Is it time to cool our quantum jets?

I've previously described quantum computing as being in its "ENIAC" phase, an analogy that would put effective quantum computing several decades away, at best. After all, it took seven decades for binary computers to get from ENIAC to Android, and there was no reason to suspect that quantum computers would any easier to develop than their binary predecessors.

According to a long article on IEEE.org, penned by Mikhail Dyakonov, who does
research in theoretical physics professionally, that decades-away estimate might actually be too optimistic. Quantum computers, he argues, might be more than merely difficult to develop, but impossible.

While I believe that such experimental research is beneficial and may lead to a better understanding of complicated quantum systems, I’m skeptical that these efforts will ever result in a practical quantum computer. Such a computer would have to be able to manipulate—on a microscopic level and with enormous precision—a physical system characterized by an unimaginably huge set of parameters, each of which can take on a continuous range of values. Could we ever learn to control the more than 10³⁰⁰ continuously variable parameters defining the quantum state of such a system?

My answer is simple. No, never.

Failing faster with Steam Play

About a week ago, I switched from Windows 7 to Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS Bionic Beaver, expressly to try out the new Proton technology that Valve was adding to Steam Play. In theory, Proton should allow Linux users to install and run almost any Windows game in Linux, seamlessly.

In practice, though... well, let's just say that it's a beta. Quite literally, actually. And, after a week of struggling with Linux as my daily driver OS, and trying to game through Steam Play, I'm retreating back to Windows 7 for the time being.

I'll let Jason Evangelho from Forbes explain why:

While the technical possibility of playing the thousands upon thousands of Windows-only Steam games on Linux is a revolutionary leap forward, it's far from perfect. When it works it's amazing. When it doesn't it's an exercise in frustration.

I've spent the past two weeks downloading dozens of games to test, and many of the ones Valve has whitelisted do indeed perform well without any hiccups. But some, like 2016's DOOM, simply won't launch. The game works for the majority of people who've submitted their experience to the Steam Play Compatibility Reports website, but for many others, it does not.

Valve can't whitelist a game and take Steam Play out of beta (it's now available to everyone using the Steam for Linux client) until every title they've put their seal of approval on works for everyone who launches it -- provided they meet the software and hardware requirements. I think the worst possible outcome is to see reports of gamers who've wiped out their Windows partition and parked themselves gleefully in the Linux camp, only to be frustrated that the experience they expected isn't happening.

Emphasis added, because that last sentence describes me perfectly.