On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 2:09 AM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <[email protected]>wrote:
> 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. > It's true that I mixed them. Alas much development is research and much research is development :-) Karl > > 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 > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
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