johnchristopher: You're certifiable.

johnchristopher: WHat answers doesn't it have?

markrandalllindsey: doesn't what have?

markrandalllindsey: Oh, Academic CS.

markrandalllindsey: It doesn't have answers to any problem which is not of interest to an academic researcher.

markrandalllindsey: Ooh, nifty. I get a blue box.

markrandalllindsey: So, for example, if there doesn't happen to be an academic who thinks that the particular configuration and operation of hundreds of programs spread across tens of machines is an interesting research problem, then it's just left to the engineering types to figure it out on their own.

johnchristopher: Yeah. I s'pse that's true.

markrandalllindsey: But if an academic thinks it's interesting to (my favorite example) develop scheduling algorithms that really only work when context switching is free and individual instructions can be sliced in half, then that will get researched.

johnchristopher: But, as an academic, you can eventually decide what's interesting for yoursefl.

markrandalllindsey: OTOH, engineering CS (in my humble experience) doesn't have all of the answers, either. Research efforts can be cut short by external deadlines so that real solutions are never quite found or tested, industry sorts can tend to believe claims a little to readily, and can resort to brute force too readily.

markrandalllindsey: And that's the weird, sticky part about academic CS: I can't really blame anyone for working on things that I find uninteresting and which may be provably impractical. It's each person's prerogative to work on whatever seems nifty to them.

johnchristopher: Very true.

markrandalllindsey: But I think sometime that the CS types that I'm aroudn are trying to imagine what the problems really are without any actual knowledge of what the problems are, and that seems unfortunate.

markrandalllindsey: Of course, I'm not at an engineering or technical institution, so it stands to reason that the bent here may be more theoretical. Or perhaps it's not more theoretical, and my first encounter with throw-hardware-to-the-wind theoreticians has just been so startling.

johnchristopher: You disillusioned?

markrandalllindsey: Not really, because I see a gigantic value in the sort of extremely-careful, scientific approach that's taken by the people here (my neck of the academic woods) that I'd never really seen before.

markrandalllindsey: So my goal here is to be as good an academic as I can be for a little while, and suck all of the good stuff out that I can, and then go and be a better engineer than I would have been otherwise.

johnchristopher: That would be a plan.

markrandalllindsey: It has all of the properties of a plan!

johnchristopher: Yup.

markrandalllindsey: this conversation has been added to my diary, btw.

johnchristopher: Oh, great, now I look like a bumbling sounding board AI program.

markrandalllindsey: Well, it is my diary.