VW speed: AMD vs Intel

Does anybody have AMD vs Intel benchmarks on VW's execution speed? If you have some, please leave a comment including CPU and type/speed of ram.

Microsoft praises Smalltalk... ???...

See here. It's always nice to be praised without asking for it.

Watch the use of our language!

What's this business of clerks and other office personnel needing to know something called Smalltalk? No longer I will be able to say Smalltalk without making an ambiguous reference. Now I will have to say "Smalltalk, the programming language" or something like that.

And what is this other Smalltalk? I tried looking it up, but I didn't find anything interesting. Would anyone be so kind as to tell me? Thanks in advance.

Time to increase that key size

A 640 bit RSA key was broken in only 30 years of Opteron time. Sheesh...

New Problem Restated

Here's a refinement of the problem. Given fixed integers a, b, and a variable integer x, find for what values of x this equation holds:

ax + b = (2x + 1) + (2x + 3) + ... + (2y - 1) = y^2 - x^2

Unfortunately, the value of y is not known.

The idea is to find out if the equation has solutions by looking at a and b. Factoring each ax + b yields the answer but it takes way too much time. Here's some info.

New Year, New Problem

I have a new math problem to tackle. For fixed integers a, b and a variable integer x, when is ax + b the sum of consecutive odd integers? Unfortunately the stuff I found (connected with Diophantine equations) is not very helpful, and I couldn't find papers about this issue either. Grrrr...