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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?'"
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."
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 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.
Nah....#1 Answer: PHB's !!
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Bull. (Mostly)
Now, I'm Canadian, so I can't comment authoritatively on what it's like in the U.S, but your points make no sense whatsoever. Can it be argued that government gets in the way? Perhaps, but not with the examples you've given.
Phones in cars: If it was just your life you were putting in danger, then who am I to stand in your way? However, this affects everyone around you. You become statistically more dangerous to everyone around you when you're talking on the phone while driving, and you should not have the right to do that. Governments who do this do it because more people are concerned about not getting run over by dorks who can't wait ten minutes to make their bowling plans than there are dorks.
Restrictions on talking on the phone in airplanes: There were (valid?) concerns about cell phones interfering with airplane electronics. Now that these issues are more well understood, the restrictions are going away. Personally, I'd rather them be more safe than sorry.
Electrical rate-hikes and forced conservation to combat Global Warming: Yup. Again, your right to run ten computers at artificially low rates that don't take into account the total cost of the power it takes (including the environmental cost) doesn't trump my right to not have my house under water in 50 years. You're using power, pay the full cost of it.
Sarbanes-Oxley and other laws that make business finance riskier (so there are fewer tech startups): It has been proven over and over again that businesses cannot be trusted to monitor themselves, so the public says things like "they shouldn't be allowed to do that, someone should do something about it so my retirement fund doesn't dissapear!". Well, guess what? The "someone" tends to be the government, and the "something" is S-OX. Got a better way to make sure "they" can't do "that"? I'm all ears, but if you say the invisible hand of the market I'm going to flick your ear.
And taxes, well, it costs money to do the business of government. I'd like it to be lower myself, but to say that internet shopping should be tax-free just because it's online is just arrogant and dumb. There may be other good reasons for it being tax-free, but if you want your iPod and you buy it online, you should be paying taxes just like the rest of us chumps. We can make a case for lowering taxes overall, but that's a completely different argument.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
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.
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.
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
... 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.