The Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf: Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation

Posted Jun 19, 2008 6:57 UTC (Thu) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
Parent article: The Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf: Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation

"entire computing capacity of the university" - while no doubt academic institutions carry a
great deal of computing capacity these days, I suspect that should read "universe"?

The Kernel Hacker's Bookshelf: Ultimate Physical Limits of Computation

Posted Jun 19, 2008 10:08 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link]

Maybe, but Pratchett fans will be delighted if it's not a typo!

Typo

Posted Jun 19, 2008 11:05 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (4 responses)

What if it's a really big university?

Clearly a typo, I'm not quite sure how we missed it. Fixed now.

Accademic compression

Posted Jun 19, 2008 15:20 UTC (Thu) by utoddl (guest, #1232) [Link] (3 responses)

This nicely ties back to the compression discussion above, as the accademic compression technique can squeeze an entire semester's work down to a single letter and an optional "+" or "-" qualifier.

Academic compression

Posted Jun 20, 2008 14:40 UTC (Fri) by mtorni (guest, #3618) [Link] (2 responses)

If you drop the optional qualifier you can increase the (already lossy) compression and
achieve a notable compression with a tiny loss in useful resolution.

Academic compression

Posted Jun 23, 2008 17:17 UTC (Mon) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes; from 4 bits to 3 bits; a saving of 25% !

Academic compression

Posted Jun 26, 2008 8:27 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

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.