Windows 7 32 or 64 bit ?

[John Rumm]

No, its just a fact of life...

In many cases you won't be able to start to apply one transformation until you have completed the first. Some of these activities are by their very nature multiple pass operations. For example, equalising audio levels or colour balance across an entire segment. You will need a pass to identify the maxima and minima before you can decide what scaling to apply.

Many image and audio processing processes are interactive - requiring manual assessment after each stage to work out what to do next. So in practice, sequential file processing its not going to happen for anything other than routine batch adjustments.

So take a big image, load into photoshop, make half a dozen filter operations on it and save it. Personally I would opt for having enough ram to hold the image, plus any other channels and history steps required to do it all in RAM every time, and not want to rely on the image temporary file paging.

If you can make it work equally fast off disk, then you are obviously wasted here, I am sure Adobe will pay good money for that capability.

[John Rumm]

Alas it does not really help... the actual print data are generated by the driver running on the machine doing the printing. The network machine sharing the printer is simply acting as a relay - accepting bytes from the network, and stuffing them into the printer.

Hence why when you install a shared printer you have the option of including drivers for platforms other than the OS of the machine doing the sharing. That way when a user makes a connection to the shared printer, they can automatically suck the required driver files from the machine doing the serving - even if its a different windows version.

For printers that accept a standardised print language (e.g. PCL5, PCL6, Postscript etc), you may be able to find a workaround using a driver for a similar machine - possibly at the expense of not having an exact feature match between the printer, and controls in the driver. For the so called GDI printers that have very limited CPU capabilities, and expect the host machine to do all the rasterisation first, and basically deliver a pixel stream to the printer you are going to have a harder time without the appropriate driver for your platform.

(workarounds there would include printing to file using a recognised format like PDF or postscript, and delivering it to a networked location the print server can see - having a periodic process on that which then prints that file locally using its own driver)

[george [dicegeorge]]

old computer

can see

OK [g]

[Tony Bryer]

I have a self written diary program which following each data change writes out the calendar to a PDF in a DropBox folder, thus making it available on my phone with no further work.

[Mark]

programming IMHO.

"GOTO" ... need I say more?

[Mark]

[-snip-]

Running virtual machines can be very useful. However I would avoid Microsoft Virtual PC. It's v-e-r-y slow. Oracle (Sun) VirtualBox is much better IMHO.

[Adrian C]

VB (and BBC Basic) have procedual and loop statements, that if used properly negate the need to scatter GOTO statements around the source. I can write a program in VB that would be structured identically in C (or whatever) just replacing little bits. No references to line numbers required.

Of course, before that there were plenty of implementations of BASIC that were quite horrible, and the use of spaghetti loops built around IF THEN...GOTO was a necessity. All the other mad and bad home computers on the dealer shelf, other than me cherished BBC Micro.

Thanks Richard ;-)

[Clive George]

Exists in C too, but in both languages you don't need to actually use it.

(apart from error handling in old VB, spit)

[Robin]

Does the use of GOTO matter much - or at all - with modern compilers?

I ask as I thought that modern compilers broke stuff down into control structures so they didn't care if you used goto or cleverer stuff. But pl bear in mind that for me "modern" is anything after the mid-70s ;(

[Clive George]

It's not so much compilers that care, it's people. Use of goto can make your code a nightmare to read.

[Tim Streater]

WTF does the complier have to do with it? It'll still look like spaghetti to the reader - more particularly to the poor sod charged with maintaining it.

[Mike Barnes]

Robin :

It's not the compiler that's the problem, it's the maintenance programmer who has to pick up the program and understand what it does, and how.

I think in recent decades programmers have changed, such that they're now much less likely to reach for the GOTO statement even if it is available.

[djc]

The structure in program code (ie "GOTO considered harmful") is there for the benefit of the human reader. At the very lowest level it is little more than compare and branch all te way down. But these days nobody goes there: processors and microcode are designed to work with compilers not hand written machine codes,

[The Natural Philosopher]

GOTO is a valid construct. The problem is when you uses it top produce spaghetti code.

Any IF...THEN...ELSE... will compile dowmn to at least one unconditional jump.

C supports not only 'goto' but 'break' and 'continue' which are specialised versions of the same thing.

As well as setjmp() and longjmp() which are even more flagrant abusers of structure.

But thunderingly useful when you are 40 subroutines deep and the hardware says 'er...I just lost carrier' and you want to simply abort everything and start over ...without returning the same error code up thorough the 40 subroutines.

Or you are trying to write an interrupt driven scheduler.

[The Natural Philosopher]

But you cant write a switch() statement without a 'break' really and that is the same thing:

[The Natural Philosopher]

Virtualbox is - adequate.

In order to get stable operation I have had to turn off MOST of the 'hardware acceleration' and that makes cursor response a but crappy, and also flash videos don't really run smoothly under my XP machine.

But that's OK because of what I want my windows FOR. which is graphics work.

Its useless for all but the simplest games, but its fine for RhinoCAD and CorelDraw. And by doing what amounts to a suspend rather than a shutdown, I can 'reboot' it in a few seconds.

For everything else there is Linux. Massively robust and functional. Thouugh it did go doolally trying to transer a 15 Mbyte file via NFS to a remote machines on the net...NFS is a fine protocol, but not over links that occasioally do down..:-)

[John Rumm]

Depends on what you mean by basic...

Easily avoidable on decent basic implementations in most cases...

(apart from those few cases where you really *need* goto - and then it can have the edge of languages that don't have it!)

[John Rumm]

Dare one suggest the sinclair QL basic was probably even better than Acorn's ;-)

[John Rumm]

Indeed, although these days one would argue that's what proper exception handling is for...

[george [dicegeorge]]

drat - virtualbox only 'adequate'? I'm buying a new laptop, my plan was to have Windows7 then virtual box then Xubuntu, and I'd thought it would run almost as fast as if dualbooted. Where is your slowdown coming from?

[george]