The computer is not making progress with all the components increasing their speed and capacity at the same time. Some parts progress faster. This spells trouble.
When the first computers came they could do very little things. They were only able to make some basic math and to process some text. Image was not possible and video was science fiction. Now it’s all possible even common.
The problem is that computer memory is improving much faster than computer processing power. The hard disk for example doubles it’s capacity every year as well as RAM and flash memory. The processor on the other hard only doubles it’s speed every year and a half. This means they have more information to process but they cannot do it at the same real speed they could just one year ago. Imagine that in ten years.
The amount of information you can have in your computer today is so big that you no longer think in MB anymore, you only think in GB and in TB from now on. Thanks to breakthroughs in storage devices it’s very easy to have about 8 TB in a single computer today with RAID-0 technology. Unless you buy a motherboard for a server that can have up to four special processors, you will have to be content with just one. This means that if you fill all the 8 TB with information you might never be able to use your computer again. Why?
Software improves even slower than the processor. The latest operating system came to the market five years after the previous version and brought nothing new except a lot of bugs and crashes and other problems. If you do the math this means the software remained the same for five years but the capacity of the computer increased 16 times. If you could have a computer with 512 of RAM in 2001 when XP came to the light, in 2006 you could still have XP but you could have 8 GB of RAM in the same computer. The amount of information you can carry keeps improving while the system to take care of it keeps the same or gets worse all the time.
How will it be in the future? Indexing tools are making no progress nor they help you right now. After a critical point they will crash themselves like a star turns into a black hole and they do nothing or they take several minutes to find a simple document.
Microsoft is the best or the worst software companies and newer versions of windows do not promise to take care of this issue.
In one sentence, in the future you will be able to have all the information in the world in your computer but you WILL NOT be able to access it in a useful way.
2 Responses
Interesting srticle.
thanks for sharing this…