Call me 'Scoop'...

We had our copies of the Government response to the Paying the Price consulation yesterday.

I had had a quick read and spotted the main points, including the change in the brothel laws which is hidden away in the actual document, but rather than post about this here and on various industry message boards, I had to spend the day trying to get phone extension line down a duct already far too full of stuff for it to be easy...

Does anyone have a PC with about 4G of RAM doing 'not much'?

I'm generating an endgame database.

The program looks at possible positions and sees how good they are for each side. The idea is that it'll come up with a file about a gigabyte in size, which will enable another program to play the endings perfectly.

It's been running for about ten days. But the actual CPU runtime, so far, is only 14 hours 45 minutes. This is more understandable because of its need to refer back to positions it's already seen... the extent that in that time, it's read 11,131,225,984,164 bytes or 11 terabytes.

Not surprisingly, my hard disk light has been permanently on for the past ten days.

What would be useful :) is to have a PC with enough RAM to have a 2G RAM disk, so it doesn't need to wait for a real hard drive to seek and read the data. It'd probably do it in a day...

Or stick it on 'below normal' priority and it'll happily run in the background.