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Fun with Prime Numbers
Steve Litt writes "Fun
With Prime Numbers contains a series of prime number finding algorithms starting with the most brute force imaginable, and working up to a paged algorithm capable of finding the first 1,716,050,469 primes in an hour and a half on a commodity machine. There are faster algorithms on the net, but these algorithms are within the reach of mere mortals and are fully explained."
> User assumes all risk and responsibility for any outcome.
I sure hope that doesn't include responsibility for brining his web server to its knees. I feel so guilty!
Naaaah. I'll let them get away with it by leaving this blatant advertising instead.
(Hint to the clue-challenged: I'm joking. I am not in favor of IP as a concept, which is why I give my feeble jokes away for free, which is about twice what they're worth)
Either he's got a good server, or no one cared enough to look.
That's the ultimate insult -- making the front page of Slashdot, then *not* getting Slashdotted as a result...
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
The author was definately imagining a beowulf cluster of prime number solvers.
Try actually thinking for yourself. It's quite refreshing.
Sorry, you admitted in public that you use a celeron instead of the required AMD processor.
/etc/apt/sources.list to add some extra repositories, I find it very palatable. Other distributions I've installed on it include Slackware 10, Mandrake 9, Suse 9, Fedora Core 2, and CentOS 3.
.NET I use SharpDevelop. I keep both systems side by side on my desktop, though most days I don't even turn the Windows PC on.
I'll go ahead and say more than I need to here, in part because I have nothing better to do, or maybe because of my ADD, since the former is a lie.
Yes, I'm cheap. Low income. Student budget. No scholarships.
It's actually a Dell Dimension 2400n. Shipped with no operating system, it was the cheapest they had. I chose to get 512mb ram, an 80gb hd, a 17" monitor (also the cheapest they had), and a dvd drive. No CD burner, but I already have one elsewhere.
The graphics chipset is an integrated Intel i845GV. I'm sure the GV stands for Great Value, because as expected, it's not only about 1/20th as fast as the middle end 3D cards, it's about 1/3th as fast as its low end integrated competitors. Add to that the Linux driver's buggy, encouraging me to use software rendering. I managed to speed up mesa to make some games quite playable at a severe cost to quality, like bzflag, but I think I forgot to back it up when I last wiped the hard disk.
My cheap system is currently running Ubuntu 4.10. After editing
My older system is an eMachine eTower 500ix. It has a 500mhz celeron, 256mb ram, and an 80gb hd. And it has a 64mb ATI Radeon 7500 and a 52x cd burner, both of which I'll probably move to my newer piece of crap one of these days, if I don't just buy a better system. On it I have Windows XP Professional and Visual Studio.NET, both of which were given to me for free for being a student. But not surprisingly, VS.NET started having problems at about the same time the next version came out, so now if I program with
I buy my games about 3-4 years after they hit the market, when they find their way into the $10 or less racks. I got Quake II for $1.42 on sale at Office Depot and Quake III for $9.95 at WalMart, not that I've played either in the past few months.
But I'm not entirely cheap. I probably spend around 5-10% of my income on open source related donations. Among that, $60 to GrokLaw to fight SCO fud. And probably 95% of my music collection is stuff I've bought, mostly Weird Al. Also Tom Lehrer, the Beatles, and Ozzy. Some of it as a result of sampling on Kazaa and deciding to buy the CD.
Let x = y
/. to figure out high school maths?
Multiply both sides by x:
x^2 = xy
Subtract y^2:
x^2 - y^2 = xy - y^2
Now we can factorise. The left side is done using the difference of two squares method, the right is a simple factorisation.
(x + y)(x - y) = y(x - y)
Now we can cancel out (x - y) i.e. divide both sides by this:
x + y = y
So if x = y, then x + y = 2y
Therefore:
2y = y
Give y an arbitary value, e.g. 1:
2 = 1
We can also set y to the power of 0 on both sides, also giving us
2 = 1
IANAM (I am not a mathematician, nor a great speller).
*Sanity note: Yes, there IS a flaw with this, how long will it take