One day we (the Humanity) will be laid back in a bed, tubes stuck deeply into ALL our external holes (the power), several open holes in the skull with HDMI, USB and 100 GB internet links (communication interfaces). Machines will know how to feed us, refill the food stocks, and suck our waste solids and liquids just in time. Then we will "have ALL the free time and brain power to spend on something else" (on interesting stuff, I suppose...).

I didn't use OpenCL (helas, both two courses are CUDA-directed), but compared some examples, written in CUDA and OpenCL, as given in http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Massively-Parallel-Processors-Hands/dp/0123814723/ref=pd_sim_b_3 (written by one of the instructors of Coursera HPP). My conclusion was that CUDA is more "friendly" - but indeed it is Nvidia's proprietary technology.

Since then I had no more time to explore OpenCL and other alternatives (some are proprietary and I don't intend to buy...). Eventually I would agree with you and would choose OpenCL if I was doing professional work, but that hasn't happened yet...

Final word: CUDA is now in its 5.X incarnation, and AFAIK it kept improving its user-usability with the release of recent versions...

Both can be modeled as finding a path through a network. In the TSP the path is closed (return to the starting node) and must touch all the nodes in the network. The packet travel in the net is more of finding the "best" path (BP) between two network nodes (source and destination). The definition of "best" is somewhat elusive... (faster, touching less number of nodes, using less used links to minimize congestion,...). The TSP is a NP-hard problem regarding algorithmic complexity (I think...), the BP can usually be solved with dynamic programming (in practical cases) and thus is less costly than the TSP in terms of complexity. But the routing problem (and large TSPs, also) is not solved to get the optimal solution, but instead to get an "enough good" solution, using algorithms which can run in reasonable time. And the internet network is so dynamic that when the message "leaves" the source it is not known the path that it will follow to the destination. I think that in the relay nodes the pack is routed "just-in-time" using the info the node has about the traffic in available links...

I took that course: https://www.coursera.org/course/hetero

I also took a course from Udacity: https://www.udacity.com/course/cs344 but this one I didn't finish, I've done perhaps 30% of it (I already had finished Coursera's). One of these days I'll go there to close matters :-)

The courses in Udacity are "always online", so anyone can register anytime and finish the course with his/hers own pace. Quizzes, exams and grading with certificate included have no fixed limits. On the other hand, the courses from Coursera have deadlines and run more or less in parallel with "snail" university schedules, with start and stop dates, with time limits in quizzes and exams, etc. (You can usually see videos, and do quizzes anytime after they end, but no certificates and grading AFAIK).

Both courses were good -- I recommend both, -- we did homeworks in Amazon's cloud transparently, and certainly both were "sponsored" by Nvidia, coz we learned only CUDA. (Perhaps there was a brief blah blah about competing alternatives.)

But from what I've seen, if someone is afraid from CUDA, then its better to run away very fast from alternatives (OpenCL) :-)

30 dollars? Awsome! Probably PP added another 100 bucks to that... :-)

I still run 3 Win2K machines, with 8 to 10 yrs old approximately, and for a few years I had a (free) Avira installed, until it stopped supporting Win2K and, more importantly, until the machines knelt down because of it. As time goes by, antivirus become fantastic CPU hogs.

Don't blame me for still using an unsupported OS. I'm not an IT pro but I'm proud of never having had to reinstall any OS (the only scar I have from virus attacks is a crippled Excel which was "quarantined" many years ago -- but I can live without Excel :-).

So a few years ago after trying a couple of free AVs, I found this reanimator thing -- http://greatis.com/security/reanimator.html -- and now it is what I use in all my PCs (even some newer ones with Win 7), helped by MS firewall and built-in security tools, and recommend it to family and friends. And it never let me down. But its not a real-time scanner/monitor: you can scan filesystem and memory for malware as with a regular AV, and I use it a lot to kill nasty startup processes that burn resources (Adobe and Java updaters, etc...). Reanimator's database and executable are updated very often. I don't even remember that it is there...

But, anyway, the most dangerous site I surf is Slashdot :-), so I don't need AV heavy stuff ...

Reanimator is not heavy and works either a "fire extinguisher" if you suspect you are infected or as a scan tool. In a couple of minutes I teach people how to use it (anyone without severe age damage can learn) and it is effective. However, I do not have experience in dealing with elder retired people.

Regarding switching to Linux, it's a bad day to talk to me about it: my usual server (not maintained by me), an old PC built with "pro" material, which since a f

No I'm not. I'm just trying that one of the Vine reviewers which uses the sample copy of the book as a monitor stand offers to sell me the thing by 20 bucks, at most :-)

I spent a few minutes seeing the "portfolio" of some of the "Vine reviewers" of the book, and one of them (a male, if he's not faking) even had a review of a pack of tampons (yes!!! 4 stars, I think), although he really had the decency to warn that he was doing the review on behalf of a lady in his family (daughter, niece?).

"Hey Jane, are those Vine tampons I offered you comfortable? I need to write a review..." :-)

Even if there are no "competitors" for this book, honest reviews can eventually help you in deciding to spend $127 or not. So, niche products deserve fair reviews despite not being best sellers.