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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?"
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.
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.
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"Those who quote others are more likely to one day be quoted" -Tom Planter
Um... sorry. He never said that. He said he helped in the creation of the internet... which he did as some of the key people involved in Darpanet will admit to. He pushed to have Darpanet become publicly available to everyone.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
In facts, something like 3429 baud/s is the maximum *baud rate* of an analog phone line, 8000 is the maximum baud rate for a semi-digital phone line (V.90).
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!
A "server" in 1981 would be something like a PDP-11 or Vax on the low end. Such machines were more expensive than desktop computers, and had larger physical address spaces. Even a modest PDP-11/70 had 22 address bits.
Most people preferred to spend $2000 on a PC with a 16-bit address space rather than $10000 on a PDP-11 with a 22-bit address space.
I think that 20 address bits were plenty for 1981. The real problem was that there was no upgrade path for about 10 years after that. The Intel 8086 was 20 bits, fine. The Intel 80186 was 20 bits, okay. The Intel 80286 had "protected mode" addressing to increase the addres space, but it was nearly impossible for an operating system to context switch between "protected mode" and "real mode" (there was no instruction to do it, so an OS had to actually REBOOT THE PROCESSOR and then recover all its state on the fly).
So until the 80386 came out, there was no way to get a new system with both (a) support for old programs and (b) support for more address space. And during that 10-year dry spell, that's when all those extendad / expanded memory schemes came out, and that's when the 1 megabyte limit really hurt.
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
Last year I'd have agreed with you. I had tried out various systems, with KDE 2.2 and Gnome 1.4, in addition to Fluxbox, IceWM and a handful of other window managers. It certainly wasn't pretty, and usability could've gone a long way.
My, how things have changed.
There are so many applications that do everything I needed to do on Windows, now. So you can't live without Kazaa? Download Apollon, the KDE FastTrack client. Need word processing? AbiWord/KWord are excellent pieces of work. Outlook got you down? Ximian Evolution has everything you need. Instant messaging? Gaim/Kopete. Music playing? XMMS/JuK will replace Winamp/Foobar quite handily. Graphics? The Gimp. Video/DVD playback? Xine tackles everything I throw at it. Development? KDevelop/xemacs. Web work? Quanta Plus/Bluefish. CD recording? K3b is every bit as good as Nero and is free. Web browsing? Konqueror/Mozilla/Firebird/Galeon/Epiphany. Usenet? Pan kills every similar offering on Windows.
Additionally, KDE supplies me with various features that Windows can't match. I want to save an image from a website directly to my webspace, via either FTP or WebDAV? Right-click, "Save As," click "FTP" and Save.
In addition, I paid $0 for all of the software on my computer, have ready access to the source code if I'd like to add a feature, and am not raped by vendor lock-in. I also am not subject to the ~30 holes in Internet Explorer this year, or worms like Blaster, Slammer or Welchia.
There are really only a handful of things Linux isn't better at right now, and those are very, very steadily improving. The first and most obvious would be gaming, and even though older games like Starcraft and Diablo 2 run very well under Wine, newer games like Unreal Tournament 2003 are being released natively for Linux, there's still nowhere near the selection. I concede that; it's all about choosing the right tool for the job. The second is video editing, which really isn't very good on PC either with the sole exception of Adobe Premiere. I don't touch either of these things often, so it's not a tremendous deal for me.
I wouldn't say it's good enough for Joe User right now, though. Package management and software installation still needs to be simplified for the average user (.deb should be the de facto standard, IMHO). Installation could be less painful if you don't know what you're doing. GTK+ needs a better file selector, admittedly, though I hold the opinion that GTK+ is generally worse than Qt to begin with, so I don't have trouble finding Qt-based replacements.
My older brother, who has barely touched a computer in his life, can work at my KDE setup with ease. I consider this a small victory.