URGENT! SDC computer architecture project : part 4

[rachel83az]

armstrongsubero, it is not allowed to be outright hostile to other students here. Do not ridicule them for not taking this class as seriously as you think they should. Do not tell them that they could kill people because SDC's course didn't teach them to shift 11111111. These are ridiculous and unhelpful statements.

My tutor, who works with hardware/firmware/embedded, tells me that most of the topics covered by this class have absolutely NO bearing on the real world. Almost nobody uses Assembly these days. Almost nobody needs to know about things like Truth Tables or K-Maps. Almost nobody needs to know how to shift the literal 1s and 0s around. You learn these things in school and then promptly forget about them. They do not matter. At all. The only reason my tutor still remembers these things and can help me is because they're enthusiastic about the minutiae. It's good to have the foundations, sure, but almost none of this is applicable to the industry.

You create the chips with Excel Spreadsheets and/or a closed-source programming language that you can't learn without being in the industry first. Seriously. If you want to work in hardware, you need a stomach for tedium combined with tight deadlines, but you don't necessarily need to know what 10110011 means or how to turn it into 11001110. There are too many millions of transistors on the average modern chip to even try to create every single one by hand or understand what each and every one of them needs to do.

(BTW, hardware is a good field to go into if you've got the aptitude for it. People are leaving for the "cooler" software jobs and there aren't nearly enough hardware people for the jobs that are available.)

But, unless someone discovers a passion for such, I doubt that many people here are going to go into hardware. They'll go into website development, app programming, or something similar where you really don't need to know on a daily basis how the inner workings of a computer operate. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Not everyone wants to move to Silicon Valley or its equivalents. Sometimes, you just want a better job locally. One you can get with a bit of Python knowledge and a solid understanding of algorithms.