The Biggest Roadblocks To Information Technology Development 280
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?'"
Paraphrase? (Score:2)
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.
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Examples:
Adaptive filtering
Chess
Music composition
Real-time target acquisition and tracking
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"pattern recognition" IS part of artificial intelligence..., /pedant mode = "off"
Two Different Uses of the Word (Score:5, Informative)
They're not even the same phrases. You're thinking of pattern recognition [wikipedia.org] and pattern matching [wikipedia.org]. 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.
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Depends on if your office is next to mine.
But I agree with you. I find it ridiculously annoying. Anything the vast majority of users wouldn't use should be moved to a more obscure location. Anything I never use should just sit there. I can handle not clicking it all by myself.
Horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Better not tell him about the wheel or fire (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because something is old does NOT mean it is obsolete, more and more I see this as an absolute truth, advancing (oh okay, runaway) age has nothing to do with it.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!
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I'm not going spend $400 [amazon.com] and $20/book*.
Though I'll admit to considering it as long as I can transfer my webscription [webscription.net] ebooks to it.
*Yes, they advertise "New York Times® Best Sellers and all New Releases $9.99, unless marked otherwise." The whole 'unless marked otherwise' is real assuring. Besides, I don't normally read best sellers, and pay less than $10/book.
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Using your arms and fingers to point in a screen is already a reality. I have had touch screens on monitors for a while and you don't realize how much energy you end up exerting in something as simple as playing a game of solitaire. If you had to do your entire computing like this, you would be wanting the mouse back really fast. If your mouse is set up right, you shouldn't even have to pick your wrist up to move the pointer anywhere on the screen. it is loads mor
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Re:Horrible (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, they mucked up. The word lists used to arrange the keys were all in the present tense, and so "e" ended up next to "d".
Re:Horrible (Score:4, Interesting)
They may work "good", but don't forget that good is often the enemy of better. How much of the reason we stick to improving old technologies is because of familiarity, inertia in R&D, and lack of imagination? Probably more than we can imagine, which is itself part of the problem.
People missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
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".
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You forgot the "Within 10 years, everything would have been programmed and CS will be an extinct profession".
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Wrong. If you've been paying attention, the computer industry re-invents itself whenever a new medium comes along and all the software gets written all over again.
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CS has always been and will probably ever will be a self sustaining industry, the tools and products evolve, but the work doesn't: we are continously improving things or adding new ones on top of them.
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Yes of course but I was commenting on your statement that in ten years everything will have been written. Of course there are programmers that improve software during its lifetime, add new features, make it mature. But it seems like every generation of software that becomes mature, a new medium comes along a
Here's One More (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish these outlets would stop trying to turn the internet into TV. We left TV because it was lousy.
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Moron (Score:2)
The number one problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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Agreed (Score:4, Informative)
This is the kind of question I get to deal with at work.
Re:Agreed (Score:4, Interesting)
Think about this in other terms. When I push the "power wash" button on my dishwasher, I can reasonably expect to know what is going to happen. When I push the "OK" button on a random dialog I only know that I have caused some action to happen. For almost all of the times where I might have to push an "OK" button I know that what I think is going to happen coincides with what actually happens (oops, excepting any, you know, bugs).
The GP says:
The advice I would give to someone sitting at an "Ok to continue" prompt varies greatly depending on what I know about what they are doing. That is, not all "OK" buttons are created equal - one could show you pr0n of Natalie Portman while another could wipe your disk of erm... pr0n of Natalie Portman. They could even be the same program!
Now, lets try this with a hammer analogy. So you go buy this hammer because you want to put a thermometer on the tree outside (weather bug anyone?). While securing the thermometer to the tree, your house falls down into a pile of rubble. Your hammer caused it. Wha...?
Yes, people have an obligation to use their brains when using technology, but a general purpose computer is still a complicated high tech instrument and the current generation of tools is not sufficiently advanced to resolve that complexity for the average person. If computers were as simple as hammers to use the issue would be resolved already.
One can always blame the users for the shortcomings of computers or for the shortcomings of programmers or the UI experts. However, one is likely to have an easier time shaping the tools than the users of those tools. All well and good to call them idiots, stupid and stubborn, but they can damn well use a hammer (as well as their TV remote, car, cell phone, etc.) without issues.
The question is how to best resolve that complexity so that it is more like a hammer from craftsman rather than from Acme as it appears now.
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Instead of Windows saying "This network has limited or no connectivity" and leaving the user to puzzle out exactly what the hell that means, it should just say "Unable to obtain an [[IP address]] from the [[DHCP]] server: operation timed out."
Those of us who already know what that stuff means will know that they need to go futz with their router; those of us who don't might learn something (from, o
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The average user would rather let their computer remain broken then learn what DHCP is (at least in my experience). A message stating "can't connect to the internet"
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Average users don't fix anything. So why give them details that they don't understand by default? Explain things in simple terms so they get the basic idea of the problem. When they ask someone else how to fix it the other person can read the details.
For example, the average user would understand, "No open WiFi nearby." That's enough to know basically what's going on. The techie might like to see "Authenticatio
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I think we need to change error messages to things that are technically accurate, with hyperlinks to wikipedia.
Instead of Windows saying "This network has limited or no connectivity" and leaving the user to puzzle out exactly what the hell that means, it should just say "Unable to obtain an [[IP address]] from the [[DHCP]] server: operation timed out."
(user clicks link)
"The page cannot be displayed."
... this is like the old joke about the network admin only reachable by email.
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(emphasis added) Right. The error message may change from minute to minute depending on the perception of the last editor.
Given a choice between a static yet cryptic message and one which will change without notice (and may not even be accurate), which would you choose?
While I know that the /. crowd prefers (as the commercials say "5 to1") wikipedia as a citation, this strikes me as "Lets make a
Re:The number one problem (Score:5, Insightful)
That attitude, which is effectively equivalent to the RTFM attitude many people in the open source community take towards operating system interface design, is IMO the singular biggest obstacle to widespread linux adoption. Also (at the risk of starting an OS evangalism flamewar), it is the reason Ubuntu has become so very popular so recently. Ubuntu gets the design principles right, starting with a well-thought out package manager (admittedly copied from Debian).
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Fixing a car requires specialized tools. It makes little sense to inform the owner that "fuel injector for cylinder 3 has limited flow" rather than "take your car to a dealership as soon as possible" and let the mechanic know that a fuel injector has a problem.
On the other hand, all you need to fix a "Unable to obtain an IP address from a DHCP server" is right there in the computer (or, at most, a phone call away). You could even have a "Unable to gai
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The hallmark of good design is that people don't have to know how it works under the hood. How many people who drive cars on a daily basis can describe the basics of what is going on in the engine?
I'd generally agree with you, but an awful lot of people just don't want to learn how to use a computer. At all. It's like if people refused to learn the difference between the gas pedal and the brake, bought manual transmissions but left it in reverse all day, didn't stop and stop signs and drove on the wrong
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While this is true in some cases, I think it's mostly snobbery. Well-designed tools can be used intuitively.
Most people learn exactly as much as they see a need to learn. How much do you know about how your car works? Your plumbing? Your washing machine? Just the basics, I'd guess - enough to use it. Thankfully, your car's manufacturer has kept things simple for you.
The "idiots" you refer to may have adva
Re:The number one problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that no one wants to learn how to do anything. Why? Because there's always someone they can bother with the same questions over and over again.
aka THERE'S A GOOGLE SEARCH BAR RIGHT ON THE FIREFOX BROWSER. Stop going to Google then searching!
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If hammers needed constant maintenance to function normally, people would stop using hammers.
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In that same minute, I could teach a person about how to use a mouse to manipulate a cursor, and how to double click. But a minute of instruction
Ignorance is the biggest obstacle (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Ignorance is the biggest obstacle (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Ignorance is the biggest obstacle (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mod parent up!
My 50-something parents shouldn't have to learn about virus scans and disk defragmenting and registry maintenance in order to surf the web and send email. They have already spent their careers learning their own specialties.
Why should our tools need babysitting all the time?
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That's why I set up my 70-something mother with a Macintosh.
biggest roadblocks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Contradictory and otherwise trite... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Windows (Score:3, Insightful)
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
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I'm sure I speak for most IT professionals when I say when something comes along that's better for the particular job than Windows is, we'll switch eventually. This isn't religion, just practical and professional common-sense.
Until that day, I don't think Windows is that bad to be honest. Having said that, I'd add that competition is healthy and so is diversity, but removing Windows won't achieve anything.
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But don't forget that often when deciding that Windows is "the best tool for the job", the overriding factor is, "that's what all of our customers run". So the ubiquity of Windows can be a barrier to trying new things.
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For a system that you have absolute control over, that is too true.
However, we talk about MSWindows. You only have the control they allow you to have. One cannot fix the bugs, one cannot reprogram the GUI, nor can one break intentionally disabled controls. Admin isn't even "Admin"... System is, and you cant be system.
You cant even delete opened files on MS Windows.
We're out of solutions (Score:3, Funny)
Smarter not Faster (Score:4, Interesting)
lack of ability to understand (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Eventually more like: "Perhaps the biggest roadblock is the general inability of humanity to navigate a complex system beyond an arbitrarily negotiated collection of local, mostly unrelated local optima".
For short one may name it "collective stupidity".
CC.
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On the other hand, rockets and neurosurgery gear provide employment for a tiny number of really smart people, while IT creates jobs for any halfwit who knows how to find the ';' key. For all the sneering about "the masses", I don't think you guys would be happy if they really did stop using computers.
I don't know how many times I've encountered things like people with mult
Bullshit (Score:4, Informative)
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?
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Not to mention that unless he's talking about more efficient data paths (i.e. more IPC instead of clock frequency, but still more overall execution speed), that kind of 'data tagging' is completely inappropriate for a
Re: [AC] Bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
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 o
Roadblocks my be a good thing (Score:4, Insightful)
(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.
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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.
Actually, Windows 2000 accomplished that, XP was descended from it. But thanks for playing...
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.
I don't really think Apple deserves credit for that one. Its more likely that Linux just isn't what people are used to. The number of new computer owners is getting pretty small in comparison to the number of people who are buying new computers to replace PCs that they owned before. So naturally they are inclined to buy something familiar instead of something different.
And of course the near-imposs
Semantic web, from ZDNet (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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The biggest road block is linguistic (Score:2)
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 c
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Biggest roadblock = artificial limits (Score:2, Insightful)
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. "U
The number one thing IMHO (Score:2)
I can think of three things. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
bad mushrooms. (Score:2)
A BlackBerry keyboard is a wonder of miniaturisation; shame the same's not true of most BlackBerry users.
- the author is on drugs. BTW, I don't like BBs, but many people can't live without them and the small keyboards are their cocaine and I am pretty sure those are not Smurfs we are talking about.
The current lack of global wars and/or disasters
- there are plenty of wars going on at any point in time. Let's bomb the author of this POS article, maybe that will help to improve the tech.
The author is an ass.
Idiot clients... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 th
It's Really Two Things... (Score:2)
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
Misguided view of computer architecture (Score:2, Interesting)
... 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 ...
Yes, 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
Blame Microsoft and Chip developers? (Score:2)
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.
#1: Pursuit of new shiny things... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Its an industry rag.. (Score:2)
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.
The biggest roadblock to development of IT (Score:2)
I/O performance much more important than CPU speed (Score:4, Interesting)
The divide (Score:2)
Monopoly == Technological Stagnation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
In a rut. (Score:4, Insightful)
Software Patents (Score:5, Insightful)
Clueless PHB's (Score:2)
More Women? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Biggest roadblock? (Score:4, Funny)
Nah....#1 Answer: PHB's [wikipedia.org] !!
Biggest Roadblock = Computer Geeks (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [blogspot.com]
Parallel Programming, Math and the Curse of the Algorithm [blogspot.com]
The Age of Crappy Concurrency: Erlang, Tilera, Intel, AMD, IBM, Freescale, etc... [blogspot.com]
Parallel Computers and [blogspot.com]
Nothing is stopping you. (Score:2)
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.
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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?
Re: (Score:2)
Well, war in the way article mentions was never good, is not good and will not be good.
As a Analogy i have seen some really talented artists(music artists) who are drug addicted. This does not means that one should do drugs to be a good musicians.
Re:They missed government regulation (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll agree with you that most of the original poster's points don't really make his case. However, I still think his main premise - that government is the biggest roadblock to IT development - stands, but for other reasons:
You can come up with your own list, I'm sure. There's a cost of doing business that is directly related to government regulation, which is fine and acceptable -
Re: (Score:2)
You must need that for your job that requires 10 years experience of C#.