Unto the pure, all things are pure

The hardware engineers did a fantastic job. The way the specifications of Bluetooth are developed, with all the different profiles to cater to every conceivable application, shows the professionalism and brilliance of the people behind Bluetooth. The same cannot be said of the software people. Virtually every notebook PC comes with Bluetooth these days. But it is effectively useless. The dreams and aspirations of the Bluetooth creators are not, and cannot be, realized. It is a utter complete waste. The culprits are Microsoft and the driver developers of the device makers. If some of the original goals of Bluetooh were realized, everyone would be able, among other things, : To exchange files between notebooks instead of the hassle of a thumbdrive. To connect to the Internet on the road through the mobile phone in the pocket, seamlessly. To control a PowerPoint show, for example, with a pointer device using Bluetooth, instead of having to plug in another dongle. I had gon...

It seems that most people, especially present day young ones, have problems understanding my Apollo 11 illustration .  I will try again with another example. When the most well-known bank in my city had a million customers, it had 50+ branches.  Almost every customer operated a savings account where each was given a savings book.  Every deposit or withdrawal transaction was printed as a one-line entry in the book with the latest balance in the second last column.  (The last column was a comments field.) Every teller in the branch had an IBM terminal.  Customers would fill up and sign a form to withdraw money, or just present cash to deposit.  The teller would open the savings book to the page where the last entry was and insert the book into the printer next to the terminal.  She would push the book all the way in.  When she hit the key to print, the central mainframe computer would send out the exact number of line-feeds so that the latest tr...

Probably something like 80% to 90% of the new found computing power goes into the graphical user interface. This is on personal computers as well as mobile phones. The sleek graphics painted in a window that we take for granted require billions and billions of computing cycles, repeating and repeating every time something on screen changes. The graphical UI is obviously a great enabler. It allows lay people to use the computer where previously only trained professionals could. However, do not let this be a distraction. The fact that a small fraction of an iPhone powered the complete operations of a bank or sent men to the moon and back cannot be erased. And it is repeatable, with great ease.

(I will justify shortly that) to most people, the set of things in the world is divided as follows (not to scale): Things I do not know Things that I know Figure 1 For the past thirty years or so, I have always assumed that the set of things is as follows (not to scale): Things (I know that) I do not know Things that I know Things that I do not know that I do not know Figure 2 I spend most of my waking hours tranfering things from the yellow zone to the pink zone.  It is only too easy to lapse into Figure 1 thinking if I lower my guard. Why do I think most people think like in Figure 1? I draw this conclusion from the ridicule poured on Donald Rumsfeld from almost 100% of the press. Some thought it was poetry ! The BBC called it bizzare .  I don't know whether to believe that the British Plain English Campaign doesn't understand what Mr Rumsfeld was saying.  It appears that people do not realize there is a Figure 2. To me what Mr Rumsfeld sa...

For almost five thousand years, we were certain that the sun rose in the east and set in the west. People went about planning a day's routine based on this knowledge that the sun moved in the sky around the earth. No one was hurt or killed even though our understanding was badly wrong. Newton put forth many laws of physics that govern almost everything we do. We build bridges, skyscrapers and aeroplanes based on those laws. No one has been known to be injured or killed because any of Newton's laws were faulty. But 300 years after Newton, Einstein's theory on relativity showed that Newton's laws were wrong! Newton was right only if speeds were slow.  Luckily the rocket scientists had time to make the adjustments before sending people to the moon. So, we can be right but still be wrong, and be the none worse for it. We can be wrong in totality, but if our application of knowledge is restricted to the scope of what we know, it is possible that we can still be s...

Finally, today I see someone with similar views. See Programming is a Super Power . You might have discovered that I too started with assembler on 8-bits.  Survivors from that bygone era respect power, or rather the lack thereof.  Some of us are stupid enough to always optimize every line of code in the head, mentally mapping the compiler output to IL to Intel opcode, notwithstanding that the entry-level CPU is running at a billion instructions per second in each of its four cores.  Most of the time we are proven right, as any application beyond the trivial will become sluggish when one relaxes and indulge in "easy" code, no matter how BIPS you may have. With today's hardware and the enormously rich class libraries, I am continuously thrilled by the amount of heavy lifting that a single line of innocuously looking code can do.  It must be like flying a jumbo plane - little movements on the stick maneuver 350 tons just like that! After a while, it becomes addi...

IE9 is out today and web sites have sprung up benchmarking it against Chrome, Firefox, et cetera. 100 years ago, the lunch time conversation probably centered around who's got the fastest car, and if yours was 38mph and mine was 42mph I get the looks of envy and admiration. About 50 years ago, people forgot that cars came with a maximum speed limit. Because whatever roads there were, and whatever you wanted to do, every car could go faster than what the other restrictions impose. Here we are at IE9 on an entry level consumer PC with quad-cores and a billion instructions per second per core, who are these people talking about browser benchmarks, and what are their motives?