MU120: TMA01 Result

On Tuesday I got the result back for my first MU120 TMA.  Although I got 95% I lost 3 marks through stupid mistakes in part 1 of the TMA.  1 mark was for saying one word when I meant a different word, and the other 2 were for not spotting that Excel hadn't formatted the x-axis scale on one of the graphs correctly.

MU120: 50%

I am now half-way through the course, having completed units 1 - 9, CMA's 41 & 42, and TMA's 1 & 2.  If I am able to keep this pace going then I should have the whole course completed by the end of January.  The thing is that OU courses have a habit of really increasing the learning curve at the half-way point.  Fingers crossed that it isn't to steep for MU120.

Dr. Gordon Moore

The BBC on their news web site has a fascinating interview with Dr. Moore.

In April 1965 a 36-year old electronics buff jotted down his thoughts on the future of the juvenile silicon chip industry.

Writing in a "throw-away" journal, Gordon Moore accurately imagined a future filled with mobile phones, home computers, and even intelligent cars.

But it was a much more prosaic prediction that has come to dominate his life and the industry that he helped found.

"I could see a change coming that the electronics were going to get significantly cheaper," says the co-founder of Intel, the largest maker of computer chips.

In the article in Electronics Magazine, he predicted that the number of transistors on a silicon chip would double every year for ten years.

This interview would have been useful when I did T171 back in 2004, and it might be useful for those students studying it's successor T175