Monday, May 11, 2009

FREEEEEEEEEDOM!

Well, almost. I'm waiting on the "team" to finish the last thing, but my part was done two days ago. Either way, at 9pm local (midnight back east where the college is located), it's all over, one way or another. Meanwhile, to keep my mind off the clock and wondering what sort of grade I'll end up with in the class if no team project gets turned in, I've been trying to catch up on all the stuff that I've been ignoring for a while.

This is what happens when the government runs health care. But we won't have those sorts of problems; we're Americans! Just look at how we run our banks! What? Oh. Maybe you shouldn't look. And whatever you do, don't look at how we run our government.

In lighter news, Wired featured seven hot gaming machines. At the top end, these run 10x what I just paid for our new PC, which sounds outrageous until you compare any one of the seven to what $15,000,000,000 would buy you in 1984. We have entered an age of retched excess in CPU cycles, memory, storage, etc. Using that to watch movies and play Crysis seems almost criminal. Aren't there really hard problems that I could rent out spare cycles to solve? My quad-core never rev's above 10% for what I do most of the time, and at least eight hours a day, it isn't doing anything other than running a screen saver.

Physicists are still toying with the theory underpinning a form of warp drive. It would work more like Battlestar Galactica than Star Trek, and who knows if it's even theoretically possible for anything larger than a quark, or would require infinite energy or unobtainium. Still cool.

And if you've ever wondered what polar bears do on their summer vacation:

2 comments:

GreatMatt said...

I run a distributed computing app so that my spare cpu cycles don't go to waste. It's one client that lets you work on a number of different projects. It will work on one work unit per processor core. Right now, I'm working on curing cancer! :-)

http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/

Ric said...

Thanks! I've got that running right now, working on dengue fever.

I ran SETI@Home for years, but that's sort of like using dancing penguins to eat up CPU cycles. There was a project where you could actually get paid for loaning out CPU cycles, but no work has been done on it since 2006. I'm surprised that someone like NASA or some university isn't doing this for gravity sims, star formation modeling, galactic collision modeling. With all the dead CPU cycles, they could make the models really detailed and still have it run in less than a hundred years.

Ah well. Dengue fever for now.