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A comment on Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universal Computer.

Re:Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universa... by trjordan on Thursday April 16, 2009 @11:50AM (#565316)
Look at it this way: imagine you have a server that's totally maxed out (CPU-bound), 24 hours a day. If you add just one more connection to its load, it won't be able to handle it. No matter how long you give it, it'll just fall further and further behind. The requested pages are uncomputable! A faster computer, on the other hand, will keep up just fine, and finish all the computations.

This isn't how computations have been traditionally defined, so that's why it seems so unintuitive. But, he's right nonetheless.

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Re:Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universa... by tybris on Thursday April 16, 2009 @12:25PM (#565370)
The server will get further and further behind, but you can not give it work it will never finish.
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Re:Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universa... by trjordan on Thursday April 16, 2009 @01:00PM (#565424)
Sure, you can. The work is "handle 350 requests per hour".
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Re:Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universa... by dhs on Thursday April 16, 2009 @01:35PM (#565488)
Turing's computer was an idealized human - to him, computers were humans who did computations for a living - who were granted infinite time and tape - that's the idealization - to solve exactly one problem. Anything that talks about "x problems per hour" has nothing to do with what he said.
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Re:Non-Universality in Computation: The Myth of the Universa... by tybris on Friday April 17, 2009 @06:46AM (#566642)
Where did you get the time dimension from?
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