the lady in the van, that would be very different.
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I can't say I'm familiar with either. Consider my interest piqued.
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They probably put the newbie young reports in charge of obits. And they probably only know her from Harry Potter. I still think of her as Wendy from the movie Hook. It was the first movie I ever saw her in.
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I got my SVG code parsing and more or less accurately rendering exactly one document. Found out my float point peephole parsing was off in some cases, and that my understanding of SVG path syntax was lacking. Correcting for what I learned and finding that bug dramatically improved my results, but...
I introduced errors in the vector graphics engine's antialiasing somehow. Not sure what I did, or what changed. Yikes!
No other document other than the one renders at all, but I'm not as concerned about that at the moment.
What a mess. It just reminds me of any significant project though.
I have one at work where, with demo coming up, we had to do a last minute swap of the hardware. Issue is we already had that swap in the pipeline, but somebody else nixed it due to it using a different cell protocol and them having to rewrite their code. (Not someone I work with directly usually - I'm actually working with a client, and another team - this coder is on that other team - and I'm not trying to dish on him - this was all a misunderstanding). We get the module swapped, and run into power supply problems. Fix that, run into some additional bugs. Finally, late night EST we had a deliverable. And honestly, some of that could have been avoided if I could have foreseen one of the issues we ended up with back when the project was spec'd.
Progress lurches.
They say 80% of goth is lint rolling.*
Well 80% of software development is having the patience to roll with the punches and eat your mistakes.
* The other 20% I think involves being hopelessly depressed, but that may apply to software as well.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I will not participate in them. I find them to be about as valuable as sudoku and only if I ignore the problems with them.
They teach you to be good at coding challenges. They don't teach you to be good at writing software.
Recruiters end up fishing in that pond looking for talent, which does everyone a disservice.
I think the world would be a better place without these kinds of sites.
You want a code challenge? Post something here and/or on Github. How many stars and forks do you get?
And hey, that can actually translate into paying work.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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honey the codewitch wrote: Recruiters end up fishing in that pond looking for talent, which does everyone a disservice.
Recruitment processes could be certainly perfected.
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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CPallini wrote: could be certainly perfected.
To me that implies the process is already on the right track and getting there.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
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You are right, and that's not what I really meant (my bad English).
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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Please take no offense. I didn't mean it that way.
I was pointing out the fault(s) in the interviewing process, not how you presented it.
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dandy72 wrote: Please take no offense. I didn't mean it that way.
I didn't, it's OK 
"In testa che avete, Signor di Ceprano?"
-- Rigoletto
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And half the time, you get people looking for a solution to them so the recruiters think they are good targets ... 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Much the same with "Aptitude tests" or "Intelligence tests".
They wind up selecting for "gaming the test" skillz, rather than anything meaningful in the real world.
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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Wordle 1,196 3/6
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