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Cringely has a different style than Dvorak. Cringely is often wrong, but he admits his main point is to make people think about what could be happening, what trends may be starting.
Cringely also makes predictions, but he carefully documents them, just so you CAN give him a scorecard. See his 2005 predictions:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050107. html

Robert X. Cringley hosted the PBS show "Triumph of the Nerd: The Rise of Silicon Valley" and "Nerds 2.01: A Brief History of the Internet".

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/

http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/

Robert X. Cringley hosted the PBS show "Triumph of the Nerd: The Rise of Silicon Valley" and "Nerds 2.01: A Brief History of the Internet".

http://www.pbs.org/nerds/

http://www.pbs.org/opb/nerds2.0.1/

I don't know why anyone listens to Cringely at all. He doesn't appear to have any kind of credentials in anything. I mean, this is a man who's sole reason for you to be listening to him is "I have 20 years in the field, I know what I'm talking about.". 20 years doing what? Speculating wildly?

In fact, if you look at the about page on him, he even admits that he doesn't have any credentials. Kinda seems like he's little more than a mouthpiece to me.

Disclaimer: Personally, I have no idea on how much faith to put in this particular prediction, either. I just keep my money in the S&P 500 and don't loose any sleep over the specifics.

Disclaimer: Personally, I have no idea on how much faith to put in this particular prediction, either. I just keep my money in the S&P 500 and don't loose any sleep over the specifics.

Disclaimer: Personally, I have no idea on how much faith to put in this particular prediction, either. I just keep my money in the S&P 500 and don't loose any sleep over the specifics.

Disclaimer: Personally, I have no idea on how much faith to put in this particular prediction, either. I just keep my money in the S&P 500 and don't loose any sleep over the specifics.

Given that the UK tax payer funds the program I'm reasonably sure it isn't as commercialised as whatever you have in America.

Sigh...

Doctor Who as well as other material from the BBC is typicaly carried on PBS (public broadcast system). A "private, non-profit media enterprise owned noncommercial television network". It is publicly and privatly funded, and is reasonably commercial free. In the past a corporate sponcership might result in a brief little blip noting their contribution. "This program is brought to you in part by The Acme Corporation makers of widgets. And by viewers like you." These days watching the Yankee Workshop you get a slightly longer commercial spot preceeding the show followed by the commercial free program. I can forgive them for showing an advert for power tools before a wood working program, but they couldn't forgive Bob Vila for promoting Sears Craftsmen tools. It's mostly educational, but a good deal of time is dedicated to arts and entertainment including drama and foreign programing.

PBS operates via donations rather than a mandatory tax. Further you can pledge genericaly, money for specific shows any time, or wait for pledge drive and get a spiffy gift which might be a copy of the program on VHS/DVD/CD.

In other words, for material on PBS, we not only pay for the program just like you, we choose to pay for the program. And we see the program from beginning to end without breaks.

http://www.pbs.org/aboutpbs/

Currently Doctor Who in N. America is carried only by CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corp. CBC is commercial television and isn't seen by most of America. It is common for those living near the border to be able to receive it, and some American cable networks carry it. But for the most part, America is currently Wholess commercial or otherwise.

George Lucas and The Wachowski brothers followed a formula to write Star Wars and The Matrix. They read the book "Hero with 1000 faces" by Joseph Campbell and mapped out the hero's journey that is simular across all cultures and individual experiences.

In the writing of anthropologist Joseph Campbell, Lucas had learned about the myths that pervade many disparate cultures, and it is this mythology that gives Lucas's space age epic its timeless resonance. Both of the sequels and the one prequel continued in the same vein and with equally successful. Read On

Found this interview:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/terrorism/combating/bu sh_10-11d.html

Interview back in October 11, 2001. Relevant question (of course, Bush does NOT answer it):

REPORTER: Mr. President, I'm sure many Americans are wondering where all of this will lead. And you've called upon the country to go back to business and to go back to normal, but you haven't called for any sacrifices from the American people. And I wonder, do you feel that any will be needed? Are you planning to call for any? And do you think that American life will really go back to the way it was on Sept. 10?

Clearly, works like this Patriot Act show America is far from "life as normal".

Funny this Citicorp story should come up.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wall street/

"How one company, WorldCom, and its bankers at Citigroup, came to epitomize the conflicts of interest at the heart of the late-90s bubble."

An older show about the credit card industry.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cred it/

IMHO the whole industry is a scam.

Funny this Citicorp story should come up.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wall street/

"How one company, WorldCom, and its bankers at Citigroup, came to epitomize the conflicts of interest at the heart of the late-90s bubble."

An older show about the credit card industry.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cred it/

IMHO the whole industry is a scam.

you guys cant even support PBS, so iam sure this will be no different.

If you read what really Apple wants
Selling more music

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050127. html

Mini-Intel make more sense
They use arm cpu's for ipod

http://www.ipodlinux.org/ARMDev

Intel produces Xscale (arm) and that could be
a real talk not an rumor

PBS.
Quote: "General Marshall later in August, however, did ask about the possibility of using atomic bombs in November to destroy Japanese divisions along the invasion beaches in Kyushu."

Some discussion here

lack of polar warming

Apparently you're unaware that, for example, there have been the biggest glacial calving events in recorded history in Antarctica, the greenland ice sheets are retreating at speeds several times normal, and for the first time in recorded history (after a century of visits), the North Pole is open ocean during the summer.

Here's an article describing the latest report from the Arctic Council and the International Arctic Science Committee about how extreme the polar warming trend is; it is going *faster* than the rest of the world - 5 to 7 degrees in the past century. In short, what you claimed was completely false. I'll provide as many references as you want.

long wave radiation

Once again, a completely incorrect claim. from Scientific American, citing a study published in Nature.

We could go on for a while

Go on for a while with false information? Come back when you're willing to put up true claims backed by scientific evidence (provide links), as opposed to what you heard a caller on Rush say this morning. There's a reason that, by far, the vast majority of climatologists accept global warming due to human action as fact.

Minorities can certainly always wreak havoc on the freedom of others. There have been plenty of examples throughout history where small group dictate the masses. This almost always happens with violence (dictatorships with the help of 1984-style mind control hasn't become known as of today).

Consider this discussion of Kim Il Jong of North Korea given in this blog:
http://mansei.typepad.com/dogstew/2004/10/popular_ support.html
Especially the PBS interview mentioned in the blog:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/shows/northkorea /transcript.html
Basically the Dear Leader uses both violence and mind control.

The second point is certainly acceptable by all people, the first needs some explanation. The fundamental problem is that configuration options are bad. Be it at runtime or at compile. Ideally there is one configuration which works everywhere. Every new configuration increases complexity. Not linearly but instead exponentially. Each option might influence every other option. This is a disaster not only for users, but also the developers. It means exponential growth of testing. Which of course won't happen and therefore the code is basically untested. For developers this means that often only one or two configurations are really tested. Any us of another configuration is probably doomed to failure in any non-trivial project.

I am a Macintosh programmer from long ago. In the Pre-OS X days I worked extensively with the mac ports of libxml, libxslt, and TCL. I played with other open source software on the mac as well like MacPerl and the early mozilla builds. The mac port was generally a point release or 2 behind the main development. I assume the blogger udrepper is talking about people like me. The usual situation I encountered was that mac programmers had to support the macintosh port with little input from the non-mac programmers. The project "owners" would include the mac support files in a subdirectory of the project source tree. Everybody on the project understood that the contents of this subdirectory was only of interest to mac programmers.

This was quite a reasonable situation. No mac-specific configuration options affected the rest of the project. It is no longer the case. Now the OS X (usually spelled "darwin") build is another option in the makefile.

For my new projects the razor is even sharper. Only Linux is supported and only the few interesting mainstream architecture with reasonable APIs are maintained. Support for architectures with deliberately different APIs (i.e., IA-64) can be contributed. No other configuration is supported, actively or not, and people would have to exercise their right to add patches or fork the entire code to add other support.

Over-dramatic; leads to fragmentation which leads to redundant work. I think you would do better to revert to the platform-specific sub folders and let the programmers of that platform update their patches at their own pace. This saves the "minority users" the problem of maintaining a new website and CVS system. You get the benefit of some contributions to the main development since a new feature or two usually must be added by the minority platform programmers.

If you really want to support exactly one platform with few options, then be sure to use a scripting language (any of the P* languages will do), or maybe java and/or mono.

Don't let Minorities dictate the direction!

The leadership of any substantial group of people is always a minority. How many bosses do you have? How many people work for him?

CO2 is a green house gas and is considered pollution, though not as harmful as other gases.

I want to know what is so great about biodiesel when you can get hydrogen instead?

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1506/segments/1506-3.htm

If the relative authorities are focusing on linking terrorist to copyright violations then it should be clear that either their priorities are really screwed up or they are running out of things to call WMDs...

I witnessed more terrorism from the US government and the anthrax threat it held over the news media to help it beat war drums than the taking down of a set of buildings that were the focal point representation of wrongful world economic manipulations.(re: trillion dollar bet)

That's a lot of money to try and say it wasn't connected or influencial to things like vc dotcom boom and bust, Enron, Worldcom, WTC/pentagon/white house attack...

You do someone wrong, it's only reasonable to expect retailation..

But when you fabricate enough lies, you do tend to get out of touch with proper priorities.

Which is exactly what this is about.

Don't forget about all this free-trade stuff with China and other 3rd world countries that allows Walmart to manufacture stuff in China for cheap and sell it here for a huge profit. This replaces well-paying jobs with McJobs. I'm gonna stop there before I go on ranting. There's an episode of FrontLine that asks "Is Walmart Good for America?" (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wal mart/)

"Clearly the list is fraudulent. Maddox is on the B list? I've never heard of most of the A list but I'd think getting a book deal off of having a well read blog would put you on the A list of blogging. Afterall, that's the point of having one."

I agree with you. I clicked on some of the "A List" links and found mostly news aggregation sites. One of the random "A List" clicks had the top posting as a link to The Onion, the second link on the same page to a CNN type story. Why does an amateur news aggregation site make "A list" while people who are making original material like Bruce Sterling and Maddox get delegated to the B list? The list doesn't even include Robert X. Cringely Robert X. Cringely, one of the original bloggers who blogged on the internet before these people who wrote this crappy list ever even knew what the internet was. I guess it doesn't matter because Cringely, Maddox and Sterling will keep writing their original material about relevant things while "Blogebrity" and it's "A list" keep writing about their toothpaste woes, or what brand of shoes they like, hoping for some venture capital so they can sell out without ever having contributed one iota of anything, original thought or otherwise, to society.

Or as Maddox would say, "It doesn't matter, bag my groceries"

A few weeks ago, Cringely speculated the following:

"I think this episode with Wiley and Apple's earlier legal attacks on people who it accused of leaking product information are part of a campaign to look tough to movie studios and record companies. As I've surmised before, Apple is trying to put together a high definition movie download service that requires content from all the major movie studios. If Steve looks soft on IP theft or unwilling to flex his corporate legal muscles, the studios may think he won't adequately protect their corporate jewels."

Therefore, if this is something that the RIAA doesn't want, Apple may have to close this to pursue their goal of global video domination.

There's a good documentary of this on Nova [pbs.org] called "Infinite Secrets of Archimedes".

You can grab a torrent from digitaldistractions [digitaldistractions.org].

They couldn't have been very intelligent scholars if they were stunned by his using a simple form of integral calculus, it's well documented how he used a 2 96 sided polygons with a circle inscribed and circumscribed to give upper and lower bounds for pi, 3.1429 to 3.1408, basically discovering the concept of limits, a crucial step to calculs.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/archimedes/pi.html

There's a good documentary of this on Nova called "Infinite Secrets of Archimedes".

You can grab a torrent from digitaldistractions.

Was this the program http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/archimedes/palimpsest .html

Did YOU read the whole article, did you read the part about prerendering flash, did you not stop at that point and think, "gee, this guy does not have the slightest fucking clue"?

Thats not a typo, not a slip, thats one of those, he doesn't have even a clue about how things work type moments.

Did you know XP is DOS based, well now you do - http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030116. html

Worldwide revenue loss due to software piracy was estimated at $33 billion for 2004 with about 1/3 of the software used being illegal.

Worldwide utility gains due to software piracy were estimated as worth $33 billion for 2004. Through piracy aproximately 50% more users were able to be entertained or to be more productive than otherwise. Through piracy millions of people who would not have economic conditions to buy software were given their own copy. As such it was one of the key factors helping promote digital inclusion and minimizing the digital divide. In 2004, we are confident to say, the world was a more 'equal opportunities' environment... thanks to piracy.

what I DO know is that the Google Web Accelerator effectively turns every user into a thin client, whether they know it or not.

He also says about some point in the future when Google is a platform that at that point:

Its a GoogleWorld that requires no AOL, no Microsoft, no Intel, no HP or Dell -- only Google, cable companies, telephone companies, users, and of course advertisers and web page producers.

Anyone want to take this bet? Please?? I agree more with Cringely in his article here about Google place in the market: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20050512. html

Wal-mart isn't the only store that has workers in China

It may not be, but walmart's "low prices" slogan is considered by some economists to be a prime element in controlling inflation during the recent economic slowdown.

If walmart was no longer able to obtain cheap chinese goods and was required to raise their prices, the effect on the US economy might make the SUV-driving crybabies complaining about oil prices look just like SUV-driving crybabies.

Bubba in his 4x4 might wave his shotgun, have the bumper stickers, and talk real big about America, but if you want to lose the presidency for your party, you make the housewives of America go out and spend 10% more on their kids' school clothes.

Yes, the RIAA pays a lot of lip service to illegality of downloading.
And here they say downloading a copy of a song you own is still illegal.

Personally, I think the RIAA has not taken any downloaders to court, because they'd hate to lose a case. Would this set a precedence that downloading is legal?

Also, what's the punitive damage of taking something you don't own? The cost of the item? Penalties the same as shoplifting? Pretty low. Nothing like the inferred cost of bootlegging, and providing thousands of people the product, and destroying the 'potential' income of the RIAA's clients. Even the NET ACT targets the 'uploader'.

If the RIAA tries to target a downloader, then maybe the only way they could win, is to lower the penalty fine. Maybe they don't want to put a low price tag on that crime, which many may find justifiable (like a speeding ticket).

Oh, brother. In the olden days, O'Gara would have been given a medal for generating readership.

To which olden days do you refer, Mr. Dvorak? Perhaps you mean those olden days of yellow journalism. Sorry, but I prefer a more ethical style of online writing. Dan Gillmor says it best: Be honorable.

Here's a more thorough article about what Jobs did "to save Apple" referencing a PBS article. http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/july97/0632.html

And here's another one, with some quotes:

"For right now, though, a $150 million investment really does keep Apple going"

"Well, the $150 million gets Apple a little new lease on life."

See: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/cyberspace/july-dec 97/apple_8-6.html

So, far from everything being rosy, and this just being another deal, it was viewed at the time (and still is) as being a deal which kept Apple going. If you'll recall, Jobs and Gates were far from the best of chums before this.

no torrenting, but many shows like NOVA are just online. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/programs.html theres a few episodes, check out the rest of the PBS site, many of the science shows are downloadable.

PBS has a wonderful layman-oriented mini-series on string theory online -- several hours of professional quality video presentation.

I highly recommend it as it also gives a nice background into the development of string theory and Very Important People.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html

Close.

"The Elegant Universe" is Brian Greene's book which Nova turned into a pretty decent two-part feature.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html

All 3 hours of it are avaliable on PBS's website.
It's amazing stuff.

The book "The Elegant Universe" by Brain Greene is what the TV Special above is based on.
Definitly worth a look at - if you enjoy the TV special, have a look around for the book... It goes into a LOT more detail.

This is similar to the millenium challenge military exercise where General Paul Van Riper basically negated the support to military operations intelligence gathering technology like satellites, communications intercept etc. How'd he do this? With using human runners to deliver messages, broadcasting foreign language messages over the muslim call to prayer loudspeakers and generally just negating the adversaries strong points (technology) by refusing to play in their arena.

I also think you guys way overestimate the capabilities of the NSA. Yes they have the logistical and monetary backing to electronically gather any information they want, but at the base level they are still humans with human problems like bureaucracy, slow decision making etc. The essential dialogue between a target and a team of NSA guys is still human and can be exploited with deception and and the right strategy. I'm not doubting they are a great organisation that could take down people but I'm just saying there is the possibility that one could outwit such policing and intelligence agencies if you were smart and had a paranoid and devilish attitude about it.

I won't be a fan of Ipods until the play my ogg files

And 10.4 gives us a peek at another evolution of iTunes, which is the inevitable expansion of the system to carry additional audio file formats. Looking at the unused iTunes icons that shipped with your new version of 10.4, you'll notice icons for currently-not-supported ogg vorbis and Windows Media Audio (wma), as well as several others including a variety of video formats, too.

Check Cringely's take on this:

And 10.4 gives us a peek at another evolution of iTunes, which is the inevitable expansion of the system to carry additional audio file formats. Looking at the unused iTunes icons that shipped with your new version of 10.4, you'll notice icons for currently-not-supported ogg vorbis and Windows Media Audio (wma), as well as several others including a variety of video formats, too.

With this new information we can make a pretty good guess about the evolution of both iTunes and iPod. When Apple feels that the success of iTunes is absolutely assured, which will be shortly, they'll address the user complaint that iPod only supports AAC and MP3 audio by adding these additional formats, leading to increased iPod sales. And at the same time, the video icons strongly suggest that Apple will also have a video iPod this year.

Apple's own downward price pressure on portable media players gives us another element of the probable iPod strategy that hearkens back to my question of a few weeks ago whether iPod is the razor or the blade. Ultimately, what Apple wants to do is make its money through iTunes, where the profit margins are better in the long term and the system is easily scalable. It was necessary to create the iPod platform to make this happen. But downward price pressures will eventually hurt iPod profit margins and affect Apple's stock price, so the trick is to know when to switch the business from being a mix of hardware and software to one that is software-only. That switch, which I believe to be inevitable, will happen shortly after Apple begins to license iPod clones.

Not true. As you scale a system like Google, administrative costs are one of the fastest things to scale.

Cringly may have described this scaling of administrative costs best when he wrote:

As a result, whenever a server fails at Google, THEY DO NOTHING. They don't replace the broken machine. They don't remove the broken machine. They don't even turn it off. In an army of drones, it isn't worth the cost of labor to locate and replace the bad machines. Hundreds, maybe thousands of machines lie dead, uncounted among the 10,000 plus.

We have reached the point where we are totally dependent on computers, yet the marginal cost of a computer -- at least for Google -- is nothing.

"Yes, because we all know that anyone who buys in bulk pays retail."

With a $25000/CPU list price on SQLServer Enterprise, even if they gave a 90% volume discount it'd still exceed the hardware costs. I guess >90% discounts are possible from Microsoft for some of the government contracts they're afraid to lose, but I'd guess they're pretty rare in the US at least.

I'm a physicist, and I wrote a report on The Tao of Physics years ago for an asian humanities class in college. It's been a while, but IIRC, the gist of my report was:
Capra notices some interesting coincidences in the way that people describe (in common language) a theory that cannot be properly described without a lot of abstract math and the way that people describe (in common language) spiritual experiences/ideas that cannot properly be described in common language, because they are extremely personal and subjective. Capra decides this means that quantum mechanics and eastern mysticism are somehow inextricably linked. While these observations were mildly interesting, he takes them to totally unreasonable lengths and ends up with a bunch of misconceptions about both modern physics and the various eastern religions that he lumps together.

I'd recommend against the book. If you want to know more about eastern religions, I'd recommend Alan Watts and/or going right to the source and reading translations of the important books for those religions. If you want to know more about modern physics I've heard from both physicists and nonphysicists that Brian Greene's Elegant Universe is quite good. I haven't read it myself, but I did watch the PBS special and it was good. Just remember that there is no empirical evidence for, nor testable predictions from, string theory (i.e., don't get too excited about it just yet).

And that's OK with you?

Read here:

Dred Scott was the slave of a surgeon who had taken him to Illinois, a free state. When his owner died in 1846 Scott sued for his freedom and won it temporarily, until the Missouri state supreme court overruled it in 1852. He appealed various times while with a new owner, and his case grew. The U.S. Supreme Court heard the case in 1856-7. The rather complex decision, which touched on states' rights, the status of blacks as a race, federal and constitutional authority, and the issue of slavery in the territories, determined that as an "inferior race," blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Scott's case, the Court determined, should not have been heard in the first place. The decision was not unanimous, and Republicans of the time balked. The matter greatly divided the nation and helped lead to the rise of the Republican Party.

FWIW, the Dred Scott decision also rule that the Missouri Compromise that would have limited the spread of slavery outside the south to be unconstitutional.

Does any government have a right to declare an entire ethnic group non-citizens and not subject to anything other than property laws?

Because that's why the south tried to leave the Union.

While it may be a business, it isn't something like amazon. There are data being transfered, and when data are regulated, then other packets may be designated inferior. The fear that VoIP packets will be given priority service on home networks was mentionted on /. a few months ago. Whether or not Canada is trying to help this or prevent it is yet to be seen.

Cringle has a great bit on it as well. (Scroll down a bit.)

I have no idea why, but I got to thinking what I'd want in a system like this if I was a studio exec.

Here's my answer

This is the beginning of the flood. The only thing that can compete with is a torrent.

On an related note, I'd really like to take a peek at Robert Cringely's stock portfolio!

I'm sure this is just a toe in the water for Apple to start offering movies and other on-demand video with ITMS. Anyone who's been watching how movie trailers are hosted by Apple, how iTunes interfaces with HQ trailers, how Jobs has been talking of late, and how ITMS has been dabbling in video can't help but see the writing on the wall. Apple wants to be your one-stop media shop, not just the place where you buy songs or little music players. They're looking to marginalize entire swaths of the old regime in one fell swoop, and for my part, I'm rather looking forward to the shake-up.

Yes, a lot of the preceding has been hinted at by Cringely, there's nothing wrong with agreeing with someone else's take on things. :)

With OS X 10.4, there's signs that Apple may be supporting Ogg Vorbis and WMA in the future, too.