Slashdot Mirror
The Most Incorrect Assumptions In Computing?
Miss Muis writes "After reading once again that Moore's Law will become obsolete, I amused myself thinking back to all the predictions, absolutes and impossibles in computing that have been surpassed with ease. In the late 80s I remember it being a well regarded popular 'fact' that 100MHz was the absolute limit for the speed of a CPU. Not too many years later I remember much discussion about hard drives for personal computers being physically unable to go much higher than 1GB. Let's not forget "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" from the chairman of IBM in 1943, and of course 'Apple is dying...' (for the past 25 years). What are your favorite beliefs-turned-on-their-heads in the history of computing?"
"We'll never need more than 640K of RAM!"
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
Isn't it interesting that all of these "limits" are convenient base-10 numbers? Seems something like the odometer effect to me.
*BSD is Dying...
:-P
Totally untrue. *BSD rules.
640K is enough for anyone. (that one was easy)
This Internet thing is a fad.
No one will want to look at a man stretching his bottom wide open.
Trolling is a art,
I invented the Internet......Al Gore !
I swear, this will be the last batch of RAM I'll ever need...
The quote on the wall of my highschool computer lab was the IBM one...
Never did figure if it was meant to motivate us, or keep us out...
fortune -o
...I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them. --Prof Frink, Much Apu About Nothing
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Anything Robert Cringly says is going to happen, won't and anything he says will fail, won't.
He's my bellweather.
Right...
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.
hehe
Howdy.
And one I hope to see laughed at soon...
"Linux will never make it on the desktop"
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Bring up 'Moore's Law' in a technical conversation.
Most of these assumptions about future computing technology (AI aside of course) were underestimating rather than overestimating. Let that be a lesson - computers may yet surprise us in the near future with what they can do. Never say never.
My favorite bad product assumption is right in its title:
Microsoft Works
The whole "Apple is doomed" senerio seems to keep coming up despite never actually living up to promise...
people will be thankful to have a anthropomorphic paperclip tell them what to do.
Whenever I get a new harddrive, i invariably say "I'll never be able to fill that up" and somehow within about 2 years time I'm out buying an extra hard drive.
I've never seen a citation of the Bill Gates 640K quote, or the market for five computers quote, for example. They sound reasonable, but so are lots of supposed "facts".
the worst assumption many of us are making is that humans are not themselves computers.
About Kurzweil
If you lost your job today, don't despair. You may die tomorrow anyway.
The assumption that everyone else is a better programmer than me.
HA!
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Flashing my dual 2.0 ghz g5 hasn't gotten me laid yet, I guess I was wrong !
If the dollar is an "I owe you nothing", then the Euro is a "Who owes you nothing." - Doug Casey
Download (supposed) - definition of the transfer of data from any source to another.
Download (actual) - definition of the transfer of data from an network to your machine.
Uses:
1. "I downloaded the software from the CD to my computer."
2. "I downloaded the file from the internet."
3. "I downloaded the file into my e-mail and sent it to him."
Only #2 is correct.
I had to berate my father for WEEKS before he learned the intricacies of Download vs. Upload vs. Install.
Chris
That you need more than one button on your mouse.
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home." -- Kenneth Olson, 1977, founder of Digital
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
Not technically "computing" but this is my All time favorite thus far.
"GORE: Well, I will be offering -- I'll be offering my vision when my campaign begins. And it will be comprehensive and sweeping. And I hope that it will be compelling enough to draw people toward it. I feel that it will be.
But it will emerge from my dialogue with the American people. I've traveled to every part of this country during the last six years. During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Shamelessley pulled from here
"Online dating is only for nerds."
Slashdot - News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters?
"Windows is the best OS because the most people use it."
~Philly
Microsoft Works. if one were to go by the name of that product they would probably get a pretty bad misconception
Everyone who claims that it's the end of the road for [Microsoft/Apple]. Their business decisions have alienated customers for too long. They can no longer be truly competitive. Their OS just isn't going to stand for much longer. There are too many problems - usability, security, bugs, configurability. --- Both of these companies have their own markets, and though I use primarily MS, I also use Linux and Mac. I shudder at the classic argument over who's better and who's doomed. Dinosaurs they might be; their size and age are not disputed. But I don't see either of those companies going extinct any time soon.
A Microsoft Windows 9X with a label "Virus Free" on it :D, even if it is an update
------- The last Sig. got fired.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." - Ken Olsen, Founder, Digital Equipment Corporation
Or my personal favorite...
"Trust me, this is way better than OS/2." - The dude at Computer City that sold me my copy of WIndows 95. Bastard.
once said to my friend:
"this 8mb of ram is all you'll ever need for your computer to run fast".
heh
we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively - bill hicks
The next version of will be faster/more reliable/more efficient/more secure.
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time. As the successor to DOS, which has over 10,000,000 systems in use, it creates incredible opportunities for everyone involved with PCs."
-- Bill Gates, from "OS/2 Programmer's Guide" (forward by Bill Gates)
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
....the assumption that people will pay $500 for hardware that will be obsolete in a year?
oh, wait....
It's nothing but crumpled porno and Ayn Rand.
... is the limit for a voice grade phone line.
Back in the day, I remeber there being discussions that high speed (cable, ADSL, whathaveyou) would never catch on, and all the masses would want would be their dialups. My how times have changed.
I remember working at a research firm for an internship, and the head of our department said over lunch one day that he actually spent more time dealing with problems he was having with his computer than actually doing any useful work. I've noticed this with myself also, and even though I enjoy figuring out what's going on with my computer, I imagine many people don't. Email and websurfing always suck away my working hours, what with a PC right here on my desk, and not to mention that I get asked to help other people out with their machines every once in a while, it wastes both our time.
Makes me think though...wasn't it always implied that computers would save peoples time? Has that assumption yet proved that it is indeed true? I'm not so sure it has, although maybe that's because we aren't using the things the right way. Perhaps we are waiting for a computer savvy workforce and then this might be true...but then again, who knows...
"A person who reads Slashdot is a geek..."
Now we all know Slashdot readers have multiple girlfriends, got less than A's in math, science, and physics, didn't attend college, and don't earn an average of 100k+/year doing IT work...
Eat your heart out MSI/Biz/Marketing peoples!
100MHz was the absolute limit for the speed of a CPU
Yeah, but that was because your MHz display had only two digits.
Favorite incorrect assumption: Nobody can beat Microsoft.
-No one will ever defeat 3dfx; they rule the 3d accelerator market.
Its so sad. They were my favorite graphics card company, and I always thought that ATI and nvidia blew goats while 3dfx cranked out great 3d accelerators that diamond slapped onto awesome cards.
Two bad my two favorite graphics card companies were later absorbed and eventually died. But I hear that Diamond's at least making a comeback. Hoo-ray!
Check out this article from Ars Technica: http://www.arstechnica.com/wankerdesk/01q2/limits/ limits-1.html
Entitled "The Ultimate Limits of Computers," it deals with issues including not only Moore's law, but quantum mechanics... such as Plank's constant, Boltzmann's constant, the gravitational constang, the application of quantum mechanics to thermodynamics, and other interesting things that I barely (read: don't) understand.
----
"Those who quote others are more likely to one day be quoted" -Tom Planter
What, no links?
it's a *joke*, people...
In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.
-- Yun-Men
Or Post on slashdot, and then bring that up in a technical conversation.
There were a slew of columnists circa 1985 that said "Multi-tasking? Why, other than to download a file while you are working on something else?" And just about anything John Dvorak says...
Here are mine:
All your bases are belong to us.
No soup for you!
I did not have sex wi...wait what was the question?
This is the last windows OS I'll ever run... Said in on '98se, ME, 2K, and I REALLY mean it this time on XP... A popular technology one in general, is this constant belief that Nintendo only caters to kids...
that the .com explosion would revolutionize every industry overnight, and make us all rich.
now, almost 7 years later, i'm unemployed, taking more classes, and trying to compete w/ developers in India making 1/5th of what i was making employed.
www == widespread wealth wipeout
Maybe this year I won't get one of those phone calls... "How do I make the letters bigger in the Typewriter program again?
Hilarity Ensues
Not once was there any general happiness in those linked stories. I think they may be cynical or even sarcastic.
Which is nice.
"SCO will remain on course to require customers to license infringing Linux implementations as a condition of further use." 8/7/2003
I remember telling my father once after he had bought a 40Mb hard drive that this should last him forever. Nothing could ever fill up more than this. Of course this was well before the days of .mp3 and .mpg.
When I was a kid, I remember watching the Jetsons and when George came home from work he coomplained that he had just finished a hard day at work pushing buttons. I remarked to my father that Noone could ever get a job where all they did was push buttons all day. Now, except for the one knob on the 'scope under my desk, all my interfaces to the outside world ARE buttons.
I guess I'm full of underestimations...
Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM! (Bill Gates, 1981)
o fsengl.html
Windows 95 needs at least 8MB RAM! (Bill Gates, 1996)
Courtesy of http://www.leo.org/information/freizeit/fun/windo
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
That you'd never be able to put movies on anything as easy to use as a CD.
Stories posted to Slashdot, and their follow up discussions, will be deeply researched, exhaustively fact checked, and expertly written.
'Final nail in Microsoft's coffin'
Yes, it really is...honest!
That idiot Bob Metcalfe loves trotting this one out every few years:
THE INTERNET IS GROWING TOO FAST, AND WILL COLLAPSE UPON ITSELF PRESENTLY.
I think he just wants everyone to know that he invented Ethernet, and needs to throw this story out there every couple years so people don't forget he actually did accomplish something at some point in time. Like 20 years ago.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
... we won't need floppy disks anymore.
It's been ten year that I hear this statement continuously. Last time I broke the MBR on a server without a CD drive, I had no other choice than to boot on a floppy.
Iraq: war to save the U
Since people seem to object to the name "Moore's law " since it isn't really a law, perhaps we should rename it to "Moore's Curse."
Moore's Curse (n):
1) The tendency for technology pundits to be proven wrong again and again.
2) The fact that your fancy computer will be little better than a door stop in 6 months.
Apple is dying... has got to be my favorite for a number of reasons including most significantly, Apple has been the company that the rest of the industry has depended upon. Apple has been the personal computer industries R&D lab now ever since the Apple I. Just think about all of the firsts in Apple computers. First to build in color support, first to build in CDROM drives, first to include built in networking presaging the Internet, first to include a GUI, first to create the modern laptop format with palmrests up front, first to include a built in pointing device in laptops, first to etc....etc.....etc..... You get the point.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
"Why would anyone want a computer in their home?" -- Ken Olson of DEC in late 1970's regarding personal computers.
or something to that effect.
"Whereas computers today weigh 1 ton and require 18,000 vaccum tubes, computers in the future will weigh only 1/2 ton and have under 1,000 vaccum tubes." -- Popular Mechanics, 1949.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
bogus_prediction ::= (some_new_spiffy_language_that_actually_sucks) is the future of (computing|operating_systems|networking)+
--dw
What, no "BSD is dead" yet?
How about this assumption?
One license is good for every piece of software.
Remember, put your hips into it when you stir the pot, baby.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
and given enough venture capital, an internet start up will be super profitable on the internet even though it has never made a profit, and doesn't have a sound business plan, and has a super inflated stock price.
But, it does have a great shiny mission statement:
"It's our responsibility to synergistically provide access to world-class sources as well as to assertively facilitate enterprise-wide opportunities" - Dilbert Mission Statment Generator
(Stock brokers in a flurry) BUY! BUY! BUY! BUY! BUY!
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
Binary is the only method for storing digital numerical data.
A recorded sound exceeds human hearing at a 44,100 Hz sample rate.
A recorded image exceeds human sight at 8 bits per R, G, B channeled luminance values.
Products are designed to fill or solve a known niche or problem.
Moore's Law is some kind of law instead of a gedanken observation.
[
You can't sell a computer without a floppy drive.
from http://www.paulgraham.com/quotes.html
"Lisp doesn't look any deader than usual to me."
- David Thornley, reply to a question older than most languages
Do you really think somebody would want something called a "mouse" attached to their computer?
The software will be updated long before we need to worry about adding more digits to the date.
During the late 1990s I incorrectly assumed I would be a .com multimillionaire by now and am stuck with monthly payments on a Gulfstream V :-)
John.
I walked around preaching Amiga to everyone who would - and wouldn't - listen, long after Commodore went bankrupt and the game release frequency dropped to four or five a year (including those Polish games that looked like they were produced in a barn).
But now I'm a Linux cheerleader. It feels a bit the same, just with more real-world evidence supporting my views.To anyone who asked, I would say "she is not dead, just resting!", and then I would mention that a friend of friend had been to a hotel that STILL runs Scala Multimedia for their internal tv channel, and Gateway or whoever was owning the rest of the IP at the moment "will be out with a new computer real soon now".
I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
... I will never use up that much driver space! (circa 1989).
Or...
An internet connection faster than 56K dial up for the home! Sign me up! (for me, circa 1999).
Regards,
Fredrick
So now that Apple uses *BSD, is it dying twice as fast?
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Assumption: use of computers in offices would dramatically reduce consumption of paper. Actually, the reverse is true; paper use has soared. Except in a handful of institutions which have made a concerted and well-planned effort to reduce/eliminate paper.
My favorite was from a group president of one of the telcos (that I worked with), who said that any object-oriented project could be written in six months.
This was immediately followed by them cancelling all vacation.
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. -- Aaron Burr
In the late 80s I remember it being a well regarded popular 'fact' that 100MHz was the absolute limit for the speed of a CPU.
Given the technology of the day, it was. Statements like that usually come with a caveat like "unless we develop new fabrication technology".
Not too many years later I remember much discussion about hard drives for personal computers being physically unable to go much higher than 1GB.
That was a technical limitation of the PC BIOS and the FAT16 file system. New standards for ATAPI devices were introduced and the barrier was broken. There was never a "it can't be done" statement, simply a "this is a serious inconvenience" statement.
Let's not forget "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" from the chairman of IBM in 1943
In 1943, he was correct. It's silly to extend his statement all the way to the 1980s and beyond. That's like me saying that "the space program does not need more than 5 space shuttles". Of course that will change in the future!
You're taking statements out of context and making them into nonexistent errors.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
...will continue indefinitely.
Even Intel will only say that they expect it to continue "at least through the end" of the decade. They're running out of space.
p
"You won't have to work, machines will do everything for you."
Flying Cars !
Isn't it interesting that the only the failed predictions are the ones that people remember - no matter if they are exceeded or undershot.
Its almost as if, if you want to be quoted and remembered, you need to make high sounding, but wrong predictions. The more smug the eventual reader, the more notice they take.
History, here I come.This was from a CIO of a major insurance company in the early nineties.
Apple has now switch to a BSD system, and everybody knows that BSD is dead. So Apple should be doubly dead very soon...
Its not computers, but in the early 1900, or maybe late 1800, it was believed that the human brain couldnt process all the information necessary to travel over 35 mph. And if you did travel faster than that speed you would go insane. Its a good thing that we have cell phones now, so we can drive whit out abosorbing insane amounts of information from the road.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
...is dying
"EJB is a good idea for java"
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
is that Linux is a decent operating system
HOW'S MY POSTING? CALL 1-800-POSTING
I still have a 10mb from my old 286 (now defunct). The thing is physically massive, too: It takes up TWO 5 1/4" drive bays on top of each other.
Had a Hayes rep in a tech class prove that 2400 baud was absolute top speed for data over voice grade phone lines...
"The internet will allow us to work more efficiently."
"We'll work less hours and get more done."
I call Bullshat!
I've been putting in my more hours the last 6 years than I ever did before.
So has everyone else I know that relies on computers in their business.
Just once, I'd like it if someone called me "Sir".
Without adding, "You're creating a scene."
... is the theoretical limit for modem technology.
If you post it, they will read.
SCO -- they own that Linux thing.
Working as a consultant I am faced everyday with what I think is the biggest failed promise:
That computers would bring about the "paperless office".
Not only they didn't, but they made people consume more paper than ever before. On top of all the paper spent, the cost of printing pages increased, as industry made us believe that ink jets were better, and B&W laser passee.
For more discussion see an article in Newsday about it. There's even a full book dedicated to the question of why the paperless office never came to be.
Quem a paca cara compra, paca cara pagará.
for a computer that can explain office politics to me.
"In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being. I mean a machine that will be able to read Shakespeare, grease a car, play office politics, tell a joke, have a fight. At that point the machine will begin to educate itself with fantastic speed. In a few months it will be at genius level and a few months after that its powers will be incalculable." -- Marvin Minsky, LIFE Magazine, November 20, 1970
...in my history of computing was when vi made the assumption that the modem line noise actually meant I wanted the passwd file encrypted with a key of 'esc' at the same time mr. b decided to reboot to change out a bank of serial ports. Weren't our faces red from the staying up all night fixing the mess.
My computer teacher in high school demotivated the class twice in one day. First, he told the class that he read some projections, and that within 8 years the number of computer programmers needed would fall to 25% of the current level. That was in 1983, and we all know what happened.
Then, he followed it up with a quote from Dykstra saying that BASIC programming damages a programmer's ability to think permanently. Since that was a BASIC programming class, it went over like a lead balloon.
My high school was full of these soothsayers. In senior government class (1986) the teacher was constantly saying that the communists were going to take over and destroy the country. One day he walked over to the big poster depicting the 1984 voting ballot. Reagan, Mondale, and a whole bunch of little parties. He said "By 1990, all these little parties are going to take over this country." His pointer stick was waving in the vicinity of the Worker's World party. Not really a computer story, but it's a stupid prediction anyways.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
640K is enough for anyone. (that one was easy)
...and also not true.
Do not read this sig.
...IIRC, there was this whole thing about hard drives not being able to break the 65GB per platter or something like that, making the hard drive limit 200GB (3 platters).
My personal recollection - when microcomputer were still evolving. There was a big article, forgot which publication, talked about intel 286 and forthcoming 386. The author says something like this: 386 is certainly overkill. Why do we ever need that much of computing power in microprocessor?
I guess it was sometime in mid to late 80s. Prevailing mentality of that time was that 'There is a big iron, mainframe, and then there are some minis like DEC or Prime, and then there are those intel-based desktops suitable for some word processing and other lightweight tasks.
Little did the author know that microprocessor would become the heart of the computers practically of any range - from micros to 'big iron' and supercomputers.
BSD IS DYING
Common sense is not so common.
"Toilet computing is here to stay."
-Bill Gates-
The mainframe is dead
"I don't understand why people would need more than 4gb..." (Bill Gates in an interview on 64 bit ccomputing, in which he said he didn't understand peoples' interest in it)
XML will replace relational databases
OOP will lead to more robust, easier to maintain and higher quality software
By making COBOL resemble English, anyone can program.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Behind me are two dot matrix printers that spit out about 2500 pages every few hours.
That, and my desk is ALWAYS full of stupid "SO AND SO CALLED YOU" notes.
Some people refuse to use email. NOT that using email is any good either, as some people don't understand the utility of it and use it like IM.
How about the need for computers in the classroom? That's total BS as far as I'm concerned.
/. likely went through school without computers in the classroom. Did our educations suffer as a result? No. As far as I'm concerned, I was better off in school without a computer.
I've been into computers for quite some time, and am enrolled in Computer Science at university. It's been obvious to me for years that computers in the classroom are a waste of time, energy, and resources for everyone involved.
I try to tell people this, and they wonder why I say that, given my experience with computers. No doubt it's because the people making the decisions have no clue.
Most adults on
Of course, we did have computers at school. Good ol' ICONs, and IBM 8086s. We had typing class a couple times a week, and learned to use a word processor, which is about as far as it needs to go. Leave computers for their own courses in high school (Computer Science and maybe some kind of class for basics.)
Is it not obvious that more harm is being done than good, when it comes to computers in class? There are just so many things wrong with the whole idea. Perhaps one day when computers become more appliance-like, they'll be more beneficial in class, and will be put to use in such a fashion as to not create dependancies.
What do you think?
-kidlinux.
As in Bill, editor of PC Magazine.
"The computer you want to buy will always cost $5000"
Now you could get 10 PC's for that.
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
sigs, as if you care.
ARE THEY OUT OF THEIR MINDS?! THE PHONE LINES WILL BURN UP!
This space for rent.
Does anyone remember the whole Dot-Com Bubble?
Billions in venture capital were sent to silicon valley back in the late 90s in the hope that anything and everything internet-related could be profitable, and were worth investing in the same style that brick-and-mortar companies were. We heard all kinds of great things from leading economists who were really misleading us to manipulate the market, short the stock, and fuck everyone else over. Then, in 1999, after the Microsoft ruling, the whole thing kind of collapsed.
As for today, just a few of the giants of e-commerce stand... so many companies went out of business on the predictions not far off from the ideas that we'd have groceries delivered to us over the internet (WebVan) or that we could actually stream TV-quality video over 28.8 kbps (Pixelon). It's never going to happen again, so the golden age of marketing ideas on the internet and obtaining massive capital influx is over.
The VAST majority of it was.
noooooooo!
The difference between a car salesman and a computer salesman is that the car salesman knows when he is lying.
The guy at computer city would't know enough to warn you. True story, a computer city salesman pointed to the tag in front and insisted that a machine had 2 serial ports. A quick check on the back told otherwise. Said salesman wouldn't know a serial port from an AC socket (note that they were fairly important in that era).
Wumpus
Everyone uses AOL, It's so easy to (ab)use !
Using AOL after the first month or so after you got a computer
is like a woman wearing a training bra until she's 80.
Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion, you must set yourself on fire.
I was one of the naive fools who actually believed that Microsoft would follow the terms of any of their antitrust settlements.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Luckily Microsoft proved that assumption was false.
I have a Mac friend who say his G5 is "faster than the Internet" becuase everytime he opens his browser he gets "a page not found messege" and has to hit the refresh button.
I keep on telling him that its just a bug and his computer isn't faster than his broadband connection. But, he doesn't beleive me.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE. talk about intellectual irresponsibility though i suppose it creates the possibility of 5000000000 sci fi movies.
HA!
My fav is when our CFO asserted that when we migrated to SAP "we'd no longer need programmers". The sound you here is dozens of ABAPers laughing all the way to the bank...
That whole y2k thing was pretty annoying. i could go on at great lengths, but didn't anyone else just set the date on their computer to a date in 2000(+) to see what would happen?
(proof that fear is the best marketing tool)
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
Moore's law is interesting and the immanent demise of Apple certainly so. However, the most interesting thing for me is how curiosity and greed work together to expand the frontiers in computers and what it's brought about.
True, right now, the yearly, 'we'll-be-helpless-without-faster-computers!' cycle appears to have stopped or slowed down. Big IT buyers seem to have realized that you don't need a machine that could run a weather model to replace a typewriter and that's a real good thing.
But what about software? I could be wrong. I don't do that much with my computer except surfing and writing, but much of what I see makes me wonder where all the really miraculous power of my computer is going.
I've got an operating system that takes up non-trivial space on my harddrive and aside from a constant need to keep up with the virus writers, or dealing with stuff to make Microsoft happy, I'm not seeing the bennies.
You'd think that with all this godawful power, there'd be a little more substance.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Most of the wrong assumptions involve where I want to go today.
"For a successful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled." -Feynman
A few from the dot bomb days.
"(1)When we go public, (2)after profitability, (3)we're all going to be set for life."
One of my profs actually told me that. Now I'm wishing that I had just gone for that PhD in Math I wanted instead. Given the way the economy has gone in the last few years, I'd have come out even economically, but would have had more fun.
Finding God in a Dog
Now look I would love for it to happen, but the sad fact is MS heaped so much bamboozlement into their OS and products, they've pretty much locked corporations into being forced to use the junk. If the corps. use it, what makes anyone think the typical homeuser is going to try something new. They'll stick with familiarity. Aside from that, try explaining to your about to retire 60'ish CTO the pros and cons about Linux when he thinks the F1 key you mentioned is the bonus Ferrari rumor he hard about.
Yup Windows will die is my fav
MoFscker
It's the five year old cards that are dragging down the games. Have you looked at specs lately? Every single game can still be played with a geforce.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
"A tiny pebble sends ripples across the entire pond"
Things like this were said by MANY computer industry "experts" before Y2k.
There are a lot of people that work very hard to make computers exchange information. It doesn't just happen.
With all the porn on the internet, you'd think there would be a lot more blind men around.
The Most Incorrect Assumption In Computing is accepting the number ONE as fact, when the truth is, Nobody has discovered where decimal 9 rolls over.
Do I win something ? ~@~
I can't remember which one, but shortly after the founding of IBM and the sale of punch card systems to the IRS one of the founders stated there would only be a total market for 5 to 10 computers in the country.
My second is by Scott Mcnealy (sp?) and Larry Ellison who seem to take turns declairing that the personal computer is dead.
It doesn't matter what you wrap your emotions around, Reality is a brick wall specifically designed to scramble eggs
As usual, they have the full scoop. He did indeed take great initiative in creating the internet, but the statement is still awkward and self-serving.
---IBM
(Or was it just 25,000?)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There is only one way to take what he said! Just look at the bold portion of the parent comment!
A normal, sane person would understand it.
Computer science/programming is a great career that will be in great demand well into the forseeable future (with respect to getting first world people and not Indians to take Comp. Sci.)
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
And they'd like their joke back.
That a higher clock speed means a faster processor.
There are only 10 kinds of people in this world... those who understand binary and those who don't
"There will not be any need for paper in the future. Everything will be stored in computers"
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
The truth of the matter is that Al Gore, while he was a member of Congress, did indeed sponsor several initiatives which lead to the popularization and commercialization of the Internet. Did it exist before he showed up? Sure, as an underutilized academic research network. Would most of the planet know about it today without his help? Doubtful.
Personally, while I may dislike the man, I'm tired of hearing the same tired, stupid jokes repeated over and over again.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
This story won't be posted again next week...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
That would have to be Al Gore saying he "invented the internet."
That Slashdot will go to using CSS and other more modern web standards ;-)
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Our VP of IS said that a couple of years ago. Narrow-minded managment. I think we actually had to buy Apache!
Fortunately, he doesn't know everything that goes on. Stll, we are a M$ shop.
Just about any prediction about the impending death/doom of anything I take as more or less ridiculous.
i ng industry (too bad, though)
;-)
For example, the death of:
floppies
IPv4
PCs
mainframes
CDs
record
paper in the office
Not that computing has the market cornered on "the end/death of x", look at the military:
dogfighting
guns in aircraft
pilots
infantry (aircraft and mechanized units will supplant)
bayonets
damage control (Navy, remember the Forrestal?)
guns on ships (can't hit a speedboat with a cruise missle)
And so far incorrect, my parent's repeated error in predicting that I would be the death of them.
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
Products are secure out of the box
Linux is more secure than windows
BSD is more secure than Linux
Windows cannot acheive the same uptime as *nix
People who call themselves computer techs, network engineers, systems administrators, developers, and programmers know what they're talking about. Most of them are end users with administrative rights
But I digress
...that no one needs 64 bits on the desktop.
Stick Men
Back in the days, most prompt jockeys would just laugh about this new "mouse" thing. Mouse is just a fad, etc..
While this is slightly off-topic in spirit, it isn't "by the letter of the topic"... . Really, the brunt of the joke is directed at "us" rather than "famous people" or "evil corporations".
.arj, whatever)... I remember that this was how I learned "the pigeonhole principle", or, that there are 2^(i-1) programs that you can represent with i bits, but not with i-1 bits... This is possibly why I started following theoretical CS (although I hated maths back then) instead of programming/hacking. Keep in mind, also, that this "unlimited compression algorithm" was patented! This is the most blatant failure of the patent system I can think of: the claim is even MORE obviously impossible than those for perpetual motion machines!
I remember a few silly beliefs some folks had when I was/we were young. The most remarkable thing is that some of them were "verified" by "scientific experiments" by various people.
1. That burning a copy of a CD resulted in a slightly degraded image of the data. A classmate thought he verified this by copying copies until they failed. He came up with the figure that it took seven iterated burns (on average) for the degradation to make the copy unreadable(!!!). I guess some people don't understand causation and/or the law of averages and/or hardware reliability. This was in the days of turning off the music and not touching the desk while the CDR was burning.
2. That data can just be compressed again and again (.zip,
3. That compressed data was "more prone to read failures" than uncompressed data, by virtue of "the data being closer together on the disk". Although this might sound more ridiculous than #2, it really isn't. I fell for this when I was very young, as it seemed to be empirically verified. Heh.
It is kind of fun to reflect on how all of these fallacies are due to extending what is intuitive about the real world, into the world of information and digital representation. We'll see how many current silly beliefs of ours (P!=NP?, "{absolute security|quantum computation|...} is (im)possible", &c.) have elegant refutations which we will hopefully discover in my lifetime. Remember, no one understands the world of quanta and bits yet, and that the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.
Much like it was impossible for Hussein to prove he didn't have ABC weapon programs anymore, it's impossible for Gates to prove that he didn't say it. Thus the myths prevail.
Regards,
--
*Art
who in 1950 said that in 50 years we will be able to programme computers "to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning" 53 years later we are still so incredible far from this. see this for more details.
84 keys outta be enough.
(general use computing appears)
oh wait, surely 101 keys will be plenty..
(stupid Windows keys appear)
Gee, how about 104? No way a human with 10 fingers can use all 104 keys???
(even stupider Internet/Multimedia buttons appear)
Sig? What sig?
When Win95 came out I remember the big stink AOL and others made that there was an MSN icon right on the desktop. There were predictions made that MSN would be #1 within the year.
Casual Games/Downloads
Apple wouldn't be doing as well as they are now had it not been for a CPU transplant from IBM and an OS transfusion from FreeBSD.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
I always thought my mother would *never* figure out how to use a computer.
Now, she's surfing at least once a week.
"If only I have a computer, I could do *insert typical grinding menial activity*!"
or
"I can do *whatever* faster/easier with a computer!"
or
"A computer will make me smarter!"
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
An astounding number of people assume that what they see is what I get. This leads to (for instance) poor web design. People assume that everyone browses the web with IE or Netscape, so they base their information on images, assume the screen is several hundred pixels wide, make assumptions like // can't use JavaScript
if (browser != IE && browser != Netscape)
and don't even think to check how a blind person would experience the page, whether it'll look like crap on a PDA browser, or whether anything will break with an off-the-wall browser like iCab.
This isn't a poor assumption just at the web level. It's easy to fall into the trap of designing a product so that you can use it without thinking "How might users differ from me?"
Nor is the problem limited to computers. A famous example (though I'm not sure how true it is) was trying to market cars in Japan with a steering wheel on the left side. A harder example to get right is asking undereducated girls whether they have "vaginal secretions" instead of the clearer "cunt juice."
The lesson is: there's no perfect substitute for real users.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Since at the time, they had finished doing just that with consumer electronics industry and were well on the way to doing just that to the automotive industry, most CS types were justifably concerned.
Well, the rest of the story is that it didn't happen. Not even a whimper of it got over to the western world.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
That was a good one!
That the software will be useable with the specs on the box.
Wumpus
Circa 1980:
...but the rest of the desk will be the cooling system!
Someday everyone will have a Cray on their desk...
This of course has come to fruition, but the corollary:
fortunately is not true!
That's my favorite.
My biggest frustration is that the term "Free Software" that isn't free (as in beer) means the whole Open Source thing is lying and false and "It's just like I said, you never get anything for free".
.... 10 minute discussion there just to get 'em to stop gloating about how my idealistic system got corrupted.
Grrr
And this out-dated, out-moded COBOL drivel still gets foisted on first-year CS majors.
I just know that was driving you all nuts.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Frankly Gates' denial leaves me a little unsatisifed.
If he didn't say it then who did? And how did the quote get attributed to him?
Or who wrote the original article attributing this to Gates.
Currently, AFAICT, there is only Gates' comment that he didin't say anything that moronic as "proff" that he never made the quote in the first place.
Hardly a compelling rebuttal.
works great!! ;-)
Is the juice worth the sqeeze?
The tables turn.
"Belief means not wanting to know what is true." [Nietzche, The Anti-Christ, 1889]
"Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff that matters."
I get informe by simpering users at least half a dozen times a day that the "modem thing" isn't working. They're referring to the large box under the desk that happens to be the PC.
None of our PC's have modems in them. I wish I had a dollar for every time I told a user that the big box thing isn't a modem, it's a PC.
"Nobody needs an imbilicul cord to their company." on why the Mac didn't have networking built-in.
Now, of course, the Mac has no perifs and can only exist by connecting to a network unless you plug in external devices...
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
A lot of incorrect assumptions about Linux - stated by Andrew S. Tanenbaum in 1992. Read the posting on google groups.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
When I was in the 7th grade (about 9 years ago) my computer teacher told us that computers would never be able to take voice commands. "Its just impossible," he said. Luckily I was an ignorant lil bastard and never listened to anything he said anyway...
Then there is the whole joke of "Imminent death of the net predicted!".
And my personal favorite? That one that says that Darl McBride exists. =^_^=
This sig no verb.
Come on, THAT has GOT to be the best one!
And to think that he's the richest man in the world.
I mean I've said some pretty stupid things... Couldn't I at least be a dictator in a banana-republic?
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
"With Macrovision we will eliminate bootleg VHS copies once and for all!"
"With Laserlok we will eliminate software piracy once and for all!"
"With Cactus Datashield we will eliminate Audio CD ripping once and for all!"
for each $drm_product
for each $technology
"With {$drm_product} we will eliminate {$technology} piracy once and for all!"
end
end
that's my fave.
there's no place like ~
What about the Skycar.
4 passengers, 380 mph and 28 mpg.
Only costs a Million Bucks.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
My manager: Everything
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
RFC 704 (circa Sept 1975) states:
"2. Expanded Address field. The address field will be expanded to 32 bits..." "This expansion is adequate for any forseeable ARPA Network growth"
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc704.html
-Matt
"THE PHONE LINES WILL BURN UP!"
They only burn up when I'm downloading "Hot naked asian teens" pr0n.
Last I heard, she got fired for large stash of obscene porn turning up on her public network share...
3GL/4GL Languages will allow us to do away with those damn, expensive, Primadonna Programmers.
I wonder if we can have a useful discussion without flames and insults? It is Slashdot after all!
I think the problem is that computers aren't being used in their strengths: As long as you use computers as fancy notepads and chalkboards, computers are useless in a classroom.
However, if you cater to their strengths and capabilities, I think computers are invaluable:
1) Their ability to network and connect classrooms with other locations, such as other classrooms, servers with data such as photographs, maps, and things you can't store in a classroom.
2) Their ability to virtualize. See things you can't afford to go see, do things you can't afford to go do, teach things you can't afford to otherwise teach! Books, encyclopedias, and videos offer a very static virtual representation, where a computer can be interactive! Not only can you 'see' different animals at various depths of the ocean with a computer (which a video can do just as well), you can *explore* too! Find out what happens at various pressures to your ship, to your body, see how snowflakes form, how ants find food; and then fiddle with a few settings, and see *different* snowflakes, see the ants starve, and see your ship crumple! You can design airplanes, and see if they fly or fall, you can create space stations, and see if your astronauts starve, overheat, or get bored to death!
3) Interactivity. Very tied to virtualization and networking, you can interact with a computer in a way that you cannot with a video or a book. You can change things, simulate things, watch things, and then go back and change more things. You can have a classroom that happens to have access to a freshwater lake do experiments and research, connected to a classroom that happens to have a database, some programming kids, and a good grasp of math, and at the end of each day each classroom can learn things that before networking neither could!
4) Data manipulation and storage. You can store lots of photographs, keep tremendous databases, perform tedious analysis, and create pictures out of raw numbers that a child, or even an adult, cannot. Measure the temperature, humidity, rainfall, pressure, cloud cover/sunlight, and wind at 400 locations 10 times a day across a city, and have the kids create programs to access, correlate, and manipulate that data and see if they can spot trends, correlations, and causations!
So yes, there are reasons to have computers in the classroom. No, right now no one does it properly.
GPL Deconstructed
What are your favorite beliefs-turned-on-their-heads in the history of computing?
"Slashdots readers (and story submitters) are among the most intelligent people on the Internet."
It doesn't have anything to do with computers, but Bishop Ussher declared the date of creation to be October 22, 4004 BC.
He wasn't correct, in fact he was wrong by 6 orders of magnitude. But hey, A for effort right!
Of course the adoption of a dying OS (BSD) by a dying computer company (Apple) was a well calculated plan to use double negatives to become a living force in the computer market once again ... or would that simply make them undead?
Any zombie hunters or grammar police out there?
We'll see if that one is a turned on its head...
Remember "Bob" from Microsoft? The predecessor to "Clippy"?
The REAL legacy of Microsoft Bob, from Wikipedia:
Microsoft Bob was a project managed by Melinda French, who later married Bill Gates to become Melinda Gates.
Carthago delenda est!
Since the OSI model has been required by law for implementation in government systems, TCP/IP will very shortly become outdated and therefore is not discussed in this book....... Network Programming in C, 1989
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
We actually have more programmers now that we're on SAP. Heck that's how I got my job.
There's no way I'd let the user population here get close to creating their own queries though. They'd kill the system in a heartbeat.
It continues to irk me more and more each day when I hear people exclaim "this computer is so stupid." No, it's really quite incapable of thought, the programming is what could be doing 'stupid things'.
Security through obscurity is the way to go.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
"Mainframe (n) An obsolete computer used by thousands of obsolete companies to serve millions of obsolete customers and make billions of obsolete dollars. This years are twice as fast as last years."
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
1 Kilobyte does not equal 1000 bytes, it equals 1024 bytes. Go figure.
"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)"
newsgroup post
No, really, think about it. Operating systems don't actually "die". They kind of gain a cult following. Take a look at Amiga, OS/2, DOS, etc. Granted, they're all on life support....
This sig no verb.
Any guesses on what the answer will turn out to be?
"I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year."
- editor in charge of Prentice Hall business books, 1957
Despite the complexities added, I think most tasks like word processing and information retrieval are made massively easier with computers. If you are old enough to have had to use a typewriter for papers, you know the difference.
Please keep your political LIES off here.
Gore was a true leader in getting the funding and development process for the foundation of the internet in place. He really was.
He never claimed to have developed the internet himself. That's just simpleminded political claptrap repeated by smug idiots.
Happy now?
...you can feed'em information, but you can't make'em think
1) Tablet PCs are the wave of the future!
2) Blogs will amount to nothing.
3) The MHz Myth
"You won't be drowned by the deluge of unimportant information because you'll use software to filter incoming advertising and other extranneous messages and spend your valuable time looking at those messages that interest you." - Bill Gates, The Road Ahead.
Then what have I been using exclusively for the last 2.5 years?
-Tom
-Tom
http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/burrows/quotes.htm
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
People will never copy full CDs over the Internet, it is way too big and would take days by conventional modems (read: 14.4K)
People will never copy full DVDs over the Internet, it is way too big and would take days by conventional broadband (read: 128K ISDN).
-- that is for bandwidth.
People will never be able to copy CDs, they are unreadable on computers except in audio D-A conversion.
People will never be able to copy DVDs, they are encrypted with CSS.
-- that is for format.
People will never be able to copy GameCube games, they are on their own proprietary format discs.
People will never be able to copy PSX/2 games, they have heavy protection.
People will never be able to crack the XBox protection.
-- This is for the consoles
And my #1:
This format is the next revolution! Jump in the bandwagon now!
Mike
John Romero is going to make you his bitch...
That was a good one.
How about the assumption that somebody can build a server architecture so that a page cannot be slashdotted?
myke
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
About a year ago, California Computer News did an interview with Michio Kaku on this very subject. You may find it interesting: http://www.ccnmag.com/index.php?sec=mag&id=123
I have discovered a truly marvelous
Macs are just more stable and therefore better-- If anyone has used Panther they know that is not the whole truth. Upgrading to Panther has caused pain to many users leaving forcing them to either do a clean install or an archive and install (both being hassles for some), Or rendering some macs totally useless.
Another example would be the quote "Apple's-- they just work". How many minor updates have hosed people's systems since OS X has come out, what about Keynote 1.0 causing kernel panics, all the former issues with iTunes, Safari, and all the other apps out there.
So yes, I do use a Mac, and I do like it-- but it's time everyone knows the truth-- Mac's have many problems too, especially if you use new software... the bugs get worked out eventually, but usually at the users expense.
Definitly....
> And this out-dated, out-moded COBOL drivel still
> gets foisted on first-year CS majors.
OK I'll bite. Using global variables increases the number of possible states that your program can have, up to an almost infinite number of possibilities each of which might hide a bug.
Keeping the scope of variables as local as possible keeps the number of possible states of each block of code limited, and thus it is easier to write bug free code (and to track bugs if they occur).
How is this outdated, given that it improves the quality of the code? Btw I don't program in Cobol. I do use globals once in a while, sparingly. Generally, however, imnsho, it is good practice to avoid using them.
And it will have all the features the users want.
And it won't cost more than what it is supposed to cost.
And we will be able to reuse 90% of the code.
And...
"Nobody needs more than 640K"
From BILL GATE$.
He was campaigning, folks! What do people do when they want to get elected.. well, let's see they brag about things they have accomplished in the past. So without further ado, AL GORE DID TAKE INITIATIVE IN CREATING THE INTERNET.
He fathered the bill that changed that odd, government and acedemic research network known as Arpanet into the Internet where people from all around can use it for all different sorts of purposes.
So if he wrote the bill, does that not mean he didn't take initiative in creating the Internet? Would it not be unreasonable for him to bring up this fact while he was campaigning and trying to get people to see "Hey, look what I did!"?
So please, get with it and stop political trolling. Thanks!
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Did anyone forget about the DJ? All they do is push buttons!?
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers" -- Pablo Picasso
This is a good place to once again mention the most widely held misconceptions in the history of computing, that the ENIAC was the first digital computer and Eckert/Mauchly invented electronic digital computers. It is not true.
/
The first electronic digital computer was the ABC, the "Atanasoff/Berry Computer," constructed at Iowa State University in 1937.
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
ISU recently built a replica of the computer, you can see videos of it in operation here:
http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/
The story is a really interesting one, Sperry bought Eckert & Mauchly's patents on digital computing, Atanasoff sued for infringement and the court ruled that Atanasoff was the true inventor of digital computing and the Eckert/Mauchly/Sperry patents were invalid. It turned out that Mauchly visited Atanasoff, read his notes, and copied heavily from the ABC design when constructing ENIAC.
But my favorite part of the story is how Atanasoff came up with the idea in the first place. He told about how Iowa was a dry state at that time so everyone used to drive to Illinois for a drink. Atanasoff was notorious for his high speed driving, he said he liked to work out ideas in his head while zooming along backcountry roads. The idea came to him while driving, and he sketched it out on a napkin over a whiskey when he got to his favorite Illinois roadhouse bar.
Does anyone remember the whole Dot-Com Bubble?
I like how you present that as new information. As if we might all be going "yeeaaahhhh...I totally forgot about that!"
-Waldo Jaquith
"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters."
It might matter, but only to nerds.
Rewrite: "News and Stuff that matters to Nerds."
Why is the N in nerds capitalized?
Posted Anonymously: Karma Protection.
--
The geek shall inherit the Earth.
We constantly hear that "true" artificial intelligence is right around the corner. In the sixties, we thought it'd all be worked out by the seventies. During the seventies, it was the eighties that would rocket us into the future. Now, people are talking about computers with the computational capacity of the human brain by 2020. And yet we still don't have a program that can decisely beat the top chess players in the world 100% of the time. And chess isn't even the hardest game out there (from a computational standpoint).
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that in the year 2020, we're going to be claiming that true AI will be invented by 2030. And that assumption will be just as wrong as it ever was.
In his latest positioning statement on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT operating system, company chairman and CEO Bill Gates said NT is not a competitor of Unix, but in fact uses the same kernel. "I think [NT] will very quickly be the most popular form of Unix out there, because we do not allow licensees to change it around to try and get proprietary advantages on top of what was on there," Gates said at last week's PC Expo in New York. "NT is a form of Unix. It will not replace Unix, but I expect it to be the most popular form of Unix."
-- Communication Week (no 461, p.8, July 1993)
Remember, its called GNU/Linux, but pronounced "Linux".
Back in the late 80's I remember hearing a quite authoratative statement that modems would never be able to go faster than 9600bps.
Al Gore invented the algorithm, true or false.
You'd be suprised how many people circled true....
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
DOOM III will be released. .
Would all be rewritten before 12/31/1999
True, on 286/386 PC's. Then came the 486, and I had the joy of porting software. Fortunately for whoever replaced me, I did not assume that all future ints would be 32 bits.
Best Slashdot Co
"Computers will simplify your life"
or
"Computers will give you more leisure time."
Let's face the reality. As computers have become more commonplace everyone is expected to use it to do their job plus three other people's (who were downsized (and I guess got more leisure time)) jobs. In the end this leads to more stress, more exhaustion, more overtime, less realistic expectations. Etc. Etc. Etc. THAT, I think, is the biggest false assumption in computing.
A ex-coworker of mine once said, "we've done so much with so little for so long we're now qualified to do everything with nothing at all".
64 bits will be enough for everybody!
Nothing will get you to go out and buy a CD like some idiot assuming 128kbps MP3s are CD-quality.
ugh.
Like aircraft, digital computing has many parents, each of whom advanced the state of the art just a bit. Like the Wright Brothers, Eckert & Mauchly happened to be the ones who gave it that final push.
Like Langley, Atanasoff and fans were very sore losers.
Clear, Dark Skies
As much as people say (wish?) that Apple is dying, there are as many saying the Amiga's coming back!
Uh... yeah... I'll stick with my Macs...
We can save money by outsourcing to $LOW_INCOME_COUNTRY
or conversely almost any situation where:
We can substitute $SOLUTION_X, pay-cut/fire $OVERWORKED_ALREADY_UNDERPAID_STAFF, and save $MYSTICAL_AMOUNT without any impact in service
To be fair, the second item applies to much more than computing, and the first often can as well, but has hit IT heavily more recently.
Incorrect assumption. And I've got the pictures to prove it...
The fact that he denies ever saying it doesn't disprove that he did it any more than the fact that he's quoted as saying it proves that he did.
Regardless, I nominate Dell for building a 640MB limit into their X200 laptops. They'll take two memroy chips, and one can even be a 512MB chip. But the system maxes out at 640MB.
But that's OK. It makes it easier for me to push the less expensive but slightly larger Latitudes for the engineers - who *always* want more memory. Not that I blame them.
"Computers will lead to a leisure society where people have much more free time for personal pursuits and family"
- my grade 10 high school teacher19 years ago
ahh the slashdot troll...
Yes, but admit that you would miss it if it was gone.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
"I believe OS/2 is destined to be the most important operating system, and possibly program, of all time."
-- Bill Gates
November 1987
Foreword to OS/2 Programmer's Guide
by Ed Iacobucci
ISBN 0-07-881300-X
"Hi, I'm Al Gore, the inventor of the environment and first emperor of the moon." - Al Gore (futurama)
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
When I purchased my first PC, the salesman told me that I could never possibly fill its 80MB Hard drive. Whoops.
The RFC 822 protocol has an assumption in it that if someone wants to connect to my ISP's mail server and append some mail to my mailbox, that is always an okay thing.
It's not fair to place the onus of network authentication on one protocol, but RFC 822 is a very visible place where the problem occurred (spam).
More generally, a lot of Internet Protocols are written at a time when the community was small enough so that if someone misbehaved, it was not too hard to physically identify the perpetrator and cut off their network access. That assumption is no longer valid.
"A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least in theory) absurdly rich."
I looked on ESR's vanity page, and NO he doesn't have this clinker listed as one of his essays.
1. You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem (Edward's law) [everyone does this, consider the people who wrote MS Word]
e ationCommand()'?]
2. OO represents "real world"
[When did the real world start using 'CommandContainerFacade.getEventProducerFactoryCr
3. There is a magic product out there that solves all problems.
[yeah sure, maybe in million years!]
4. Methodology X is panacea. [see Usenet]
Also see Anti-patterns catalog for other examples.
-- Esa Pulkkinen
Back when we were around 100 or 200 mHz, I remember hearing that we could get faster processors (or maybe it was bus speeds) if only for the horrible FM radio interference it would create. There'd be no way to get FCC approval.
I don't remember any large frequency segments getting skipped. So either they were wrong or my interpretation was.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I know this is difficult when you're in the middle of a mindless rant, but you might want to try to get the facts before you embarrass yourself next time (even if you ARE posting as an AC).
Apple PAID for the rights to the stuff from Xerox. The facts are covered in numerous places if you'd like to trouble yourself to get a clue about this incident in computer history.
Much of the rest of what you have to say is too self-contradictory to be worth responding to.
I heard this jewel come from the podium at the first Apple developer's conference in an auditorium in one of the suburbs of Chicago, around 1980:
"Pascal is the language of choice for all future software development at Apple. If you want to write software for Apple computers, all of our development tools will support the Pascal language only. We both need one standard language to develop in and support, and we have chosen Pascal as the most popular and best language for development." (Or words to that effect)
This was said by one of the technical suits at Apple at the time who's name escapes me. The 'conference' was actually a 2-3 hour presentation on a Saturday afternoon. It was sparsely attended (maybe 200 people total), which only filled the auditorium to about 20% capacity. A personal highlight for me was running into Steve Jobs in the hallway and having a chance to shake his hand and chat with him briefly, which was no small feat considering he already had a squadron of bodyguards.
Obviuosly, the 'Pascal' proclamation was dropped within months. But it was encouraging to hear them acknowledge and attempt to support the needs of third-party developers.
IBM installing DOS from M$ instead of developing their own OS because the software was irrelevant! hardware rulez!
100MHz was the absolute limit for the speed of a CPU.
This isn't true? Does that mean I have to upgrade my 90 MHz Pentiums now?
-Tom Duff
Let's not forget that Cringely got caught for his long-time claim that he had a PhD and taught at Stanford.
-Waldo Jaquith
Your copy of the Snopes article is not what they posted. Anyone who actually read what you posted would have noted this glaring discontinuity.
I can appreciate the clarification on Gore's "inventing" the Internet. But I think Gore gets too high a mark here and I'd like to point out why I think so as a side note to a comment I read in Snopes' essay.
Snopes cites Vince Cerf saying "that as a Senator and now as Vice President, Gore has made it a point to be as well-informed as possible on technology and issues that surround it" but by 1999 (the copyright date on the Cerf page Snopes cites), Clinton/Gore had brought us the 1996 Telecommunications Act (which was a big step toward the media deregulation many groups across a wide political spectrum rail against today), the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act. So I come away thinking that Al Gore's legislative history deserves a more mixed review than Cerf (and Snopes) describe.
Digital Citizen
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" from the chairman of IBM in 1943, and of course 'Apple is dying...' (for the past 25 years)...
One small correction: Apple *IS* dying. Just vewwy vewwy slowly.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
...a real hottie named Elissabeth, ...and man she was HOT... but she told me once that IBM said MCA would be the top bus til the year 2000.
HAHAHAHAHA!!
I told her that it would be old hat by then.
-- I am. Therefore, I think!
3.5" floppies? They'll never be popular. They're smaller than 5.25 disks, so they obviously store less data. Maybe people with portable computers will use them.
Scope and visibility resolution has its own set of complexities and the pitfalls that go with them.
Another added problem is that many languages dynamically allocate variables that are not global as they come into scope. Statically allocated from a design perspective, but dynamic in actual execution. For high-intensity applications this can be a problem.
AFAIK Many video game developers, for whom performance is key, use global variables exclusively. More to keep track of, but less complexity and (every once in a while) better performance.
The Nasdaq will grow by 15% each year until the end of times.
"...but 5 years from now
everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5."
Andy Tanenbaum, Creator of Minix
30 Jan 92 13:44:34 GMT
Andy wrote this during the "Linux is Obsolete" debate between Linus Torvalds and himself back in '92.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Remember the "Internet appliances are the future" hype? No local applications or storage, just a bunch of dumb terminals connected to a paid service.
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
Ultimate Limits of Computers (Yeah, yeah, I know copy, paste, remove slashdot-inserted space, it works too, BUT...)
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"File trading is killing the Entertainment industry."
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Now that would be an "ask slashdot" that would be guaranteed to make some serious flames.
... and still quite active among low level users. The fact that "you can't use your phone line and PC at the same time."
"President Bush will be recognised by history as a fine president"
...than I when it comes to the 1984-esque development of society. President Bush was a terrible^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfine president, according to slashdot anno 2003. Just look at how much handwaving is being done around Iraq's past and how the US helped it come true, because they feared Iran.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Nobody can predict with any accuracy where computers will be in 20 years, these knowitall freaks make me sick.
Actually, 16K and 32K limits were mostly because memory was so expensive then. The real limit, before DOS (?) came up with a way around it, was 64K, since that was the highest number you could directly reference with a 16bit integer (2^16-1 = 65535). I worked on "top end" CP/M systems, which ran on a Z/80 processor, and long ints were 16 bit. Hence, the most memory we could put in them, regardless of cost, was 64K
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Slackware is dead! Yea, right. :)
Don't like hearing me say that, Amiga Inc.? Fine then, prove me wrong already, release the damn thing in finished form...
There's no wrong way, to eat a Rhesus...
...the one knob on the 'scope under my desk...
Dude, we don't WANT to know about that one!
I know that this isn't so much a misconception as a device limitation. But isn't it about time that even cheap computers handle order of operations?
Angleyne: You can't bend that girder - it's unbendable! Bender: Well I don't know anything about lifting, so that ju
Looks like Heinlein was paraphrasing one of Clarke's laws.
-cmh
"9600bps is the maximum speed able to be sent over copper phone lines."
"Computer games don't affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd all be running around in darkened rooms, munching on magic pills and listening to repetitive electronic music."
Kristian Wilson, Nintendo, Inc. 1989
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
For each of these incorrect assumptions, what was it that allowed people
to demonstrate these assumptions are wrong?
I've noticed that in the examples cited above, they are mostly assumptions
based on numerical limits (100mhz, 1GB and 5). The question then becomes
what was it that allowed us to workaround these "hard" limits?
-cmh
"Another twenty years" -The most common answer to the question when we will have a fully conscious AI for the last 50 years
EvilCON - Made Famous by
42!
Thanksgiving: This dumb broad whom I never met before found out that I do something with computers, so she chews my ear off for a half hour about how she bought a new video card and why wasn't it making her online gaming any faster, blah blah blah.
Another Time: My mom gave my home phone number to an aunt I hadn't heard from in about 20 years because she was having computer trouble. She calls and takes a few hours of my time. I haven't heard from her since.
Several Times: Mom has trouble with her laptop, calls me after I get off work, takes up a precious hour of my "free" time.
And so on, and so on, and so on.....
Moral: Don't let anyone know what you do for a living, say you're in frozen foods. If they do find out and demand support, politely inform them of your $50/hr support fee.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
is fair and accurate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
Paraphrased: "The internet is just a passing fad?" Back in '95 or so?
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Keep in mind that when TJ Watson said it, his company was *already* engaged in the sale of semi-programmable card-sorting and tabulating gear, of which they were building a LOT.
What he *meant* was "There's a market for 5 really high-end machines far and above the rest of the competition". The word "supercomputer" wouldn't be around for a few decades yet. And what do you know? Even today, there's a small handful of machines at the truly high end (currently, above 5 teraflops or so)
Not from computing but from telecomm, the assumption that one day we would all have ISDN lines to our homes and that 128 kbps would be more than enough bandwidth. Now there's talk about all telephone being VoIP phones within 10 years. I don't buy it.
The whole iridium fiasco: Thousands of people would carry brick-size phones and pay $$$ per minute.
G5 is the fastest desktop processor in the world--Apple
That's funny stuff
Parent gets modded offtopic but grandparent +3 Insightful? Moderators, do your worst, I guess...
diskspace...
this is some true fact, that wont be proven wrong til bill gates raises from the dead.
"Just think it, believe it, dream about it and it's real man."
St. Anselm said the same thing about God.
Unfotunately for him, the logic didn't work out. Heinlein, on the other hand, was probably pretty much right.
"I invented the internet"
An incorrect assumption made millions of times a day, I'll wager.
Some of you moderators are stupid. Check the time and ID# of my post vs. the ones that said the same thing -- I am not the redundant post.
Just because you didn't see my article first doesn't mean I'm redundant -- it means you are negligent in doling out negative moderation by not checking to see who submitted first.
To meta-moderators -- check any post labelled redundant against posts in that thread to verify who actually posted the idea first -- then meta-moderate accordingly.
Simple fact -- you can't be redundant if you said it first.
Now to be ontopic -- the most incorrect assumption in computing is that anyone is capable of being a Slashdot moderator.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
eat shit: bilions of flies cant be wrong
\m/
wasn't it always implied that computers would save peoples time?
Nope, that was just some BS line to justify research spending.
That being said, as with any tool, once you have a clear and defined purpose and once you know the ins and outs of your tool, you can do wonderous thigns with it. Home recording and "bedroom producers" have exploded thanks to a computer, a sound card, and some wicked software.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Need I say more?
"Where a computer like the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons."
And now I must be off, leaving the country, assuming another identity in the hope no /. will ever recognise me.
Cheers,
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Unless you want to believe in a self-aware intelligent computer (think Skynet in Terminator movies) who has derived how to mimic human behavior (a more difficult task than simply *being* a human, it's not like we're concious of everything we do), isn't that really the downfall of programming?
I think a computer of today would have more than sufficient processing power and storage space (particularly if it can do live Internet searches as an "extended memory") to imitate a human - there's just no capable program.
Think about how you eat an apple. No, I wasn't really thinking about the chewing process, you can express that. Express how your body knows how to decompose the apple into various nutrients, absorb those into the body, deliver them to where they're needed, the chemical processes used to transform them into energy for our bodies, and how the byproducts are returned to the waste system, probably filtered by the kidneys and whatnot. Maybe now you can, if you're a doctor of medicine, but otherwise not. And people live and eat apples just fine without knowing.
On the other hand, if you wanted to design an artifical digestive system, you'd need to know all that. In short, you'd have to know a damn lot. In the same way, humanity is pretty much stuck when it comes to describing how a human mind works. It doesn't help you at all that you see the brain in function every day, no more than you see a man chew and swallow an apple. There's simply no way to build artifical intelligence until we understand human intelligence. And when it comes to that, we're still way off.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The Atari Stacy predates the PowerBook 100's 1991 release by 2 years and it had a built-in trackball as it's pointer. The STBook had a "disc" type pointer and was released in 1990. So... not only was Atari first in giving us a laptop with a built-in pointer, it inadvertently gave us the first REAL Mac laptop since there was a Mac emulator cart for the ST that would also work on the STacy (I know the mac portable was introduced in 89 like the Stacy, but the Stacy is just better).
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Nobody will still be using this program after 1999.
You say
Yep, CPUs keep getting faster, byt high-end x86 processor speeds haven't anywhere near doubled in the last 18 months (and, yes, I know that Moore's law isn't really about speed). A year ago 2.4GHz was a common speed. And guess what...it still is. There was a jump to 2.8GHz--a 16% increase--but beyond that has been trouble. The few percent that got us up to 3GHz was more than balanced by a greater increase in power consumption. Ditto for 3.2GHz. And the 3.4GHz P4 has been delayed for just those reasons. So now we're going up a very steep slope, getting piddling gains for expensive tradeoffs.
Moore's law *will* continue, but the advances need to come from a different direction than the one we've been following. It's already hitting the point where you just don't *want* a high-end processor in your laptop, because you have to keep it running much slower anyway just to get some acceptable battery life. The 3.4GHz Prescott is arguably something you don't want in your *desktop* as it is.
Bottom line: Moore's law is no longer the most important concern in computing technology.
The assumption that any given user will not be a screaming idiot when presented with the option "press any key to continue".
Anyone recognize this ?
You could have taken your tuition money, invested in Microsoft Stock and now you'd be too wealthy to post on Slashdot
When buying my first one the saleman said, "go for the SX, the only reason that you would need a DX is if you were doing CAD." If only we still didn't need math coprocessors
How about: "The N-Gage will sell 6 million units by 2005."
"Derp de derp."
Subject says it all.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
The truely misquoted quote is One step for man, One giant leap for mankind. Do to an error in the transmission, it came out of wrong. The real quote was supposed to be One step for men, One giant leap for mankind.
One Microsoft Way - truly another bad assumption
I had just taken a class where we (once again) learned the prefixes: kilo-, mega-, giga-, etc.
In our computer lab, we had the "huge" 20MB hard drives which sparked up this conversation with the computer teacher.
Me: How long do you think before we have GIGAbyte hard drives?
Teacher: We will never have such a thing. It's totally impossible.
And he left it at that. I think he was trying to make me feel stupid in front of my other nerd friends. Even at that young age I knew he was wrong.
BTW, this was 1985 I believe. They probably already had gigabyte arrays of some sort back then.
He fathered the bill that changed that odd, government and acedemic research network known as Arpanet into the Internet where people from all around can use it for all different sorts of purposes.
In particular, his bill legalized using the Internet for commercial purposes - a big no-no up until then.
Unfortunately, this had the unintended side-effect of legalizing spam (or at least giving spammers some ground for their argument that their activities are legitimate commercial use of a service for which they've paid).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You sound like you've got some issues to work through.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
I don't need to backup, it has a RAID.
Doh!
Maybe she should have married Bill Doors instead. Much more attractive than French Gates.
How easily do you believe we are fooled?
"Bill Gates didn't say that, Achmed noted while surfing the web on his Commodore 64, in the Afghan mountains."
Reliable sources, yours are not. Mhmm.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
The real gains of the amd64 is the memory bandwidth and the obviation of the northbridge on the mother board.
I believe it was the president of DEC at the time that asked "Who would ever want a computer on his desk?"
Another bad assumption made, that my coworker just said, was "the Knapsack crypto algorithm is secure." The knapsack algorithm was a public/private key crypto system that was very elegant in the design and speed, but was eventually broken (on an apple ][, even).
saves money.
This is the most bullshit thing i've ever heard.
If you standardize on something shitty - like say Windows - you've broken the proverb - don't put your eggs all in one basket.
Plus, its usually only used an excuse by IT Nazi's to "get rid of Macs and Unix".
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
One day there will be a paperless office.
Computers do more to produce paper output than anything else in history.
Look at the amount of flyers, junk mail, that we now get.
WhatMeWorry
What hasn't happened yet is that humanity has not yet shocked itself with its own capacity for violence. A full scale nuclear exchange, with millions or billions dead, and more dying over the course of years, would probably do it (not that it would matter in the end, because at that point, it would be too late).
The most disturbing thing about all of this is that I can sit here and say this, already knowing what the likely outcome would be, and I can "feel" some of the possible suffering (ie, I can put myself into a "vision" of the aftermath and see the consequences). I am not a genious. Yet there are those out there who honestly think nuclear bombs are the answer for many questions - for some reason, they just don't understand the horror of these weapons, and more importantly, the horror of knowing it is mankind against mankind that came up with the need and uses of these weapons.
F'in apes slingin' poo, the lot of us...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
1. "That 100 GB hard drive is really 100GB."
2. "Duke Nukem Forever will be released 'Soon' "
3. "I just poured hot grits down my pants"
4. This item left blank on purpose.
5. "The 'New Economy' is for real and here to stay"
640 bytes should be enough for anyone!
Pac-man ran fine... :-)
My father stays with M$ and everytime he buys a new PC, it goes slower thanks to the M$ that is able to program operating systems in such a way that you will need in 2 years time a 10GHz pc to do word processing. On the other hand, who could ever imagine that all the C64's I bought for .50 Euro per piece are now in use as a webserver ? Maybe my father will ask me in 2010 to borrow my Linux C64 to do wordprocessing because his 10Ghz PC has become too slow.
I remember that computing was supposed to make our lives paperless. I never had so many stacks of paper sitting around before I got a computer.
SharkJumper
Gawd, did everyone forget that it was an assumption not too long ago that if you put an ad on tv with any word ending in .com that you would be rich?
In the O'Reilly book "Open Sources", ESR made some claims in the last paragraph of his article. One of them was "Win2K will be dead on arrival when it ships" implying that it will die a painful death.
Well, the CDC Cyber 205 was doing 800 MHz in the early 80's.
As noted elsewhere, nobody, including Bill Gates, ever said anything about 640K being enough.
The source of the quote was Steve Jobs, questioning Steve Wozniak's suggestion to build the "Language Card", the 16K memory card that took the Apple II/II Plus from 48K to 64K.
Jobs' actual words were, "Why would anyone ever need more than 48K?" Not 64K, as assumed by the first misquoters, based on the maximum direct addressability of 8 bit processors, and not 640K as assumed by those who decided to misattribute the quote altogether.
Jobs was always questioning Woz's technically oriented decisions, and frequently making the opposite decision when he had the power to do so. For example, he argued that there was no reason to build color into the Apple II. Woz did it anyway. When Jobs got the chance to make a similar decision, he went against Woz's reasoning, and even against the advice of others under him when making them. Hence, the original Macs, and several versions after, were strictly monochrome.
I'd like to think Jobs learned his lesson after ignoring someone's advice not to hire "some soda pop selling suit" and losing control of his company for 10 years. But I could be wrong.
Anyway, that's what I recall from my old "SoftTalk" and "The Road Apple" days.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
That's one I have been making for 10+ years and now Win64 comes along and violates it for no apparent reason as far as I can tell... Sigh, now I have to go and fix all my sloppy code...
Kind of like "Groupwise".
"Go ahead and put in <inelegent crufty shortcut>, nobody will be using this program in a few years anyway."
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
The best technology will win in the marketplace.
And next year, we're going to do 3-D calculations.
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
I'm reminded of an episode of "King of the Hill" where Hank tells Bobby not to play "lawyer ball." You make sense, but in a lawyer kind of way. :)
I think most people have issue with the word "create." It was created by the tech folks living in the underground labs (yes, I'm exaggerating). Gore did play a large role in the opening of the internet and helping it become what it is, but his word choice implies he was like Dr. Frankenstein to the monster.
Look at it this way, it's like your boss telling you to write some code and then taking credit for it, telling others that he created the new app that everyone loves. I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate that, and that's why people have a beef with this saying.
In some ways, it's worse because he is a politician, who is supposed to be an intelligent, capable speaker. And, yes, before the hyper-liberals start pointing out all of GWB's verbal boners, it happens to virtually all politicians.
Here are some of Al Gore's other screw-ups:
"A zebra does not change its spots." - Al Gore, attacking President George Bush in 1992.
(Sources: The Toronto Sun, 11/19/95; May 13th page of the "365 stupidest things ever said, 1999 Calendar." ALL quotes from this calendar are from a book called "The 700 Stupidest Things Ever Said") The book and calendar are by a brother and sister team called Ross and Kathryn Petras. The original book "The 776 Stupidest things ever said" was printed in March 1993, and the calendar was printed August 1998.)
http://www.gargaro.com/algore.html
Repeat after me, ALL public speakers goof from time to time. Why not try to treat them on equal footing rather than attack those who have different political views than you, and ignoring the mistakes of those you share political views with? (note: this is a general comment, not directed at you in particular)
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
To claim the commercialisation of the Internet was bad because of spam is akin to claiming the building of Interstate Highways was bad because it enabled drink driving at high speed.
Microsoft/Dell are leaders in innovation...
There was a link way up there, if you would have read it before posting it would lead you to an interview with Gates. Here is his response on hardware taken from Interview with Bill Gates
BG: Microsoft was playing a much broader role[laughs] than just doing software for this machine. I mean whether it is the keyboard, the character set, the graphics adapter, or even the memory layouts. I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that. That is why they talk about the 640K limit. It is actually a limit, not of the software, in any way, shape, or form, it is the limit of the microprocessor. That thing generates addresses, 20-bits addresses, that only can address a megabyte of memory. And, therefore, all the applications are tied to that limit. It was ten times what we had before. But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within -- oh five or six years people were complaining.
(emphasis added for clarity)
Occasionally, I do RTFA in advance of posting!
"If you can't do it in 48K, it's not worth doing"
I just hope that people are using the network
At 5 kilobytes per second? Not everybody lives in an area where affordable broadband is offered, and very few people can afford to move house for just that reason.
Thanks for your post. I get tired of the Al Gore joke, too. The "Internet" before Gore was DARPA's Advanced Research Projects Administration Net. DARPA is an organization of the U.S. government that researches more efficient ways of killing people and destroying their property. The post-Gore Internet is a force for good in the world.
Microsoft is dying. The nail is in their coffin. It's amusing, I can read these comments back probably to the 80s where people bitched about DOS and BASIC. They were especially prevalent right before that "Chicago" vaporware was released with the name Windows 95. And it continues in the hearts and minds of those on the smaller end of the marketshare.
It actually irks me to see everyone call "Moore's Law" a "law" and consider it as such. Isn't it really more a trend that has, thus far, continued and held true? When I think of laws, I think of gravity, themodynamics, etc. Things which will never fail. And if they do, we're majorly screwed. :)
If a new faster computer doesn't come out, then I guess I just have to play the newest FPS at a slightly lower frame-rate... I'd say that most people would just shrug their shoulders and not care too much if/when Moore's Law doesn't hold. Not a big deal.
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
You could beat them to death with the facts and they will still cling to their bias. Who in the fuck voted them authorities on anything? Must be nice to be a legend in one's own mind, then get the whole fucking internet to believe you. There is more bullshit in their site than in a Kansas City Stockyard. But, I guess they are smarter than you, for you believe them! I guess you worship at the altar of Mickelson...
Between CDR, wifi, internet and the new cheap usb jump drives I don't see the need to put a floppy drive in a machine any more.
What about brain-damaged CD recording software that, when making an El Torito boot CD, requires that a floppy drive exist on the machine because it can't use a 1440 KiB floppy image instead <cough>bundled Roxio</cough>? Not everybody has $100 for Nero. Heck, not everybody can afford a CD recorder, and some of those who can afford a CD recorder cannot afford the larger case that holds the extra drive bay that adding a CD recorder requires.
Well, it turns out that this dot-com myth is somewhat wrong and the growth is not so much stronger than radio and TV.
Very interesting stuff, bumped into it on Usenet.
Melius mori in libertate quam vivere in servitute.
...that Gates is so insecure he decided to marry MS's dumbest employee. Microsoft Bob? You have to be kidding.
Or, did MS only release that shit because she was already knobbing the boss? So hard to tell.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
They are number 1 because they have the best product.
They are number 1 because they serve the customer's best.
Windows is the only operating system worth using.
Internet Explorer is the best browser for the Web.
But my A-1 one favorite canard in this industry is...
Microsoft reputition for bad security is undeserved.
But I imagine that I am preaching to the choir.
Most of these assumptions never happened in the first place! This article got pulled out of thin air. For instance:
Not! For the speed of a cpu with one particular technology, sure. Which is true; each technology has limits and needs to be replaced with a better technology.
Same with disk sizes. But NO ONE who had even the tiniest clue thought that 100Mhz and 1GB were limits established by physics.
And the "world market of 5 computers" (A) was just one person, (B) has been claimed to have been only an accurate estimate for the coming year, (C) has been discussed to death.
As for the coming death of Apple, BSD, and Unix in general, these things have been predicted endlessly by self-proclaimed marketing pundits who typically don't know anything about anything.
This article is complete crap. And as for its question:
They haven't happened yet. Strong AI will eventually be my favorite.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
I'm learning to hate the damned things as much as I used to love them. Sure they increase productive, allow incredible scientific breakthroughs, blah blah blah... But in the long run all it seems to be good for is generating more stuff I don't need to overcomplicate my life!
I remember reading that it now takes NASA substantially more man-hours to do the same tasks now than before computers were used for design/CAD work. If I remember correctly, it took engineers roughly half the amount of time to design a rocket like the Saturn V than it would today using CAD (Computer Aided Design)! Also, much more paper is used now then back then when all of the drafting was hand-drawn, with typewriters used for everything else. I think they also tended to make fewer mistakes because they were more closely involved in the numbers, not using a potentially buggy black box to help them out.
My favorite was that Y2K was going to be the end of civilization as we knew it, causing a major collapse in infrastructure. Whoops.
I'm posting this right now from inside a twm-managed desktop. Of course, it's a thoroughly customized configuration, but it's still twm.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
This many posts and no one has dropped the J word.
When I was graduating high school it seemed the conventional wisdom was "In the future, everything will run on java anyway"
This was just about the time I was getting into computers heavily, and I remember you couldn't buy a computer mag without having JAVA somewhere on the cover.
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
"Why would anyone want to leave Windows?", in response to a question as to why there was no way to exit Windows and return to DOS.
What you reap is what you sow
telnet tinyurl.com 80 /xr2v HTTP/1.1
w ers.gif
w ers.gif
GET
HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Date: Thu, 04 Dec 2003 23:07:10 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.29 (Unix) PHP/4.3.4 mod_perl/1.29 mod_auth_pam/1.1.1 mod_ssl/
2.8.16 OpenSSL/0.9.6l
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.3.4
X-abuse: Harvesting TinyURLs is not tolerated. It overloads our servers and is considered theft of service.
Location: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/spring/clip/flo
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html
43
Location: http://www.kidsdomain.com/holiday/spring/clip/flo
0
Yeah, right Zealots.
is the best beer because so many people drink it.
Apparntly I can buy some herbs that'll add 3 inches length to my penis, and easily eliminate all my bad debt, and get any medication I want at a deep discount without a prescription, and get all the pay-for-view cable channels without paying, and lose weight without diet or excersize, and make thousands of dollars every week without doing any real work, and simply order a diploma for any degree I want, and get my share of millions of dollars left in an abandoned Nigerian bank account, and get a great deal on magician show supplies!
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
Windows 1.0 - "Yes! This new version of Windows is a preemptive multitasker!"
Windows 3.0 - "Yes! This new version of Windows is a preemptive multithreaded multitasker!"
Windows 3.1 - "Yes! This new version of Windows is a preemptive multithreaded multitasker!"
Windows 3.11 - "Yes! This new version of Windows is a preemptive 32bit multithreaded multitasker!"
Windows 95 - "Yes! This new version of Windows is a preemptive multithreaded multitasker!"
Windows 95OSR2 - "Yes! This new version of Windows is a preemptive multithreaded multitasker!"
Windows 98 - "Yes! This new version of Windows is a FASTER preemptive multithreaded multitasker!"
Windows 98SE - "Yes! This new version of Windows is a FASTER preemptive multithreaded multitasker!"
Windows ME - "Yes! This new version of Windows is a FASTER preemptive multithreaded multitasker!"
NT 3.5 - "Yes! This new version is rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
NT 4 - "Yes! This new version is rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
NT 4 SP1 - "Yes! This new version is rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
NT 4 SP3 - "Yes! This new version is rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
NT 4 SP5 - "Yes! This new version is rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
NT 4 SP6 - "Yes! This new version is rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
NT 4 SP6A - "Yes! This new version is rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
NT 4 SP6ASRP - "Yes! This new version is rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
2K - "Yes! This new version is FASTER! Rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
XP - "Yes! This new version is FASTER! Rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
AS2k2 - "Yes! This new version is FASTER! Rock solid stable, and rock solid secure!"
Longhorn - "Yes! This new version is Trustworthy(tm)!"
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I was expecting something horrible. I tensely held the cursor over the stop button, and then it was this hot cheerleader chick. Very nice. Using a modem has it's advantages (slow loading slashdot blind links).
Does that mean when I download the kernel from kernel.org that kernel.org is uploading the kernel to my machine, or do the terms only apply to the instigator of the transaction? Then again, in that sense, I've never actually had someone upload data to my box without my knowledge or sanction, since mozilla blocks all those recalcitrant popups.
If he had said, "I took the initiative in expanding the Internet, and in making it publicly available", then no one would be likely to quibble.
That is NOT what he said.
Accept the fact that he lied by exaggerating (beyond all reason). You only make yourself look completely silly.
Arrr!
This is OT, but I recently found out that the reason the fires in the Trade Towers were so enormous were because of all of the paper in the buildings. In fact, all of the jet fuel burned off within a few minutes. If the buildings hadn't been stuffed with combustible materials (esp. paper), the fires almost certainly could have been brought quickly under control, saving many, many lives (although the buildings still probably would have been torn down later at great expense).
I still refuse to use a printer at home!
Apple has done a good job of going into a death spiral a couple of times. Then they come back, go back down. There is a difference between a company starting to die and being dead. Apple has gone through a couple of cycles that, if uninterrupted, would have resulted in inevitable death.
Now any one who claimed that Apple was inevatably going to die in those cases was wrong, but claiming that they were dying at the time is not wrong. If a person has advanced cancer, it isn't wrong to claim they are dying. If medical science, a miracle, or something else later rids them of that and lets them live, you weren't wrong at the time that they were dying.
Some said 3d interfaces were the future. We'd all be using them in the year 2000.
Like flying cars, it was wrong on so many levels.
Notice he said "first to ... include a GUI", he never said Apple invented it.
Although, Apple DID improve on it...
And Apple DID actually ship a product that had a GUI...
But I guess you were too busy pointing out HIS mindless rant to notice such things.
"Upload/download also refers to who is initiating the action."
:-)
This is the way I've always used the terms:
download: v. To receive data from another computer/system.
upload: v. To send data to another computer/system.
That definition is easily understood and less ambiguous.
"But if you're downloading data from a site, the site is not also uploading that data to you."
I disagree. A "download" is always paired with an "upload". One end of the transfer has to call a program (subroutine, whatever) which sends the data, and the other end has to call a program which receives it. You have to have both. Every action has an equal but opposite reaction. Call it "Dragonhawk's First Law of Data Transmission".
"The action exists at only one end of the operation, at the initiator of the action."
Trying to talk about who "initiated" the transfer can get murky. For example: The ZModem file transfer protocol can automatically signal the other end to start a transfer. This was typically used by interactive menu systems connected to terminal emulators -- BBSes and PCs, to use the popular terms. The user, at the PC, hits a key to select a file. The BBS gets that keystroke, and sends the signal to start the transfer. The BBS is sending and the PC is receiving, but who really initiated that transfer? The BBS software because it sent the signal? Or the user, because he hit the button? What about if the BBS has some kind of timed event to automatically send a file at a given time? What if the PC does that in a script?
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
...it's taught by that old guy, he can't possibly know anything about modern networks! ...ha.
...the quality of computer hardware will only get better, and that prices will continue to fall, until (following that theory to the extreme) you're being paid to take home top-rate hardware.
That's when I keep hearing horror stories about thing like huge (capacity) hard drives that barely last a year, or that expire shortly after their warranties do.
It's true with computers, it's true with test equipment, it's true with cars, consumer electronics, food, and anything else that can be bought, sold, rented, leased, traded, or stolen:
YOU GETS WHAT YOU PAYS FOR.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
I always thought this would turn out to be true. But for some reason I'm starting to change my mind:
That that Duke Nukem Forever, in fact, will one day be released.
--
George
Even given this, the limit of analog modems across standard phone lines (from one analog line to another) is 33.6k (uncompressed). This is very close to the theoretical limits you can squeeze across a carrier with a phone line's properties.
56k modems, however, pull more trickery. They only work when the ISP has incoming digital lines, and IIRC they somehow disable the line filters that normally limit maximum bandwidth (in the analog signal sense) on a phone line to allow more data to be transferred. 56k modems do actually transmit 56,000 (or, in practice, more like 48,000 or 50,000) uncompressed bits per second.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Moore's Law can't continue to hold out, period. That's because Moore's Law refers to silicon transistors, and you can't make a transistor with a feature that is less than one silicon atom thick.
Intel and IBM both have demonstrated 65 nm experimental processes, though for volume production, 130 nm is the current state of the art. There are only eight more doublings left until the line width is less than the diameter of an atom (the diameter of a silicon atom is about a third of a nanometer). One doubling every two years means it's all over in 16.
Now, we could possibly continue to increase circuit density for a long time after that by going to 3-D, but we would no longer be in the domain of Moore's Law: we'd be adding more transistors but they wouldn't be getting any smaller.
Frink:
"I predict that within 100 years computers will grow so large that they will to put into interstellar cubes, which I call Frinkagons."
My first post. Bye.
People alwasy tell me that 120 GIG or 300 GIG will be too much to fill up. What if i wanted to watch the third episode of season 3 of the simpsons, do i have to load it in via a cd or dvd? I hate physically placing a cd or dvd in the slot and waiting for it to be read? No matter how fast or how much space you have, you will alwasy want more. Don't people know that by now? How come games come on multiple cd's and DVD movies usually have 1 disc for a movie, and one for the extra's. Can't they put them both on one disk? Oh well, it will be better in the future.
Mark
AMD couldn't have hoped for a better present from it's greatest rival. They have started building a new factory in Dresden (Fab 36) in anticipation of the increased demand of Opterons and Athlon64s.
The desktops we will be buying in 2005 (2004?) will be 64-bit and it seams they won't be "intel inside".
Yeah, OT... but I always loved the story about how people generally assumed it wasn't humanly possible to run a mile in under 4 minutes until Roget Bannister did it in '56, in 15mph crosswinds no less.
He was an Oxford med student at the time, and used his med school training to test and optimize his training techniques.
Nowadays, of course, there are high schoolers running sub-four miles. Madness.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
I remember some news stories from '95 or so, back when the Web was really taking off. Bill Gates made an announcement that Microsoft would never have an Internet division, because "the Internet is like air, it permeates through all our divisions and products," or something like that.
Then, some months or a year later, Microsoft formed an Internet division. "Air is good," Gates announced, "we like air."
I don't recall the exact quote, and I can no longer find the articles, so if anyone else has a better recollection of this, please speak up!
I think the worst assumption in computing is that it's inherently complicated to use a computer from an end-user's point of view. It shouldn't be.
If software programmers and electrical engineers designed products better and eliminated complications, their experience would be better in general. Advanced and complicated settings, if they're needed, should be hidden as must as possible from beginning and novice computer users that either don't know how to set them correctly, are simply intimidated by them.
Here's an example: channel settings in WiFi. If WiFi hopped frequencies automatically, like Bluetooth, there would be one less complication involved with WiFi and finding a clear channel in noisy environments.
One of the largest costs in running a business involved with computing is the cost of customer support. Eliminate potential problems and fewer calls to tech support take place... thus saving money.
Elimination of unneeded complications should be a priority when designing products for mass-use.
one of the more recent outcries: macromedia flash is dying. an outcry i heard from a french coworker a few years back: the internet is dying.
"I'm the first one to post a comment about that."
Sorry, kept trying to post the proof of P = NP here but /. lameness filters won't let me.
;-)
Oh well, I'll leave the proof as an exercise for the reader...
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
Lets see what he really says
"...During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the internet.."
I have it recorded for all posterity.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
"DOS addresses only 1 Megabyte of RAM because we cannot imagine any applications needing more."
- Microsoft on the development of DOS, 1980.
"Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM which is more than any application will ever need".
- Microsoft on the development of Windows NT, 1992.
Yah. Total agreement with the parent, especially on XML/OOP/COBOL.
"There is no silver bullet", as Fred Brooks says.
Which gives me an opportunity to plug one of my favorite non-fiction books. Anyone who is interested in computer engineering or history and has not read Fred Brooks's classic The Mythical Man-Month should do so as soon as possible. I am continually amazed that most of the problems we're facing today in 2003 are the same ones early software engineers were facing in 1955. If anything, things have gotten worse, not better.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Not to give my age away but I distinctly remember Jerry Pournelle writing in Byte magazine some time way back when disks were still floppy saying 640K and 5Mb of hard disk was all anyone could ever use. Being wrong was kind of a specialty of his.
Science fiction for grown-ups...
used to be the only baud the phone company would guarantee you could get with a modem by their line quality standards.
Dunno if this is still true.
-
I'm in the compiler,languages and tools business, and I've heard a few myself.
- speed doesn't matter with todays computers. (one shouldn't be overfocussed on speed, but totally neglecting it is also wrong)
- garbage collection doesn't affect speed. (it does, and also mem-footprint. If it is a problem depends on the app)
- scripting languages are in speed near to compiled languages (C, C++, Delphi were named in this discussion), or even faster due to runtime optimizing
Well, my computer weighs less than 1/2 ton and has less than 1000 vaccum tubes. In fact, all my computers put together weigh less than 1/2 ton and have less than 1000 vaccum tubes (3 currently, 5 total owned). With the advent of flat panel displays, the number of tubes is not likely to increase much.
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
in the form of Cinerella. But it is even less intuitive to a beginner than Premier, which is a far cry from the ease-of-use of iMovie or what have you.
That being said, Cinerella is a BEAST. And free. It's a shame it's not getting the attention it deserves.
There is also gstreamer + transcode, and LiVES (which is rough around the edges but has the right idea), and the slick JahShaka.
Fuck Beta. Fuck Dice
I have been arguing this for years.
The education establishment basically argues "We need computers so the kids can learn"
Kids learned before computers. Computers can assist in learning, but they are not the end all be all of learning. I would be willing to bet that most computers in US schools are used the same as the one in my son's classroom, as a reward for good behavior.
The other big arguement is that "Every job requires at least a basic famialiarity with computers"
What most jobs require is an open mind and a desire to learn. If someone takes a typing class using a $99 typewriter, understands how a letter should look, how to make a letter look like should, and how to type, they can't figure out the basics of most word processors with just a short training period?
We are educating a generation of children who can't figure out a manual typewriter, a card catalog, can't do math without a calculator.
One of my old college professors is a Chemical Engineer. To this day, he makes triple his salary in consulting fees by verifying by hand the results that computers turn out. If there aren't people who know how to do complex mathematics by hand, how do we verify the results given by a computer are accurate?
In direct contradiction to Brooks' law, managers still believe that adding more programmers to a late project will ensure that it meets its deadline.
First PDA.
Heck, let's not forget iTunes. Apple did have few bad years there, but it's back.
No, it's closer to being akin to complaining about all the billboards and noisy truck traffic that Interstates brought through previously residential neighborhoods.
Program Intellivision!
For years, Bubble Memory was *the* hot future technology. Everyone talked about it, everyone wrote about it, and yet I don't think anyone ever actually bought it.
:-)
The fundamental idea, from what I recall, was creating tiny bubbles in a viscous fluid, and then rotating the fluid around and reading the bubbles again. I think the read process destroyed the bubble, and the bubbles drifted over time into the wrong places, so the whole media had to be constantly rotated, read, and recreated. (which actually isn't too much different from DRAM, which constantly leaks charge and must be refreshed with new current.)
This sounds absolutely ridiculous now, but I can't tell you how many breathless articles I read about how bubble memory would offer the ability to store *megabytes* in tiny devices, no bigger than a small refrigerator. (Okay, okay, I'm exaggerating a bit there, mostly because I don't remember size clearly. I think the pictures showed devices about the size of a 15" monitor, but I'm really not sure anymore. )
Being young and not knowing any better, I read all the articles and waited impatiently for these huge storage devices to appear. I'm confused about timeframes and would have to research to be sure, but I think what eventually killed off the idea of bubble memory was the first hard disks.... the Winchester drives.
Just think...ten megabytes in under a cubic foot of space!
what moderator scored this offtopic? What rot!
Want to put all of that power to use? Folding is a great thing Stanford is doing to help with cancer research. It uses spare CPU cycles on your computer, and you probably won't even notice that it's running.
hey!
According to the article:
An aside - did you know you can ask him anything you want at: askbill@microsoft.com
What do you get when you write to killbill@microsoft.com?
fs
"Mankind has reached it's limits of technology."
- Walter Cronkite talking about the F101.
I actually got hit on while buying my dual 2.0GHz G5. As it was my first Mac following a long series of PC's, my first thought was that things really are different in the Mac world. Now, had she been attractive, there'd be more story to tell, but as it is, I think she was just drooling over the box anyway. -Hope
My pointer isn't null!! or Who would pass a string over 1000 characters?
When I see kids being hooked up to machines without human contact or supervision I feel very sorry for them.
Computers were interesting to my generation because we *did not* have them at school ( thats not exactly true we had 2 or 3 - but they were novelties)
Because they were different and interesting I self studied them, a fortunate twist of fate, however the rest of my education was traditional - maths on a blackboard, English in the Library, Cadets and PE out on the field.
Kids today, who would have grown up geeks in my generation, are turned off computers because they are the norm. While everybody else sits their fat ass in front of them 18 hours a day creative and intelligent kid will actually want very little to do with them.
ironically now many people actually want to mod LCDs into their machines...
When two modems are connected, as in BBS, and the caller is downloading, why does the recievers' modems' UPLOAD light flash? ARGH your so WRONG I can't HANDLE it.
"micro" and "soft".
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
How about the belief that a computer science degree is a reasonable requirement for a job involving tech support, network installation, administration, or PC repair?
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
The assumption that Linux is secure seems to be a myth.
Interesting that you should mention that. Once, I looked at an old Hitachi laptop, optimized for graphics speed back in the bad old days. In terms of video response, it actually seemed faster than the latest greatest Sony Viao.
Now, I've got to admit that there is no objective measure here without getting up a lot of money for some retro-computing, but the way things seemed in the store that day, the simpler code in the earlier windows system, although nowhere near as as powerful, as the new system, still provided video-response that smoked the newer one.
I'd love to see that kind of response in the computers I find myself using now.
As far as Apple is concerned. Personally, I don't like them for purely personal reasons. I don't think anyone else should dislike them (I don't care) but I'm underimpressed with them. Be that as it may, Apple's eye candy is nice, but can you really call it Apple's?
Apple grabbed a version of BSD and slapped a proprietary GUI on it. It's just an interface, and it doesn't seem to scream onto the screen any more than Windows does.
Yes, it does operate reliably, but the most surprising thing about that is how, in the midst of an amazing technological boom, our expectations have been so skewed by marketing, customer loyalty and compu-ignorance, that we think a company's rectifying problems of N+1 years duration to do what had been par for the course in UNIX is somehow an achievement that goes above and beyond the call of duty.
To mail me, remove the 'mailno' from my email addy.
"Yeah. It smells, too..."
Remember "push technology" circa 1999? "Active Channels" and "NetCaster" were supposed to revolutionize the Internet. I hated the silly "channels" bar that popped up by default in Windows after IE 4 was installed. Yeah, Microsoft, instead of searching the Web for things I'm interested in, I want you to "push" your sponsors' lame content at me. Well, at least they caught on quickly and dropped it.
For me this was another example of consumers ruling the marketplace with an iron fist. You can't get us to drive Edsels, drink New Coke, or subscribe to Active Channels, no matter how much money you have.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
All your dll's are belong to us.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
My prediction is that 90% of the posts will be smarmy comments about Gates "640k" comment.
You can purchase a CD player for less than the price of a music CD today...
man rtfm
UNIX versus VMS
"One of the questions that comes up all the time is: How enthusiastic is our support for UNIX?
Unix was written on our machines and for our machines many years ago. Today, much of UNIX being done is done on our machines. Ten percent of our VAXs are going for UNIX use. UNIX is a simple language, easy to understand, easy to get started with. It's great for students, great for somewhat casual users, and it's great for interchanging programs between different machines. And so, because of its popularity in these markets, we support it. We have good UNIX on VAX and good UNIX on PDP-11s.
It is our belief, however, that serious professional users will run out of things they can do with UNIX. They'll want a real system and will end up doing VMS when they get to be serious about programming.
With UNIX, if you're looking for something, you can easily and quickly check that small manual and find out that it's not there. With VMS, no matter what you look for -- it's literally a five-foot shelf of documentation -- if you look long enough it's there. That's the difference -- the beauty of UNIX is it's simple; and the beauty of VMS is that it's all there."
-- Ken Olsen, President of DEC, 1984
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
IMHO, that's worst assumption one could ever make ...
The Raven
Personally, I haven't needed a lawyer, but I want to be able to get a really good one when I need one (and I don't want to be locked up for a couple of years in a third world country without access to one).
- Kristin Wilson, Nintendo, Inc., 1989.
Do you know what language the first several releases of Mac OS were written in?
Hint: Professor Wirth was very happy with their choice.
Clear, Dark Skies
The assumption:
"Protocol XYZ specifies this data sent to our software will only be 32k. If the other program sends more, it's their bug!"
The Result
I get it! I GET IT! Zarro Boogs found!
My favorite myth was that all Mac users were gay....wait a minute... ok, so it wasn't a myth.
From Communication Week (no 461, p.8) in the Summer of 1993:
In his latest positioning statement on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT operating system, company chairman and CEO Bill Gates said NT is not a competitor of Unix, but in fact uses the same kernel. "I think [NT] will very quickly be the
most popular form of Unix out there, because we do not allow licensees to change it around to try and get proprietary advantages on top of what was on there," Gates said at last week's PC Expo in New York. "NT is a form of Unix. It will
not replace Unix, but I expect it to be the most popular form of Unix."
The grandparent's But if you're downloading data from a site, the site is not also uploading that data to you. The action exists at only one end of the operation, at the initiator of the action is correct.
Continuing haystor's beer analogy, the remote machine is called a server.
Your machine requests something from a stationary location. That is a pull operation, and is called "downloading", (such as requestnig a drink and being given a beer.)
Your machine sends something of yours to the stationary location. That is a push operation, and is called "uploading", (such as giving money to the bartender.)
The remote machine responds to each request. It is "serving", (such as the bartender taking requests and returning drinks, also known as serving.)
---
Another poster suggested that the definition has to do with the size of the machines, but this is obviously incorrect. If a 300lb man gets a beer from a midget bartender, the man is still doing the requesting and the bartender is still serving.
Or think about P2P networks. The machines can be considered to be equivalent, but a computer with a 2GB hard drive and only 10 files still serves those files to the computer with a 200GB hard drive and millions of files. The latter computer is doing the requesting and "downloading".
The confusion may be because your ISP is limiting your upstream or "upload" bandwidth, which is used for the transaction whether you are serving (also known as sharing) or uploading (also known as posting) the files, even though that bandwidth is also used for requesting. English is great; the last sentence had five words for the process where bits move from your computer to another.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Quite simply, any Japanese businessman that isn't promoted to management within 3 to 5 years is considered a failure by their family. This virtually guarantees that all software in Japan is written by either junior programmers or incompetent employees. I've been writing software for 20 years and I'm still learning new things. India has a simular problem: when you go from having 10 thousand programmers to 10 million programmers in a few years, that means 99.99% of the software is written by... inexperienced programmers. So quality suffers, and it's not really cost effective to ship important work over there RIGHT NOW. However, 10 or 20 years from now, they should have some of the best programmers in the world; then it will REALLY make sense to send work offshore. Right now, we're basically subsidizing the training of Indian employees to replace us...
Wow, you must have struck a nerve... How can you get modded Troll when the subject is incorrect assumptions?
I'm so suprised no one said: "Duke Nukem will be out in time for Christmas."
Of course, I expected someone to say something about "closed source software is more secure" or windows has 5 9's of uptime.
Karma Clown
He had to be the worst, but thankfully, with the demise of Byte, nobody has to read his columns any more. They were just frightening. He would always describe these stupid problems he had that even my semi-computer-illiterate mom could figure out. And he never seemed to learn. Even after 10+ years of using a computer.
goatse.cx is a cool webpage.
Just five more minutes.
"I just found a bug in the compiler!"
Uh huh. They forgot to implement the do-what-I-meant feature.
Caution: Do not look into laser beam with remaining eye.
"Computer games make kids more violent". Still a hotly-contested issue...
qntm.org
Windows NT will be "a better Unix than Unix"
- Bill Gates
Did anyone ever actually use the POSIX API under Windows NT?
1. Quantum computing is not possible
I think (or I have a hunch) that this "quantum computing is not possible" will be proven to be at least partially wrong. At least, I don't think that we will be stuck with a binary "load and store" (I believe that is what they are called) machines. Computers will change in ways that are going to highlight the delicate balance and fragile characteristics of life itself, while making our bodies more useful - not in a borg sense, but in a sense that computers will become easier to use, or more peripheral, perhaps even orthogonal to the process of going about your daily activities.
2. "I'm going to get into computers"
"I'm going to get into computers" as a worthwhile career goal. Working in the computer industry is going to (has) become increasingly more challenging, and is going to (does) require increasingly complex skillsets as computer science and real-world computer science applications evolve. The industry as a whole will continue to become more important in our daily lives, but the skill required will also increase exponentially. "Computers" will no longer represent a middle ground between the corporate, scientific, and research worlds and the unskilled labor workforce.
the worst assumption many of us are making is that humans are not themselves computers. ...it's not just an assumption. There's some very lively argument over it. Penrose tends to the belief there are some non-computational processes that in the universe and they may underly consciousness.
I'll point out here that I know that some of his arguments aren't watertight and the discussion is definitely in progress -- he knows this, as is evidenced by quotes like this from the article: "With apparently genuine humility, Penrose emphasizes that these ideas should not be called theories yet: be prefers the word 'suggestions.'" But they're as well supported as any other speculations about the nature of consciousness.
Tweet, tweet.
Eh, lets see:
-- In five years, everybody will be using fourth-generation languages (our 4GL, etc) for everything except the lowest level of hardware support.
-- You wont need programmers at all if you use our programmerless rule development interface. (See, NetExpert 8-)
Basically, the any-idiot "enabling" technologies that were supposed to do away with all forms of having to know how a computer works.
[Includes "death" of C and C++, Java, Perl, etc in favor of Power-Builder-esque symbolic/graphical program construction systems.]
yea, sure... 8-)
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Well, if I'd invented Ethernet, I'd sure as hell mention it as often as I could.
I mean, those are some pretty serious laurels to rest on.
All I can say (so far, so far!) is that I've written some fairly mean business software and, um, maintained server uptime within the limits specified in the SLA. That's hardly
Steve Jobs, 1984: "A floppy's good enough. Nobody really needs a hard drive."
Steve Jobs, 1998: "A hard drive's good enough. Nobody really needs a floppy drive."
(paraphrased)
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
How many years has that been going on?
Netware 6.5 is a great piece of technology, and Netware services on Linux has huge potential.
nt
I have two billion keys on my mouse, but I kinda wish that I had two billion and two so I also had keys for deleting bad porn and moving rar files from my download folder to my to_burn folder.
An ideology doesn't make a methodology.
Sorry everyone...
Arthur C. Clark. In 2001 we will be able to launch a spaceship to Jupiter controlled by a computer that talks and behaves like a human, HAL9000 Ah yes! Also in 198something dogs will and cats are going to die and we all are going to have monkeys as pets and they will become smarter..wait that's Planet of the Apes! Dr. Zeus Dr. Zeus!
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
"The initial actor, the first action."
And, like I said, that's murky. Where do you define "first"? You state, "If the BBS initiates the transfer not at the behest of the user, the system is uploading to the user's system." Well, lets' talk about that timed event in the BBS system that sends a file to the user at a given time, regardless of where they are in the system. By your definition, of the sysop of the board sets up the timed event, the BBS is uploading to the PC. But if the user sets up the timed event, the PC is downloading from the BBS. Same software and mechanisms and actions on both ends, both times. That's inconsistent.
But, if we define "upload" to mean "send" and "download" to mean "receive", then in all of the timed event cases, the BBS is uploading to the PC, and the PC is downloading from the BBS. Consistent and symmetric.
Consider the venerable XModem protocol. There is no way for one end to signal the other in XModem. So, to transfer a file with XModem, one end has to start sending, and the other end has to start receiving. In the case of a person using a menu system like a BBS, then the send on the BBS might be trigger by the user in the menu system, who then commands his terminal emulator to receive. But what about two terminal emulators connected head-to-head? Now a person at both ends is invoking the menu commands. Likewise, what about two scripted systems running unattended? Now no human being is involved.
Remember, we're talking about computers here. Users don't actually transfer files. Computers do. Instructions have to execute for anything to happen, and that means both ends have to do something.
You use the term "passive action". That's a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. Passive is, by definition, the lack of action. Active is, by definition, the presence of action. You cannot have a "passive action" any more then you can have a "dry wet".
You claim receiving is involuntary. Not at all. Perhaps it might be in the physical world, but not in terms of file transfers. Both sides have to participate in a file transfer. If a BBS (or an Internet host, for that matter) starts sending without the far end taking action to receive, then the data is discarded, and no transfer takes place.
"The definitions I always understood had downloading be pulling and uploading be pushing, both being active actions. Push and pull; put and get; give and take."
I'm with you on everything but the "active actions" part. (Again, by definition, all actions are active.)
Push and pull is fine. But when one end pulls, the other end has to push. Think of a rope; if two people are each holding a rope taught, one has to push the rope for the other to pull.
Give and take is fine. But if you want to give something to me, I have to take it. If I refuse to take it, you can't give it to me. Likewise, you can't take something from me unless I let you; unless I give it to you.
In all cases, both ends are involved. You simply cannot transfer data between two systems unless both ends are involved.
"...this becomes important legislatively regarding penalties for uploading or downloading files. If you divest the definitions of active actions, you can't assign culpability. So both must be defined actively."
That's bunk, too. Any law that attempts to say "uploading" is okay but "downloading" is not is insane. But fortunately, we don't need to worry about that. You don't outlaw uploading or downloading files. Those are not intrinsically good or bad behaviors. You outlaw things like copying data without permission, or modifying a system without permission.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
"3 Billion human lives ended on August 29th 1997. The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgement Day. They lived only to face a new nightmare. The war against the machines."
Read the first line of what I replied to. The AC said, "Apple was the first to steal the GUI from Xerox...." Did you somehow overlook that? Or did you just not understand the connection between his charge of Apple stealing and my pointing out that Xerox was paid?
"Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." --Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949
"There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. " - Sean Connery as King Arthur
That's an easy one. Just use the extended real numbers -- then dividing any non-zero number by zero gives infinity!
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Thanks to Computer Technology, nobody will ever have to repeat a topic on Slashdot.
With GUI-based query builders, any executive can dig into his company's database and produce his own reports.
As if a command-line prompt was all that ever stood in the way. Pity is, this is still a belief held my some.
--Richard
If this keeps up, the number of lines of stolen code will soon exceed the total number of lines in the entire kernel, all the modules, and the System V code itself.
philcrissman.com.
"Introducing the world fastest computer."
linux is and always will be the servant of windows.
I hope that Pop Sci didn't have "vaccum" in their article. ;)
howsabout: Apple is thriving.
I even repeated this one a few times: "FORTRAN is a dead language."
I don't even know how many new FORTRAN standards have come out since this one started. I just know I heard FORTRAN was a dead language in about 1987 or 1988 and it continues not to be, about 16 years later.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
Ever took an Early 90's software and run it on today's machine? The software back then was just as functional, runs screamingly fast on low end machines today, and ran in 1MB.
The fact your browser takes 33MB to run is a problem. Every software wants to include the kitchen sink, that's a problem.
Maybe if we have less abstraction layers, less dynamic invocations, less runtime discovery, and more focus on building something that works, we really would not need 4GB of RAM. Maybe, just maybe, the programs will run faster as well.
I have an actual WAV file of Bill gates stating:
We believe that OS/2 is the operating system of the nineties.
For smart people it was. And contrary to continued rumours (and to paraphrase a famous quote): "The death of OS/2 is greatly exaggerated"
eComStation
WarpDavey
This eCS-OS/2 system uptime is 6 days 12 hrs 49 mins and 03 secs
See Subject , hehe .
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Old word: "Copeland" New word: "Longhorn"
"It's no use getting anything faster than a double speed CD-Rom, the light is never on all the time anyway"!!
(Advice from freindly local computer tech.)
... SCO's "I own Linux"?
Uuuh, not porven yet?
Well, thinking Linux is going to somehow overwhelm Windows on the desktop is one that has been in the making for several years. Highly amusing indeed.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
My favorite ones:
Less is more !
My Commodore 16 casette tape is the best, storage and you will never get anything bigger! That was many youthful moons ago. Now I'm looking at purchasing five 200gb drives to end up with a 1Tb disk array. Yeah, and that is just as Joe Homeuser with a 1Tb array. Who ever though a homeuser could end up with a Terrabyte of storage 10 years ago? --mikew
It's all about RTFM.
Let's build a probe and send it to Mars. This time around, let's just assume that 1 foot is equal to 1 meter.
Here
"...when it comes to shrinking the size of transistors, one of the chief methods for making chips that are smaller..."
I'm not sure if I should attribute such sharpness to the fact that this site is:
1. sponsored by MS
2. USian
3. or was it purposefully enforcing the sense of the article - perhaps at the time, they weren't aware of such a link between shrinking things, and their resuling smaller size..?
Not to mention the use itself of the phrase "shrinking the size" [shudder]
Ok it's back to the halfbakery for me!
---
Revolutionaries, schmevolutionaries..what are they going to revolt against when anarchy becomes regime du jour?
"all your base are belong to us"
To use a highly contrived and oversimplified example, a 200MHz processor that can do a floating-point multiply in 10 cycles will be faster (for that task, at least) than a 1GHz processor that requires 100 cycles.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
I suppose it could be worse, imagine goatse in braille!
See my journal, I write things there
1286 comments at time of writing, and there is no thought here. There is just an embarrassing waste of time.
You people are sitting at jobs, doing nothing all day. Just posting crap here. And people wonder why companies outsource today.
And you can't think, you can't spell, you can't type.
You're such a total waste of space.
You're my hero!! wanna come sit at the end of my bed and be geek worshipped??
bah!*@%!
Well actually its all true, since only the cpu has accelerated whereas the internal motherboard speed has gone from 33mhz in the 486 to 166mhz today, where the cpu has gone from 33 mhz to 3800mhz, so basically you still have one hell of a bottleneck.
So we have only hacked us to a high mhz, we haven't implemented it across the pc architecture and thats a shame, i would like to see a system where everything was running at same speed (not very likely), if nothing else then maybe the pc will finally have a more accurate timer.
Back in 1983 or 84, with my first job's 1 year of savings, I bought my first computer -- a TRS-color equivalent with 96KBytes of memory -- 64KB RAM and 32 KB ROM, and it had a hardware (memory-mapped) port that switched between memory banks, and it could handle up to 512KB of memory (16 origin 32KB banks to 2 destination memory positions - 0K and 32K)
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
No BIOS on the Mac of course... but it's got wide Open Firmware.
I thought he never said it was any kind of law and he was postulating. And then the media got hold of it, and suddenly it's law.
I think you totally misunderstand Moore's Law. It doesn't state that the speed of processors will double every 18 months (which is a very common misconception). In fact, it states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a die will double every 18 months.
This still holds true.
Your point about speed is an important one, because you're talking about raw clock cycles of the CPU, rather than taking into account the overall processing efficiency and power consumption of the processor. For example, everyone criticises the lower clock speeds of Athlon processors, thinking that an Athlon 3200+ with it's 2.09GHz clock is slower that a 3.06GHz P4, when in reality the two systems are of roughly equivalent performance due to the differing processing pipelines implemented by AMD, as well as some smart decisions to bring a 512KB L2 cache to the party.
Looking at power consumption and heat dissipation (being the bigger problem, as heat is a direct result of the conductive ineffeciency of the medium), then Moore's law is the limiting factor. As the size of components is gradually reduced, the clock frequency can gradually be increased, and heat dissipation decreases. Reducing component size without increases clock speeds results in a fall-off in heat dissipation, and this is a balance that must be struck in the market struggle for faster computing. The limiting factors in computer speeds are the switching speeds of clock regulator circuits, and the distrance that a signal must travel through a circuit. In a system where cycles are measured in ten-billionths of a second, simply reducing the length of a circuit can have an enormous impact upon the clock frequency used for a system.
The problem with such reductions in scale is that, with traditional semiconductor manufacturing processes, eventually Moore's law will push against the limits of the physical processes involved, with current bleed across neighbouring wires, and the electrical resistance of increasingly thinner wires becoming real problems. Fortunately, the properties of nano-scale carbon wire suggest that radically new techniques available in the next decade will continue to allow the application of Moore's law for some time to come.
Mac was using an extended version of Pascal for years after it had withered everywhere else. In that vein, large parts of Mac OS X are written in Objective C.
Objective C isn't that bad, though - since it's an explicit superset of C it's not hard to learn.
Clear, Dark Skies
What is the "Mark I"?
Clear, Dark Skies
Maybe the places where you have worked they are incompetent.
I have had the same 20 or 30 pages of paper sitting on my desk for the last six months (relating to the most important ongoing projects, these are the most referenced things).
All the rest of information is scattered in electronic format in email and internal applications that follo up everything from audits, project completions, requests, HR information, expenses, etc.
I guess it is a matter of how competent the IT people in your workplace are.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Is how you can test if a number is prime without finding all prime numbers less than half of that one.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Money == Lawyers
Seymour Cray once said, "Memory is like sex. Real is a whole lot better than virtual."
I think we're finally to the point (gads... gonna regret this statement in a few years) where the majority of CPUs are powerful enough for the majority of people.
Heat and *noise* are the two big issues now, and I'm not so sure that the anti-noise bandwagon is going to be just a fad. A year or two ago, power users wanted power at any cost (heat / electricity used / acoustic noise), but I've seen more and more meme lately about quiet PCs, low-power PCs, passive cooling only. Basically, the users are saying that they have enough processing power and that more processing power isn't worth the extra heat / energy / noise.
(Personally, I'm looking into the Antec Sonata cases or the mini-ITX stuff...)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Has anyone else noticed that hard disk capacities have not increased for the past year?
300 GB is still tops, same as last xmas. A minuscule growth in laptop hard disks, 12 months ago 60 GB, now 80 GB.
I don't recall stagnation like this happening *ever* before.
Why are they called Virgin Trains?
Because they don't go all the way.
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
There really is no reason for most individuals to have a computer in their home. A computer is a tool and is not useful by itself, but is instead only a means to an end. The sort of ends that it can serve a means to, is far beyond the intelligence of average people.
"There's simply no way to build artifical intelligence until we understand human intelligence. And when it comes to that, we're still way off."
This isn't strictly speaking true. Artificial Intelligence isn't intelligence, it's a program or application that can pretend to be intelligent. Even if you do mean real intelligence from a computer, why can't it happen unless we fully understand human intelligence? This kind of intelligence is created every day from people who haven't a clue about basic science, never mind computer programming. At some point along a child's development, it suddenly becomes self-aware and starts to learn. I presume that it is this point where we assume intelligence begins. We don't fully understand how it happens and possibly never will. However, surely a computer that is complex enough to form new programs/connections could just receive and process data and then all of a sudden, just suddenly become aware?
Personally, I'm not 100% convinced this could happen as I think there is something intangible about real intelligence that we may never be able to emulate in a machine. However, I fully accept that I cannot successfully argue my case. I think I'm just worried about the consequences of creating an intelligent machine. In my mind, an intelligent machine has as much right to 'life' and liberty as any other intelligent creature. If not, we create a new form of slavery.
Where do you define "first"?
By your definition, if the sysop of the board sets up the timed event, the BBS is uploading to the PC. But if the user sets up the timed event, the PC is downloading from the BBS.
No, the sysop is uploading to the user's PC and the user is downloading from the sysop's BBS. You're changing the subject of the action mid-sentence, from the people to the machines.
Same software and mechanisms and actions on both ends, both times. That's inconsistent.
If you take the humans out of the equation as you are wont to do, then the BBS would be uploading to the PC in both cases. But if you examine the greater context of who initiated the actions, then you use the upload/download terms relative to the actor, not the hardware.
To upload and to download are transitive verbs. They require a direct object to complete their meanings. Knowing the context of the action is essential to the correct use of them.
Remember, we're talking about computers here. Users don't actually transfer files. Computers do. Instructions have to execute for anything to happen, and that means both ends have to do something.
Then we are talking about different things. I upload a file to you(r computer); I download a file from you(r computer); you upload a file to me(/my computer), you download a file from me(/my computer). It's a quaternary state. The subject (you/I) must be defined as well as the destination. I define it at the human; you define it at the machine or process.
I'm saying that to be accurate you must widen your scope, not contract it. (And that English is for humans, not machines. It should be acceptable to define my actions upon computers with these verbs.)
Besides, computers do nothing without a causer. We have an abundance of passive senders out there that transmit data by remote command. Some also passively receive. But they still do not act unless someone else does. Whosoever does becomes the subject of these verbs. To cast the role of subject onto the machines is to disavow responsibility for the action.
Push and pull is fine. But when one end pulls, the other end has to push. Think of a rope; if two people are each holding a rope taught, one has to push the rope for the other to pull.
But you don't download people, you download files, analogous to inanimate objects. If I pull on a rope attached to an object, that object is not pushing on the rope to bring itself to me. Same if I'm pushing on the object down a rail to someone else, it is not pulling me.
If I pull a product from the shelf, the store owner isn't pushing it into my hands. If I pull you through a doorway, you aren't pushing me through it. And I haven't shoplifted if the store puts a product in my hand and shoves me out the door. If you ignore the greater context, you introduce ambiguity and ignore liability.
And, back to your analogy, if a rope is taut, then both ends are pulling and no one is pushing. If they're moving a taut rope, then one is pulling less than the other, but that doesn't make the lesser puller a pusher.
The applier of the force is the one pushing or pulling. Similarly, the one who initially causes a file transfer is the one downloading or uploading.
Any law that attempts to say "uploading" is okay but "downloading" is not is insane. But fortunately, we don't need to worry about that. You don't outlaw uploading or downloading files.
The legislative angle I referred to is
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
So a processor is only faster if it accomplished the task in less time, which means you are wrong.
I'll bill you for the hours it took to write this.
What about the 3rd Dimension? You are assuming that computers continue to be made up of chips that are effectively 2 dimensional. Yeah I understand that there are various engineering issues with going 3D, but I expect it will happen at sometime.
"Same with gyroscopic mice -- they're going the way of the Dodo, despite happy predictions."
==
Check out http://www.gyration.com
Their gyroscopic mice also work as conventional optical mice. I use their mouse (and wireless RF) keyboard with my media pc hooked up to the TV.
It works great! I cant imagine NOT having a gyroscopic/conventional optical mouse.
perhaps you missed the irony, so...
bart : Mom, dad said hell
Homer : I did not say hell!
Bart : Yeah ya did!
Error 666 - SCO source has been found in your Linux kernel. Please remove it.
Formerly kdsolutions
I'm reading this a day later, so I will be buried.
At university, a senior in early 1990 said to me "A CPU will never go faster than 200Mhz, because that is where the TV band starts (channel 2). With a computer in every home, we would be unable to watch TV using an antenna".
It took less than 4 years to prove him wrong!
Not sure if release dates count, but Team Fortress 2 coming out in second quarter 1998 was a pretty big one. (for the record, it's still not out, but anyone that saw the halflife2 source leak knows TF2 is being worked on. not that I would know)
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
My favorite is when someone says "Oh just install XyZ, It'll 'just work'". Yeah, right.
Like when we went from an NT4 domain structure to Active Directory... all the upgrade tools "just worked" like they were supposed to the first time.... bah!
http://slashdot.org/~tf23/journal
No doubt Gore was pro- Internet "back in the day" as some say. The Sept. 1991 issue of Scientific American carried an article of his entitled "Infrastucture for the Global Village"
(Is there something with left leaning politicians and the word "village"? Does it take a global village with infrastructure to raise a child? I digress...)
Subtitled "A high-capacity network will not be built without government investment"
He makes the argument that federal $$ were needed to seed a national network that would stimulate demand for the network (once people actually see how neato the national network is, they'll want it for themselves and the whole idea will take off). But without that initial federal funding to create demand, the infrastructure won't ever get built.
Now, not knowing the specifics, I'll leave it to others to debate the reasons for the Internet really taking off. I seem to recall that it opened to commerical activities at some point in the early 1990's which helped jump start it. Perhaps how much this helped the Internet vs. whatever government funding there was for a national network is worth debating. Or any of several other factors for that matter, like the Internet tax ban.
In other words, maybe Gore's push for federal funding wasn't absolutely necessary? Maybe once people realized how much porn was available on the Internet that spurred demand? Maybe there are other factors which were much more important in widespread Internet access adoption that Gore didn't foresee? His article is kinda heavy on the research and educational applications for the Internet, less so the commerical possiblities.... but one couldn't expect him to see the future precisely, he's just a politician.
But even back then he touted his work in Congress:
"For almost 15 years, I have been working to change federal policy so that as a nation we will invest in the critical infrstructure of information super-highways."
he *did* play a key role in the creation of the internet, you wanker. without his help from that place he could help (public funding) it *would not exist*. period. full stop. eat dick.