E-Cigarette Forum Discussion Thread

[kristin]

Holy cow, we've gone from the Outside to a foreign language forum! LOL! (Actually, I'm kind of proud that I actually understood about 15% of that, lol!) My mom (an ancient 63 years old in Nate's world) would probably understand 90% of it though! She was a systems analyst something-or-other for Northwestern Mutual. My son is going to school for game design, so he's probably get a lot more than me, too. I'm the lost generation between the baby boomers and the Milleniums, but at least I'm somewhat web savvy, lol!

 

[MagnusEunson]

I still maintain access to the SGI Altix gear in MN, WI, and VA and I still don't have a need for it. It's an absurd amount of power. I contemplated getting arrested by running a Bitcoin port across eight or twelve thousand cores and the FPGA farm but I was fairly sure it'd be a Federal offense.

I do miss big iron sometimes though. Nothing like walking ~through~ your computer under the bridge of ccNuma cables and the tray of fiber to the completely gratuitous ultra-low latency networking gear from Force10 and that proprietary evil garbage from Myrinet. And datacenters built into the side of small mountains with missile shields because they're in the line of flight for nearby airports. The absurd has its high points on occasion. -Magnus

 

[LibertariaNate]

I do miss big iron sometimes though. Nothing like walking ~through~ your computer under the bridge of ccNuma cables and the tray of fiber to the completely gratuitous ultra-low latency networking gear from Force10 and that proprietary evil garbage from Myrinet. And datacenters built into the side of small mountains with missile shields because they're in the line of flight for nearby airports. The absurd has its high points on occasion. -Magnus

All that just to play Jeopardy!? I kid...

Anybody else watch Watson? Impressive stuff though I was disappointed "he" was being fed the clues via text files.

EDIT: Yes... I am a Jeopardy! junkie.
EDIT x2: Yes... I am disappointed that a computer would beat me.

 

[LibertariaNate]

<snip> (an ancient 63 years old in Nate's world) <snip>

Old is anyone who is 20 years or more your senior...

 

[hobotivo]

... every byte came at a premium.

Not just every byte, every bit had value. I remember writing algorithms in Assembler to handle 3 bit variables because we had a huge array of variables with only 7 possible states and you couldn't waste a whole byte to store a value that would fit in 3 bits, now could you? Used a little more CPU time but the trade-off was considered acceptable. We used to worry about things like that.

I also wrote (for a different project) a suite of bit manipulation routines (AND, OR, XOR etc) in COBOL because COBOL lacked any bit level tools at all and Assembler wasn't allowed to be used on that particular project. It was incredibly inefficient but it worked. I don't like COBOL.

Thanks for the opportunity to wander down memory lane.

Cheers

 

[Halsey]

I still maintain access to the SGI Altix gear in MN, WI, and VA and I still don't have a need for it. It's an absurd amount of power. I contemplated getting arrested by running a Bitcoin port across eight or twelve thousand cores and the FPGA farm but I was fairly sure it'd be a Federal offense.

Probably not a good idea, but I have to admit to seeing the appeal.

Not much good programming wise for more than cobbling together a quick PERL or PHP script. Definitely a bit of a jack of all trades IT wise, though I've never had the opportunity to play with the real big iron. Nothing bigger than a few DEC mini computers. You never know though it's always fun to learn something new.

Halsey

 

[MagnusEunson]

Anybody else watch Watson? Impressive stuff though I was disappointed "he" was being fed the clues via text files.

I was more disappointing they didn't build in a reasonable lag to response based on human times. They admitted that if a certain number of data triggers were hit they'd buzz in before the decision tree was complete. Add that to the artificially fast reflex time and I think it was the earliest conspiracy of SkyNet. -Magnus

 

[MadmanMacguyver]

Muahaha...Dangit I'm surrouded by Programers Even My wife...she's a Cobol/MFCICS (think that's the acronym) programmer...and worse...and I will probably have Mustang sallie throwing books or something at me for this...My mother and grandmother Both did Punch card programming...Me I just remember the half a day to program in basic and then watching the HDD saving the data and taking 20 min to do it and hoping it wouldn't be interrupted by a power blip...(No UPS)...and once breaking down in tears after a whole days worth of work was killed by a dog bumping the table and crashing the drive...Platters on the drive were the size of dinner plates I still have an old Micro computer sitting in my garage and have been thinking about stripping it for the gold in the connectors...(back then all the chip Pins were gold) dang thing weighs a ton and is the size of a couch in 4 modules...lol...Hey I'm Rich!!! ROFL

 

[LibertariaNate]

<snip> you couldn't waste a whole byte to store a value that would fit in 3 bits, now could you? Used a little more CPU time but the trade-off was considered acceptable. We used to worry about things like that.

I admittedly could be better in this area. I have been known to use an "int" when a "short" would suffice. I know, wasting a whole 16 bits there...

 

[MustangSallie]

Old is anyone who is 20 years or more your senior...

Phew! I'm NOT old! Yippee! I was really starting to worry there.

 

[MustangSallie]

I remember writing algorithms in Assembler...

I remember going home and night and crying because I knew if I had to write code in Assembler I was NEVER going to make it as a programmer.

 

[LibertariaNate]

I remember listening to old people talk about programming in Assembler...

 

[kalvinf]

I admittedly could be better in this area. I have been known to use an "int" when a "short" would suffice. I know, wasting a whole 16 bits there...

Doesn't matter, the days of elegant coding are gone. Today, if you had an array of 1000 elements in testing and eventually had to expand then you could just go to 50,000 elements and it won't make any difference.

 

[MustangSallie]

and I will probably have Mustang sallie throwing books or something at me for this...

Nah, not books. Those utterly USELESS COBOL tomes in which you would look up an error code and it would tell you absolutely NOTHING except "Program error, correct and rerun", or something equally as useful.

And besides, Nate has already verified that I am NOT old.

 

[MustangSallie]

I remember listening to old people talk about programming in Assembler...

And now you're just being bratty!

 

[MagnusEunson]

I remember listening to old people talk about programming in Assembler...

EDR
CLD
SHB
RTI

-Magnus

 

[kalvinf]

I remember going home and night and crying because I knew if I had to write code in Assembler I was NEVER going to make it as a programmer.

Ditto, well not the crying part, but for not being accomplished in C language , until I WAS accomplished in C lol.

 

[MagnusEunson]

Doesn't matter, the days of elegant coding are gone.

I disagree, realtime needs, high security needs, and the next generation of SCADA systems all depend on going back to classical software engineering techniques. In general though, yes, you're correct. -Magnus

 

[MustangSallie]

Ditto, well not the crying part, but for not being accomplished in C language , until I WAS accomplished in C lol.

Yes, C++ started out in a similar fashion for me. Thank goodness I was 12 years in at that point and I figured it out.

 

[MustangSallie]

I disagree, realtime needs, high security needs, and the next generation of SCADA systems all depend on going back to classical software engineering techniques. In general though, yes, you're correct. -Magnus

Mobile computing is making old techniques relevant again as well. You just don't have the computing power or memory available as you do with desktop apps.