On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 01:11:08PM -0700, Darren New spake thusly: > Nothing exciting about data structures? He's the doctor who doesn't > read up on new cures and thus thinks things have stagnated.
Molecular biologist IIRC, not doctor. It's a bit different. And things have changed so fast in that area that if you don't actually practice it every day as your profession you will get lost. > Everyone, hands up if you live in a house that has major innovations > compared to the one your parents lived in. You mean things that are intrinsic in the house and not just simple add-ons that I've done such as replacing the bulbs with CFL's? My house was built in 1959 and could very well have been the one my grew up in. Original pretty much everything except paint, bathroom tile/fixtures, and the furniture I've put in it. > >Try to imagine a computing system that will be working 90 years from now? > >It?s impossible to imagine. > > He seems to have missed the part that we've had a world-wide network > running since routers were made of protein that has never gone offline > in many decades. It's a business thing. You just have to plan for it. Routers made of protein? Huh? Is what you are referring to man-made? I don't follow. > And we build systems that 50 years ago would have been utterly > inconceivable and 20 years ago would have been impossible to run and > nowadays are off-the-shelf components. 15 years ago, a spelling checker > was a major feat of engineering. That's all because of hardware. They could have done the same things we do today if the hardware had been born fully formed with gigabytes of RAM and quad 64 bit processors. > I have a lot of respect for Alan Kay, but he seems to be missing the > point. Maybe cool stuff in computers just doesn't get popularized like > cool stuff in astronomy and biology. It really doesn't. Everyone knows about DNA. Your average guy on the street knows about it thanks to OJ Simpson and the like. But nobody but us geeks know what a solid state disk is, for example. -- Tracy Reed http://tracyreed.org
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