I thought so too, until the Intel Itanium chip. Just look at this chart. Everyone in the industry was convinced that the chip would take over the whole CPU market. It is still hard to understand how everyone could be so wrong.
Tuesday, February 12, 2019
The big tech firms can be wrong
You might think that if well-respected technology companies, like IBM, Google, and Microsoft, are solidly pursuing quantum computing, then it must have some commercial viability.
I thought so too, until the Intel Itanium chip. Just look at this chart. Everyone in the industry was convinced that the chip would take over the whole CPU market. It is still hard to understand how everyone could be so wrong.
I thought so too, until the Intel Itanium chip. Just look at this chart. Everyone in the industry was convinced that the chip would take over the whole CPU market. It is still hard to understand how everyone could be so wrong.
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This may come as a shock, but the more people who say something does not make something more likely true or factual. Individuals can think and sift through evidence, mobs of people repeating each other can't.
ReplyDeleteExperts are just people, often they make the same mistakes everyone else does, and are even more prone to their own special varieties of confirmation bias because of their inability to confront their own insular hubris.
That's true for IT and a great deal of the pretend productivity of computers. Hell, they can't even reduce the labor to create movies. The 3D animated movie Tangle took SIX YEARS to make with a budget of $260 million. Even traditional animation is way less expensive and time consuming! The Princess and the Frog (a better movie) had a budget of $105 million.
DeleteThe paperless office is a total scam but companies spend billions trying to accomplish it. The office computer does some fast searches and emails but you need a whole IT department, obsoleting hardware and licensed software, large electricity usage, security services, backup services, cloud services, off-site replication centers, generators, high-speed Internet, servers, programming & development costs, etc. So what's the net? Well, the Solow paradox. It didn't really show in the productivity numbers.
Computers are shit.
Intel had the Pocket PC market with chips like xScale but didn't predict smartphones. That's the biggest mistake they ever made. American tech is mediocre and China is already ahead. It's not hard to be ahead of these imbeciles. Just compare a MINIX or Kolibri to a Microsloth Windblows or CryOS. Alan Kay says they're all garbage. They just reinvented the 1973 Alto after they shrunk the circuitry but try to take all the credit. Just commercial trash. They can't even improve web browsers or interfaces. Intel makes shitty desktop CISC processors (my i7 even rapidly cycles with heat load) that suck tons of power. The software industry is just putting out less functional "apps" and insecure, bloated spaghetti code. I could run modern system on a tenth the power with only the on-die cache. Only dropouts and loser consider careers in technology anymore. Not even slightly interesting. It's a career for people with no talent or friends. I don’t have a good word to say about them. They have given China endless ability to steal IP.
ReplyDeleteIntel was such an idiot that they put MINIX on their chips and didn't tell anybody, including Andy Tanenbaum. It was an academic experiment and not a ready-to-ship OS! What morons complicate a processor like this? Unbelievable. Even though MINIX has tremendously fewer lines of code than most OSs, they still left an idiotic bug and compromised the entire system. The eventual patches significantly slowed the systems.
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