In this world full of smartphones, this feels especially true: towards your kids or loved one.
The best tricks I know of are:
- Place your phone some place other than your pocket.
- And use it exclusively there: at a place where it is more directly obvious to tour sourroundings that you are occupied. Such as in a separate room or a specific corner less within sight from where the kids are playing.
- Get an Apple Watch or other device that only steal your attention for a brief moment. This will give you the comfort of knowing what’s going on, such as a colleague in need of assistance, without the lure or acting upon it at the cost of losing attention on what’s in front of you.
Yes, it was one node serving 8 lines (modems) connected by 8 port "Hydra" ISA board with 16850 FIFO UARTs. Binkley/2 could automatically distinguish between unattended mailer call or user call and spawned Maximus if user was there. My BBS was quite heavly loaded, all eight lines were busy quite often.
One of the coolest thing about OS/2 2.x is that it was truely multitasking (pre-emtive multitasking), which allowed me to do some work on this same box in PM while it was serving users in background. :-)
About Pascal:
It makes me happy. It looks clean and pseudocode-like. It helps readers from around the world with different languages understand. I am happy that Pack made people curious about this old but great goodie.
Speed, Here are some reasons:
- Pack does all the steps of pack or unpack (read, check, compress/decompress and write) together and this weaving helped achieve this speed and random access. It is by far the fastest speed I get to see reading or writing random files from file systems, as fast or faster than asynchronous read operations or OVERLAPPED on Windows. To a point, it is limited to file system. For example, on NTFS, Pack can pack Linux code base in around 1.3 s; similar is done on ext4 in 0.96 s.
- It is based on a heavily optimized code base, standard library, and the FreePascal compiler, which produces great binary.
- Multi core design: even mobiles have multi-core CPUs these days. Choosing threads based on the content and machine, it does not eat your machine.
- Speed-configured SQLite. SQLite is much faster than most people think it is.
- Configured the already rapid Zstandard.
In summary, standing on the shoulders of giants while trying hard to improve reliability, speed and user experience is a sign of respect for them.
The best tricks I know of are:
- Place your phone some place other than your pocket.
- And use it exclusively there: at a place where it is more directly obvious to tour sourroundings that you are occupied. Such as in a separate room or a specific corner less within sight from where the kids are playing.
- Get an Apple Watch or other device that only steal your attention for a brief moment. This will give you the comfort of knowing what’s going on, such as a colleague in need of assistance, without the lure or acting upon it at the cost of losing attention on what’s in front of you.