twice

In most real world disciplines, things get built according to pre-determined plans that have been used to build the same thing in the past. Go look at some new housing estate, and you will see that every house is the same, or at least is the same as a small set of possible houses. Also with planes and cars, every one of a particular make and model is the same. Hence the time spent building it is mostly taken up with physically hauling around bits of raw material, punching nails through them etc, according to the same design that was used last time, hence the time taken should be about the same as time taken last time.

In software development, if you want a second instance of some program or piece of software, you don't need to 'rewrite' it, you just copy it (or relink it, etc).

This means that every bit of code that you write, you are writing for the first time.

Clever developers will re-use code they have written in the past as much as possible, but all this does is reduce the overall time, which can actually cause estimates to go even further wrong because the "unknown code written from scratch" now constitutes a larger percentage of the overall development effort.

Don't forget the 'uncrop'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUFkb0d1kbU

Write once, run away*

* I can't take original credit for this. I read it somewhere and thought it was very funny.

Because they named the first one 'Ponce'!

No. Yes.
Thunderbolt is the next Firewire.

Have a nice day.

http://wallls.com/wallpaper/25151/

That would be 4:34

Actually, spelling it out would be "Tee aitch eye are tee why space ess eye..."

But yeah, that is a ridiculous sum of money.

Actually, I think that's a preview of some future version of Windows.

2010 called and wants its time machine back.

Joseph Stalin would have loved this.

I switched to OS X in 2004, and never looked back till Lion. Now I'm just getting too annoyed with the whole iOS-creep, and also as I get older my eye sight isn't what it used to be. There is no way in OS X to increase the size of the system font. Let me say that again. There is no way in OS X to increase the size of the system font. I just can't read the damn thing anymore.

Also the new keyboards are shit.

So where does the future lie? My latest computer purchase was a Dell XPS and a copy of VMWare Workstation 9.

I have set it up to load VMWare automatically on boot, and then I have various Linux distros and Windows 7 installed in VM's (the machine runs 8 which I consider a "server" OS as I would never want to "use" it.)

I get:

• Lots of fast hardware (16GB Ram, SSD hybrid drive) for a pretty reasonable price (even factoring in the cost of VMWare).
• Linux 'Just Works' because all the hardware is abstracted by VMWare.
• Speed and efficiency of Windows 8 (which is pretty good as long as you don't actually have to interact with it).
• Surprisingly, even the tech support was pretty good ("I'm sorry sir, but you have called during weekend hours, and your XPS support agreement only covers Monday to Friday... but since you're here now, try changing this UEFI setting and it will fix your boot problem").

I work in an open plan office

I'm lucky if I get 45 minutes productive work done each day

<Life of Brian>Sometimes I hang awake at night dreaming of being allowed to work 3 hours a day.</Life of Brian>

200–240V single phase AC, 47–63Hz, with two 11/13 Amp circuits redundant with another two on a separate grid