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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?"
*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 swear, this will be the last batch of RAM I'll ever need...
...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
Right...
I always save my last mod point to mod up a good troll. You people are too serious.
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.
Gates has actually discounted that rumor several times (one of which can be found here, and I've got to say that it probably *is* untrue, as I really can't imagine anybody ever saying that.
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.
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.
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
"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
Nope he never said that.. sorry... popular myth
Here's a Wired.com article with some more details
Slashdot - News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters?
"Windows is the best OS because the most people use it."
~Philly
"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.
"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.
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...
100MHz was the absolute limit for the speed of a CPU
Yeah, but that was because your MHz display had only two digits.
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
"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...
Conversly;
"Linux is good enough right now for the desktop."
is being laughed at right now.
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
It's a known fact that Bill Gates never actually said this, or at best, that it is rephrased severely and taken out of context.
Having said that, in 1981, 640kB technically _was_ enough for most people.
I hereby nominate "640k ought to be enough for anybody" as most misquoted phrase ever.
Quality, performance, value; you get only two, and you don't always get to pick.
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
"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
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
Back to the original topic, I'd point to the idea that sticking children in front of computers somehow magically benefits them.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
So now that Apple uses *BSD, is it dying twice as fast?
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
"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.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
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,1484,00. html
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
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.
640K is enough for anyone. (that one was easy)
...and also not true.
Do not read this sig.
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+
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.
Taken from the Wired Article attributed above.
"Meanwhile, I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough..."
Hmm....looks like he said it atleast once. Flaimbait....check
__
Thou hast besquirted me, O leotarded one.
ARE THEY OUT OF THEIR MINDS?! THE PHONE LINES WILL BURN UP!
This space for rent.
In a related story, Microsoft today announced a $17 Million investment in Wired.com.
Make money with Real Estate Investing
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.
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.
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..."
With all the porn on the internet, you'd think there would be a lot more blind men around.
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.
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
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?"
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.
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.
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...
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.
"Belief means not wanting to know what is true." [Nietzche, The Anti-Christ, 1889]
Ok, Gates claims he never said it. Great. I'd leave it at that, but I went to a talk he gave at the University of Waterloo in 1989, and he did meekly accept responsibility for that quote. We all politely chuckled, and the talk went on.
I could easily be mistaken, as that was quite a while ago, but I distinctly remember it as a mea culpa.
If you say, "now I'll be modded down because of X", I'll happily oblige.
"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
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
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
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?
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!
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
It is NOT a limition of DOS, it is a limitation of the original IBM PC HARDWARE. You see, in 1981, the IBM PC was built around the Intel 8088 CPU, which could address 1024k of memory. The upper 384k was reserved by the hardware for the system bios, video ram, video bios, and any other board that needed memory-mapped I/O. Even the 80286 CPU had the 1024K limitation when it ran in "real" (8086/8088) mode.
Xerox never commercialized the Alto, did it? Yes, the real invention was PARC's. Apple's innovation is at making computer innovation a product; Microsoft's is at making it a commodity.
MS-DOS does not have a 640K memory limit.
I've used a computer that had 900K of memory and ran MS-DOS just fine. All of it was conventional memory. No tricks.
The 640K limit comes from the following architectural limitations:
(1) Intel 8086 physical addresses are 20 bits long.
(2) IBM partitioned the 1 megabyte address space into 640K of memory space, 384K of device space.
Other manufacturers made MS-DOS computers that were not PC register compatible. Some of them did allocate more of the 1024K address space to memory. MS-DOS works just fine up to the physical addressing limit of the 8086.
Back around 1981, I read a Byte article about the new IBM PC which said that it had a gigantic memory space. And they were right! Filling up that 640K would cost about $5000 at the price of memory back then. I think it's reaasonable for a personal computer to have enough address space to handle $5000 worth of memory (especially when $5000 in 1981 dollars is worth quite a bit more than $5000 in 2003 dollars).
Are you using a 64-bit desktop yet? Because if you're not, your 2003 desktop computer can't handle $5000 of memory!
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!
Another one: The things you want to download always require leaving your computer downloading overnight. In 1995 I had to leave my 14.4kbps modem running overnight to get MP3s, and now DVD-R images take about the same amount of time.
"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
"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
A normal, sane person would understand it.
Yes, as a normal, sane person, I understand it: he is 100% correct.
Befor the Congress pushed for it's opening to the world, there was no such thing known as the 'Internet'; there was a closed network of universities and military computers (ever wondered what DARPA means?).
He, as a congressman, was one of the main players in opening that network to the world, so he played a very important role (if not the most important) in the creation of the 'Internet'.
It seems to me that the un-normal, un-sane person in this thread is, you.
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
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.
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
"...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.
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".
is fair and accurate.
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
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)
And I'd be much happier giving my mother (despite three college degrees and quite a high IQ, Macs are too complex for her) a Linux box than a Windows box or Mac.
Reminds me of a Dilbert strip.
PHB: Make it simple enough so even my mother could us it.
Alice: It's already simple enough that a squirrel could use it. How much dumber is your mother?
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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
Subject says it all.
I can count to 1023 on my hands. Ask me about #132.
Actually, in real mode, a Pentium 4 has this same 1024K limitation. Even the Opteron is not immune. Real mode suck.
Hardware, software, and blinking lights!
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.
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
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.
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
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".
Approximately true, but you can't make a transistor less than N atoms thick, where N is "thin enough to allow a significant probability of electrons tunneling". Depending on whether you want to allow a 5% error rate or 1%, or less, N is at a guess about 4 to as much as 16 nanometers (nm). The exact cut off is hard to fix, because it depends on just how much of the design you want to devote to error correction, but it's definitely there. Finding a way around it will take making small groups of atoms behave deterministically instead of according to Quantum Mechanics. That is unfortunately a hard problem. No one has a real clue as to how to solve it.
What isn't yet clear is just what error correction itself means. Could a designer get a bit smaller scaling, but only by making the chip unable to run any existing programs? Could we turn quantum effects to our advantage with what is called Quantum based computing? Will Intel or IBM want to make a computer that needs a completely different approach to writing every last bit of software it can run?
The answers to the first two questions are unknown. The third, however, is an obvious NO! Mor's law will stop, either because we can't make the switches any smaller, or because we stop using transistors.
Who is John Cabal?
You got a good ways. Now you just have to think.
The question was 'What have you accomplished in congress?' or something similar. So now let's look at his response in that *CONTEXT*.
Did Al Gore take the initiative IN CONGRESS in creating the internet? You bet he did! In fact, Newt Gingrich said that if there had been no Al Gore, there would be no internet as we know it today. (Of course, that was a few years ago. But still.) He was the prime mover behind getting funding for it. And without government funding, the internet would never have grown like it did, and may well still be some strange, escoteric thing that connects a few universities together... and AOL (or *shudder* MSN) could be the 'Information Superhighway'.
So, you can still say that since he didn't explicitly SAY 'in Congress' in response to the question about what he did in congress, he was actually claiming to have invented the entire internet from scratch. But at that point, anyone with an ounce of intellectual honesty would have to admit that this was a 'lie' that was created entirely by the press and was perpetrated on an American public that is instantly ready to believe anything they hear, as long as it's bad.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
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.
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.
The original estimate was off since the minimum feature size is not the same as the smallest dimension in the transistor gate. The limit is actually set by the gate width which can't go less than about 5 nm without the probability of quantum tunnelling occuring going above an acceptable limit (some leakage is OK but there is a point where it is not possible to distinguish the on state from the off...
We have two more halvings of the minimum feature size before production silicon reaches state of the art and two more halvings after that before the show is all over folks.
The doubling density each year rule corresponds to a halving of minimum feature size each 2 years. Intel say this is extending to 3 years (Bush recession, war on terror etc.) and the show is over completely by about 2015 at the latest.
There will be cleanup work for some time but if you think about what you end up with at the end point it is quite interesting. You can fit 64 times the current number of transistors onto a chip. So you can comfortably fit your current state of the art Quad-Pentium processor with 4Gb of RAM all onto the same chip. So cut away the external memory bus completely and in its place add a couple of laser diodes on each edge and some receivers and you have a processing unit that communicates to its peripherals and any neighbors by means of optical couplings. It does not need special cooling either because only a small part of the chip area is CPU, the rest is memory.
Instead of adding memory to this type of system you add more processor/memory units. You cound easily fit four, sixteen into a comodity PC box. The optical couplings mean that memory paging etc can be handled by making a request to a neighboring processor that stores that information.
Big supercomputers are built by simply lashing a few hundred standard boards together.
Back to the future, I was building these systems 20 years ago. Only then we called them transputers and they only had 4Kb of RAM
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