From: Randall Parker 

Dave Ings wrote:
> Two main reasons I can think of: (1) simplicity, appearance (2) the
> widescreen monitor can double as a 16:9 display for watching movies. I
> thought Dell had a 21 inch widescreen for around $1500? Given you can write
> this off as a business expense, I wouldn't have thought the difference in $$
> was all that great (although the pixel count isn't as great as the two Dell
> monitors combined you mention)

Maybe I'm not looking at the right place on Dell's site. But I see 21"
flat panels
with 1600x1200 for about $440. Then to go up to wider ranges of pixels
costs somewhere between more and much much much more. Show me a 3200 pixel
wide monitor
that doesn't cost a thousands of dollars.

BTW, I really want more than 1200 going downward when looking at long source files.
Can any Dell or Viewsonic flat panels out get rotated 90 degrees?

> Many (most?) modern IDEs are incremental build environments, so routine
> builds are instantaneous,

Depends on the language you are programming in. Also depends on what you mean by
"incremental".

Since I do a lot in C++ nowadays (lots of embedded stuff but some GUI apps too) I get
hit by:

A) templates that take a lot of time.

B) Some unavoidable dependencies between headers where changing one header kicks off
a lot of files to recompile. I work to reduce the dependencies. But sometimes it is
difficult to do.

C) Link times that get get kinda long.

>so I wouldn't think build time would be an issue
> for a typical developer's workstation. Build machines doing a full build
> from scratch are a different matter, but my experience has been that full
> builds are at least as I/O bound as CPU bound in which case maybe you should
> be looking at SCSI to save build time.

One can also put a lot of source code in a RAM disk and see if that helps.

Right now I"m working on a laptop and its slower hard drive really
slows down builds
(like twice as long) versus a Dell desktop with same CPU speed that I also
use sometimes.

>
> Dave
>
>

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