Phoshi

16,058 reputation

12856

bio	website	py.phzzz.co.uk
	location	England, United Kingdom
	age	21
visits	member for	3 years, 10 months
	seen	8 hours ago
stats	profile views	1,192

Hello, I'm Phoshi, amateur programmer and web designer. I'm also infatuated with the AutoHotKey scripting language, and try to answer questions using it whenever possible. (The argument 'but people might not have it installed' simply does not make sense to me. Who wouldn't install autohotkey? Horrible!) Also in love with Python, the first programming language I can write just for the joy of writing it, rather than for the end result. Minor crush on C# - I still write it for the end result, but it does that pretty well.

Feel free to follow me on twitter, but I don't say much.

	16,058 reputation	bio	website	py.phzzz.co.uk	visits	member for	3 years, 10 months
12856 badges		location	England, United Kingdom		seen	8 hours ago

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May 28	awarded	Enlightened
May 28	awarded	Nice Answer
May 4	awarded	Enlightened
May 3	awarded	Nice Answer
Apr 23	revised	difference between md5 and iso added 58 characters in body
Apr 23	comment	difference between md5 and iso @ysangkok: Oh, hm, so I do. I'm not sure that's a very defensible position at all. I'll edit the answer to make this clear. On the subject of checksumming, though, I discourage the use of MD5 there too--as it is, regardless of how broken, a cryptographic hash it is designed to be slower than a non-cryptographic hash, which can checksum data much faster with acceptable collisions.
Apr 22	comment	difference between md5 and iso @ysangkok: While this is undeniably true, and I would never advocate using MD5 for, well, anything at all in a new project, I feel it does still provide "good enough" verification to defend against data corruption. It's a hideously broken algorithm, true, but not so broken that it's very likely for random changes to retain the same hash.
Apr 10	awarded	Nice Question
Apr 10	awarded	Guru
Apr 4	comment	Why is Google so much faster than a hard-drive search? @Adnan In a sense, the FS Tree is optimised against searching. It's designed to allow addressing of known locations. From your root node, all you get is a list of directories and files under root. Every directory just knows about the files in it, and the directories below it. Accessing a known filepath is very fast under this, and it offers a lot of flexibility, but there does not exist a global listing of files to search through. You must always descend through the directory tree, and that makes for a lot of distinct lookups.
Apr 4	comment	Why is Google so much faster than a hard-drive search? @DavidSchwartz Google has always been very fast. Indeed, their lack in early life is a large contributor, as it forced them to figure out a way of parallelising queries across many machines of varying quality.
Mar 16	awarded	Notable Question
Mar 6	awarded	Nice Answer
Mar 5	awarded	Nice Answer
Feb 23	comment	Why does it take longer for Linux to tell me that my user password is wrong, than it does for Windows? Note, of course, that Windows will take much longer to tell you your password is wrong after a few attempts.
Feb 13	comment	Why are we still using CPUs instead of GPUs? @danielcg25: It's a different kind of processing, though, which is what the question is about. Each CPU core is effectively separate, working with its own chunks of data and its own processes. Each CPU core performs a different, separate task to every other, and they do not scale upwards linearly--an octo-core is not twice as useful as a quad core is not twice as useful as a dual core. GPU cores, on the other hand, perform the same task across different pieces of data, and do scale linearly. It is obvious that multi-core CPUs exist, but this is not the same thing.
Feb 12	comment	Why are we still using CPUs instead of GPUs? @danielcg25: I'm aware, but a comment with a fundamental (albeit intentional) misunderstanding of the answer could be harmful if anybody was reading it without already knowing the topic. "Being an ass" in that sense isn't really appreciated on SE as it lowers the signal:noise ratio.
Feb 11	comment	Why are we still using CPUs instead of GPUs? @danielcg25: And most modern GPUs are designed to do 256, 512, 1024 things at once (The GTX 680 has 1536 CUDA cores). Each individual CPU core is a distinct entity conceptually, but this is not true of a GPU.
Feb 5	awarded	command-line
Jan 22	comment	Why do laptops need fans but tablets don't? @JoelCoehoorn: It's a lot more than that. An ultraportable with an SSD still isn't going to be fast, and a netbook that's running everything in-memory is still sluggish--just less so. The netbook is slow because it was built for the absolute minimum price it could be. Every component is subpar, not just the drive.