Karl Ramberg wrote: > One of Alans points in his talk is that students should be using bleeding edge > hardware, not just regular laptops. I think he is right for some part but he > also > recollected the Joss environment which was done on a machine about to be > scraped. Some research and development does not need the bleeding edge > hardware. It can get a long way by using what you have till it's fullest.
You mixed research and development, and they are rather different. One is building stuff for the computers of 2020, the other for those of 2012. I was at a talk where Intel was showing their new multicore direction and the guy kept repeating how the academic people really should be changing their courses to teach their students to deal with, for example, four cores. At the very end he showed an experimental 80 core chip and as he ended the talk and took questions he left that slide up. When it was my turn to ask, I pointed to the 80 core chip on the screen and asked if programming it was exactly the same as on a quad core. He said it was different, so I asked if it wouldn't be better investment to teach the students to program the 80 core one instead? He said he didn't have an answer to that. About Joss, we normally like to plot computer improvement on a log scale. But if you look at it on a linear scale, you see that many years go by initially where we don't see any change. So the relative improvement in five years is more or less the same no matter what five years you pick, but the absolute improvement is very different. When I needed a "serious" computer for software development back in 1985 I built an Apple II clone for myself, even though that machine was already 8 years old at the time (about five Moore cycles). The state of the art in personal computers at the time was the IBM PC AT (6MHz iAPX286) which was indeed a few times faster than the Apple II, but not enough to make a qualitative difference for me. If I compare a 1992 PC with one from 2000, the difference is far more important to me. > On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 9:02 PM, Kim Rose wrote: > > For those of you looking to hear more from Alan Kay -- you'll find a talk from > him and several other "big names in computer science" here -- thanks to San > Jose State University. > > http://www.sjsu.edu/atn/services/webcasting/archives/fall_2011/hist/computing.html Thanks, Kim, for the link! I have added this and four other talks from 2011 to http://www.smalltalk.org.br/movies/ I also added a link to the Esug channel on Youtube, which has lots of stuff from their recent conferences. Cheers, -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
