[rescue] another sandia/los Alamos auction

[Stephen Sukovich]

>http://computer-refuge.org/compcollect/

there was an s/390 in there.... what in the world do you do with that?
Besides put it next to the crays menacingly?


>I know they're currently teaching C and C++ in CS, as some of my
friends 
>that are a year or two behind me (I'm graduating at the end of this 
>semester in CompE) have taken classes in them.  In fact I think they've

>switched one or both of the CS intro classes (CS 180/181) to C or C++.

Oh thank god the switched it back... cs 180/181 was in java for me. One
of my most pointless classes was 201 I think.. it was advanced data
structures ... in java... argggggg!!!


>Java is a decent teaching and prototyping language, but it's not very 
>well suited to production (compute-bound) applications.  I don't think 
>we've got many people (researchers) that use it for compute jobs at 
>work, but there's probably some... just like the ones that use MATLAB 
>for compute bound tasks, becuase they refuse to learn a new language. 
>In one example, converting one professor's code from MATLAB to C 
>dropped the runtime from about 12-24hrs to 30mins.  That's a quite 
>significant increase in speed!

My compE roommate had to use matlab for something like that. He rewrote
the matlab code in C which I ended up helping him debug, and it got done
in a minute something that took matlab 6 hours to run. 

Stephen Sukovich