Stijn!!

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by Andy911sc

Thanks guys for the wishes.

I just got a call. They want me to come in on Monday for a 3.5 hour long interview and to meet the team. I am excited.

However, it is my friday. I have a long weekend get away with some buddies to head to my cabin. Relaxation and drinking some beers to calm the nerves before mondays interview.

Don't let your biddies shave half your head while you're sleeping ......
Not like they would, just saying.

[Outback Porsche]

Hi all

Back home, and retirement training completed again. Fiji was thoroughly enjoyed.

The 944 got its rego check, and all sorted for another year.

[Outback Porsche]

Originally Posted by Andy911sc

I just got a call. They want me to come in on Monday for a 3.5 hour long interview and to meet the team. I am excited.

Good luck Andy

[GH85Carrera]

I finished my little snap shot image yesterday. After cutting it up and reassembling it it looks great, and works fine for the client. We just mail them a thumbdrive instead of truing to FTP a monster file.



The file on the hard drive is "just" 10 GB, but that is with LZW lossless compression. As you can see the image is actually a 36.7 GB image. At least Photoshop will let me open it and see it. I can remember when the limits were 20,000 pixels in either dimension. Now if they will decide to change the limit and let me save it I will love them again. For now I am gonna keep cussing them. When several other mapping programs I have don't even blink at opening or editing the files I know it is not a real limit with tif files.

Photoshop does have a large image format that I can save it to with Photoshop, but only Photoshop opens it, so it is useless to me. If they would just make the JPEG2000 format work right that would solve the issue. For now they are just not interested in playing nice.

Of course all of this still amazes me. My first computer hard drive was 10 MB. Then I moved up to a huge 32 MB drive. I remember my first giant huge 1 GB hard drive. I named it Big Drive. I moved though several computers before I ever got to a drive big enough to store that tif file. It was many years before I got a 500 GB drive. Right now I have two 6 TB hard drives hooked to my system. 6,000 GB each. It still amazes me.

[Porsche-poor]

Morning all. I don't think my first computer has enough power to warm a cup of coffee by todays standards.

[GH85Carrera]

Yea, my first PC was a real powerhouse, 8088 CPU running at 4.47 MHz with 256K of RAM, and a no hard drive, just a twin floppy 5.25 inch standard density floppy. I souped it up to the full 640K and added a 10MB hard drive. It ran DOS 2.1.

I was up to DOS 3.3 by the time I got my first 386 with a 60 MB hard drive. I still have the copy of Windows 386 and my original Microsoft mouse that says Pat. Pending.

The 486 was a big upgrade and next was a Pentium CPU. I remember reading the magazines and the worry was when a CPU gets up to 500 MHz it might interfere with TV reception.

At work my first computer was a 6 MHz IBM PC AT running DOS 3.3 on 32 MB hard drive in about 1986. It had Extended memory and 2 entire MB of RAM, and a main monitor that was black background with amber text, and a second monitor that could display 16 million colors. It cost 34 grand with the film recorder. It ran one program from Zenographics that would let us design color 35mm slides with full 16 million color and 4K resolution. We charged from 18 to 60 bucks per 35 mm slide, depending on the complexity of the slide. The customers brought us the hand written text, and I made them into slides.

I vividly remember doing a doctors slide show on pertinacious discectomy, and how he had developed a procedure to revolutionize spine surgery. It was 40 slides, and he paid almost 2,000 bucks for me to make it. I of course made only my regular salary. At least I was out of the dark room.

[Porsche-poor]

I think we went from a 8086 to a dx50 then onto a Pentium of some sort. I remember constantly having to modify the boot up process to get enough free ram to play games.

[RKDinOKC]

My first computer was an HP21, but you could only display 2 words, hELL and 8OO8IE5

[GH85Carrera]

Well, my first computer was actually a Vic20 and I knew from the start it needed more than 8K so I had the 16K expansion card. It had a cassette drive. It would take 5 minutes to load a 2K program. Moving up to the Commodore 64 and a floppy drive was a big step up. I had to hook it to my TV for for a while. I finally bought the Commodore monitor that was great. I still have that monitor out in my garage and used it for years as a TV monitor. I have not turned it on in many years, but it was working great last time I fired it up. It is the old standard definition resolution TV input.

[Porsche-poor]

my first monitor was one of the orange displays. God CAD sucked back then. I did have a really cool scale drawing of the solar system on it. Took forever to load.

[GH85Carrera]

I am having fun doing the reconciliation of the business credit card. The balance gets to be breathtaking in a month, but we always pay the full statement balance automatically. We pay zero interest.

I have the statement open, and by federal law they have to put the information for idiots on there. If I pay only the minimum, and never charge on the card again, it will take 27 years to pay the bill, and the amount paid will be over double the amount due. I can save almost 8 grand it I up it to just $304 per month and pay it off "only" three years.

I think I will stick to full statement balance.

It took me a few phone calls to get them to accept the fact our airplane can fly to another state, buy $250 or more in fuel, fly to another state and do it that again in one day. It can suck up some money like crazy. Fortunately we are smart enough to mark that cost up and get the client to pay their bill, and make money on that.

[Jim Richards]

I had an Apple II+, amber monitor, and two floppy disc drives. I could sling code in Basic and FORTRAN back then. Mad skills.

[Porsche-poor]

Only code I ever played with was in high school. I think they were Apple II's. The funny part was that one kid in the class was a foreign exchange student, he got high praise for using his native language for variables. They would spell out words to bad they were Finish cuss words.

[flipper35]

Originally Posted by Porsche-poor

Morning all. I don't think my first computer has enough power to warm a cup of coffee by todays standards.

The Pentium 4 in their last days put out between 170 and 200 watts of heat. Plus the heat form the PS and other chips made for a warm case.

Had a C64, then and Amiga 500 then a A2000. Then downgraded to PCs. Now I have a whole bunch of the stinking things at the house.

[flipper35]

I started coding in 8th grade. Unfortunately, I am still doing it in some capacity or another.

[Porsche-poor]

speaking of computers laying around the house I think there are two Dell laptops that I should get rid of.

[flipper35]

Just short the batteries and they will get rid of themselves!

[GH85Carrera]

Our aerial photo company has a total of 11 computers, all running Win 10 Pro. We have 4 laptops, and one Lenovo desktop mini. It is a cute little thing that has a fast i7 CPU and 32 Gig of memory and a 1 Gig internal SSD and we bought it for $500.

Everything else is a computer I built from a pile of parts I ordered. We end up with a computer that is super reliable built from quality components, and fast. I really want to build me a new system with a next Gen i8 32 core and 64 gig of RAM and multiple Solid State drives. If we get a few more big projects I will have to have it. The system I am using for this is my main system and I built it in 2013 using Windows 7 Pro. So it is a 6 year old system. That is ancient for a computer built for me to surf the web and do email.

[flipper35]

My babies at work only have 192GB RAM and I only have three of them.

I guess they are 6 months old so they are close to preteen by now!

[GH85Carrera]

We have just one computer with 128 gig. Most of the software we run never use all of 32 gig. Only once did we get close to using all 128 gig on a huge project.

The number of CPU cores is a big part of the speed for the software we use. Ironically none of them can use a dual CPU setup except one CPU at a time. Video card speed is a big part of it too.

We have no servers at all. Everything is peer to peer. One software package can split a project up into work units they call fusers. Each fuser cost us another license fee. We have to buy extra fuser seats on a as needed basis. The program sets up one computer as the maser source, and each of the other computers have one fuser seat, and it gets a hunk of data, churns for hours, spits it back, and asks for more. That can run for a week at a time. That is a big part of why we have more computers.

One of the big projects we are still in the running to get a piece of is a large 3D capture of a metropolitan area. It would end up with over a million images. We will have to pay the software manufacturer a fee to run it for us. They are caculating it might take 256 fusers a few weeks to produce. Right now it is a pipe dream. I suspect the final client will fold at the cost of doing it. They all want super high resolution, super accurate imagery, and super low prices. That part is impossible. We don't work for free.