[Beowulf] El Reg: AMD reveals potent parallel processing breakthrough

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

On 5/12/13 4:01 AM, "Vincent Diepeveen" <diep at xs4all.nl> wrote:

>You find it a cool idea to learn students how to drive a moped and to
>steer well with a moped
>in order to let them understand the problems of how to fly an
>airplane, meanwhile at home they got a car?
>
>They will never respect you in this manner, and they are da*** right
>doing that.
>

I think that if we want people to design and fix automobile and jet
engines, it is a wise thing to start them with lawnmower and moped engines
first, rather than have their first hands on experience be with a
hypersonic SCRAMjet burning hydrazine and FOOF.

Or in this case, if you want students to learn about network topologies,
fault tolerance, etc.: I'd rather they do it on something that fits on a
desktop, is tangible (I can pull a cable and cause a "link failure") than
try to turn them loose managing the internet.



If they make a mistake and screw up that Arduino, it's cheap to fix or
replace. It gets "reflashed" every time you load a new program. You may
have the best PC support organization in the world, but reloading
someone's boot drive, or managing thin clients with net boot, is going to
be more timeconsuming and expensive.

>