Ladies and gentlemen ...

Howdy!

My real name is Michel, I'm a 52 year-old frenchman. I have lived in New York from 1959 to 1965, and Bozo was then a friendly clown on a TV program for kids, that explains my user name (yes: I still happen to be a clown myself!).

So, I'm happy to meet you all. Since the time I have been coming regularly on Major Geeks' site, I wonder why it took me so long to come in and present myself to the crew! Well, here I am.

I'm not a geek. I'd love to be. But I'm not. I get on quite well with home computing, but nothing too complicated. I guess it'll be an interesting opportunity to share our knowledge and preferences.

I won't be coming very often, because I am quite busy with work. But it will be a pleasure for me and, I hope, for you too.

Bye for now

 

....about time you signed up Welcome...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v173/star17abby/Animrevbozo.gif

 

We've got a lot of clowns around here, but you may be the only professional one.

Welcome.

 

Star17 and G.T., thanks for your welcome!

EDIT: btw, I'm discovering the "architecture" of this forum, and I must say it's rather well done. Very handy.

 

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v173/star17abby/howdy.jpg

Welcome to MG Bozo! Always glad to have another 'clown' on-board to liven things up. Pull up a chair and enjoy your stay.

 

Well, I guess I'll just turn my chair around and, hum, well, hum, just say how nice it is to be be welcomed by a nice lady. That's kind of you, mam'

Hope to read you soon

 

Welcome, Bozo. MajorGeeks is a good place to have all your computer problems solved and to chat with people. Have fun.

 

Sir, yes sir!
If you only knew how many programs i have downloaded from MG' site... I've been reading some posts and there are rather skilled personalities around here, that's great.
Nice place

 

Hey there Bozo...nice to see another skilled character at MGs to liven things up some

 

Hey Bozo!

Welp, if ya can "juggle" some spare time and come and yak with some of us, you're very welcome.

At least when people say to you "you're a clown, mister" You can say "Yep, and proud of it", LoL!

Welcome to M.G.'s!

 

Have a great stay!!!

Star, I just sat and watched that clock picture for a solid 2 minutes, hoping it would change......I'll quietly go

 

Welcome to MG's circus Bozo....pull up a chair and fool around awhile.

My my that's a big clock you have o starry-eyed one.........

 

Oooouuuuccchhhh!!!!

 

SNORT!!! *ducks and runs* heh heh heh

 

Hello and welcome....this place`ll make you think too...

 

Hi and welcome to Major Geeks.

As you see, fun group of people here.
Gal

 

Good welcome! Have a great stay

Do you fold?

 

LOL! What you don't know is I changed the setup instructions to say that you need to enter the username goldfish

Hehe, just kidding! I do need a few more points though, I'm WAY behind, which isn't so great for a "leader"

We're really close to breaking top 100... just a few weeks in fact! Hopefully we can crack it for Christmas this year

 

Yes, studying the O.J. Simpson case can be quite the task

 

Yes, glove can be so blind

 

I experimented with Grid-style processing quite recently - or a very simplistic implementation of it. I got a version of Linux that fits on a floppy with network drivers and a custom server and booted all the PCs in my house off it. It would recieve instructions to compute and send back the data to a central work allocation server.

It was VERY simplistic, I got it to do was compute sin x where 0 < x < 10000 (degrees). It chunked it up into parts defined by how many clients could be allocated to do the task. So, chunk 1 might be sin x 0 < x < 90, chunk 2 90 < x < 180. It'd then stream the results back to the allocation server and it'd glue the tables returned together, and use gnuplot to make a graph of them.

As I said it was VERY basic, most of the code was borrowed (most of the networking code was copy/pasted) but it worked. Though computing that particular equation wouldn't have taken very long using a single CPU so distributing it didn't really demonstrate the speed increace... but it worked which was the aim.

Really, you could make the process a lot more efficient, and useful. For example you could have a server that had an abstraction layer which would take CPU instructions and send them out to individual clients, while keeping track of distributed memory and registers.

Very, very cool. Just imagine - you log into a workstation and you have the power of the entire network at your hands instantly for any task you wish to do. The Folding guys are even working on using graphics chipsets to do distributed work, so... bandwidth allowing - you could render images very VERY fast.

 

I found out that when my girlfriend went to Imerial university Biology department, they were apprently trialing Grid processing for computational biology. I bet they'll have some good PR vibes from that when Grid-based systems become more trendy.

 

Hum - thinking about it, maybe in the time before I go to uni (assuming I actually get a place) I should give writing an application a shot. Because once I'm here, I'll be using a lot of computational power - especially if I'm doing a CG scene with a lot of physics in it. A grid for that kinda thing would totally rock.

Just imagine: when you open up your device manager instead of seeing a lone entry for CPU saying "Intel P4" or "AMD Athlon", you see 200 CPUs listed You'd be able to use the multi-core functionality in Windows to distribute the load for you, all I'd need to do is write a device driver to abstract the communication with the core and route instructions through a TCP/IP stack instead.

Ok, I'll stop right there before someone tries to steal my ideas!

It'll be pretty low priority, I've already got a number of projects running.

 

Welcome Bozo!
My dad used to be a part time clown!
Too bad he doesn't go on this site (or any for that matter)
I'm sure you both could tell a lot of stories!