He’s more likely to prescribe Laudanum in such a case. Not that it really makes a difference…

On top of this, there are norms that are in a way part of the law (as in: if you ignore them, you are liable), and they are commercial, so you have to pay through the nose for them.

Follow the money…

Seems to be in the US, but they think they don’t need to mention it.

An American shooting star, obviously…

There are others, where there are way more arrows, and they are not at all orthogonal…

You claim you don’t, but there are thousands of people out there every year claiming a different story…

Well, American education levels…

And saved the government a bunch of money in the process.

There are good and bad fairy tales. For me, Star Wars never was one of the first ones…

It’s not exactly the quantum computers having an OS. Like with supercomputers back in my time, there are more or less normal computers running a more or less normal OS, which has the computational engine as a kind of device. You create and compile your “application” on that host processor, and load the “binary” onto the quantum device and execute it.

“Custom” and “Exotic” is a thing of the past. Been there, used that. It didn’t have Linux, either.

Nowadays, it’s more or less stock PCs (with high-end specs for CPU, RAM, GPU, etc), but nothing that would not run a common OS. They would probably even run Windows.

What it makes special is clustering.

I remember a clustering software for NT, but I never heard of one for the Mac.

I once worked on a supercomputer in the olden times - this was before Linux. You basically wrote your calculation application on a front-end system with a cross-compiler. It was then transferred to the target machines’ RAM and ran there. Your application was the only thing running on that machine. No OS, no drivers, no interrupts (at least not that I knew of). Just your application directly on the hardware. Once your program was finished, the RAM was read back, and you could analyze the dump to extract your results.

This is called a “Cluster” and it precedes Linux by a decade or two, but yes.

And what else would the supercomputers run on? Windows? You won’t get into the tops if half your computers are bluescreening while the other half is busy updating…

The times when supercomputers were batch-oriented machines where your calculation was the only thing that was running on the hardware, with your software basically including the OS (or at least the parts that you needed) are long over.

It stopped being any good after “Episode VI”. And before it, it was just a kids fairy tale in a space-themed Trenchcoat.

I don’t think so. If it was AI, it would not even print the order…

So the intern who hacked up the order website forgot a size limit on that field? Maybe one should check out what other things he messed up…

I’ve got a DELL server that I used as home server, but it was too loud. But it worked well, even at an advanced age. I moved the disks to a normal desktop machine (not DELL) that is much, much quieter.

Or he was just too afraid to contact the police. Remember, this took place in the USA, where people have reason to fear them.