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Top 5 Submerging Technologies Pinpointed
An anonymous reader writes "Computerworld makes its picks of five 'submerging' (i.e. dying) technologies, as the article asks 'Where are the review committees for obsolete technologies?' The picks, made by 'corporate IT managers and analysts', include Windows 9x, client/server computing and Visual Basic 6."
how about the pre-recorded compact disc? (no I havent RTFA yet)
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Client/Server architecture?
Yeah...whatever.
Because the internet (www especially) would work FINE if it was all p2p.
If client/server is dying, .NET is in for a hell of a rough ride :)
I'd say the opposite - everyone's going back to the server because it's a complete 'mare to configure thousands of clients to do the same thing (users keep mucking it up)... the new stuff just uses the client as a souped up web browser.
Although magnetic tape's cost per megabyte will give it a role in keeping archival records for years to come, better technologies and techniques are eroding tape's dominance for day-to-day backup and recovery tasks.
Heh. Let me tell you why tapes are good. Tapes are very, very simple and well understood. You can repair a broken tape with a Stanley knife and Sellotape if you have to. Sure you might lose a few blocks, but with decent archiving tools (like cpio and bzip2) losing a file won't cost you the entire archive. If a tape drive fails, just replace it, easy.
Now, when a hard drive fails, what're you going to do? Repair the platter? Transplant it to another hard drive? Just not feasible. And how're you going to store archives? Tapes are cheap and high density. Maybe you've moved buildings a couple of times and they've been kicked around, how certain are you HDs can be plugged back in and run? And they take more physical space too, and still cost more.
Tapes aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
Does anyone else find it strange that two old versions of programs - Windows 9x and VB6 are on that list? Maybe not strange so much as OBVIOUS. Of COURSE they're dying, newer and much better versions of the software are out - why wouldn't the old versions go away?
This is like saying that Quake is dying when Quake 2 and 3 have been out for years. Isn't it to be expected that old, obsolete versions die off?
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Yeah. I also don't know whether to be disturbed or amused that "Windows 9x" and "VB6" -- i.e., specific, not very good instances of particular products from a particular company -- are classed as "technologies" along with as vast a category as "client-server computing." It's kind of like saying "Fuel injection and the 1998 Ford Taurus are both major automotive technologies." No, one's a technology; the other is a brand name. And when we can't tell branding apart from innovation, we've got a problem.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Only a small segment of the business community still uses them.
;)
yea, I suppose you are right, if every point of sale system on the planet is considered a "small segment of the business community". Think about it the next time you are at a restaurant and they hand you the multi-copy bill to sign or any other time you use a credit card. Think about it the next time you take your car to the repair shop and they print up the work order and then later the bill. Does your paycheck get direct deposited? If not it is likely printed on a dot matrix printer. Also on the subject of banks, they usually use dot matrix printers for receipts and check endorsements.
Yea, dot matrix must be dead I haven't seen one for almost forever.
Er, maybe 15 years ago (and probably not even then), but now days most of those six year olds could probably frag the daylights out of their teacher. For any kid raised on a steady diet of console game controllers bristling with buttons, a two button one wheel mouse probably seems quaint. Face it, the one button mouse is probably more for the benefit of the computer-phobic person teaching the class.
... or "submerging", whatever that's supposed to mean.
.NET and Java. HTTP and HTML are wonderful, but they are not the solution to every problem. In some cases, people need GUI behavior that is just too difficult to get through a browser. For example, just try editing a grid of data in a browser. The web is not made for that sort of activity.
I work for a company that builds business software. We have big projects building N-tier apps with "rich clients" on both
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
Why not just write the kiddie program so that both mice are tied to the same event?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
My vote would be for WAP.
Does anyone remember when it was going to be the next great thing - it'll revolutionise the world, we'll tak the internet with us on our phones and PDA's! Wow!
Hmm, someone didn't think that one out too well.
WAP is dying as fast as it appeared.
This sig has been deprecated.
The original client/server scheme--where the application's visual presentation and business logic reside on the desktop, and data resides on a server--is an idea whose time has passed. It's being replaced by Web browser clients, n-tier systems and Web services.
Um... duh?
Isn't a Web service still based on a client/server architecture? Aren't n-tier systems just an extrapolation of the client/server model?
The same stuff's still out there and going strong, they're just using different buzzwords to describe it.
Think about what Windows 9x really IS. What is happening is that DOS is finally dying and THAT is a big shift. And while is was silly to refer to the specific version of VB (the last one, Version 6) the bigger picture is that VB is also dying, a language/product line that powered most of the corporate world's interally developed applications for well over a decade. VB.net's only connection to VB is the brand name Microsoft is trying to leverage.
My problem with the article is the barely concealed sales pitch for the upgrade treadmill. An attitude of "who care if it works, better pitch it now lest something bad happen. We promise that nothing bad can happen if you buy shiny, new stuff because we all know it will seamlessly migrate and probably even get you laid."
My philosophy is that if you happen to have a boatload of printers on Token Ring that are working well, leave em the hell alone until they stop working well. But DO start planning for that day because it will happen eventually.
Democrat delenda est
The thing is, VB.NET isn't just an incremental upgrade to VB6 and Win2k/XP aren't incremental upgrades to win9x. They're very different systems using the same name.
.NET API) to do nearly everything. The problem is that VB6 applications are becomming legacy apps (in the sense that Cobol apps are legacy apps) quickly. Part of the draw of VB6 was that any monkey off the street could quickly learn to make something that works in it; what happens when all the monkeys know VB.NET and have never seen VB6?
VB6 and VB.NET are -very- different things. Calling them the same language is almost absurd; not only was the syntax radically altered, but VB.NET should really be using a completely different set of libraries (the
NT/2K/XP, other than having the win32 API, don't really share much with win9x systems; under the hood there's a completely different kernel at work & the resource requirements are such that very few systems that shipped with 95/98 would even be capable of running XP properly (I doubt ME ever got into the corporate environment in any major way, so we can ignore it).
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
The article mentions Windows 9x as dying technology. No doubt about that. But the article makes this statement:
They make this prediction that these 92 million users are going to be driven for various reasons to Windows 2K/XP. What's funny about this is that the very same article then goes on to number two...
So if they predict this mass drive from Old Windows (tm) to New Windows (tm), why then tell us that 2-teir architecture with fat clients is dead? Windows is the fattest of the fat. What a silly contradiction. Of course, they give absolute minimum treatment to Linux with lame excuses as to why it isn't or won't be adopted.
A few other silly things about this article... Dot-matrix printers being replaced with laser or ink yet? This is either a "no shit, Sherlock" or it's a "never will happen." There's a LOT of dot-matrix printers out there that are used on carbon paper for instant duplicates. You can't do that with other types of printers without printing multiplesheets. Dot-matrix is also better for populating forms that can otherwise be filled out by humans (on the same carbon paper, btw). So, this article is either stating the obvious or dead wrong on this point. Useless.
Next, they mention CRTs will be replaced with LCD displays. I would argue that we'll see OLEDs which are cheaper to manufacture and higher quality than LCD displays long before LCDs really hit the same volume as CRTs. This is a nah-uh.
As for file servers being replaced by small storage appliances... uhm, I think they missed the point.
I cannot believe this article got posted to Slashdot. It's the most absurd thing I've ever seen. It was written by some poor schmuck who has no clue and is struggling to write to save his job. The simple trick here is to write something that'll spark controversy or something along those lines... utterly pointless, obvious, or outright wrong.
And here I am wasting my time.
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