Re: Will computers ever be as simple and reliable as a refrigerato

From: mattlubic (mattlubic_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 01/31/05 

Date: Mon, 31 Jan 2005 02:31:02 -0800

Thank you. I understand everything you've said. But it wasn't my intention
to compare computers to refrigerators. What I was asking was will computers
ever BE safe from the bored 8 to 25 year olds? Can you envision software
that operates, in effect, much like "System Restore" and that cleans out all
the junk not just each time a machine is turned on, but as you're surfing or
importing website data?

Sure, there are spam blockers, adware blockers, spyware blockers, etc. etc.
etc. and all the crap these things are designed to counter is continuously
evolving and adapting such that the countermeasures have to keep pace. It's
evolution personified as a an adaptation of electrons rather than sex cells.

But Stephen Wolfram's ideas [A New Kind of Science] seem to offer a possible
path to understanding the complexity inherent in the problem. All software
writers who aren't in the 8 to 25 year old bracket or who aren't one of the
greed barons think no differenty about what they're doing--the code they
write--than these same idiots. It's not a matter of who can write more
clever code. I doubt too that the problems---the spam, the viruses, the
hacking and hijacking--aren't really all that complex. (After all, they're
being written by 8 to 25 year olds!) You can't fix a problem using the same
kind of thinking that created it. And virus code writers and anti-virus code
writers all think the same way... IN the same way. It requires a whole new
way of thinking to see through the complexity and to see that the complexity
is IMPLIED, but it's not necessarity inherent.

"...it is in principle possible to construct a cellular automaton that
emulates a practical computer in its entirety." [ANKOS, pp 663] Maybe what
Bill Gates should do is ask Wolfram to explain simplicity.

Thanks again.
 
      

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