Mark McDougall wrote:
Leif Strand wrote:Even for silly stuff -- likewhen somebody runs out of disk space: "don't waste your time cleaning thejunk off your hard drive -- we'll just buy you a new, bigger one."Well, it sounds silly, but it does actually make commercial sense. As a contractor who charges time and materials, sometimes I have to catch myself and step back and look at the "silly stuff" in terms of hours of my time - it doesn't take more than a few hours of my time wasted before the real cost starts to become significant...
Not to mention the huge potential for destructive errors when scanning directories and deleting lots of files. My own personal policy is to delete only obvious duplicates, and only then when they are in the same "place". Disk capacities are now increasing fast enough that I can copy my entire previous disk into a folder on the new disk and still only take up a small fraction of the new drive.
Especially when coding in C/C++, sometimes I have to remind myself that computers are a zillion times faster now; that it is a waste of my time to micro-optimize the routine I happen to be staring at.Heh, certainly true for PC applications, but for the odd job we're still using 8051's, and it _can_ still sometimes need that attention to detail!
Small embedded applications are the one remaining bastion of tight assembly programming (except for hobby programming ;-). And as flash memories on microcontrollers surge beyond 32KB, space is no longer a consideration--only time-critical code. -michael ******** Note new website URL ******** NadaNet and AppleCrate II for Apple II parallel computing! Home page: http://home.comcast.net/~mjmahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."