[Gllug] VACANCY: Junior Systems Support

[Nix]

On 6 Sep 2009, Richard Jones outgrape:

> On Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 09:08:14PM +0100, James Laver wrote:
>> Frankly, I got bored in school when we were being told that computers  
>> have more hard disk space than RAM [1], which is a bit of a jaw- 
>> dropping 'no, really' moment. If I'd gone to university and sat  
>> through all of that crap, there's no way in hell I'd want to do any IT  
>> work beyond desktop support (and frankly the idea that I might want to  
>> do desktop support scares the crap out of me).
>
> A good university course can't be described as "crap" and you
> certainly won't be talking about hard disk space vs RAM.

Except briefly in a description of the storage hierarchy, which is
bloody complex now and has to be understood to tell why your nifty fast
algorithm is actually running really slowly. (Not that my uni course
covered that: it was in transition between a good CS course and a bad
management course run by failed CS lecturers at the time. Despite this
the final-year mandatory module on project management was so bad that I
had to get my mother to re-explain it to me. It took her about five
minutes to impart more knowledge than the whole module had managed
before then.)

> - Parallel architectures: More important than ever now, and very
> little understood (although many spout incorrect opinions on the
> subject).

Yes yes yes. (Though even the theory has a long way to go.)

> - Functional programming: Also more important than ever although most
> don't realize it.

The lack of side effects that you don't ask for is of course really
important in producing stuff that's efficient on parallel architectures!
C-style threads are a worse idea than ever (IPI and cache ping-ponging can
make your code slower than ever, yay).

> - Theory of databases.

Not so terribly useful for me, even though I ended up working in the DB
world. SQL is so far from relational algebra that knowing the latter
helps little with the former, and normalization starts out bleeding
obvious and turns into overkill.

> - Theory of user interface design.

Yeah, well unfortunately I disagree with virtually the whole field, which
appears to be predicated on the assumption that all humans are visual
animals and find images harder to deal with than text. This is said
despite the course having textbooks rather than picture books.

> - Mathematics behind encryption and a whole load of other stuff.

We did GAs too, but the compiler theory course was the one that
literally set my brain on fire. (Um, metaphorically literally.)
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