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The Biggest Roadblocks To Information Technology Development
ZDOne writes "ZDNet UK has put together a list of some of the biggest obstacles preventing information technology from achieving its true potential, in terms of development and progress. Microsoft's stranglehold on the desktop makes the list, as does the chip-makers' obsession with speed. 'There is more to computing than processor speed -- a point which can be easily proven by comparing a two-year-old PC running Linux with a new PC buckling under the weight of Vista. Shrinking the manufacturing process to enable greater speed has proven essential, but it's running out of magic ... What about smarter ways of tagging data? The semantic web initiative runs along these sorts of lines, so where is the hardware-based equivalent?'"
0. Lack of (artificial) intelligence (still)
/satire This will be fixed once evil&co realize that such a 'profiler' is a well performing surveillance tool while at the same time realizing that 'progress' that is purely driven by the technologically feasible does not cut it.
More specifically, lack of ability of applications (or lack of applications able) to adapt to the needs of the individual user automagically (top of my wishlist: a memory crutch).
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
IT workers and their know-it-all attitudes.
We are reliant because they work damn good. Its not like they were the simpliest of ideas, they were just the ones taht stuck because they worked.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
I'll say it but it isn't going to do any good anyways.
One of the big roadblocks is users not seeing the big picture or not caring. Over the years, I've seen so many programs (especially open source) get off track of their goals because of a large number of vocal users that don't get the point of the program and expect it to do something else.
Or how about the biggest misconception of all time "Computers are going to make your life easier and they are going to be easy to use".
The insistence to present everything as a video instead of an article or good analytical summary is holding back technology information sharing (much like this video).
I wish these outlets would stop trying to turn the internet into TV. We left TV because it was lousy.
The success of the PC is that it is a quite universal tool. Changing its hardware to deal with some kind of data in a particular way is OK for some niches, but not mainstream. Who would want 1 PC to go on the web, one for word processor, one for mails...
The number one problem is all the idiots who are too stubborn/stupid to learn how to use their tools. If these people knew as little about hammers and they do about computers, there wouldn't be a round thumb left in the whole goddamn world. Just because it's a computer doesn't mean you have to turn off your brain.
The simple fact that most people don't have a basic understanding of even the most simple IT tasks. Most people look at a computer and see it as just a box that hums and hisses and produces magical pictures. As long as most people have a largely uneducated view of IT it won't "live up to its potential", whatever that may be. Seriously, think about how much more productive an IT worker could be without having to do the constant virus cleanup and such things which can be, for the most part, easily avoided with just a basic understanding of security. Ignorance is the biggest obstacle
I got a catholic block.
Management.
I personally believe Microsoft's dominance, and recent anti-tust troubles, has helped spur underground and indie programming. Nothing motivates youth like an evil world corporation, no? Granted they operated using a walled garden (or prison?) for many years, but you cannot tell me that a portion of the world's elite *nux programmers aren't motivated by the success of M$.
And different forms of input? How do you release that article today- in the age of the Wii, and the smart table, etc. I think it- sans carpal tunnel- that ye ole keyboard is simply the most efficient.
Other than that (and some other sophmoric entries like "war") this article focuses on true hinderances, in my opinion. I believe lock-out, gaps in education and copyright laws enfringe upon innovation the most. People will always have a desire to make something great, even if it is in the presence of a war, or Microsoft, etc. But people cannot innovate if it means punishment or imprisonment.
art is science made clear. -cocteau
I suppose there are those people who will think this a troll.
it's not, and it's the right answer.
Windows is the single biggest stifler of progress in every IT shop I've been in. yes, there are other challenges, but those are for the most part, workable.
you cannot work around this steaming pile of operating system. it rides on your ass all day, every day, like a yoke a slave might wear as he spends his 14 hour day rowing. every now and they the whip comes down.
remove windows from the IT shop and watch it THRIVE
Gosh, it's easier to blame Microsoft or the fact that we still use mice for a lack of creativity, isn't it?
The operating system matters less than what we run on it. Operating systems can be modified. Better mouse drivers can be written.
This article is the usual blaming the tool not the market forces that reward crap products. It's easier to get a Zwinky(tm) than find a practical use for the semantic web, but this idiot wants us to worry about whether we're still using a mouse or not.
All technological breakthroughs have happened already. The fax machine was the pinnacle of human achievement. Just give up.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I've said much the same as he did in regards to system speeds. If I optimize my system, I can outperform the latest and greatest my friends have. But I can optimize only so far due to the hardware design. I long back to the old Amiga days, where the core of the system was integrated around the CPU, but still giving the user a completely flexible design. Heck, you can find decades old machines running very modern hardware, due to their innovative design. Ever tried to run a modern video card, soundcard or NIC in a PC from 1989? I've seen Amigas do it. And they did it through being smarter, not faster.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
It ought to be there...
Perhaps the biggest roadblock is the general inability of the masses to grasp technology and at the same time technology's allure and ubiquity. Unlike other nuanced sciences (rocket science, brain surgery, etc), computer technology is trotted out as "easy enough for the masses".
That "easy enough" has trickled down from the anointed few to the general population, both in the work place and in homes.
Now, what drives decisions and directions for technology is driven more by uninformed Golf Course conversations than true understanding and needs and the ability to match technology to solutions correctly. Heck, I experienced an entire abandonment of one technology at management's whim to implement a newer and better solution. This, while the existing solution worked fine, and the new solution was unproven. (coda to that story, five years later, that team is busily re-converting the "new" back to the "old".)
Time and again I see people doing bizarre things with technology... in the workplace, with hubris, unwilling to ask others what is most appropriate, and in the home, where ignorance, while benign in intent, rules. I don't know how many times I've encountered things like people with multiple virus checkers running on their machine because they figure more is better.
At the same time, I remember a salesman trying to steer me away from a PC that wasn't their "hot" item because it had a video card with FOUR megabytes memory (this was a LONG time ago)... his reasoning? Who in their right mind would ever USE four megabytes memory for video??? Yeah, this salesman was senior. Yeah, I got it, he was an idiot. But these are the drivers of technology.... people not in the know.
And, while I only have limited direct anecdotal experience of this in well-known companies, I would expect it to be more widespread than many might realize.
Just because something is old does NOT mean it is obsolete, more and more I see this as an absolute truth, advancing (oh okay, runaway) age has nothing to do with it.
Some things just work and don't really need to be replaced. Change for change sake is bad. NOW GET OF MY LAWN!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The biggest obstacle is the relative immaturity of the field compared to other fields. Just look at all the literature on how to improve the process.
i think the biggest obstacle are dumb users,
you know the ones that open spam emails, install all sorts of crapware (then end up having their computer being part of a botnet) and fuel the whole online advertising industry
There is more to computing than processor speed
As someone who does scientific computing, I say bunk! My primary bottleneck is still the processor. FTA:
Too much R&D time and money goes into processor speed when other issues remain under-addressed. For example, could data not be handled a bit better? What about smarter ways of tagging data? The semantic web initiative runs along these sorts of lines, so where is the hardware-based equivalent?
Sure, tagging and controlling data is important, but far from difficult, and with well-written programs a good suite of visualization tools is relatively easy. Give me some speed, dammit! Why should I have to wait for my slot on the cluster when I could have the power right here under my desk?
What, Open Source didn't make the list?!? On the other hand, neither did Software Patents. Where is a good shill when you need one?
Perhaps because I am a Mac user and I am kinda use to "Best of both worlds"
(Or worst of both worlds depending on your priorities) Of WIndows and Linux. But Using all 3 OSs
I have seen significant progress in the past 8 years. While there hasn't been to much new innovation
per se like the killer apps that will change the world and how we think and do things. But
society has greatly changed and technology has improved...
Windows. Love it or Loath it. Windows has greatly improved over the past 8 years. Just with XP
Alone. It got the population off of DOS based OS's DOS, Windows 3 - Windows ME onto the more stable
NT Kernel. As a result major PC problems have been reduced compared to the increasing danger it
faces. Take a 98 box and do some web browsing and see how long before it become unusable. No it is
not perfect by any means and there is a lot of suckage to it. And Vista doesn't seem much better
but there has been a huge stabilization on Windows even Vista is more solid then 98 or ME.
Linux. It is no longer considered a FAD os. People now take it seriously, not just a baby Unix clone. It
is taken seriously and used widely in the server environment. Desktop Linux never really hit full force
mostly because of the rebirth of Apple but there were a lot of huge improvements in OS User-interface
and it is comparable to current versions of windows.
Internet Use. During the 90s people used the internet mostly as a fad but now it is used as part of their
life. Just imagine doing things 10 years ago. Most things you needed to go to the store to buy. For information
you needed to trek to the library, doing papers required huge amount of time dedicated on finding sources.
There were a lot of things we wanted to know but we didn't because there wasn't any speedy way of looking it up.
Finding People, getting directions, things are much different now then they use to be.
While there hasn't been great innovation there has been great stabilization and culture change around technology
which help to spur on the next wave of innovation in the future. We as a culture need time to lets massive changes to
sink in so we can fully understand what the problems are with technology that need to be fixed.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Right, look at their page, filled with words that have NOTHING to do with the actuall contents but that still get noticed by search engines.
All the big sites work like that, designed to show up at no matter what you search for. Games sites are especially bad/good at this, no matter what game you look for IGN will show up as the definitive source for info on it.
If you want the semantic web dear ZDNet stop this crap NOW. Start it yourselve and clean up your site so that your pages are only indexed for the actual article, not all the crap around it.
Oh but you don't wanna do that do you, because that ain't economical and will put you at a disadvantage.
Well, that is the same reason behind all your other points. DOn't ask Intel to give up the speed race if you are unwilling to give up the keyword race.
Semantic web? Wikipedia is my new search engine. Because wikipedia is one of the only sites to only want to return accurate results and not spam keywords like mad.
The semantic web can't happen until you get rid of people who spam keywords. You can't make smarter PC's as long as reviewers and customers obsesss about clockspeeds.
The first to change might win, but they will be taking a huge risk, none of the established players will do that. Remember, it took an upstart like google to change the search market, now that it is big, do you really think google would dare blacklist IGN from returning results because they got to many empty pages? Offcourse not, maybe the next search company will try that, but not google.
Change your own site first ZDNet, then talk about how the rest of the industry should change.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
how about hardware, its the year 2007 we have quad core cpus and graphics that are out of this world but we are still using those hard to pull molex connectors and what about getting ram into and out of some dell cases. Maybe we should focus a LITTLE attention on the physical factors, not a lot just a little bit.
Government regulation is going to be the main thing holding back technology in the next 20 years. These regulations are spawned by people wanting to substitute their choices for yours and mine. And greed. Examples:
- Restrictions on talking on the phone in your car
- Restrictions on talking on the phone in airplanes
- Electrical rate-hikes and forced conservation to combat Global Warming
- Sarbanes-Oxley and other laws that make business finance riskier (so there are fewer tech startups)
- Internet taxes
- Other taxes that take money away from folks who could but tech and put it in the hands of governments
There are more examples, but I'm out of time.
This isn't meant to be flamebait or a troll. This is the beauty of open source. You can DIY if you want to. You don't have to if you don't want to. You can contribute time, money, etc.. to your favorite project. Or nothing at all. But open source allows you to be the solution to the problem that you have noticed.
Go ahead, scratch that itch.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
I see the biggest limiting factor that prevents us from experiencing computing nirvana (a la Star Trek; "computer do this..") is artificial limits placed on us by corporations trying to gouge us for more profit.
Cell phone companies: Imagine how much more pervasive internet access would be if data access didn't cost more then a mortgage payment. I can accept a certain degree of slowness based on technical limitations.
ISP's: Offer the moon, and then restrict your access if you try to leave the driveway. "UNLIMITED INTERNET FOR $20/MONTH*" *If you exceed whatever usage we deem is to expensive for us, we will charge you hundreds of dollars and give you a bad credit rating.
Media Companies & DRM: Wake up and drink the kool-aid. Your business model has changed and it all started with the VCR. People do not like being forced to jump through hoops. There are multiple options that are available that will allow you to thrive in this digital age but like buggy-whip manufacturers you refuse to adapt.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
You don't necessarily need war to advances technology...at least not a hot war. The Apollo program spurred numerous technologies. Of course it was a product of the Cold War.
is the skills of the people practicing IT. The root of the problem is the skills of the people hiring the people who practice IT, who prefer to hire more cheaper people than fewer good ones.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
If Americans aren't doing it the way you want it, why not grab the ball and run with it yourself? What is stopping you? And what is the "logical route"? Care to elaborate on that?
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
"It says click OK to continue... what should I do?"
This is the kind of question I get to deal with at work.
The X86, MS-DOS/Widows, and Unix/Posix.
Yes the X86 is fast and cheap but we have it only because it ran MS-DOS and then Windows. I have to wonder just how good an ARM core made with the latest process would be? How cheap would it be at a tiny fraction of the die size of an X86. How little power would it take?
How many of them could you put on a die the size of the latest from Intel or AMD CPU? Maybe 16 or 32?
It will not run Windows thought...
Take a look at the T2 from Sun.
And then we get to Unix. Yes I use Linux everyday. I love it and I want to keep it. The problem is that I think we could do better. Linux and the other Unix and Unix like OS are eating up a huge amount of development resources.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
The author is an ass.
You can't handle the truth.
That are too obsessed with what they want, and ignore the developers who know what they need and how to mesh want and need together.
The site I launched last week (prematurely, at the client's insistence) had no content, but it did have the oh-so-necessary splash page with a 5 meg flash video (with sound!) embedded in it that to the casual observer looks like a trailer for a new Batman movie. All the issues I'd brought up since the project began suddenly became important after the site went live (except the lack of content).
Do people go to the dentist and demand that their fillings are candy flavored lead? No. But when that person wants a website, they demand every poison they can think of (splash page, ambush the user with audio, flash navigation that search engines can't follow, giant flash ads for themselves on every page, no content) no matter what the "doctor" recommends.
The best clients don't assume they know the web, and will explain their business model, then ask the developers what should be done.
War spurs development! Most technological advantages have been made in research for military. R&D only gets proper funding during wartime. Funny but true.
'There is more to computing than processor speed -- a point which can be easily proven by comparing a two-year-old PC running Linux with a new PC buckling under the weight of Vista.' Are they suggesting Intel and AMD should be developing software instead of improving on their processors?
Why would he mention eBay purchasing Skype in comparison to Microsoft investing in facebook under the heading of Web 2.0? That was a huh moment in the article.
The other huh moment is that global war is going to produce technical innovation at the consumer level. Bunker-busting bombs do nothing for our desktops. And already with technical military dominance that is way over the top, the US has no real competition to advance against. The technical advances of World War II were a result of relatively low technology state. We're no longer at the same point in development and to think that war would do anything for us except consume money on expensive weapons is complete and utter nonsense.
In a sense, I guess if we have global war, we'll be nuked backed to the days of everyone farming their land and struggling to survive and yes, then maybe we'll innovate from that point and find ways to get by...like converting vista DVD's into sparkling scarecrows that keep the birds away from our crops.
...the speed at which humans work and the Graphical User Interface.
We are the main limiting factor in any system. Computers are theoretically designed to meet human expectations of response times. However, How much overall variation in response have we noticed between the response on a 386 running MSDOS and Windows 3.1 15 years ago and a 2 Gig Pentium running XP today? Maybe compilers run faster, but everyday tasks like word-processing or e-mail seem to run at about the same speed from a user perspective. If we designed systems to respond faster we'd likely confuse or annoy most of the current computer-using populace.
From a GUI perspective, the "modern" GUI is full of speed bumbs. Very little has changed since the original Macintosh design (or the original Xerox design, for that matter) except to add more menues, buttons and widgets that make it even harder to develop a reflexive capability in navigating the desktop. Hotkeys are still the fastest way to activate functions, but most people I know stil use the mouse and menus even for simple things like cutting and pasting text. You'd think someone would have developed a way to use screen corners plus keys to activate functions, but other than activating or disabling a Mac's screensaver no GUI designer has used the only four points on the monitor anyone can find while blindfolded to automate functions. Every time we take our eyes off what we're working on we lose "visual attention," which causes a loss of concentration. How many of us can hit any button in a window in any interface without looking? The way GUIs have stagnated under the guise of providing "familiarity" simply adds to our limitations.
We are the weakest link.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
... as does the chip-makers' obsession with speed. 'There is more to computing than processor speed -- a point which can be easily proven by comparing a two-year-old PC running Linux with a new PC buckling under the weight of Vista. Shrinking the manufacturing process to enable greater speed has proven essential, but it's running out of magicYes, there is more to a processor than raw clock speed. But the article misses a great discussion here and suggests "a better way of tagging data." WTF?
AMD and Intel have already realized that faster clock speeds no longer equates into free performance. The newest processors have cache sizes that were unthought of four years ago. Whether consumers realize it or not, multicore superscalar desktop processors will and have become the norm. These processors have the ability to take advantage of parallelism in programs, which is what the article should have addressed: the slow adoption of desktop processor technologies by large software companies.
While some software, such as 3D renderers and other CPU-intensive applications, take advantage of multiple cores on the same CPU, the vast majority of desktop software still is compiled for a single-issue, single-core CPU. Until we see compilers that are able to take advantage of parallelism in source code, and coding languages that emphasize run-time parallelism and multi-threading become the norm, desktop performance is going to progress pretty slowly.
Ridiculous. There are plenty of open source projects with American developers that think smaller and more modular is better. Take XFCE, for example. Small, lightweight.
On the other side of the pond, there are plenty of European developers that think bigger is better. Take KDE for example. Much of the development team is German.
I'm not saying one approach is better than the other, but the whole point of open source is to give you some choices. You want big and full featured? You know where to find it. You want small and lightweight? You know where to find it.
My blog
This is about the stupidest article I've read in a while.
.NET while far from perfect, is a pretty good building ground. Want to know why Mac gaming, or Linux gaming never took off? Ask John Carmack, who has espoused Microsoft as a very good platform on which to build his engines. And he can do it easily, and cheaply too.
.NET code to it. You can share it, and collaborate on it. All through Microsoft software. All reasonably seamlessly. And cheaply to boot. When there are BETTER ALTERNATIVES to the "whole package", then Microsoft will lose its foothold. But ask any financial institution what they need more than anything in their office, and the word back will be resoundingly "Excel." Breaking the stranglehold means offering something BETTER than Microsoft can offer. And right now, there is no better office suite than MS Office, not by a LONG SHOT. And the new version (2007) is actually VERY good, regardless of what the naysayers may have you believe.
What "holds back tech" is the lack of talent. Plain and simple. If you want to beat Microsoft, you have to out innovate them. Yes, they have a stranglehold on the desktop, but why? Because they have an open OS that is easy to program for, and has low development costs along with quick development.
And then you blame chip makers for focusing on chip speeds? Of course, THAT'S the problem! Too fast chips!
Every market, whether it be automobiles, fast food, or anything else responds to what the market will bear and want. It's why consumers buy more Japanese cars than American cars nowadays, simply because they last longer, are cheaper to maintain, and overall, have higher build quality and give better gas mileage. If Ford finally put out a car that wasn't a total piece of shit, don't you think people would buy it? But no.. the tried and true Honda Accord and Toyota Camry are amongst the best selling cars in the entire world. Because they make sure to hit the points that customers will need, and have been shown to want.
The IT world is NO DIFFERENT. You want to "break the stranglehold" on Microsoft? Then go make something better. Make an OS that has software around it that compliments another. Right now there is no equivalent to the Office and Windows combination. You can create a document in Windows, in Office. You put that on Sharepoint. Then you add
I'm far from a Microsoft lover. I hate a lot of things about them, I think Vista is largely pointless, but not BAD. I think that it's too expensive. But in the end, my games play on Windows, not on a Mac, and not on Linux. I could go through the trouble of setting up Wine and getting games to work... but why would I bother? It works on Windows, and it's easy to do. When it's easy to do on Linux or a Mac, then you will see the paradigm shift. But not before then.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
I know I'm going to get it for this, but here goes. One of the biggest holdbacks on technology progress is the constant churning of the tech landscape every few months. Before you think I'm crazy, hear me out. How many people work in workplaces that use Technology X where the CIO reads an airline magazine article about Technology Y? The next day, you're ripping out system X, which was actually getting stable and mature, and implementing Y just because it's new. When Y starts causing all sorts of problems, Technology Z will come along and solve everything. Software and hardware vendors love this because it keeps them in business. Most mature IT people can't stand it because they're constantly reinventing the wheel.
There's a reason why core systems at large businesses are never changed...they work, and have had years to stabilize. Along the way, new features are added on top.
I know the thrust of the article was "what's holding up progress in general?" Part of running a good IT organization is balancing the new and shiny with the mature and tested. Bringing in new stuff alongside the mature stuff is definitely the way to go. See what works for you, and keep stuff that works and isn't a huge pain to support.
One other note -- a lot of technology innovation isn't really innovation. It's just repackaging old ideas. SOA and Web 2.0 is the new mainframe/centalized computing environment. Utility computing is just beefed-up timesharing distributed out on a massive scale. This is another thing that holds up progress. Vendors reinvent the same tech over and over to build "new" products.
So there MUST be 10, no more, no less.
Problems with IT development:
1. Proprietary formats: Mow much effort is lost in "Resend that as a *** file?" Or "How do I open that file?" We have some decent standards like Post Script, Latex, HTML, and OOXML. But everybody is intent on using that newfangled version of MSOffice, in which each version is intentionally incompatible with the previous.
2. Proprietary network protocols: We still talk about MS again. This time in terms of SMB filesharing and Kerberos munging. These tactics are purely to sell more copies of MS software, and have no real good interest for us users and admins. Even beter yet, we dont know what actually is being transferred as many a times it uses some sort of "hidden encryption".
3. Licensing struggles and legal harassment: As we se with the BSA attacks, proprietary software brings in a segment of liability that GPL (and alike) software does not have. It is impossible to violate the terms of the GPL if you only USE the software. Try saying that about any of the big box companies. One simply cannot.
4. High speed bandwidth deployment: At least in the USA, we have the telcos and our government to blame. Our country could have a much richer infrastructure and allow IT people remote everything. Instead, many of us haven't the bandwidth to stream an MP3.
The biggest roadblock is that there are not enough people doing pure computer science research, everything else is secondary.
You can't handle the truth.
About 3 years ago at a windows software packaging contractor this packager submitted a package for QA review. The QA was a female in her early twenties, having worked there for half a year before most packagers came aboard. Get this: she FAILED the package because she didn't like what some aspect of the application looked like. After being told that the original application's dialogs haven't been modified at all, she still ordered the packager to change it to something 'prettier', to which he ironically suggested that he should also change the background color and maybe add some flowers. She actually considered it (for about 5 seconds) before she realized he was joking.
Yeah, fuck that! I don't need this kind of 'humanity'.
I'd rather have a machine with slower CPU but with wide, fast busses and smart, fast I/O subsystems, then a machine with a faster CPU but with crappy I/O. Maybe I'm just wierd that way.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
Who should we blame? Developers of both Operating Systems, and the applications that run on them. Just because I have a faster processor & more storage than in yesteryear, the basic requirements of my day-to-day computing experience (web surf, email, develop some code, listen to music, etc) have not. Yet, the operating system, and applications these days are such resource hogs. Before we get more UI candy, or the latest 'framework' how about making the code more efficient?
It is becoming an arms race between the lazy programmers and the hardware guys keeping up to produce systems that will support a basic install.
and profit (which is by definition "anti-innovation") are forced to survive in the same 'for profit' economy are the need for true competition to coerce progress from the forces of stagnation.
ARPA, which became DARPA, was a 'not for profit', 'damn the cost', 'pedal to the metal' engine of innovation which tackled the glacial pace of change that existed before then.
It created the environment that made the modern world (the world since 1950) possible and that world in turn has created enormous engines of wealth.
In dealing with climate change, we could have another ARPA, if people are bright enough to see the possibilities as well as the need.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Articles that claim to be IT related, but are really just filling space in hopes of getting advertising revenue.
You're conflating two different uses of the word "pattern" from two different computer science/programming contexts and think this constitutes cleverness. BZZZZZT! Wrong! No cigar!
They're not even the same phrases. You're thinking of pattern recognition and pattern matching. Read the 2nd article. They are definitely not the same thing!
We need another RISC revolution, but in support of what we really need as programmers. That would be better support of VMs for high level languages. VMs in the sense of Xen will also be useful, but we are already making significant progress there.
Print view: http://www.zdnet.co.uk/misc/print/0,1000000169,39291080-39001111c,00.htm
0I like the war analogy - War against "environmental change, disease and international political and economic upheaval!" ... so, because no one likes change, and everyone has their own goals and motives first, technological advancement will not meet its full potential. AKA, we need the buggers to attack so we can unite around Ender Wiggins.
IMO, the biggest obstacle is the digital divide. The prevalining and overwhelming majority of people in the world are economically and socially dispossessed, which one can only imagine deprives the rest of us of people who would otherwise have contributed richly to IT development.
The Banjo Players Must Die!
This is a pretty well accepted notion and has numerous examples not of where monopolistic powers coincide with stagnation of technology, but examples of where monopolies were busted and things changed shortly thereafter. The most common example of this is when the phone service monopolies were interrupted.
But in most (probably all) states in the US, there is a utility commission that sets the minimum standards for service offerings. Why is this? Clearly, because there is a need to mandate to companies a minimum required level of service. When the utility commissions don't mandate levels of service high enough, we end up with... well, what we see all too often, which are technological "ghettos" where service providers don't want to invest in areas that yield low return. They would rather, if it were up to them, cherry pick only the areas that would yield premium return as it would make sense. But even today, there are too many places where DSL isn't available or more commonly, where fiber service is unavailable.
And all too often we hear about "net neutrality" because the telecoms are complaining that various applications are flooding the internet and threatening to crash it. The answer that they don't want to hear, of course, is that they should be required to scale up their hardware to handle heavier loads. They would rather restrict or impede certain types of service to reduce the bandwidth demand. (Think Comcast)
But beyond communications, when Microsoft or any other company lacks competition, they lose incentive to apply funding to R&D, which directly affects new technologies being developed and released. Microsoft probably doesn't do much R&D. Instead, their strategy seems bent on "buying new things." This makes their R&D budget low and relies on a practice that maintains their monopoly while being parasitic against the rest of the industry. (That is to say when someone comes up with and develops a really good idea, Microsoft is likely to simply buy it... and either suppress it or put their name on it.)
This is a rather "natural" behavior even if it is unhealthy for economies and societies hungry for growth and improvement. Note my assertion that "natural" doesn't mean healthy or good.
IMHO, I think IT is in a rut, just as the article eludes to. What is needed is to rethink the process. Look at providing important information to the people where they are. In other words it shouldn't matter where I am, if I sit down in front of a computer I should be able to get to my information and application's wherever I am. Information and not the computer should become ubiquitous. A RFID card system (with encryption) should allow a person to sit in a an office, or cube, and have their phone calls and desktop forwarded to the workstation their in front of.
in that we never say what we mean.
Try transliterating most expressions, specially curses, across linguistic barriers and you immediately see the problem.
How is a computer supposed to 'understand' you when you can't even understand yourself without years of intimately shared experience?
Google, with its extremely sophisticated pattern matching, is part of the solution, but they can only do so much.
Yahoo, with its human moderated search spaces, is also part of the solution, but they can only do so much.
Deep contextual dependency, a.k.a. the semantic web, is something that is hard to achieve, even in humans.
We will NEVER achieve perfect solutions, language is always evolving, but the solutions will improve over time (they'll require less of it.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Are they fucking serious? A mid-sentence page break? In a web article?
IF YOU'RE NOT USING PAPER, YOU CAN PUT PAGE BREAKS WHEREVER YOU WANT. Even between items on the list. Jesus fucking Christ.
I'd prefer if their advertising didn't mandate that an article like this had to be split over two pages, but if it does, they could at least not make it a total pain in the ass to read.
IT workers and their know-it-all attitudes.
I agree. The biggest roadblock is the computer geeks themselves. Computer science is controlled by a bunch of aged computer geeks who still have the mentality of Charles Babbage and Lady Ada when it comes to designing and programming computers. Here are some more roadblocks:
Half a Century of Crappy Computing
Parallel Programming, Math and the Curse of the Algorithm
The Age of Crappy Concurrency: Erlang, Tilera, Intel, AMD, IBM, Freescale, etc...
Parallel Computers and the Algorithm: Square Peg vs. Round Hole
Killing the Beast
as a civy for the army i say the biggest roadblocks are institutional resistance and the enforcing of 20+ year old draconian policies
... are the biggest roadblock to IT development. No entity, not even non-commercial open source, is safe from being sued to oblivion for the crime of not only having an idea, but implementing it. The risk is still low enough, that most of us are still taking it. But it is building like an epidemic. The only defense is a policy of Mutually Assured Destruction backed by a massive portfolio of your own asinine software patents.
ALL MICROSOFTS FAULT!
/. and other media
They have a "stranglehold" on the desktop of course, whatever that means.
It cant be that an Apple desktop is way overpriced
It cant be that Linux is geared for people who spend too much time playing with the OS
rather than productively using it
It cant be a true alternative has just not been brought forth
But NOOOOO, its Microsoft, the all knowing and seeing evil incarnate
Its obvious whats going on here at
What time have you scheduled the storming of the Bastille?
that don't fund stuff or even try to push out stuff that they have no Clue about but they read about somewhere and they want IT to use it with out asking them if it will be a good fit.
RIAA and friends are going fast in the wrong direction, and the common people are going fast in the other direction by copying more than ever before. And it's more and more becoming right to copy from these bandits (Or even better: Avoid them totally and support people who are for free information instead), than sponsoring the terrorism and spying on the people by paying for copying.
Luckily encryption and the technology will win this battle. Hopefully without that we have to see starving mega-stars in riots on the street, but that is a cost I'm willing to take as the benefits are so huge.
Slashdot.
They left out the single biggest thing that make the first two possible. I would like to see how many of you know what it is, but I'm going to spoil it for for you. That's right kids. It's the flawed concept of "Intellectual Property". Get rid of it and progress will FLY! As long as we carry that ball and chain we shall trudge along in perpetuity in our ox carts and cinder block shoes...of course uphill in both directions.
What?
An automobile may be less complex than Windows in terms of interacting parts; there is more to a car than what you have on the road as there is also the factory tooling to build the car while the factoring tooling to pound out shrink-wrap copies of Windows is nowhere near the same. A car nowadays also has multiple embedded computer systems in it. Not nearly the SLOC as Windows, but critical code with regard to software errors.
What has matured about a car is that the market doesn't accept the MS business model of slap it together and push it out the door. GM, Ford, and Chrysler would love to do just that, but the Toyota and Honda competition doesn't let them. You can't just build a car to a certain performance spec and call it a day -- all of those interacting parts have to interact with each other through at minimum of 100,000 miles of abuse at the hands of lusers, perhaps the standard has increase to 200,000, without big ticket rebuilds of engines and transmissions.
A mass market car these days has to be crafted to the engineering standards as Space Shuttle software rather than MS software -- if the number of parts and interactions between parts is smaller, the expectation of how they hold up has been greatly raised, and as such, the intellectual labor to create a new car is somewhat greater.
I see there being two tiers of OSS. Something like Eclipse or Open Office (or perhaps Star Office) is in the first tier. A lot of other things are in the second tier, and the difference relates to installation. I am speaking from the standpoint of getting these things going under Windows, and I imagine the same thing occurs for Linux.
The first tier software may requiring reading TFM, and the menus or other interfaces may be quirky compared to other software one is used to, but generally there is a FM to read and plenty of tips offered on many Web pages. The issue with the second tier is one of dependencies. You want to install and get going with the first tier, generally there is some kind of install program and package that you download, hit install, make a couple of choices, wait, and then go. The second tier package is rife with dependencies. Want to run GovLabs partial differential equation solver. Gee, if you are running under Windows, you have to set up Cygwin and GTK and learn some Unix commands. Oh, you need to get a working setup of OpenGL up and running? And did we tell you, you need SparsMat sparse matrix solver from these other guys because all of our stuff is based on it.
It becomes this multi-day treasure hunt of going through the list of dependencies and installing other stuff first and hoping everything hangs together. It is like buying a carbody from Volvo, and engine from Volkswagen, a transmission from Borg Warner, and being knee deep in instructions on how to install the VW engine on the Borg Warner transmission flange and drop the whole thing into the engine compartment and get the wheels to turn and hook up the gas pedal to the throttle.
The reason scientific computing requires such huge amounts of processing power is that scientists are writing the code.
... a good friend of mine went to school as a CS, and up to a few months ago before I switched companies, he worked across the hall from me, taking engineer's algorithms and implementing it in code.
I'll grant you that, to a point. I'm a Mechanical/aerospace engineer, I've only had 1 formal course in C++ although I've been programming C++ since I was 12, and BASIC for years before that. I don't consider myself a computer scientist by any means. However, you need to look at the problems we are solving. Regardless of how elegant your code is, you will be pegging a processor for days or even weeks at a time. When you are trying to solve a CFD grid for heat transfer coefficients on something like a missile or Ares, you are going to have multi-million node meshes, integrating several differential equations at each node. Optimize away, your bottleneck is still going to be the processor.
Believe it or not engineers **do** integrate with CS types every now and then
What we do have are wars of a different kind - less bloody but still driving the progress. Linux vs Windows, Mac vs PC etc. The only problem is that right now all those healthy competitions are brought under a very moist blanket by the IP property laws and the software patents.
The time for a revolution in IP property laws is now - and not necessarily to make them stricter but to provide the credits to the real creators and not some overlord or troll trying to milk money from other people's creations.
Openness and inventions are what's driving the wheel of progress forward while IP lawsuits are the potholes and the rocks on the road. It's not that patents themselves are evil, but they are today driven by the lawyers and not by the inventors. Being a lawyer is probably one of the safest ways to earn money - if you have spare time you can always find some violation to prosecute.
Standardization is another important factor - the US is still sticking around with a whole set of obsolete and obnoxious measurements while almost every other country in the world is supporting the metric system. Time to pull out the head of the sand here...
Religious fanatics are always a problem. "Oh no - you can't use condoms to stop the spread of Aids - that will go against the will of God". Yes you can abstain from sex, but it's not that easy - and not everyone wants either.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The whole development landscape has turned into a minefield due to the constant threat of lawsuits over copyright and patents. These have been interpreted, bent, folded, spindled, and mutilated by a legal system that encourages incredibly expensive litigation over the most trivial issue. It's been taken to such extremes that frivolous cases (think SCO vs. everybody) cost tens of millions of dollars to defend, tens of millions to settle, or tens of millions to lose.
This has resulted in technology actually becoming a feudal system, where different players own their own "turf" and can either claim a tribute or prevent use of nearly anything now. Taking this analogy a little further, it's as if every road has been mined by "Lord GUI-Click".
10. The current lack of global wars and/or disasters ....
.... ... nepotism titles), ...), ...), ...).
We don't need wars killing millions of kith_&_kin, destroying nations, religions
We don't need dogma wars imposing and sustaining
vapor-power (political, official, family
organized-crime (drugs, prostitution, gambling
corporate-welfare (RIAA, IPR, Farm, Drugs
religious-myth (My-god, Sex-sin, Different-evil
The dogma affected will never reason effective, and should have no more
responsibility than a drunk alcoholic, cocaine addict, and/or the mentally
and emotionally disturbed person suffering hallucinations.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Seriously though, you should not have to know all this stuff to use a computer. Even a hammer is a lot more complex than most people care to think. When I use a hammer, I don't care about the metallurgy of the steel in the head (which is important to prevent the head from shattering or deforming), the designing engineer did that for me.
The biggest difference with the computer world vs the physical world is that the physical world dangers tend to be a bit more obvious. When my 11 year-old son operates a chainsaw he knows that applying chain to leg is not a clever thing to do. Explaining firewalls etc to him is a bit more difficult. All the more reason for software engineers to do a better job of designing security etc into their products.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"But for the time being, we are stuck with us geeks."
And you're "stuck" with their money.
Other than what is mentioned in the article, I believe these factors some what contributes in slowing down the IT...
1. Lack of Coherency between many IT giants
If you go back to 80s, there were hundreds of computer brands, hardware and software. If it remained the same way, we might never see the technological advent we saw during last decade.
In early days, different networks had their own protocols. After they all came to an agreement for a common protocol, TCP/IP.... now everyone enjoys internet.
As of today, we see many IT giants try to stick to their own tech standard rather coming to an agreement with other parties for a common platform, where everyone can contribute for its evolution. Even AMD, Intel both produce x86 chips.. SSE4 instructions are different. Only very recently Apple opened up their doors for Intel Chips and other popular hardware platforms.
I think proper, single standard is the key.
2. Global Warming
This is soon gonna be a big barrier. I think I don't need to explain.
3. Legacy support
Why many hardware/software platforms find it difficult to reach the next stage simple as they cannot give up the support for legacy applications.
I am working in a PABX providing company. Certain software we have to operate systems only works with windows 2000. So either present OS should support them OR software need to be upgraded (Which is highly unlikel after a product is retired)
4. Politics
To buy the 3G/WCDMA operating license in many countries on this planet earth requires some jaw dropping amount of cash. This is adversly affecting IT market, as telecom companies go bankrupt after buying the license.
Only 2 countries (to my knowledge) have free licensing schemes, they are Japan and S. Korea. Both countries help new technologies to be publicly tested. This level of flexibility and non-politic environment certainly helps in growing the IT sector.
5. Greediness
Most companies 'save the best for last'. For an example, Intel, didn't reveal many secrets of NetBurst Architecture based P4s. Only when Extreme Editions are in market... we all knew how many features were inside the architecture which never been enabled earlier, rather enabling them time to time as a strategy to keep the sales intact.
This level of greediness certainly not helps for the IT development. But nobody can do anything as Companies do things to earn better for a long time...
C++ has to die.
It's just plain awful. I can't believe this shitty language has taken over the world.
factor 966971: 966971
I think the confusion of then and than are what limits IT the most
"Windows unified the personal-computer market, and led it into the enterprise. A good thing, surely? Yes -- if unity is more important than innovation, flexibility and a free market. The European Commission disagreed with that, as have courts around the world."
Bwa-hah-hah! Courts and the EC standing up for innovation, flexibility and a free market. That'll be the day! Funny s**t.
Second WTF:
What is with you setting up "Reply" and "Parent" links to logout?. If you had done this Sunday you would have been modded into oblivion.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
You both have valid points.
When dealing with huge amounts of data and computationally intensive tasks, it's going to take a long time, period.
That said, though, there are frequently optimizations that would occur to someone skilled in computer programming that wouldn't to someone whose training and experience lies elsewhere.
Case in point, I once made a simple change to some code (specifically, the disk location of certain working files) that reduced the run time from about 40 days (extrapolated from a sample data set) to about 30 hours. (The change was to put the input, workfile and output on different disk drives, eliminating seek time and disk head thrashing. This was long ago, hardware constraints were severe.)
The difference lies in knowing what the underlying systems (libraries, OS, memory and I/O systems, hardware) are actually doing when you code your high level analysis routines. Can't make the floating point calculations any faster (although perhaps there are some you can cache for later reuse) but there are a lot of things that can be tweaked and are worth tweaking for high volume calculations.
-- Alastair
With every laptop I get, I upgrade the disk to 7200RPM and I keep the CPU underclocked at 300MHz or 1GHz. Works perfectly. Less noise, less heat, less power-hungry... and never or rarely feel the need for more speed.
I respectfully disagree.
The masses are slowly grasping technology. Even the staunchest holdbacks are at least mumbling "Eh, I'm too old to learn that stuff, but my kid is good at it". Kinda the Augie Doggie Daddy wistful tone.
An iconic movie of the 1980's was "Revenge of the Nerds". Here we are. I enjoy teaching what little I know, because every discussion of "There are three file types that contain text that you will see often..." is about a new user trying to understand.
The good managers know when they're cooked, and set out to hire an IT whiz to *recommend* solutions. "I kinda want to do that unified thing, you know, that server thingie. Where do I start?"
Turbo Clueless guys aren't doing so well in consulting anymore. In any good sized company is often an undiscovered Computer Guy (who may or may not thunder "You're Welcome!") who pipes up when a bogus pseudo-salesman is full of it. If the Senior Team is listening, they'll give him one of those "You saved our company money" pizza parties and promote him to BS detector.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What roadblock? Everything is cyclical. Financial markets are cyclical, war and peace are cyclical, epidemics are cyclical. Once new technologies come up you know there will be some initial retrace, bugs, slowness, glitches that prevent you from achieving the true potential. Then time passes, bugs are solved, things improved and you get to the maximum until a totally new technology develops and the cycle repeat.
It is truthful to say that anything since the break-up has matched the technical innovations and achievements of AT&T, Western Electric, and Bell Labs? The Cell Phone Rvolution
A footnote:
American Heritage and Invention & Technology have been purchased from Forbes by Edwin S. Grosvenor, the great grandson of Alexander Graham Bell and the grandson of Gilbert H. Grosvenor, editor of National Geographic from 1899 to 1954.
all the fucking frameworks. what is the newest next framework of the week. jesus christ already. find something and work with it for more than two weeks. frameworks might be OK but everyone works the same way... so that there is no new novel way to find a different means to the same end... stagnation. unless of course all million of you do it together with this week's framework, and then here we go again... stop watching tv, you all have ADD... oops here's another framework.... duck! there goes another. good thing we're all on the same page
Sadly, I have to agree. Or, I have to sadly agree. Or something.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
It used to be the case (in the days of embedded 386/486/Pentium chips vs. embedded ARM chips) that an X86-based chip would have up to 10 times as many gates on it for a similar level of functionality. In large part this was because of the complex, variable-size instruction format.
As modern out-of-order execution designs have progressed, X86 and "RISC" designs have grown closer and closer together. At this point, a modern X86 chip is over 90% "RISC stuff" and only a small fraction of its gates (at most 5-10%) are related to the "front end" for decoding the complex instruction set, register renaming, and all that fun stuff.
Over the last 10 years, Intel and AMD have pushed the X86 technology to the point where it was almost as good as the best competing RISC designs. In some areas (like branch predictors), X86 chips have actually been ahead of the crowd for several years now.
The arguments against X86 are now weaker than they were even 5 years ago. If you were going to replace it with anything different, you would definitely want it to be something with on-the-fly decompression of the instruction stream; otherwise you are not going to even match the density of X86 and you will have more cache misses, page faults, and so on.
That went over well. Not.
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
One of the biggest holdbacks on technology progress is the constant churning of the tech landscape every few months.
One thing that relates to this is the desktop-app versus web-based. Desktop GUI's were getting mature and easy-to-make around the mid-90's when suddenly the web yanked them away and everybody tries to put everything thru HTML+JS+DOM. It improved deployability, but complicated and limited software development. We need a better form standard that melds the best of both. The current attempts are either limited, highly proprietary, or overly-tied to a specific language. And I don't think MS will support JavaScript well enough to get AJAX working smooth.
Table-ized A.I.
is desktop 3D printer.
In the beginning there is materials in the world. Everything thereafter is a result of software operations.
Repost, really sorry, I forgot to check the formatting :-S
Could someone please kill the previous post?
I know ARM/PXA/XScale can run some intensive applications (Tomtom is my favorite Killer App) on my PDA.
I also have an ARM in my (linux-enabled) router, so I know what it's capable of and some multi-core'ing would be nice (push data with samba and read with UPnP simultaneous).
I even have a Gamepark portable console with an ARM9 inside, that can play DivX and DOOM (!) full-screen at 320x200.
On the other hand, my PDA and my router run severely-stripped OS'es (busybox, for example) and the Gamepark can only run one task at a time (reboot, open next game).
I never said it was a poor CPU, I just said that most programs on it are built with highly optimized code.
Firefox it an excellent example of something that can be highly multi-threaded (simultaneously retrieve multiple pages/images, run Flash and Java applets, etc.
Unfortunately, it is also an absolute pig when it comes to memory consumption (around 500MB, a.t.m.) and some of the Flash applets kick my Core Duo into 75% CPU load (just a single applet).
There is also another problem: those cores need a complex architecture, if you want to stick over 4 cores on a single die.
The Quadcore is made of 2 DualCore CPU's that happen to share the same socket, like Pentium2's douls be run in DualCPU, by putting both of them on the same bus and toggling a single CPU bit.
This will not scale nicely over 4 cores and will get worse as more cores are stuck on the same bus.
AMD took a -very long time- to build a native QuadCore CPU with an efficient crossbar architecture. (I don't know how long it took Sun to design the Niagara CPU).
I have one of those wonderful next-gen PowerPC CPU's in my Playstation3, but the programmer's design guidelines tend to scare most programmers.
Each sub-cpu is linked to the main CPU, so traffic from one sub-CPU to the next (sending that downloaded image to the Firefox rendering engine is painstakingly slow.
Also, I haven't seen reports of multi-core architectures slowing down individual cores.
Because the core is linked to its bus at a (usually) fixed multiplier, slowing down individual cores means managing bus and multiplier speeds for each Core individually,
which will make the Interconnection architecture (Crossbar) more complex, and thus slower and more prone to bugs.
Yes, X86 is a dog that should be simply put to sleep.
Unfortunately, all other architectures (Itanium, Sun T2) are not built for mainstream use and thus are prohibitively expensive.
Transmeta has tried to build/sell a new CPU with a brand-new architecture, which could emulate X86 and 68K, but it failed miserably.
(It was even more power-efficient, but it was probably killed stone dead by Intel)
I really hope someone else will build a new Crusoe and, this time, succeed.
If they manage to make the interface (mostly) compatible with existing PCIe interfaces,
companies might even start building hardware for it
(otherwise, they would have to re-design their device, investing into something
that is unproven and might not even outlive the design process).
"I was in love with a beautiful blonde once, dear. She drove me to drink. It's the one thing I am indebted to her for."
The number one problem is so obvious it's sitting on your shoulders. We don't need more speed, we need more parallel processing. Parallel processing has been, by far, the most underdeveloped aspect of computing. We are so insanely focused on more speed that we forget the reason we need all that speed is to do context switching between applications, as the number of applications we run in parallel continues to grow. Think about this, not even the fastest commercially available single core Intel processor can compete with one hundred 133MHz processor running in parallel.
Forget all the other excuses. What we need is chip-makers that will provide more parallel processing. That is the #1 problem.
They are not going to do that, however, because they know that it would empower the people. Think about it. If everybody had say, 1000 small 500 Mhz processors the you get 10000 people together, and you have more parallel processing power then any computer in history, all in the hands of a relatively small group of people. For the first time in history the PEOPLE would have more power than any monopoly or government. That is what they (and you know which "they" I'm talking about) are most afraid of. And, perhaps, their fear is justified.