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

[Vincent Diepeveen]

On May 12, 2013, at 4:07 PM, Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:

>
> 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.
>>
>

[SNIP] <lawnmoyers and such>

Jim,

If you want to train a new jetfighter pilot, you're going to just  
give them a course how to drive a moped,
and after they can drive a moped, you are going to give them a pilot  
license and wave good bye to
them: "good luck to you flying your own Cessna".

You gotta be joking with what you write here.

> 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.
>
>>
>