samoa - Slashdot User

30th Anniversary of the (No Good) Spreadsheet 407

Posted by timothy on Tuesday January 13, 2009 @10:01AM from the malignant-cells dept.

theodp writes "PC Magazine's John C. Dvorak offers his curmudgeonly take on the 30th anniversary of the spreadsheet, which Dvorak blames for elevating once lowly bean counters to the executive suite and enabling them to make some truly horrible decisions. But even if you believe that VisiCalc was the root-of-all-evil, as Dvorak claims, your geek side still has to admire it for the programming tour-de-force that it was, implemented in 32KB memory using the look-Ma-no-multiply-or-divide instruction set of the 1MHz 8-bit 6502 processor that powered the Apple II." On the brighter side, one of my favorite things about Visicalc is the widely repeated story that it was snuck into businesses on Apple machines bought under the guise of word processors, but covertly used for accounting instead.

Comment Re:Linux? (Score 1) 375

by samoa on Sunday June 26, 2005 @05:39AM (#12913178) Attached to: Linux Chess Supercomputer Overpowers Grandmaster

well, i don't know anything about how operating systems work, but i'll have a crack :)

this 'computer' is a clustered system right? 16x4 clusters running MPI on linux (the specs are on google somewhere). such a setup requires support for MPI , and the different implementations of this technology on different kernels will yield differing performance levels. im not saying that linux would provide the best results, or that the performance difference between different MPI implementations would be significant - just that it would exist and you would need to choose your operating system based on where you think you'll get the most gains.

the other advantage of open source kernels is that the kernel can be stripped of uneccesary crap, and since hydra runs a chess engine only, this is ideal for maximising memory usage etc. i don't think you can do that (at least to the same extent) on any proprietary OS

i will concede that the use of 'linux' in the posts subject was unneccesary and excessive since it's not the primary governing factor when evaluating such a system, but i don't think the OS is 'meaningless'.

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