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."
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.
I don't know that you can say Linus created an evolutionary piece of software since it was basically a clone of Unix, though one can argue the forms the Linux kernel has taken since its inception have been very evolutionary. Nor did he really create a revolutionary way of software development. OSS and the GPL were around before Linux, Linus simply made them popular.
What Linus did create was a kinship among software developers that blossomed into a community. This community formed distributions and companies to market their newly created softwares. I suppose he did create a new commerce system in which OSS was popular. For this he deserves an award for changing commerce and how people everywhere are viewing copyrights for software.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
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?
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
This reminds me much of Time Magazine's choice of Person of the Year for 2001. The guidelines for this choice tend towards choosing someone who had the largest overall impact on the world for that year, whether that impact be positive or negative.(1)
This year's choice is Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York City. I find their choice to be unwise, probably prompted by feel-good patriotism rather than by clinical reasoning and good journalistic intregrity.
In New York City, Mayor Giuliani may have had the biggest effect after the September 11 events, and possibly would loom that large in the public eye in all of New York State, but I question his impact to the world, or even the entire United States.
A better choice would have been Osama Bin Laden, in spite of how reprehensible his actions may have been, or how hated the man has become in America and other NATO countries.
Bin Laden had an unarguably huge effect throughout the world with his successful attack and toppling of the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001. Laws and personal freedoms throughout the world have been wrenched into a new status, and the ripple effect will be felt for years to come.
His is now a household name spoken as a curse or a blessing. We all know who he is and don't tend to have luke warm feelings towards the man.
Perhaps speculation about Bin Laden had saturated the press too much, or perhaps Time Magazine wished to focus on the positive rather than the negative, but their choice for POY 2001 is still, to me, very questionable.
Whereas I didn't agree with Time Magazine's choice for POY 2001, I don't disagree with Nature's choice of Shawn Fanning as the winner for both the categories of Entertainment and Entrepreneurship, or for being a finalist for the category of Marketing Communications.
Fanning's product and company (Napster) had a huge effect on the Entertainment industry, and he definitely qualified as a stand-out entrepreneur.
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(1) Prior precedent for individuals with a very negative effect on history was set in 1938 by choosing Adoph Hitler, and in both 1939 and 1942 by choosing Joseph Stalin.