Academic compression
Posted Jun 26, 2008 8:27 UTC (Thu) by
forthy (guest, #1525)
In reply to:
Academic compression by salimma
Parent article:
The Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf: Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation
But most of the mark details are useless, all you require is a single
bit "pass" or "fail". Nobody is going to read your detailed marks for
each semester exam later in your career. For all reasonable degrees, it's
basically a two-bit information: Dropout, Bachelor, Master, PhD. Don't
think "dropout" is a career limiter: The world's richest man is a
dropout.
I'm quite sure I'll see several limits to the exponential growth in my
lifetime (probably the next 50 years), at least I already experience one
(probably temporal) limit: clock frequency didn't go up much the last 5
years. There however is a way to get more power out of computers: write
better software. It is amazing what vintage computer fans get out of
ancient designs. We are used to write software for computers that get
faster and have more memory, so we write a lot of slow, bloated
software.
Due to the fact that single-threaded CPUs don't get (significantly)
faster anymore, we probably should start right now: Use better algorithms
to make single-threaded programs faster.
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