Just installed Linux Mint - I love it! A real improvement over the bloated Ubuntu 11.10 release and Unity. It's fast to startup and shutdown, responsive and has a lovely UI.
The hand off between producer and consumer can be configured to be both synchronous (single threaded) as well as asynchronous (one producer thread, many consumers threads).
As far as I understand three of the key features are:
1. Reduced queue contention: queues are typically implemented with a list, e.g. linked list, this introduces contention (queues spend a lot of time empty or very full) for the head and tail of the queue which are often the same dummy node. The ring buffer removes this contention.
2. Machine Sympathy vis a vis cache striding and ensuring concurrent threads are not invalidating each others level 1/2 cache.
3. Pre-allocation of queue data structures to ensure GC is not a factor.
Personally I think the LMAX team have done well in advancing the state of the art in what is often a key component in event driven, high throughput low latency systems such as those used in banks for trading, exchanges and market data.
That mammals other than humans are capable of emotion and concious thought comes as no surprise to me. Why some humans derive pleasure from inflicting unnecessary cruelty towards other beasts I will never understand.
That's never going to happen. Anything that anyone ever wants to use to trade on in a cost/time sensitive manner will already have event-action (notification/trade) functionality built in.
A lengthy process (about 3 months) to get signed up with Sage Pay only to be declined the merchant account (yet to give us a reason although they said they would tell us, that was 2 months ago).
We ended up settling on PayPal just to get started, not ideal for taking recurring payments, but quick, easy and better than nothing.
Agreed that Chrome's history search provides similar functionality, although it is somewhat clunky to use. For example, you can not constrain results by time period.
In addition, unlike normal Google search results the history search seems to weight every word on the page equally, in recawl there is an attempt to prioritise body content whilst ignoring repeating menus & footers, and it is built on top of Lucene's excellent scoring function.
In addition for any gives search terms it learns to prefer the search results you click on, so that over time if you constantly search your history for the same or similar search terms then historical results you have already clicked on bubble up to the top.
This makes it quite a useful tool for recalling often used pages.
It also offers keywords related to your search to further help narrow down your query.
Finally, you can block certain sites that you know are not of interest from appearing in search results, again cutting down on noise.
Finally, being able to remotely search your history can come in really handy.
Except I honestly don't think these answers weren't meant to be sarcastic. I sometimes skim through Guardian comments and these seem par for the course.
A poor mans PageRank algorithm, assuming nothing else, would assign a higher PageRank to shorter site links on a page. Presumably the crawler visits pages with a higher PR first.