And I hope it shines good on you, 'cos on me, it has been, in metaphor, rainin'. Theoretically, I'm on vacation this week; as a practical matter, Something Pretty Important blew a gasket Saturday morning and (thanks to prior plans), I spent Saturday evening and allllll of the night just past on it. It's oh-five-hundred and I am goin' to bed.
What frustrates me is, what blew up was an old computer (MS-DOS!) running old software. They make a shiny happy-with-XP version of the program that I already tried once to buy. Or was it twice?
Update: the new software's free. My time to configure for our stuff (192 channels of fun and delight), not so much: I'll be trading in some vacation time for straight time; but I can save the vacation day(s) for later.
As a general rule, about 2 of my vacations out of three, a major system at the Skunk Works breaks or goes loony. The best one was the time my boss and I were both out of town for a week and somehow the big genset came on line at the North Campus (lighting up a tiny little warning light no one bothered to investigate at the main building), ran for three days 'til it was out of fuel and shut down, taking the entire facility dark. Madcap hijinks, as they say, ensued.
Sleep well. And remember that DOS has some rather sharp limits but it is usually ready to accept data faster than you can gather the data to input; seldom crashes for no reason at all; and it will process faster than you can input data. things that WinApp based 'pewters often fail at.
ReplyDeleteI have been using the same custom made DOS program since 1991 - and the darn thing is still faster than anything the peddlers have tried to sell me. Most importantly, it works - NOW.
Stranger
command line interface is always faster than GUI apps, no matter the OS.
ReplyDeleteI've seen 40K mail pieces OCR'd per hour on Win XP on 5 years ago's hardware. Unless you have some real hard real time stuff, XP is up to the task.
ReplyDeleteAgree in principal, but I also remember what a complete b!tch it could be to get something running on a DOS system.
ReplyDeletea tiny little warning light no one bothered to investigate
ReplyDeleteWhich, I trust, was subsequently augmented with a strobe/klaxon combination located in the GM's office?