Engineering a career at the PC's creation
Published: 05 Jul 2007 17:07 BST
…they tend to be for young people who don't go out and don't really have a social life. So they have a sort of a second social life on Second Life, and that's a kind of sad. But who am I to judge?
You also helped to design the tablet PC. The concept still has not won over the mass public. How do you see the trend likely playing out over the next five to 10 years?
Well, it's actually interesting because when we actually built the tablet at DEC in 1993, we were fairly familiar with what the problems were going to be — and we knew they would be severe. The main one being battery life. The handwriting recognition had to work very well in order for it to be accepted without a keyboard, and I think we came very, very close. I think there's a lot more evolution that is possible there... So, in some ways, the tablet has been disappointing. But, on the other hand, I'm heartened by the fact that it is still a growing market. It just grows every year a little bit, and it's the only tablet-like computing product that it has ever lived in the market for as long as it has. It's now six years old.
We need a combination of better education and we need better models for programming
Chuck Thacker, Microsoft
I'd like to get your thoughts on the quality of computer scientists coming up through the ranks these days. There's been a lot of controversy about the quality of maths and science education. Some people say that it's got to the point where the US is in danger of losing its technology edge to other nations.
I am actually quite disturbed by this trend. I worked on a project to try to figure out how to actually use computers more effectively in education in the lower grades because a lot of people now work on improving university-level education and maybe high school. That's not where the problem is. The problem is in the very first exposure of a kid to education. It's a hard slog because the education market is worse than the medical market in terms of fragmentation.
As a computer scientist, what do you see as the next big challenge, the next big hurdle for computer science?
It is getting to be the case that you cannot build a more complex chip. You can't actually keep up with Moore's Law the way we have been doing. For 35 years the Intels and the AMDs of the world have been turning Moore's Law into more performance — that is, higher speed. Unfortunately, one of the things about that is, it also increases the power and you're now pretty much up against the limit of the amount of heat you can remove from one of these chips.
So we need to look around and see what to do... The trade-off is that it looks like the manufacturers are going to want to increase the number of processors on one silicon chip rather than increasing the complexity of a single processor. The problem with that is that we don't know how to program it. We just aren't very good at concurrence. One of the things that I say to my academic friends is that — to some extent — this is your fault because we hire a lot of computer science graduates with bachelor degrees. They have not learned anything about parallel programming.
So, we need a combination of better education and we need better models for programming... If we could develop better abstraction that would be fine, but we're in the dark right now. I think that's the big challenge going forward.
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