Well, it was a complicated data format for many 10s of GB of seismic data on machines that probably had 32MB or 64MB of memory. The partial sort and merge did the trick for me.
Why would you gamble with your freedom? Most of Paul Graham's fans could easily do 3 years of lawschool at a top tier school and could then work 5 years and retire for life.
Typically, you're about $160k in debt from law school, so the first year is spent paying that back. The next 4 years taken together is only $795k, nowhere near enough to retire for life. All the associate years together is only about $1.6M, still not enough to retire after 11 years.
Then you have to make partner; if you don't, you're out of the firm and usually have to set yourself up as a sole proprietor. If you do make partner, you're set for life, but at 11 years getting there, the road is nearly as long as becoming a tenured professor and usually longer than becoming a successful entrepreneur.
There is about to be a whole raft of federal packages for small plumbing companies; that is the real reason to get started. Apparently you don't even need a license.
It's not. The assumption - following on from cstejerean's comment - being that once XP is no longer receiving security updates, any reasonably knowledgeable person would feel compelled to move to something else. I know I will be.
My comment was really just a facetious one, coming from my personal point of view, which is that Mac's are looking better and better these days.
I'm almost the opposite, Debian on my Laptop. XP Pro on my desktop (until my next big hardware upgrade, anyway).
But as I'm very partial to Linux, I'm starting to think Mac might be the way to go for my next big upgrade. I use my laptop almost purely for development work, but my desktop I use for work/multimedia entertainment.
While I know it's certainly doable to set up a Linux machine for multimedia capabilities, I'm somewhat attracted to the (hopefully) more "batteries included" functionality of a Mac if say, I want to watch a movie piped out to my TV or whatever. In cases like this, I'd prefer to just be able to click a few buttons and make it happen rather than trawl through mailing list archives looking for the right combination of xorg.conf directives for my particular graphics card.
My XP box works fine for this kind of stuff already, but with a Mac, I get the bonus of the familiar Unix-like underpinnings.
Still probably be a while before I might say goodbye to Bill, though.
Linux on a laptop has never worked out well for me every time I tried. Getting an external project to work usually has issues, wireless is sometimes flakey and battery life typically sucks. I highly recommend checking out OS X on a laptop. I always found the Mac desktops to be too expensive for what I need (since I already have a laptop I don't need heavy multimedia just an always-on workhorse).
> Linux on a laptop has never worked out well for me ...
Then you need to try out an IBM/Lenovo T60. :) This is what I've got (bought it cheap second hand, it was a great buy) and it's rock solid running Debian Lenny, everything works, and works well. ThinkPads in general are great for Linux compatibility.
But thanks, I will definitely take your words under advisement when upgrade time comes around.
It's apparently okay for folks to rent two weeks a year and okay for someone to rent to said folks. Yet it's unacceptable for someone to own and use two weeks a year.
However, a huge fraction of the "stay there two weeks a year" folks try to rent the other weeks. So you distinguishing between folks who try to rent a secondary house all but two weeks a year and folks who try to rent a secondary house all but two weeks a year.
That seems a bit subtle. Perhaps you can elaborate.
It's apparently okay for folks to rent two weeks a year and okay for someone to rent to said folks
a huge fraction of the "stay there two weeks a year" folks try to rent the other weeks
I disagree. Few people maintain a property only to rent it for two weeks a year. Once you bother to rent it, you try to do it for as long as possible. On the other hand, people who buy one, two, ... n houses for vacationing or speculating purposes can often afford to have them empty.
In any event, that's irrelevant to my point. Be them a huge or tiny fraction, I'm not so much against those. A house that gets occupied, by owners or renters, for most of the year, serves a genuine need.
Knowing even the slightest basics about Einstein's random walk, I would be somewhat surprised if the percentage difference between any arbitrarily categorized sets of days weren't that large.
You should have put it all into the highest yielding (and thus riskiest) money market accounts. The government ended up giving them the same coverage as your CDs (not that you could have known that would happen...).
