Week 2 Readings: Comments

http://woodss53.blogspot.com/2008/08/muddiest-point.html?showComment=1220025060000#c5451725186316239361

http://petersblog-landark.blogspot.com/2008/08/reading-notes-for-week-2.html?showComment=1220043720000#c7267749768817356761

Muddiest Point: Lecture 1

I'll join what I perceive as the majority by identifying Lecture 1's muddiest point as informing the class of when our assignments are due. Certain assignments are only "readings" and the posts on blogs such as this one wherein we discuss what we've read, but certain other assignments are real "assignments"... some of which are in fact only readings themselves. Readings are due on Fridays, and assignments are due on Tuesdays, which somehow translates into Week 1's reading being due next Tuesday after Week 2's reading, which is due today. At least, that's my understanding from the part of the lecture where the final requests for clarification arose, found around 1:26:00 in the Lecture 1 video. So, I've already got "Week 2 Readings" posted, although I won't have "Week 1 Readings" posted until next Monday or Tuesday.

Week 2 Readings

I didn't find the Wikipedia articles for either computer hardware or Moore's Law to be particularly helpful. The computer hardware article uses few complete sentences, and the Moore's Law article spends nearly half its length discussing laws other than Moore's. Luckily, I found alternate web pages that discussed these two topics at Hardware (computer) and Forty years of Moore's Law.
I already knew almost everything that the articles on computer hardware had to teach me: i.e., there is input hardware, output hardware, and storage hardware. I did learn a thing or two about the standardization of cables such as serial and USB, though.
Moore's Law I was also pretty familiar with, although it was nice to have a refresher on the details. And it is of course fascinating to speculate as to what will happen when transistors shrink to the "electron leak" stage in about ten years. The video that we were assigned to watch did well to point this problem out and to visualize the impressiveness of constant doubling.
As for computerhistory.org, I have no idea what we're actually supposed to read, having been assigned a website as opposed to a web page. I guess we're just meant to browse the site for a few minutes according to what interests us?