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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...
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
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.
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.
Nope he never said that.. sorry... popular myth
Here's a Wired.com article with some more details
"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.
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
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...
... 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
Demonstrate with a beer.
Upload it to the refrigerator.
Download it from the refrigerator.
Install it.
Uninstall it.
t
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
While it might have seemed a bit of an boast, it is, technically, accurate.
_ 10/wiggins /g ins /#w4
Links:
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5
http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue5_10/wig
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
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...
With all the porn on the internet, you'd think there would be a lot more blind men around.
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?"
But he definitely wrote (or at least took the "credit" for writing):
in "The Road Ahead".
-Peter
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.
"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
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).
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!
First things first. The original poster didn't attribute the quote to Bill Gates. So a denial from Bill Gates doesn't mean that someone didn't actually say it. Second, someone had to have come to that conclusion, whether they said it or not, because that was in fact the limit. Third, if I were Bill Gates, and I *had* said that incredibly stupid thing, the chances are pretty high that (a) I'd lie about it later on, or (b) I'd forget that I said it.
My point is that Bill Gates is denying it. Bill Gates also says that Microsoft is not a monopoly. Bill Gates saying something does not necessarily make it true.
$.02
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long 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.
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
"File trading is killing the Entertainment industry."
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
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!
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.