[cctalk] Old UNIX Systems

On Mon, 3 Jun 2013, Liam Proven wrote: There are some things that need the additional capacity, speed, etc. That would be one. So would image editing. Some web browsing, although I have plenty of gripes about "information" websites that are obsessed with "style" at the expense of providing the information that they are for. My specific example about adornment of a meeting announcement was really more a gripe about how some users (college administrators) abuse features. (relevant here in terms of existence of not necessarily useful features) One of the administrators at the college that I worked at for 30 years (until last week!) creates overly elaborate imagery for simple content ("curriculum committee Thursday 10:30, room 451"), then prints it out, SCANS that, and attaches the scanned image to an email with Subject: "FYI" and body of "See the attachment". He vetoed having an Information Science in response to the state mandate that we should teach "information competency", on the grounds that everybody on campus is already "information competent". Alas, writing "efficient" software seems to be rejected on the grounds that 1) "Modern compilers optimize better than a human possibly could" 2) "The upcoming round of machines will be so fast that there is no need to bother with that stuff" (being efficient) When I taught beginning Data Structures And Algorithms, I always got a few students who rejected the idea of being efficient ("throw hardware at it"), and specifically objected to spending an entire 3 hour class session on how to create algorithms for sorting and searching datasets too big to fit into memory ("just get a bigger computer and load it all into a single array in memory!") But, the exponential growth part of the curve was a helluva ride! -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com