It’s the Response Time, Stupid! (Quit Wasting My Time!)
Speaker
Edward Fredkin
Distinguished Service Adjunct Professor, Robotics
When
-
Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)
Description
The one resource that is irrecoverable is time. A sufficient cause for unhappiness is having our time wasted by things beyond our control. We can justify getting angry with people who persist in wasting our time. But today, for many people, the greatest and most annoying source of senseless wasting of time is interaction with personal computers. This is a double-edged sword in that we use computers because we want to save time. It is certainly true that using computers often lets us get more done, done better and quicker. But there is no trade-off because computers manage to waste our time stupidly, unnecessarily and persistently in ways that confer no benefit whatsoever. This kind of time wastage ranges from the boot process to the shutdown process. It occurs whenever the user request an action from a computer and the computer takes longer than necessary to respond. On a higher dimension, when we load new software, upgrade software, add new hardware or buy a new computer things can get very much worse. The kinds of problems that waste seconds out of minutes, minutes out of hours give way to major calamities that can literally waste most of the days in a week. Because there are so many vendors and products involved in every PC, and because the problem lies almost everywhere at once, no one company is in a position to solve the problem.
We believe that there are general solutions to almost all of PC bad behavior. We see how to enable a PC to both know when it is screwing up and to also know what to do about it! What we have in mind is that the OS could realize that a program had hung up or crashed, diagnose the problem, find the fix, get things going again … in less than 100 milliseconds. These kinds of solutions require action on the part of several players in the PC business, including Intel, MS and ISVs. But it does not require that everyone raises their standards to near perfection. In other words, the solutions we propose basically leave the state of the art of programming where it is, but add a small number of new approaches and facilities that could make things much better. The main objective is to once and for all kill the attitude that it is OK to waste everybody’s time.
Speaker's Bio
Ed Fredkin served as a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Director of the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He helped to found several high tech companies in the computer industry. His main research interests are in computational modeling of basic processes in Physics. He is known for his work in reversible computation and the Fredkin Gate. He received Carnegie Mellon University’s Dickson Prize for Research Excellence in 1984. He established the Fredkin Prize for Computer Chess in 1979. The $100,000 Grand Prize was won by IBM’s Deep Blue Computer Chess Machine in 1997. He established the Fredkin Chair in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon, currently held by William L. (Red) Whittaker, and the Fredkin Chair in Artificial Intelligence currently held by Tom Mitchell. Fredkin currently spends his time as a computer programmer, pilot, advisor to businesses and creator of computational models in Physics.