My main pain is having to wait for windows to finish doing it’s thing at startup. I have a great idea and instead of pressing play and record like in the old days it’s faff about and make a cup of tea before I can get started.
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lol the G.A.S. has done that to me also it takes forever for the DAW to open because of the 8 million plug ins.
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SSD and hibernation renders waiting like that not a thing for me at least. Different workflows work for different people. To me, the time to get all the hardware configured just for myt idea instead of just using a saved template is just a lot longer than a DAW. Also dont have the space for a lot of hardware at the moment anyways.
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Last time I properly built a PC was about 1998 and just used the laptop after about 2004…
Bought an old Dell Optiplex 3020 Around February to use as a DAW…
I like disco lights, but in the right place… This is half of the setup we have been doing over the last couple of days for a small DJ event
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I have both ssd and hibernation but im using an i7 Lenovo laptop and the hibernate function is woeful. I used to leave it on all the time but these days when im so rarely able to just get up and do it the machine lives in a drawer.
My specs arnt steller either. I find as long as you have an audio interface and something from the last 7 years, it should be enough.
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A powered USB3 hub was my saviour
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I dunno. To me every computer built since about 2002 seems like some weird thing from the future. I could happily live forever with an endless supply of decent ThinkPads from 2007 or so. Later ThinkPads have wider screens (um, okay I suppose) but the keyboards aren’t so nice.
I don’t play computer games and I appreciate that my systems couldn’t keep up with the needs of even casual gaming. But I’m a programmer who likes to do a bit of music, and for those purposes no ridiculously powerful multicore systems are necessary.
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I have to disagree, for the programmer part anyway…
I’m working on the foundations of our app, and every change pretty much recompiles everything.
I couldn’t live with less than the 12 cores/24 threads MacPro I use. It already takes over 2 minutes to recompile the thing, during which I sit idle in front of my monitors (well, I do browse the web until the “dong”…)
Luckily I get paid for that wasted time… (It probably totals to more or less an hour per day)
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Why is that necessary? Modular programming and Makefiles (and their successors) were invented to prevent this. I’ve even seen IDEs renew a build on the fly per line of code that you write.
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I hear younger coders talking about needing hungry systems and I just can’t imagine what they’re doing with all that power. Chacun à son goût.
My daughter bought us all Christmas presents. Here’s what she got me. A copy of the first volume of The Sandman, to which I was only recently introduced through the excellent audio production by Audible. I asked her for that. And a surprise, an action figure of my favourite comic book character, Captain America as portrayed by Chris Evans in the 2012 MCU Avengers film (Avengers Assemble was its official name here to avoid confusion with the still-popular sixties British TV series). For ages 4+ it says, so I’m probably safe.
One year she surprised me with a soft toy version of my other favourite character, the perpetually effervescent Pinky Pie. She’s the brony of the family and knows Pinky Pie always makes me smile when I see her on screen.
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When you change a header file that’s included (directly or indirectly) in 90% of the source files…
And my job is to improve and maintain that kind of low level stuff.
Other team members usually don’t have to recompile that much, except once after my more or less weekly push.
There are languages that can compile on the fly… my favorite is Eiffel…
But not C++ AFAIK, especially when it comes to cross-platform MacOS/Linux/windows/Android.
And for high-performance you can’t beat C++ (except assembly…)
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I’m just here to say; programming is a big world, and there are widely different solutions and widely different needs depending on what you use.
We all are just tricking rocks into thinking, one way or another.
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My first programming job involved tricking Winchester drives (top loading washing machines) to cough up their goods using little paper slips with many holes punched into them.
Everything since is frankly too easy and lacking in the magical sciency woo woo that allowed me to charge $5000 a day. Mwahahahahaaaaa!
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I remember those drives. “This one holds SIXTY MEGABYTES.” As the RAM of the ICL mainframe it was attached to was 128K of 24-bit words (individually addressable as 6-bit characters) this seemed like a staggering amount of storage. And we had three of them, each one about the size and shape of a washing machine. They took a while to spin up and spin down, being so huge.
Within five years you could buy the same amount of hard drive memory and walk out of the shop with the drives not weighing down your coat pocket unduly.
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That’s them. Only blue! ICL in Dalkeith were one of my first underage contracts.
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Sandman! 
I got Ash a hard copy of Anansi Boys (Gaiman) and some Terry Prattchett novels (discworld - Equal Rites, and Wyrd Sisters) 
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Sandman is one of the best works of literature I’ve read.
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The full cast audio version had to come out before I was able to process it. I’m still finding drawn media rather challenging. Too much distraction compared to written or spoken word. It’s a very noisy medium. I’m glad I got around to it, though I find American Gods more enjoyable as an example of Gaiman’s narrative voice. Again I got into the latter through a full cast audiobook.
One advantage of the visual medium, I have found, is that I can leaf through a story in minutes. I no longer spend hours reading novels; I prefer to have a story read to me. When I don’t find that convenient, a graphical version can serve as an aide-mémoire for the version of the story that I keep in my head.
Here’s a link to another Gaiman story in audio. It’s available free to listen for a few weeks (not just in the UK).
The Sleeper and the Spindle
Full cast including Gwendoline Christie and Penelope Wilton, with a cameo by the author himself.
(57 minutes)
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Bitnik,
The mind creates a portion of the media with a fascinating mechanism of coding on the page. Look for this analysis of what drawn media does when it’s read.
Understanding Comics
-Fumu / Esopus
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