An m2.4xlarge EC2 machine running linux currently costs $0.0712 per hour. This has 64 gigabytes of ram, which makes for a fairly capable J platform.
Note also that if you install x windows on your local computer (it's a free part of cygwin if you are running windows), you can run jqt on the linux machine and it looks just like it's running as an application on your windows machine (albeit with occasional network issues). Now, it is true that that kind of money adds up, and you are taxed on your income also. But for some tasks it's worth spinning up a machine like this - if you value your time at minimum wage, your big cost here is mostly trying it out for the first time. Once you are set up, if you value your time at minimum wage, it would take quite a lot of computation to add up to the cost of an hour of your own time. (That said, some things do take quite a lot of computation...) Note that you do need to be able to set up ssh and xwindows, though, to make this work. (ssh has a feature which supports tunneling of xwindows traffic. xwindows is a gui designed back in the "bad old days" which was designed to let your graphics come from a different machine than your local one. (At one point it looked like the advancement of game systems would make that practice obsolete, but that was assuming that prices would make sense, and they do not.) Thanks, -- Raul ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
