[Tutor] A fun puzzle

[Luke Paireepinart]

Dick Moores wrote:
> At 12:12 PM 8/24/2007, Kent Johnson wrote:
>> Dick Moores wrote:
>>> At 10:22 AM 8/24/2007, Kent Johnson wrote:
>>>> So you actually pasted that code into timeit.py?
>>> Yeah. :-( I think I learned on the Tutor list to do it that way, but 
>>> I'm not sure. Thanks for showing me a correct way.
>>
>> I hope not!
>>
>>>> Using timeit more conventionally I get unsurprising results. This 
>>>> program has output:
>>>> 0.497083902359
>>>> 0.359513998032
>>>>
>>>> which is more in line with what I would expect.
>>> Using your exact code, I just got
>>> 0.737564690484
>>> 1.17399585702
>>> Which is the reverse of your result, but on a slower computer. 
>>> What's up with that??
>>
>> I have no idea. Some strange interaction with the memory cache? I'm 
>> running Python 2.5.1 on a MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo processor). 
>> How about you?
>
> Python 2.5; Dell Dimension 4600i; 2.80 gigahertz Intel Pentium 4. The 
> other day my computer guy put in a 512K stick of memory, making the 
> total 1024K.
Wow, I don't think I've ever owned a computer with less than 32 Mb of 
memory!
I hope you didn't pay him too much for that 1024K.
> However, by doing so he shut off the dual channel memory. I understand 
> now that he should have put in a pair of 256k sticks to go with the 
> pair that were already there. 
Assuming you're meaning to talk about megabytes and not kilobytes, I'm 
not sure how easy it would be to get dual-channel 256 mb sticks anyway, 
the minimum I usually see is 512 (512x2 for 1024 total).
Ah, never mind, I was wrong.  Newegg has some 2x256MB sets for $30.
-Luke