Author Topic: Technology Myths (Read 27258 times)

arunpawar · « **on:** November 05, 2007, 04:15 AM »

Hi,im starting this thread to know if there are any myths arround you regarding technology.Ofcourse these myths are in those people with less technical expertise +more social life.There are lot of geeks who know the truth and really laughs at them.In india where i live we've lot of myths about MS,some of the popular myths are:

1. Microsoft windows is the first operating system on the planet,other operating system if exist are copycat of microsoft.
2. All Windows features are copied into apple,and apple never innovates anything.Steve job came into Microsoft and copied the windows and started the apple macintosh.
3. Opensource and Freeware is threat to software industry,if software not get patented then this will affect jobs in future.
4. Windows operating system is good at provacy than linux or mac.
5. Windows Vista requirs 4GB RAM.

I laugh,when someone talks vague like this.
6. Norton Antivirus,Quick Heal,E-scan antivirus are the best antivirus.(Even if norton and quick heal eats 60% of your system resources)
7.Linux is most dificult operating system,where is the start button or add-remove programs button? (Where is DOS?

please don't laugh)

The myths about programming languages spread by teachers and computer training institutes,sales person of software are:

1. Java is outdated,.Net is the programming language of the future and its trend.(

It doesn't matter if java is cross platform or secure or stable or easy) There will be more jobs for .net than java.
2.To learn C++,you should learn C first otherwise you dont understand the C++.
3. Flash is outdated and Expression Blend is current trend.(

Even if Flash i portable over any operating system,has no features copied from any other thing)
4. Maybe someday i might hear Flash is copied from Expression blend

Ha ha ha

Ok enough with blurb.What are myths in your neighbourhood?Do post about them?Lets laugh on it together.

f0dder · « **Reply #1 on:** November 05, 2007, 08:13 AM »

2. All Windows features are copied into apple,and apple never innovates anything.Steve job came into Microsoft and copied the windows and started the apple macintosh.

Do they innovate? They come up with some crappy design that other people don't, but apart from that? Apple steals/borrows as much as everybody else (OS X: basically a mix of BSD and Nextstep, with eyecandy ideas borrowed from elsewhere).

Does sound like people are uninformed, though, but... does that come as a surprise? ^_^

jgpaiva · « **Reply #2 on:** November 05, 2007, 11:03 AM »

Probably this thread's wings should be cutted now, or this is just asking for flame wars...
(not criticizing you, f0dder, i had the same impulse of bad-mouthing apple

)

Lashiec · « **Reply #3 on:** November 05, 2007, 02:34 PM »

If you open this thread in Ars Technica Open Forum's Battlefront, you'll get a HUGE flaming war.

f0dder · « **Reply #4 on:** November 05, 2007, 05:07 PM »

If you open this thread in Ars Technica Open Forum's Battlefront, you'll get a HUGE flaming war.
-Lashiec (November 05, 2007, 02:34 PM)

Much less so here, because DonationCoder is a nice community

Darwin · « **Reply #5 on:** November 05, 2007, 06:58 PM »

All I'll say is that it's funny that the bulk of the myths listed in the OP are sort of mirror images of a lot of the Apple myths that are prevalent in NA. I'm not taking sides, though, just making an observation!

iphigenie · « **Reply #6 on:** November 06, 2007, 03:42 AM »

I don't think it will if people read the text properly, since it is about stupid claims people make about their products of choice or against their product of choice's main rivals. I think it is a fun list to keep as it really often sounds like snake oil or magic cure thinking... and putting the ones about macs / windows / linux side by side is always fun as they all end up claiming the same things "mine is better just because!!!!"

On all sides of any technology debate there are many people who will have decided that product/technology/language X is clearly superior, because it works for them. And they feel kind of threatened or insulted by any criticism of their product of choice. So they make pronouncements like these above. You get this from the MS crowd but also from the linux crowd, the mac users, and the mozilla/firefox crowd, and about a dozen different niches. And worst of all in the programming languages debates.

The pragmatic truth is:
- everyone has been copying/inspired by everyone else for the past 40 years. Nobody could have come up with all these concepts in a vaccuum.
- When we think we identified the originator of an idea they probably themselves had been inspired by someone else
- 80% of anything is recycled from previous products/os/languages. Even if the code was totally rewritten from scratch the concepts/ideas/interfaces have been recycled
- 75% of the features someone says are wonderful things about their chosen product/os/language actually come from other products (goes up to 95% in the linux world as advocates think all open source software in their distro is "linux")
- there is no "better" language/OS/program in an universal sense, although there are "better" choices for specific types of tasks
- the fact that someone who knows a product really well can make it do something the product wasnt initially made for DOES NOT MEAN that the product is a good choice for that type of tasks for anyone else.
- most people havent tried enough products/os/programs to be able to really realise where their product of choice is the better choice and where it isnt. which to me means I can ignore them - I think in some circles (Ada) it is called Nebbe's rule: "if you can't think of one are in which the language you are criticising is better than your language of choice, then you aren't competent enough to comment on it in the first place"

(percentage numbers made up, i didnt do formal research on that one. I went at it with a cookie cutter as is proper in this kind of cases although i bet the real numbers are probably higher)

You'll agree that the myths are much more fun than the pragmatic truth.

And as mentioned just above, the fun thing is that the OS/language/product mentioned is interchangeable

arunpawar · « **Reply #7 on:** November 06, 2007, 04:45 AM »

I didn't started to make any flame wars.I started to share the fun.And to let u know how technologically less literate poeple can do to technology.

Darwin · « **Reply #8 on:** November 06, 2007, 07:14 AM »

No worries, arunpawar, I *think* most of us took it that way. As iphigenie says, it's good fun and from an anthropological perspective interesting to see both the similariites and the differences that exist regionally. Thanks for sharing the list because it gave me a laugh AND it made me think

Renegade · « **Reply #9 on:** November 06, 2007, 07:39 AM »

Ok - no technology discussion is complete until porn or sex is discussed... So...

Condoms do not necessarily protect from VD. There are diseases that don't care if you use a condom, and you'll still get infected.

Hey... No flames! I'm on topic! Condoms are technology... It takes skillz to make them latex things.

CWuestefeld · « **Reply #10 on:** November 06, 2007, 11:03 AM »

As a manager of software development, one of my greatest annoyances is the myth that platform independence matters.

To be fair, I'm sure that there are some situations where it does. Companies like Adobe with products that straddle platforms are obvious examples. However, in most cases, and particularly with internal enterprise software, this is completely irrelevant.

I get developers out of college that are all enthusiastic about adding an extra layer to the database access, just in case we decide to change from SQL Server to Oracle. The thing is we will never make that change (and if we did, making the necessary changes to data access would be the smallest of the problems). And by adding this layer, they add unnecessary complexity to the system. And that makes the system both more fragile and harder to maintain all at the same time.

While treading carefully to try to avoid flaming, I think your list of myths reveals another set of "counter-myths". For example, saying that "Windows operating system is good at provacy than linux or mac" is a myth implies that Windows is worse at protecting our privacy. In fact, I'd say that either OS is about equal in providing a platform in which we can protect our privacy, if it's important to us. The problem isn't so much with the OS as with the users (not personally, but in their willingness to make it a priority)

Also, you state this "myth": "To learn C++,you should learn C first otherwise you dont understand the C++". Actually, C++ is a proper superset of C (with a couple of tiny exceptions), so if you don't understand C, you won't be able to understand C++. That said, though, learning C qua C is not the way to learn C++ because, while the two may share syntax, they absolutely do NOT share the same mode of thought. So this myth may be true, depending on what aspect you're getting at.

iphigenie · « **Reply #11 on:** November 06, 2007, 12:01 PM »

sometimes it is a good idea to have that flexibility that an abstraction layer brings, and sometimes it isnt.

That's one technology myth though, that one database is just as good as another - specifically that "mysql" is as good as any other and could replace them all. I hear that one a lot.

There's another one that thinks that for anything serious you have to use Oracle.

app103 · « **Reply #12 on:** November 06, 2007, 01:27 PM »

Now here is a myth created by the 'smarties' that desperately needs shattering:

- All AOL users are stupid people that barely know how to turn their PC on.

^{This myth buster is brought to you by...an AOL user.}

nontroppo · « **Reply #13 on:** November 06, 2007, 03:07 PM »

But we *do* know that AOL users use far too much toilet paper!

p3lb0x · « **Reply #14 on:** November 06, 2007, 03:13 PM »

Here is a gaming myth

- you need a G15 keyboard and G5 mouse to be any good in a shooter

f0dder · « **Reply #15 on:** November 06, 2007, 05:29 PM »

CWuestefeld: imho you need some database layer abstraction, at least you certainly don't want to sprinkle your code with SQL strings all over. And not for web scripting languages either - it's too ugly and fragile.

You might not want to switch DB provider once the system has launched, but during development it can be handy to be able to test different providers (and if you only need the SQL subset that sqlite supports, boy is it much easier using that than setting up a test db server

).

A proper abstraction also makes it easier to make use of something like memcached - try that on spaghetti code with SQL strings hanging all over

iphigenie · « **Reply #16 on:** November 06, 2007, 06:04 PM »

You need to be clever as to how you write your code and of course you would structure this to keep the parts that need to know about the database and SQL into one place. But there is not necessarily a need to make it all database-independent. I meant what's the point of having something like Oracle, or postgres, or sql server if you cannot use some of their powerful features and extensions?

CWuestefeld · « **Reply #17 on:** November 06, 2007, 06:19 PM »

imho you need some database layer abstraction, at least you certainly don't want to sprinkle your code with SQL strings all over.
-f0dder (November 06, 2007, 05:29 PM)

Of course I want a (one, singular) data abstraction layer. But I don't know why I would want a second one so that I'd have the opportunity (say) rephrase all of my stored proc calls to work through Oracle.

You might not want to switch DB provider once the system has launched, but during development it can be handy to be able to test different providers
-f0dder (November 06, 2007, 05:29 PM)

I don't think so. I know the target is SQL Server, and I have another SQL Server available to me for development; why in the world would I want to develop against something different, and risk getting to production only discover we'd made a mistake?

BTW, I definitely don't want SQL strings all over. In fact, my rule is NO SQL strings anywhere -- everything goes through a stored proc (although I haven't quite figured out how to square this with LINQ, if indeed I decide to use it).

icekin · « **Reply #18 on:** November 06, 2007, 10:24 PM »

Technology myths I've heard of :

1) "Overclocking gives improved performance for free.

I once knew a guy in my college dorm who used to build PCs for people at a price, based on custom parts from Pricewatch. He offered overclocking as if it was a legitimate 'free' upgrade option. Some of the PCs he built had up to 10% - 15% overclocked Front Side Bus.

I am not saying overclocking is bad, but to not inform his customers of the consequences (overheating, fried processors etc.) was incorrect. Its never free, the cost to be paid is higher risk and possibly reduced stability and lifespan of components.

2) AMD is better for overclocking and games than Intel

While Thunderbird XP and Duron were far better than their Intel counterparts (Pentium III and the old Celeron) in terms of value, the new core 2 HT processors as just as capable of playing the best games. I have also tried overclocking both my Intel Pentium 4 3Ghz with HT as well as the Thunderbird XP machine. Both are quite capable of being clocked up with the right mainboard.

3) "Clearing the pre-fetch cache improves performance. In fact, disable it altogether!"

I don't know why so many tweaking programs offer this option. There may be reasons to clear the cache once in a while, but to disable it makes little sense. I thought the the purpose of pre-fetch was to improve software startup time and thus raise performance. Maybe someone can shed light on this.

There are plenty more in the hardware world.

Ralf Maximus · « **Reply #19 on:** November 07, 2007, 10:01 AM »

Faster CPU == Better Performance

Usually false. Only because no matter how fast your workstation clocks in at, most applications are hideously disk-bound. I've gotten whiz-bang performance from "slow" PCs by bolting on a fast RAID system, or quadrupling the amount of RAM. Unless you're crunching huge spreadsheets, running Vista, or sequencing DNA, most CPU cycles go to "idle" time.

Oh, and the myth perpetrated by Dell that pink or yellow computers are cool. They are not. They just aren't. Sorry.

Deozaan · « **Reply #20 on:** November 07, 2007, 06:19 PM »

Myth: Full hard drive means a sluggish computer.

While this can lead to some slowdown with the HDD having to seek everywhere from fragmented files, the real problem is most likely that that the hard drive is full because you've installed a billion programs, all of which are running services which are usually visible from a glance at the tray.

Pseudo-Myth: More memory will make your computer faster.

This is true (or can be), but many people think a bigger hard drive is more memory.

Deozaan · « **Reply #21 on:** November 07, 2007, 06:21 PM »

Oh, and the myth perpetrated by Dell that pink or yellow computers are cool. They are not. They just aren't. Sorry.
-Ralf Maximus (November 07, 2007, 10:01 AM)

I've never seen a pink or yellow Dell, and I used to work there. $:-\$

Ralf Maximus · « **Reply #22 on:** November 07, 2007, 06:28 PM »

Ahem. It appears in your absence they were unable to resist the... erm, not-so-dark side.

Deozaan · « **Reply #23 on:** November 07, 2007, 06:40 PM »

Ahem. It appears in your absence they were unable to resist the... erm, not-so-dark side.
-Ralf Maximus (November 07, 2007, 06:28 PM)

I guess I was the only thing keeping them straight...

f0dder · « **Reply #24 on:** November 08, 2007, 08:51 AM »

imho you need some database layer abstraction, at least you certainly don't want to sprinkle your code with SQL strings all over.
-f0dder (November 06, 2007, 05:29 PM)
Of course I want a (one, singular) data abstraction layer. But I don't know why I would want a second one so that I'd have the opportunity (say) rephrase all of my stored proc calls to work through Oracle.
-CWuestefeld (November 06, 2007, 06:19 PM)

My database needs have always been pretty simple, so I've never worked with stored procedures - syntax of those are probably different from db to db, but invoking them pretty similar?

I don't think so. I know the target is SQL Server, and I have another SQL Server available to me for development; why in the world would I want to develop against something different, and risk getting to production only discover we'd made a mistake?
-CWuestefeld (November 06, 2007, 06:19 PM)

Obviously depends on what you're doing - for a big and complex project, it's not feasible switching to a different db provider (banking software, anyone?

), for smaller systems it can be nice being able to demo features on a laptop that doesn't have a network connection.

Supporting multiple database backends is, again, probably not something you want for complex systems, but for simpler stuff (web community, blog, simple shopping system, and things of similar scale) it's nice enough if you can just plug it into whatever's available.

BTW, I definitely don't want SQL strings all over. In fact, my rule is NO SQL strings anywhere -- everything goes through a stored proc (although I haven't quite figured out how to square this with LINQ, if indeed I decide to use it).
-CWuestefeld (November 06, 2007, 06:19 PM)

Haven't tried using LINQ, but the snippets I've seen look pretty nice compared to spaghetti SQL strings... good enough that I probably wouldn't mind using it. And I guess it's a bit more portable than stored procedures?

But I guess stored procedures are run on the db server, and can thus have some efficiency benefits compared to pulling data out of the db and processing client-side...