User talk:Nifty.olpc

My nifty little computer:

It is a sufficiently interesting computer in and of itself.

The OLPC project goals are nearly without bounds. If you do not see a project you like, start it.

In wandering the pages here there was one with three parables. A fourth might be a reflection on an old cartoon. I think it was a "B.C." cartoon that started out with one caveman chipping away on a rock. A second caveman asked what he was doing. The first answered that he was inventing writing. Walking away the second shook his head and remarked "You just made the whole world illiterate". In a way this is how I see projects like this. It may not be as earth shaking as literacy but it needs teachers, materials, books, paper, ink and minds.

My50000Factorial benchmark:

For years now i have kept a little benchmark in my homedir. I calculate 50000! with the unix calculator bc/dc. Not a quick floating point result but an exact answer. If printed on paper the answer would hang from a second story window with a pile of paper on the ground. More than 20 years ago this little benchmark would take more than a week to run on the 68010 system I had access to at that time. After a "yum install bc", on this little OLPC box the exact same script ran in less than 25 min. Then I ran the test using python and the obvious result was to "rpm -e bc".