From: David Gibbs
Sadly, trying to read the 2nd page of the article causes the CMS system
to blow up. :(
Not for me...
Trends&Tech
Continued...
King Solomon complained about the state of man: "The thing that hath been,
it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be
done: and there is no new thing under the sun." He could have been talking
about IT. Things we have discussed as trends in this column over the years
come into general use: virtual machines, blade servers, SANs, distributed
computing, XML, SOA, etc. Those "hot topics" are old hat, and they probably
were when we first wrote about them.
Information technology is waiting for the next paradigm shift-for the next
quantum breakthrough that once again will revolutionize the world. The
personal computer changed the way we do business forever, but the PC did not
represent a technological breakthrough. It simply was the logical
culmination of two things: Claude Shannon's seminal works on information
theory in the late '40s and the creation of the first transistor in 1947.
Shannon's two-part paper, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," was
published in 1948. Coincidently, both events occurred at Bell Labs, which
makes you wonder what we would be getting out of Bell Labs today if it had
been permitted to exist and been funded as it was in its heyday. Regardless,
the personal computer was the inevitable result of those two occurrences.
Two circumstances must exist for truly new technologies or paradigm shifts
to happen: First, there must be the theoretical idea something could happen
if certain conditions are met. Information theory was such a concept.
Second, the ability to create machines that apply that theory must be
feasible-the creation of the transistor was the engineering technology that
allowed Claude Shannon's theories to grow to fruition. So, really
significant changes in the way man interacts with his environment require
the big idea-the new theory-and the implementation of that theory. The
implementation often is just engineering or applied science.
The Chicken or the Egg?
Which leaves us wondering: What is the new idea, or the new theory, that is
going to change the way we process information? Is that even a valid
question? It just may be the current state of the art-an art in which we
transform all information into a digital state and then perform operations
on that digital state. This would indicate the current state already has
reached its highest achievable plateau and the only change we can expect is
better hardware on which to run these digital systems.
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