Unit IX.

_{Humor the Computer}

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Computer was given to man to complete him for what he is not; science jokes to console him for what he is. So keep smiling!

Reading and Discussion

A. Is there humor in the workplace? Perhaps, engineer­ing is too serious to be funny — or is it not? Do you know any science jokes? Read one below and get ready to tell your favorite jokes.

An assemblage of the most gifted minds in the world were all posed the following question:

"What is 2 x 2?"

The engineer whips out his slide rule (so it's old) and shuffles it back and forth, and finally announces 3.99.

The physicist consults his technical references, sets up the problem on his computer, and announces, "It lies between 3.98 and 4.02".

The mathematician cogitates for a while, oblivious to the rest of the world, then announces, "I don't know what the answer is, but I can tell you, an answer exists!"

Philosopher, "But what do you mean by 2 x 2?" Logician: "Please define 2x2 more precisely."

Accountant closes all the doors and windows, looks around care­fully, then asks, "What do you want the answer to be?"

Elementary school teacher from Columbus, Georgia, USA: 4

B. Electrical engineering vs. Computer science

Once upon a time, in a kingdom not far from here, a king sum­moned two of his advisors for a test. He showed them both a shiny metal box with two slots in the top, a control knob, and a lever. "What do you think this is?"

One advisor, an engineer, answered first. "It is a toaster, " he said. The king asked, "How would you design an embedded computer for it?" The engineer replied, "Using a four-bit microcontroller, I would write a simple program that reads the darkness knob and quantizes its position to one of 16 shades of darkness, from snow white to coal black. The program would use that darkness level as the index to a 16-element table of initial timer values. Then it would turn on the heating elements and start the timer with the initial value selected from the table. At the end of the time delay, it would turn off the heat and pop up the toast. Come back next week, and I'll show you a working prototype."

The second advisor, a computer scientist, immediately recognized the danger of such shortsighted thinking. He said, "Toasters don't just turn bread into toast, they are also used to warm frozen waffles. What you see before you is really a breakfast food cooker. As the subjects of your kingdom become more sophisticated, they will demand more capabilities. They will need a breakfast food cooker that can also cook sausage, fry bacon, and make scrambled eggs. A toaster that only makes toast will soon be obsolete. If we don't look to the future, we will have to completely redesign the toaster in just a few years.

With this in mind, we can formulate a more intelligent solution to the problem. First, create a class of breakfast foods. Specialize this class into subclasses: grains, pork, and poultry. The specialization process should be repeated with grains divided into toast, muffins, pancakes, and waffles; pork divided into sausage, links, and bacon; and poultry divided into scrambled eggs, hard-boiled eggs, poached eggs, fried eggs, and various omelet classes.

The ham and cheese omelet class is worth special attention because it must inherit characteristics from the pork, dairy, and poultry classes. Thus, we see that the problem cannot be properly solved without mul-

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tiple inheritance. At run time, the program must create, the proper object and send a message to the object that says, "Cook yourself." The semantics of this message depend, of course, on the kind of object, so they have a different meaning to a piece of toast than to scrambled eggs.

Reviewing the process so far, we see that the analysis phase has revealed that the primary requirement is to cook any kind of breakfast food. In the design phase, we have discovered some derived requirements. Specifically, we need an object-oriented language with multiple inheritance. Of course, users don't want the eggs to get cold while the bacon is frying, so concurrent processing is required, too.

We must not forget the user interface. The lever that lowers the food lacks versatility, and the darkness knob is confusing. Users won't buy the product unless it has a user-friendly, graphical interface. When the breakfast cooker is plugged in, users should see a cowboy boot on the screen. Users click on it, and the message "Booting UNIX v.8.3" appears on the screen. (UNIX 8.3 should be out by the time the product gets to the market). Users can pull down a menu and click on the foods they want to cook.

Having made the wise decision of specifying the software first in the design phase, all that remains is to pick an adequate hardware platform for the implementation phase. An Intel 80386 with 8 MB of memory, a 30 MB hard disk, and a VGA monitor should be sufficient. If you select a multitasking, object oriented language that supports multi­ple inheritance and has a built-in GUI, writing the program will be a snap. (Imagine the difficulty we would have had if we had foolishly allowed a hardware-first design strategy to lock us into a four-bit micro­controller!).

The king wisely had the computer scientist beheaded, and they all lived happily ever after.

EXERCISES

I. Find the equivalents to:

призвать; советник; снежно-белый; угольно-черный; встроенный; близорукий; множественное наследование; главное требование; па­раллельная обработка; загрузка; ниспадающее меню; в стадии раз­работки; многозадачный режим; стадия внедрения; легкое дело; обез­главить.

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II. What do these acronyms and abbreviations stand for:

GUI, MB, vs., VGA, UNIX, v.8.3.

III. Translate the text.

IV. Compare other types of engineering with computer engineering.

C. Natural upgrade path

Come on people: you are all missing the most obvious upgrade path to the most powerful and satisfying computer of all. The upgrade path goes:

And then you reach the pinnacle of modern computing facilities:

Graduate students. Yes, you just sit back and do all of your comput­ing through lowly graduate students. Imagine the advantages.

Multi-processing, with as many processes as you have students. You can easily add more power by promising more desperate undergrade that they can indeed escape college through your guidance. Special student units can even handle several tasks on their own!

Full voice recognition interface. Never touch a keyboard or mouse again. Just mumble commands and they will be understood (or else!).

No hardware upgrades and no installation required. Every student comes complete with all hardware necessary. Never again fry a chip or $10,000 board by improper installation!

Just sit that sniveling student at a desk, give it writing utensils (mak­ing sure to point out which is the dangerous end) and off it goes.

Low maintenance. Remember when that hard disk crashed in your Beta 9900, causing all of our work to go the great bit bucket in the sky? This won't happen with grad. students. All that is required is that you

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