I'm here for the ICIAM conference this week. It's a really nice city and with a completely impressive airport and a lot of other stuff too
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I admit that they can be useful ways of getting something but I contend that that thing they are getting you is in the majority of applications of little value. There are a few applications where they help. There are many many applications where they seem to help but don't
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You should come and talk to our students then, it would be amusing to watch their reactions.
I must admit, watching the current students the solution to everything is "throw more at it." If it doesn't work, change a line and recompile. If its slow, whine until you get a faster machine.
I know its showing my age, but when I was at uni, compile meant 1.5hrs. You were a lot more careful with your coding then because you knew a "if $i > 0" vs "if $i >= 0" was an hour of twiddling your thumbs and you thought about what you were doing because memory and CPU time were finite.
I have had students come in here requesting machines with 12Gb of RAM because "that's how much I need" The worrying thing is though, its quite easily doable. But hey, I've also had students complaining the computers are running slow because they're reading 1000 images off their NFS mounted home drive to put the images into RAM to make the matching process faster.
I just shake my head a lot, shrug and tell them I just work here.
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I must admit, watching the current students the solution to everything is "throw more at it." If it doesn't work, change a line and recompile. If its slow, whine until you get a faster machine.
I know its showing my age, but when I was at uni, compile meant 1.5hrs. You were a lot more careful with your coding then because you knew a "if $i > 0" vs "if $i >= 0" was an hour of twiddling your thumbs and you thought about what you were doing because memory and CPU time were finite.
I have had students come in here requesting machines with 12Gb of RAM because "that's how much I need" The worrying thing is though, its quite easily doable. But hey, I've also had students complaining the computers are running slow because they're reading 1000 images off their NFS mounted home drive to put the images into RAM to make the matching process faster.
I just shake my head a lot, shrug and tell them I just work here.
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