"Demystification" is just as important as "Abstraction" in "Computer Science" (Was: Know any Fortran

[Fred Cisin]

> > They literally refused to understand that a
> > dataset could exist that would be too large to fit into memory.
On Fri, 30 Oct 2015, ANDY HOLT wrote:
> In the UK, the Home Secretary wants to force all ISPs to store and
> keep (reasonably) easily searchable logs of all URLs accessed by all
> their customers.
> This, I think, is an example of "big data" … possibly so big that backup
> is impracticable.
> When I did daily analysis of the urls accessed by the 2000 or so students
> at a University*, that daily database was pushing what I could get into memory
> on my desktop system (well specified) … now imagine 20 million users for 365 days - I'd be doubtful
> that even todays mainframes and supercomputers could do that.
> * When I questioned the legality (and morality) of doing this the answer was
> "we believe it is legal" (and "stop complaining and keep digging").

That would have been a much better example to bring up with the 
Chancellor, since the Peralta Colleges administrators would LOVE
to keep track of all student computer usage!
He would have thought that it was a trivial requirement until walking him 
through the arithmetic.


At one time, they had a "Chief Information Officer" who was joining 
[temporarily?] various Yahoo email groups for the sole purpose of access 
to archives to look for faculty posting "inappropriate" content (any 
defamation of Peralta administration!)   Yes, John Wxxxxxxx, eat shit and 
die.