Cringley Asking for 12 Month Predictions

sckienle writes "Robert X. Cringely is asking in his pulpit this week for help in determining what's going to happen in the tech industry in the next 12 months." I expect that robots will take over the world, and openly hunt humans in a post apocolyptic landscape. This will occur in January. For the rest of the year, technology will take a vacation.

Comments

Quick!

[Zelet]

Somebody mod the article summary up as funny!

I predict LNUX will die

[Pave Low]

today's activities notwithstanding, VA Linux is headed for the tubes.

Once this POS hits bankruptcy, the Linux as Microsoft-beater movement will be over.

(This ia a real prediction, not a troll).

The "tech industry"

[PhysicsGenius]

If we are allowed to include the science industry as well, here are my predictions:

• Cold fusion will continue to gain acceptance among more and more "mainstream" physicists (it's at about 30% acceptance now)
• 12 months puts us in late 2003, right before the next election. Hopefully Bush, in need of popular support, will finally stand up to the big pharm companies and tell the FAA to approve so-called "alternative medicines" which have been languishing. Most of those herbal remedies are clinically proven but are being suppressed.
• As the economy continues to worsen, companies will begin to realize that they don't need to put up with arrogant, socially-inept programmers who live at the bottom of the food chain. Especially those that don't have any actual experience. On the downside, this means more of them will be posting here.
• I expect ther to be several improvements in the Linux arena. For instance, I understand Linus Wall is intending to release a version of Perl that doesn't require that confusing CPAN stuff and uses regular DLLs like every other language in the universe.
• Another Linux improvement is likely to be the inclusion of optically-differentiated subbuses on the front end buffer array to increase volatility throughput.

Good point

[PhysicsGenius]

Also, when it is found that a lot of these scaling problems could have been fixed by switching to proven Enterprise software instead of stuff they found on the Internet, it will lead to a revolution in the software industry. Engineering licenses and governmental oversight (code inspectors), while a little onerous at first, improve the level of coding worldwide, saving millions of lives and dollars.

Oh absolutely

[PhysicsGenius]

It's obvious that ESP is right when he says that many eyes make bugs shallow, but I think his idea is implemented badly. The eyes that inspect the code have to be experienced and knowledgeable--having your neighbor's teenager type cat source.c isn't really enough.

That's why I recommend a three-pronged approach:

1) A large internal testing infrastructure, such as you might find at Oracle or Microsoft.

2) A set of coding guidelines intended to reduce well-known problems like buffer-overruns and the use of error-prone C++ in general. These would be analogous to engineering "best practices" as found in other fields and, like in those other fields, would be overseen by government inspection and periodic code review at the federal level.

3) Most important of all, I think we need to make sure that inexperienced-but-well-meaning child hackers don't destroy what we already have by accident. Larry Torvalds should probably stop accepting patches for his web server project, for instance, because each one is a potential timebomb. It is time for the adults to run the software industry, is my belief.

Re:Here are my predictions

[s20451]

For example, the banning of nail clippers and other small personal items on flights when it is the mental state of the terrorist that is the true danger - not the everyday personal effects that can be transformed into weapons.

I agree with your post, until this last line. I find it absurd to argue that "The real problem is X" when the problem X cannot be addressed through any known or reasonable means -- do we propose administering polygraphs and personality tests as a requirement to board aircraft? It is this sort of reasoning that leads to statements like, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people" -- which avoids discussing the obvious fact that we can't tell in advance which people are predisposed to kill people, and that there's no need to make it easy for them by making guns readily available.

Sometimes, the symptoms and not the root causes are all we are capable of dealing with. In that case, banning personal items is only one part of an overall strategy of being more vigilant with airline security, which -- who knows -- may have already paid dividends. At the very least we have increased the level of sophistication required to destroy an airplane.

PAC smack

[Tablizer]

I predict that frustrated ex-IT workers will switch careers *out* of IT in droves to survive, and the ITAA will site the dwindling number of IT workers as evidence that congress needs to raise the quotas again on H-1B visas.

I also predict that some stupid slashdot Spelling Nazi will complain about my spelling rather than work to put a hilighting spell-checker into OSS browsers.