Slashdot Mirror
World Technology Awards 2001
struanr writes: "Nature has published the winners and finalists of the World Technology Awards, which are run by the World Technology Network. "These are about those individuals whose work today will, in our opinion, create the greatest "ripple effects" in the future... in both expected and unexpected ways." There are some big names chosen here, and some glaring omissions."
It's nice to see Linus credited for such an evolutionary piece of software and a revolutionary way of software development.
I give my congratulations and my thanks.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
I went to this during the summer -- I was one of the semi-finalists for HavenCo in Entrepreneurship. There were some very interesting people there -- not really any of the "big names" in the business/tech categories who won, but lots of interesting people from the media, law, etc. I met only one other person under 40, though.
My personal favorite is the University of Surrey's satellite center -- I think constellations of LEO microsatellites, using packet-switching, are going to be one of the most interesting technologies in the next 20 years. There are some ways to get the costs down to the point where you could have flatrate global email from an LEO constellation for about as much as US nationwide 2-way pager coverage, which may not seem like much, but when applied to non-human operations like trucks, containers, etc. sending telemetry, it's very exciting.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the Open Source software model founded by that hippie, shoeless slob Richard Stallman? If open source didn't exist (don't know how anyone can claim they "invented" OSS anyway), how could have Linus copylefted the Linux kernel in the first place?
You have to be kidding me. Shawn Fanning wins in TWO seperate categories? All the little fuck did in 2000 was sell out and spend the rest of the year in court. Seriously, there are a thousand people more deserving of both of his wins here. What's next, Bill Gates for "Innovative Government Payouts"?
FINANCE
Winner: Mr Thomas Weisel, Founder and Chairman, Thomas Weisel Partners, USA.
I love it when a guy who is basically named "Weasel" wins a finance award. It reminds me way to much of the old law firm saw, "Dewie, Cheayum, & Howe"
-Frums
I note that the award is the 2001 version, after which it speaks of recognizing "recent" accomplishments.
Now, I admire Bob Metcalfe as much as anyone, but the creation of Ethernet is hardly recent. The recognition of Torvalds, Gordon Moore, and Michael Dell (a finalist) likewise begs the question: Hasn't anyone done anything in technology lately?
I would suppose that this award is like the Nobel, in that it is given once time has proved that the nominee's accomplishments are not a flash-in-the-pan.
---Any philosophy that can be put "in a nutshell" belongs there.---
I just think some of the results are odd. Also, some of them on that page did not have explanations, which is strange as well.
Shawn Fanning of Napster for Entrepreneurship? Napster was nice and all, but did Fanning really make a business? It seems to me that he had an excellent idea for a piece of software, it got big, and someone threw money at it. It sort of road the coat-tails of a technology boom. And look at them now. You can't really make a sucessful company by following their business plan. They hardly have one, and it hasn't been particularly profitable. The entertainment category award makes much more sense to me.
And I'm all for Bob Metcalf, but the blurb on him didn't really say anything about what he's done lately. Yeah, ethernet is great and all, but these are the 2001 awards. Ethernet is not new.
Same with Gordon Moore. His little writeup is all about stuff he did back in the day. And yeah, a lot of it is still relevant, but surely 2001 had some hardware development that's more interesting than a 'law' everyone has been quoting for years.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
But! It's really misleading. It makes it sound like the idea of giving away your code was invented by Linus and it wasn't. It wasn't invented by RMS either, but RMS would claim that he's the guy who's done the most for it. Heck, RMS doesn't even get a token "GNU/Linux" in these awards.
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
To the execs of VA Software, Inc. I implore you: Please give Mr. Katz the full support he deserves to become contender for next year.
I agree completely - instead of hiding his talent between moronic technical news posts, please give this man the soapbox he deserves. A man of Jon Katz's talents should have nothing less than his own web site, where he can publish more stories, more often, without having to compete with Slashdot's stories. And furthermore, this new site should have a complete lock on Katz's work, so that no other site can publish it. That's a moneymaker right there, VA, and the entire Slashdot community would stand up and applaud such a fine measure.
(Now let's see how many people moderate me down as a troll before they figure out what the real message is...)
What's your damage, Heather?
I couldn't find Steve Case (CEO of AOL) in the marketing section. I mean come on, this guy should be at least a runner-up with all those billions and billions of CD's sent out. AOL *is* somewhat responsible for making the Internet as "value added" as it is today (at least according to Bob Metcalfes rule- the more people on the network the more valuable).
If you're not familiar with Singer, here's a good page about him. The short version is that he advocates infanticide until 28 days for disabled newborns and euthanasia for people with cognitive
disabilities. He first made it big in the animal rights community, but many are abandoning him after he tried to justify some forms of bestiality (see this). Here's one of his quotes:
Sounds like a real champion of animal rights, huh?
Also, as other posters have mentioned, although he's well deserving of the award, Linus didn't establish the Open Source software model. Some of the posters have said RMS did, but there are a couple issues with that:
RMS would say he's not for Open Source, he's for Free Software
The model was around long before RMS, he just successfully described & codified it in the GPL
Relative to GNU ?
Clearly it's a politica aware and not a politically correct one at that.
Strange, I thought Ballard Power systems was in Vancouver B.C. Canada (not USA as indicated).
Did the border move while I was celebrating the new year?
:-)
There seems to be an impression around slashdot that linux is somehow the most brilliantly advanced operating system around.
Linus and friends have created a great (the best) hobbyist operating system, so good that it stands up well even against "real" commercial operating systems. But the design of the operating system is nothing revolutionary; it is based on 30+ year-old ideas.
Anyway, I am glad to have the pressure on Microsoft (and others) and to see Open Source and Free Software benefit as well. Thanks linus!
And why was saving the monolithic design so worthwhile? I think we'd have a more secure, stable, extensible, and maintainable OS if we were using the modern microkernel approach. That's why academia and industry were (and are...) abandoning it, remember?
I think linux is pretty good, but I don't see why it's necessarily good to save an obsolescent idea.
After looking it over, there aren't many pioneers in there.
In the area of computer technology, I'd say that only Gordon Moore deserves this level of recognition. Gordon almost single-handedly created the microprocessor industry as well as provided essential direction on mp design. Say what you will about the purity of Intel's mp designs, the fact remains that designing for manufacturability is as critical as designing for pure performance.
As has been said elsewhere, Linus did something evolutionary, but they give him far more credit that is fair (he didn't create the OSS...he DID popularize it).
Bob Metcalf is a pioneer with twenty years to rest on his laurels and other networking technologies are fundamentally better, just not as popular. Bob is the next most legit candidate.
Shawn has contributed to some of the most important dialog on intellectual property and copyright laws by the actions of a curious kid, but he did this without attempting to do anything more interesting than share ripped music, so he can hardly be called cerebral or a major contributor.
"... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
As I look through this list, it appears some of this year's winners, really haven't done anything groundbreaking in 2001. It appears they have been selected based on older achievements.
Names such as Bob Metcalfe, Shawn Fanning, and Linus Torvalds stand out.
Metcalfe, since his retirement from 3Com, really hasn't done anything useful. He's made a lot of money as a columnist, which really isn't deserving of a "World Technology Award," especially when he makes bold predictions of the internet's demise, and Linux being old technology. I know, those examples didn't happen in 2001, but to be honest I haven't paid attention to him much in 2001.
Shawn Fanning.. in the beginning of 2001, I don't think Napster was completely deactivated, but I'm pretty sure it was crippled beyond usefulness by all the record-company imposed filters. Furthermore, he had the idea first. It wasn't a new idea, or something that nobody else would have come up with, and he certainly didn't do the best implementation of peer to peer. If he had to win at all, it should have been in 2000, if not 1999. By the end of 2001, Napster had become totally irrelevant.
And last, Linus Torvalds.. What he did is remarkable, but it seems kind of arbitrary picking 2001 as the year to give him a prize. I don't know about this one, maybe he deserved it. But why 2001?
I've done a bit of a summary of who-won-what for handiness and bragging rights; the results are quite interesting.
:)
/. lameness filter sucks when you're trying to do a graph.
No. of wins - No. of finalists --- Pop. in millions
USA : 12.5 - 60 --- 263
UK : 2 - 12 --- 58
Japan : 0 - 7 --- 125
India : 1 - 4 --- 936
France : 1 - 3 --- 58
Brazil : 1 - 2 --- 156
Germany : 0 - 3 --- 82
Switzerland : 0 - 2 --- 7
Finland : 1 - 1 --- 5
Netherlands : 0 - 2 --- 15
South Africa : 0.5 - 1 --- 41
Italy : 1 - 0 --- 57
Australia : 1 - 0 --- 18
Indonesia : 1 - 0 --- 195
Iceland : 0 - 1 --- 0.27
Taiwan : 0 - 1 --- 21
Canada : 0 - 1 --- 30
Russia : 0 - 1 --- 148
Kenya : 0 - 1 --- 31
For pure weight-of-numbers there's no competition; the USA is miles ahead, with the UK and Japan fairly entranched in 2nd and 3rd places. More intersting is to compare this with their population.
When you do this, the USA is still very successful, with the UK only marginally ahead (probably due to it's univeristy system). Iceland however steals the show; although they only got a finalist, their population is a tiny fraction of most of the countries' major cities. *
It's also clear that many countries are majorly underachieving; Sweden, Belgium and Sapin spring to mind as non-appearers, and Russia, Canada Austrialia and the Netherlands didn't do spectiacularly well.
How much of this is due to the innate bias in the selection process is debatable, but then doing an analysis on these figures is pretty random anyway, so what the hell.
* Yes I know, one isn't a very good sample size
Brown
PS. If anyone's wondering, I considered a win to be a bit better than a finalist, but not that much.
PPS. The
Note that just because the awards were given away in 2001, doesn't mean that the WORK they were awarded for had to be completed in the same year. Often the impact of an award is not apparent for a number of years after the award is given -- if you wish to give out awards based on long-term consequences of a work, and not just "flash-in-the-pan" results, you have to sit back and see how history unfolds. Just look at the list of Nobel Prizes and you will see this is quite true -- only rarely, when an obviously stunning piece of research comes out (ie, high T_C superconductors) is a prize awarded in the short-term.
Also, since this prize has not been around for that long, it still has to contend with "queued" up winners, just as the Nobel did in its early days. Is it really fair to hand out the award for hardware to an individual of lesser importance when someone like Gordon Moore is sitting in the wings without a prize?
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Princeton doesn't tend to appoint crackpots to its faculty, and they haven't in this case.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)