Re^2: multi-PC tasking

I often wonder what the impetus will be for today's CS students to grok efficiency in cycles, bandwidth, or context switching. I had to throw away (well, recycle) a whole bunch of donated P-II's because schools in the South Valley turned up their noses at them. Never mind that they rendered BSD-based Blender3D faster than P-4's on XP could refresh Corel! No, they were "old".

Besides the laziness, there's an IT mentality (Re: On the wane?) that thrives on making out PO's for bigger iron and more Microsoft. I'm not sure if it evolved from bureaucracy or whether it's a parallel development. The CYA/job security aspect is surely evident in both. Time and again I see the same story about successful replacement using open source as you relate, and, more often than not, within six months the guy who reports it has moved on to a more stimulating job/culture.

Comment on Re^2: multi-PC tasking

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Re^3: multi-PC tasking by xdg (Monsignor) on Aug 26, 2005 at 17:14 UTC
That's a sad comment on the state of education today. I'd have guessed it would be easy to find a bunch of teenage computer club geeks, give them a bunch of old hardware, throw in a couple books on Beowulf clusters and watch them happily build their own supercomputer... -xdg Code written by xdg and posted on PerlMonks is public domain. It is provided as is with no warranties, express or implied, of any kind. Posted code may not have been tested. Use of posted code is at your own risk.	[reply]
Re^4: multi-PC tasking by samizdat (Vicar) on Aug 26, 2005 at 19:10 UTC
We do have three or four Lug/OSug variants here in central New Mexico, and there are some teens in them, but in attempting to jump-start what you suggested in the schools, I've noticed very little internal motivation in kids to put anything more complicated than a game console together. I tried teaching / volunteering in gifted classrooms for several years, and, without externally applied motivation, it fell flat as soon as the bell rang. I blame two things: high-bandwidth one-way entertainment and authoritarian schools. Truth is, sitting still and accepting what's offered is what's rewarded in most classrooms. Even in the gifted classrooms, most of the kids' brain cycles were spent in figuring out what behavior was going to be rewarded.	[reply]