KDB Systems

Last night I was on my deck watch­ing the Per­seid meteor shower. I started won­der­ing what our ances­tors must have thought about events like this. I was think­ing that they must have had all sorts of weird super­sti­tious beliefs about omens and such. Lay­ing there watch­ing the sky gave me lots of time to think. The more I thought about it I started won­der­ing what some­one sev­eral thou­sand years in the future would think about my beliefs regard­ing the meteor shower. To me they are facts that I know. I am sure that to our ances­tors their beliefs were also facts that they knew with absolute cer­tainty. This means that my facts may in fact be only a belief and not really a fact. In the future they may think that our cur­rent beliefs about space, meteor show­ers, etc. are quaint, super­sti­tious beliefs because they have dis­cov­ered some new facts.

What does all this have to do with com­put­ers? Many peo­ple have beliefs regard­ing com­put­ers that they see as facts. One exam­ple of this is the fact that OS X is more secure than Win­dows. An alter­nate fact, just as wrong, would be that Win­dows 7 is more secure than OS X. My belief about this fact is that you can’t mea­sure how secure an OS is so the ques­tion is moot. My point is we all have many beliefs about com­put­ers. Many of these beliefs, which cur­rently are thought of as facts, will prob­a­bly change over time. Don’t get too com­fort­able with the facts.