Lunchtime Reflections

[mdlbear]

Well, here I am at work, finishing lunch (I eat at my desk to leave time for a walk) and wondering whether to pick up a 300GB Maxtor drive at Fry's. They're only $80 this weekend. Since you were wondering, or even if you weren't, the price of a byte of rotating memory has been dropping steadily by a factor of two every year for the last half-century. That's roughly a factor of a quadrillion. If somebody offers you storage as a long-term investment, don't take it.

Now that I've been handed the expense check for last week's OSCON trip, I'm not feeling nearly as impoverished as I was this morning.

Here I am, at least two decades since research conclusively proved that flowcharts were worse than useless as a tool for software design, dusting off a copy of dia so that I can draw some flowcharts. For a software patent, no less. I'm going to need a shower when I get home.

Comments

[patoadam]

In the situation I described, the main advantage of using flowcharts was that they were a higher-level language than the actual code.

I must admit that nowadays, I use flowcharts rarely, usually in situations where I find that their visual gestalt clarifies complex control structures better than source code.

Chacun à son goût.