Facing the Storm Chapter 19
| Facing the Storm | |
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| Chapter 19 of 41 | |
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| Time frame | 2000 |
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Locations
- Phil and Brandy's house in Spearfish Lake
Characters
Summary
Phil gets home to tell Brandy that he's invited John and Candice for a meal tomorrow night - telling her that John has quit his job and is looking to join McGuinness Accounting.
Troy Moorehead has contacted Brandy about doing computer work for Front Range Technical Services from home.
The next night over dinner John confirms that he is serious about coming back to Spearfish Lake, although he won't be earning as much as he had been, it would solve a number of other issues. They get to talking kayaking and dog sleds, Phil still hasn't decided whether he wants to do the Iditarod again.
Brandy gets Mark Gravengood to get her (or build her) the fastest and most powerful PC he can and to set up a fast connection to the internet.
Once the new computer is up and running Phil is horrified to learn that Front Range had never updated the demonstrator software he'd originally written to prove the concept of the Magres. Since the demonstrator was aimed at a mid-1980s 286 platform running at 8-12 MHz with one megabyte of memory, a small hard drive and 16-color video graphics it wasn't anywhere near as good as it could be once rewritten in a modern compiled computer language and running on a modern computer - one with a superior graphics display, 60 times the disk storage, over 100 times the processing speed and over 250 times the memory.
The item that really shocks Brandy is that they've always had resolution and noise problems, and she didn't know that the extremely limited demonstrator program was throwing away nine out of every ten input data points - 90% of the data - just to accomplish what it could.
