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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.
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
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.
Think how much more productive an IT worker could be if the software tools didn't require them to learn a bunch of skills which are irrelevant to their job. Back when cars had chokes and manually adjusted spark advance, you would have been claiming how important it was for drivers to get 'basic understanding' of these things. But of course the real answer was to completely hide these details from drivers so that today they have no idea what it even means to choke an engine or advance a spark. Yes, ignorance is a problem. But it's not the users who are ignorant. It's those of us who develop and maintain the IT systems who are ignorantly blaming the users for our own failings.
"It says click OK to continue... what should I do?"
This is the kind of question I get to deal with at work.
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.
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.
... 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.