Quantumtroll

Irl, stairs are only used in exceptions because of issues like wheelchair accessibility and maintenance equipment.

Thanks, this led to some interesting googling. Check this one out, for example.

I've seen a fair number of step-dense towns in Norwegian fjords, where the steps usually act as pedestrian shortcuts between segments of winding road.

Heh, I understand what you mean. My (sometimes idiot) brother once turned a relatively controlled little fire into a minor disaster when he instinctively kicked said fire. Not stomp, because it was burning too high, but an outward kick that sent burning pine needles flying over a wide area, with the expected consequences.

For what it's worth, I work with parallel scientific computing, and I agree with you about parallelizing DF. DF seems to be mostly bandwidth-bound due to a lot of random memory accesses, and adding more threads of computation doesn't get you any more memory bandwidth (on most CPU's) so you probably wouldn't see much of an improvement.

One thing that parallelization forces people to do, though, is improve their usage of cache, which does improve the performance of bandwidth-bound programs. I imagine this is the one of the things you mean by "getting quite a bit of mileage out of garden variety optimization".

edit: Once you do get to parallelization (and you will, because computer will increasingly require you to), I suggest you look into task-based parallelization. It's really easy to program, and very effective.