Whenever I visit my Msc advisor I always leave stunned by the agility (or is it dark magic?) he has on using the Linux console in all its virtues (sed, awk, sort, shell scripting, make, emacs, vim, etc..). I can imagine other stunning activities besides watching someone using the console but I doubt any can boost your productivity like mastering these babbies.

When I began thinking about distributed computing more seriously for my Msc work I looked at it as being an old idea. Almost as old as computers itself.. I thought. Boy, was I wrong..

Distributed computing is known to have began around 1970 with the emergence of PCs and computer networks (mainly ethernet and the Internet). As PCs were slower than the mainframes the way to scale was to buy more of them. Also, the trend toward cheaper machines made the idea of having many PCs a feasible replacement for a single mainframe. We can think of it was the parallel machine of the poor..

Although there is some controversy about what is considered to be the first computer, the difference between it and the appearance of distributed computing will always be significant. I choosed to consider the first computer the first fully programmable mechanical device by Charles Babbage that goes back to 1837. In this case, that makes a difference of 133 years, which in human history is not much but in terms of computers is a lifetime.

Demystified..

I mean, if Donald Knuth got distracted while writing “The Art of Computer Programming” and spent ten years working on his typesetting system LaTeX, how will I be able to complete my MSc thesis without getting distracted?

A wonderful post about time-travelling, Infinity and parallel universes.

A fantastic cellular automatation simulation…

Taken from the povray.org community hall-of-fame. Some of these images take more than a month to render, even on powerful machines..

Images are copyrighted by their authors. If you like them a lot of can buy posters at zazzle.com.