"Robert G. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> By the way, this isn't special to computer science. Imagine if laymen >> were directing the physics research . Progress in physics might be >> rather slowed down, don't you think. > > The problem here or anywhere is money.
I'm reminded of an analogous problem. There is a saying in many chemistry labs that "a month in the lab can save you an hour in the library". The man too busy to learn wastes time. Sure, it is difficult and expensive to teach people the appropriate skills. The question is, can you afford *not* to? We're now in an era where scientific computing resources can cost millions of dollars. Is it really a savings to avoid personnel costs at the expense of projects costing vastly more money or even being unachievable because someone doesn't see that an algorithm can be converted from O(n^4) to O(n^2), or doesn't even understand what big-O notation means? The resource constrained are in an even worse situation. If you have barely any cash to spend on resources, you really need to make that cash count. > There are ten times as many problems and projects and groups where one > is lucky to be able to afford enough grad students to barely keep your > research moving, buy computers with money that you dragged out of a > reluctant grant agency, and that you can only run at all because your > University provides electricity and housing for them because your grant > literally couldn't afford to pay the power bill once the above are paid > for. I know many people who claim they're too busy to do time management of their day, which of course means they waste more time than they've saved by avoiding doing planning. It is not very different to see people with limited resources saying they can't afford to figure out how to make optimal use of them. The man with $3M to burn on computers needs to understand how to use them properly so as not to waste money, but the man with $5000 *really* needs to understand how to use them properly because that's going to make the difference in getting something done *at all*. The difference between the right algorithm and the wrong one is the difference between running a mediocre cut down version of your problem over the course of six months and running a reasonable version in one. This doesn't apply to people who are just running pre-written software, that's a different story, but if you need custom code, you need the people designing the software to understand the problem, and at least some of the people who understand the problem to understand how to design software. Perry -- Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
