With regard to the long exposures, I've found digital makes one aspect of the process much, much better, and that's the oldest argument in favour of digital in general: experimentation is quick and cheap. I've started using Lee's Big Stopper recently and I'm pleased I can chuck away (without developing) 97% of my early work with it!

From Oxford Dictionary of English:

commentator |ËkÉ'mÉ(TM)nteÉtÉ(TM)|
noun
a person who comments on events or on a text.
â a person who commentates on a sports match or other event.

Commenter may have been more appropriate in the circumstances, I'll grant you.

At the risk of getting all mushy and sentimental - thank you aussie.virologist, and your ilk, for doing something worthwhile with all these processor cycles available to the world.

1. Traffic monitoring built in to my chosen GPS enables changes to route after setting off.

2. Even without automatic traffic updates, I can see problems ahead, turn off the current route and let the GPS pick up the pieces.

3. If I've got a long route memorised (in a hypothetical world without GPS), but somehow forget a turning I will have to backtrack or find signs to the next "waypoint" in my mind. If I'm in another country, or well outside my usual area of travel, that's a non-trivial task.

4. "Safety" camera information is available from the GPS, along with stuff like petrol stations, car parks, etc..

5. Why shouldn't I use GPS? Just because people have done things for about a century doesn't mean we can't embrace progress. I can still read a map quite nicely, thanks and still use one for planning longer walks or driving tours etc. But I would not willingly sacrifice my car's GPS for day-to-day driving.

... although the inkjet is sidelined at the moment with clogged nozzles.

Get off the treadmill :) Whilst I do have some "current" Rails books (notably The Rails 3 Way), I've stopped getting new editions of the Pickaxe or Agile WDR books. RailsCasts and good old fashioned studying the docs or picking through Stack Overflow have replaced purchasing books on Rails.

And the solution has hardly changed "completely" every two years. You'd still recognise Rails 1 code if you saw it today.

I limit my book purchases now to well-regarded overviews of new technologies, published before the full developer ecosystem has evolved, along with meatier tomes on design or subjects that I might one day make use of but don't currently need (most recently a book on ANTLR).

Microsoft's wide portfolio of products may allow a little cross-subsidisation (mild understatement), which is not really an option for a one-product firm as described in this story.

Also the Express editions might be considered loss-leaders: you start with the basics and eventually you need the full-blown paid product. It doesn't seem like this firm is differentiating its offerings in such a way.

Small company, 10 employees. Offsite to a Drobo (rsnapshot and Carbon Copy clones of various Linux and Mac servers). Back that up to another external drive.

Separately back up key info from the servers, including complete email incoming and outgoing, to a portable drive, moved out of my office every night.

Also site-to-site backup of key Linux servers.

So I've got backups in London and two locations in Kent, for servers in London and Frankfurt.

And still I wake in a cold sweat every once in a while...

Replying to my own post in order to correct inaccuracy in first paragraph. As multiple responders have pointed out, milk is not sold by metric volume but by our version of Imperial measurements.

Still, they do "map quite closely to the old sizes" :)

Check your test suite covers all the functionality you want your program to have. If you're feeling paranoid, create a couple of tests that WILL fail when the undesirable code is deleted. Make sure everything is in the repo. Maybe branch/tag. Delete, repeat tests, roll-back or checkin (after deleting the canary tests added above) and move on to the next thrilling episode in your coding career.

The first sentence of the paragraph above is of cours the killer - without a full-stack suite of tests there'll always be room for doubt.

250ml, 500ml, 1l, 2l and 4l are typical sales units for dairy products in the UK. And before you say "look, they're using powers of two, metric is all a sham", those particular sizes map quite closely to the old sizes, making it easier for uber-conservative (and ardently anti-European) Britons to accept and understand metric.

I'm not conservative or anti-European and I prefer to work in base 10, with consistent ratios, not having to remember the different number of ounces in a pound, vs the number of pounds in a stone, vs the number of fluid ounces in a pint. I like that I can think of a litre of water and have an immediate feel for what a kilogram weighs, or what 100mm looks like.

I'm 43 years old, so I went to school post-initial-metrication, but there are still plenty of hold-outs my age and older who "can't stand metric", including my otherwise-sane wife. But at least we're 30 years further along the metrication process and can report that the world won't end if you do get with the program(me).

The following assumes you were making a serious point - a self-inflicted "whooosh!" if you weren't.

Power, in this context, is relative. The power of the electronic calculator is obviously portability combined with immediacy. The resolution of which you speak so proudly came with a form factor that was inappropriate for putting in your pocket (unless you've got seriously baggy cargo pants on with room for a small CRT, a power supply, and a tape player or perhaps a microdrive).

The Spectrum's handling of maths from complex numbers upwards was also a little challenging (write your own routines from scratch).

Program retention was limited at launch time to saving to audio tape, which again hampered portability and also meant you couldn't just switch it on, factor a polynomial and get on with your life.

Horses for courses etc., and I don't think anyone would advocate using a ZX for maths, any more than you'd use a TI (or an HP) to learn BASIC programming (basic programming maybe, but not BASIC).

Absolutely. I recently treated myself to a brand-new HP50g after a couple of years of using 48 series emulators on my Mac and iOS devices. Makes maths fun again and it's inspired me to re-learn a lot of the calculus that I've forgotten since Uni. Back in the day ('87 was when I stopped learning maths the first time) I had a Casio 7000G. Rambling now, but RPN FTW!

Reading through all the comments here, you (tehcyder) seem to be popping up quite a lot. Do you have a beef with:

• humour: whilst it's merely chuckleworthy, rather than laugh-out-loud, it really is funny, both for the individual concerned and for us lot looking at the figures;
• the Jedi faith: this would be illogical and suggest that you possibly were mentally ill (see item above - it's a joke);
• all faiths other than "the one true faith": I get the feeling, call it a hunch, that you're a believer. Possibly one who's aggrieved that "your" faith has reduced in popularity over the last ten years. Possibly even blaming people who put "Jedi" down as their religion for the drop in adherents to your faith.
• all of the above
• none of the above

I've been there, done that, in terms of being a believer, and I think I recognise the signs of someone being just a little bit defensive: "how liberal the UK is", rather than "how enlightened, sure of itself and diverse the UK is" is a bit of a giveaway. Sorry if I've misjudged you, etc., but it would have been me posting verbatim what you've been doing, in the dim and distant past.

Absolutely. I gleaned the figures from a variety of sources (particularly the water one, which came from a "green eating" site complaining about the increase in water content) so there'll be some double counting. Wheat flour definitely has some water in it, maybe around 14% at the start of processing.