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omnibrain
4 years ago
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link
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The Datacenter as a Computer: An Introduction to the Design of Warehouse-Scale Machines (2009)
There is a second edition: http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/abs/10.2200/S00516ED2V01Y201306CAC024
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I’m still fulfilling small change requests to Project/Budgetmanagementsystems based on SAP PPM. And now I even have to fight with Adobe Lifecycle Designer. :(
At home I continue with Learn C The Hard Way and to keep myself hooked I blog about my progress.
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At work I fulfil change request after change request for our SAP PPM based propositions management system. They are all pretty small but occasionally I encounter something new and I have to ask a colleague. The first 2 months of the year are usually very slow.
At home I started to learn C. I want to be able to dig into lower level stuff and the sourcecode of useful tools. To keep myself engaged I decided to blog about my progress.
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The text tackles the topic from a simililar perspective like http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html
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That’s a good article. I was going to sum it up to make my own observation, but then there it is at end:
the bottom line is that a JavaSchool that won’t teach C and won’t teach Scheme is not really teaching computer science, either.
Very true in my experience. At the schools that use C for coursework, the programming isn’t be the hardest part of the degree. If you’re changing the language for projects to be easier, it’s because the coding has shifted to being the hardest part of the degree, which means all the really hard parts got left in a pile somewhere.
(I also have my gripes with the CS vs programming fanatics who swing too far in the other direction. Practical programming is not a trivial addon to someone who memorized an algorithms textbook.)
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Ironically, in my circles, MIT didn’t have a great reputation as a school you’d want to hire somebody from because after that one scheme course, it was possible to slip through the program without ever touching a keyboard again. i.e., they may be smart, but they have no experience making anything resembling real programs. (by reputation, I didn’t try enrolling at MIT to test this theory.) That aside…
I can understand the appeal of skipping over syntax so that freshmen can unlock the magic of the computer, as it were, within the first week. But even C syntax isn’t that hard. My intro class was taught in C and the mechanics of curly braces and semicolons were purely an afterthought. Like literally the professor said “you put curly braces here and a semicolon after each line” and that was it. Next topic: pointers.
Remember I don’t teach programming; I was only taught programming. I would say, however, there’s a difference between a single intro programming class and an entire CS degree worth of coursework. Burning one week out of ten on syntax is a lot. One week out of 100? Optimizing the wrong problem.
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It certainly sounds appealing, but the 30Hz lag would kill it for me personally. That may not the same for everyone else, though. He mentions the brightness and a possible fix via a firmware patch, otherwise this would be my other complaint.
I hope he writes a follow up after some time has passed.
The notion of this article actually resonates with my thoughts when I played ET for the first time a few months ago. I thought that it is not even half as bad as I imagined it after everything I read about it.
Same. I enjoyed it as a child.
The only thing I remember about this game is playing it over my girlfriends house and eating Reese Pieces. I guess the marketing worked. :)