The mediocre reviews at Amazon are likely at anomaly.
Or maybe it's just that many people who don't like discrete mathematics are forced to take a course with this textbook as part of their degree. I can see that leading to a flury of bad reviews.
An application that was written in a "serial" way will not scale by throwing more CPUs after the first few. Those applications are better served by a very fast CPU rather than several CPUs.
If you are trying to scale an application that much, the application itself must be built with scalling in mind to allow parallelism. In that case, how much you can scale it depends on how much paralelism exists in the nature of the problem you are solving. Typically you stop getting good speedup after adding lots of CPUs with a given input data set but if you increase the size of the problem (or number of users or whatnot) then you can keep scaling forever.
I also started on a Vic20 and became a programmer.
It was not only that you could write your own games and such it was also that you could write some as good or better as the ones that came with system. Even if you make an XBox360 boot into an interpreter today kids might feel that what they do is much less cool than what comes standard.
Now if you made the XBox360 boot into a 3D builder tool with object scripting capabilities (something akin to SecondLife) then I see it happening.
Very interesting read.
One thing I have to dissagree with is about needing to see/reproduce a problem in order to fix it. It's true that not being able to reproduce makes finding a bug much harder but it's not impossible.
As a server programmer I frequently have to debug race condition bugs, corruption bug or other problems that are not reproduceable at will. Sometimes good detective work can lead you to a find and sometime not. Often you end up having to add some diagnostic code that hopes to gather more information on the problem the next time someone encounters it.
If it happened just once, often we cant fix it but then it's not that important... If it happens "once in a while" and/or "only in production at a large customer site" then we can usually fix it given enough time to work on it. I actually enjoy these kinds of bugs:-)
-Akiba
Poker is often counted as "gambling" but to me
it's precisely because it's not gambling but
rather a game of skill that it's interesting.
It's a zero sum game with some randomness so that
you need to play for a little while to really see the better player emerge.
I also think that MUDs have more affect on people because of the level of roleplay in some of them. You can become very intimately tied with your character and have genuine friends in your "fake" life.
Definately more effect on you outside gaming that a "shoot-em-up" addiction. Also less detrimental since you can actually gain and learn positive stuff from the human relatioships that come from it.
PS: I hang around Aetolia mostly.
Slashdot Mirror
The original 1920's Dr. Calligari is of course a classic and way ahead of his time as a Crazy Scientist:http://imdb.com/title/tt0010323/ It was also remade last year as: http://imdb.com/title/tt0441741/
The one that really takes the prize is his grandaughter though. The 1989 Dr. Calligari is WAY out (and up) there: http://imdb.com/title/tt0097228/
An application that was written in a "serial" way will not scale by throwing more CPUs after the first few. Those applications are better served by a very fast CPU rather than several CPUs. If you are trying to scale an application that much, the application itself must be built with scalling in mind to allow parallelism. In that case, how much you can scale it depends on how much paralelism exists in the nature of the problem you are solving. Typically you stop getting good speedup after adding lots of CPUs with a given input data set but if you increase the size of the problem (or number of users or whatnot) then you can keep scaling forever.
I also started on a Vic20 and became a programmer.
It was not only that you could write your own games and such it
was also that you could write some as good or better as the ones that
came with system. Even if you make an XBox360 boot into an interpreter
today kids might feel that what they do is much less cool than what comes standard.
Now if you made the XBox360 boot into a 3D builder tool with object scripting capabilities (something akin to SecondLife) then I see it happening.
Video killed the radio star!
Very interesting read. One thing I have to dissagree with is about needing to see/reproduce a problem in order to fix it. It's true that not being able to reproduce makes finding a bug much harder but it's not impossible. As a server programmer I frequently have to debug race condition bugs, corruption bug or other problems that are not reproduceable at will. Sometimes good detective work can lead you to a find and sometime not. Often you end up having to add some diagnostic code that hopes to gather more information on the problem the next time someone encounters it. If it happened just once, often we cant fix it but then it's not that important... If it happens "once in a while" and/or "only in production at a large customer site" then we can usually fix it given enough time to work on it. I actually enjoy these kinds of bugs :-)
-Akiba
Poker is often counted as "gambling" but to me it's precisely because it's not gambling but rather a game of skill that it's interesting. It's a zero sum game with some randomness so that you need to play for a little while to really see the better player emerge.
I also think that MUDs have more affect on people because of the level of roleplay in some of them. You can become very intimately tied with your character and have genuine friends in your "fake" life. Definately more effect on you outside gaming that a "shoot-em-up" addiction. Also less detrimental since you can actually gain and learn positive stuff from the human relatioships that come from it. PS: I hang around Aetolia mostly.