Up to Date on "The Second Coming"

Mech_Engineer

If you want to get back to basics in computing, why not check this out:

http://www.parallax.com/

Description of a BASIC stamp chip

Quote by Parallax.com

A BASIC Stamp microcontroller is a single-board computer that runs the Parallax PBASIC language interpreter in its microcontroller. The developer's code is stored in an EEPROM, which can also be used for data storage. The PBASIC language has easy-to-use commands for basic I/O, like turning devices on or off, interfacing with sensors, etc. More advanced commands let the BASIC Stamp module interface with other integrated circuits, communicate with each other, and operate in networks. The BASIC Stamp microcontroller has prospered in hobby, lower-volume engineering projects and education due to ease of use and a wide support base of free application resources.

*rudinreader*

Thanks for the link mech_engineer.. They have a lot of intriguing products at good prices.. One project that I am kind of considering (a couple years down the road) is to read through Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, and preferably do the exercises on the lowest level device as possible (I'm not sure if this would make sense as of yet..).. Could be I could use a parallax device..

As for a reason why anyone would want to do that, here's a clip from a conversation with Bill Gates at http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/e...ltySummit.aspx:

MARIA KLAWE:....And I wondered if you had just ideas that would help us or whether Microsoft has ideas that might help computer science departments stay on top of the most recent technological developments.

BILL GATES: Well, certainly it's the goal of our University Relations Group to make sure that we're talking about what we think the state of the art problems are, finding out from the universities and a lot of dialogue back and forth about that. In a certain sense, yeah, the curriculum has changed, but say somebody came for an interview and they said, "Hey, I read the 'Art of Computer Programming', that's all I ever read, I did all the problems, I would hire them right then."

MARIA KLAWE: You'd hire them right then.

BILL GATES: Yeah, that's right.

MARIA KLAWE: So would I.

I'm not saying necessarily that I wan't to work for Microsoft (as opposed to becoming a Math professor), but I found it interesting how his ideal new hire would have studied just Art of Computer Programming...

Another quoute I found interesting

BILL GATES:--- it's about time you guys figured out how to take n processors and get n capability out of these things, and now just go do that.

Well, that turns out to be one of the great unsolved problems, and yet there's no way around it. I mean, literally Intel is going to have 32-processor systems running at 5 gigahertz, and that's what a modern PC will be, say, within four or five years. So we certainly need brilliant people thinking about that problem, what's going to go on with it.

chroot

The Art of Computer Programming is literally the bible of computer science. If you know the stuff between its covers, you know 90% of what's really important about programming a computer.

Being a computer scientist is not about knowing lots of programming languages, or being able to use Visual Studio to make graphical applications, or being able to download and use a math library.

Being a computer scientist means understanding the deep, important subjects that underly all computer programming -- data structures, algorithms, and trade-offs. Those three topics literally define computer science. All the rest that goes on top of it (PHP, Visual Basic, etc.) is fluff. The fluff is easy to learn, and changes yearly -- that's why Microsoft would rather hire programmers who have ignored the fluff and studied only the deep magic.

This is why I think this entire thread is misguided, rudinreader. You seem to be mistaking pretty graphical interfaces, network applications, layers of abstraction on top of the hardware, rapid application development languages, etc. as computer science, but they aren't.

In the same vein, interior design is not architecture.

- Warren

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