[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
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.
I was making an analogy. I wasn't claiming he was a biologist *or* a
doctor. I was pointing out that he's complaining that his field isn't
advancing, but it really is, because he's not paying attention to the
areas where it's advancing. He's looking at the introductory computer
classes and complaining that they're teaching the same as the
introductory computing courses from 30 years ago. Well, yeah. Now look
at the introductory science courses. They teach *wrong* stuff that's the
same as 30 years ago, like newtonian physics and such. You need to be a
grad student to learn a lot about the cutting-edge science of the last
20 years, and you need to take more than an intro to computer science to
learn the cutting edge stuff from 20 years ago in computers.
Or, since academia isn't really where cutting edge computer science
happens, you need to be in a progressive industry.
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.
In some sense... ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:TexasRichardson_telephoneExchangeOperator.jpg
108 years old, still running.
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 disagree. I think there had to be time to develop the stuff. If you
showed up with an amazon compute cloud 40 years ago, you wouldn't be
making Pixar movies 38 years ago. There were a lot of false starts at
the beginning of the arpanet. All that stuff takes time to develop, and
the reason buildings don't fall down is we've been doing them for ages.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
