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Leif, you're a great story-teller, with a great story here! (I should talk to the moderator(s), and see if more Around Topic stuff like this can be posted...;-) At first I was crestfallen with ya, as I wondered how long it would-a taken you to write the entire APP this fellow was attempting (if I understand it correctly). Then I was crestfallen with ya again, as I realized I'm a daggone YOUNGSTER next to you!! (So I should, by definition, be able to disrespect you for no other reason than that, right!?...;-) But I'm sure you learned a lesson you never forgot, so I wasn't sorry fer ya a-tall, about solving the wrong problem efficiently not being all that great as it might appear at first. And then I was wondering, not in a rhetorical sense at all, how long WOULD it take you to code the errant solution this fellow was misapplying. Wouldn't it seem like a useful algorithm for Grid or BitTorrent (and IBM's similar software)? And this may be what these technologies DO do, I dunno. But if you measured the "distance" in time rather than linear miles, it'd seem like this would be a useful algorithm, because the distance would vary from moment to moment between computer and computer or data and processor. Dunno. | -----Original Message----- | From: mi400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:mi400-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On | Behalf Of Leif Svalgaard | Sent: Friday, March 19, 2004 5:04 PM | To: MI Programming on the AS400 / iSeries | Subject: Re: [MI400] QCMDEXC errors | | | From: Ted Slate <tslateone@xxxxxxxxxxx> | > Sorry I'm an efficiency guy. | | When I started out with computers (circa 1963) I got an | (unpaid) job to help other users at "the computer center". | One guy had a real problem: his program ran for hours | (when computing time cost 1,000 [1963!] dollars per | hour). And he needed to run once a week every week. | So he came to me and that he needed a faster square | root routine. The built-in one calculated 12 significant | digits and he only needed about 3, so he figured that | a tailor-made routine would speed up his program. | Full of youthful enthusiasm I went to work (this was | done in machine code - not even assembler) and after | a week that a routine that made his program run 20 times | as fast. I was mighty proud. | Then I did something really dumb: I asked him how his | program worked, what he used my fancy super-optimized | hyper-efficient square-root routine for. This is what he told | me: "I make weather maps. Weather stations that supply | data are located at irregular places and I need to compute | the data onto a fixed and regular grid. to do this I compute | the distances from each grid-intersection point and all the | weather stations that have data for a particular time. Based | on the distances I pick the five nearest stations and use a | complicated interpolation formula to obtain interpolated | data at the regular gridpoints. You routine makes this sooh | fast, thank you sooh very much". I was crestfallen.
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