Most real-world problems are parallel problems. Even the ones that aren't (say... compiling a file in C) you can usually run a lot of instances of in parallel.
Actually, compiling a file in C is a pretty good example of something that can be broken down into parallel bits. At the lowest level you are reading the file and running the C pre-processor on it. Put that in one thread and pass the output to another. Then your are dividing it up into tokens - put that in another thread. But most importantly, you have (usually) a bunch of functions each of which can be compiled separately from each other.
Want to get rid of the drug dealers? It only takes a few easy and cheap steps.
Step 1: Provide free high quality drugs to people already addicted with no criminal penalties or consequences to people who come forward and ask for them.
Step 2: You're basicly done, you've knocked the bottom out of the drug buisness, you are now the distributor and you have no reason to try to get more people addicted. Drug dealers can no longer make any profit out of getting kids addicted since they just go to you when it starts costing money.
Nice argument, but how do you know that the person coming to you for their free supply is already an addict? Remember the reason a lot of people become addicts in the first place is that they are living miserable lives and heroin (or whatever) gives them a temporary escape. If they see their mates blissed out on government smack, what's to stop them also going along and pretending to be an addict?
At least having a cost attached limits their ability to afford it.
Yeah, but "Eric Harshbarger, a former Sun engineer..." doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Am I just being cynical or are these kinds of stories surreptitious advertising for Google, as in "look how smart our engineers are". I can't find the original source for this story. Or maybe people are just primed now to take more notice of something done by a Google employee?
The first computer I ever programmed back in the seventies was a Marconi Myriad and had a built-in speaker. The speaker made a different noise according to (I think) what instruction was being processed (or maybe the tone was based on the memory address?). But anyway, there were lots of paper tapes around with programs that would do various loops to play tunes, eg classical organ pieces.
The nice thing about it though was it served as an excellent diagnostic aid. When the full system was working properly it would make a very complex sound, a bit like a dishwasher or something, but when it hit a
bug and hung you'd get a single tone (a bit like those "beep beep
beeeeeeep" monitors in hospitals). And you could tell when things were
starting to go wrong, a bit like listening to a car engine. Quite cool,
I sometimes miss being able to "listen" to complex programs executing.
A read only database can generally perform MANY times better than one that has to be optimized to support read/write and especially if it is highly transactional.
Do you have any references for that? The only thing I could find on a quick Google scan was this which claims that for SQL Server there was only an 8% speedup. The author found it hard to get real empirical data.
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"I still do not fully understand why it happened." Alan Greenspan, October 2008.
I want to be irrationally exuberant again.
Actually, compiling a file in C is a pretty good example of something that can be broken down into parallel bits. At the lowest level you are reading the file and running the C pre-processor on it. Put that in one thread and pass the output to another. Then your are dividing it up into tokens - put that in another thread. But most importantly, you have (usually) a bunch of functions each of which can be compiled separately from each other.
There is loads of scope for parallelization.
The Universe is a machine for creating stories and God is the ultimate Couch Potato watching it all unfold.
Nice argument, but how do you know that the person coming to you for their free supply is already an addict? Remember the reason a lot of people become addicts in the first place is that they are living miserable lives and heroin (or whatever) gives them a temporary escape. If they see their mates blissed out on government smack, what's to stop them also going along and pretending to be an addict?
At least having a cost attached limits their ability to afford it.
Yeah, but "Eric Harshbarger, a former Sun engineer..." doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Am I just being cynical or are these kinds of stories surreptitious advertising for Google, as in "look how smart our engineers are". I can't find the original source for this story. Or maybe people are just primed now to take more notice of something done by a Google employee?
Check out SWT which is available for C++ as well as Java.
The nice thing about it though was it served as an excellent diagnostic aid. When the full system was working properly it would make a very complex sound, a bit like a dishwasher or something, but when it hit a bug and hung you'd get a single tone (a bit like those "beep beep beeeeeeep" monitors in hospitals). And you could tell when things were starting to go wrong, a bit like listening to a car engine. Quite cool, I sometimes miss being able to "listen" to complex programs executing.
Do you have any references for that? The only thing I could find on a quick Google scan was this which claims that for SQL Server there was only an 8% speedup. The author found it hard to get real empirical data.