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Nominations for 2003 Vaporware Awards
spin2cool writes "Wired News is now accepting submissions for its fifth annual Vaporware Awards. These awards "celebrate all those eagerly anticipated gizmos that were put off, put away or quietly put down. And, of course, those that existed merely as a figment of someone's imagination."
It couldn't be anything else really. Despite a demo by billg, the release date has slipped from 2004 to 2009!.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Nuff said...
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
We were promised "discovery" of those amazing Iraqi WMDs which can destroy west in matter of hours. Those will certainly qualify.
Every year we are told it will happen, but it still has not. I'm talking about a desktop for mom and pop, neither KDE or Gnome are anywhere near yet.
Like MOO3 which I believe a few of the 2002 Vaporware lists. Quicksilver and Atari managed to mangle a very well know TBS name. They even managed to forget to support it, having disappeared after mid-July.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
WMD definitely fall into the category of things "that existed merely as a figment of someone's imagination."
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
Refer to a random nanotechnology source. Pick a random word with nano (as in nanobot, nanomotor, nanogear etc) as its prefix. It will certainly qualify.
A release date that has never been announced cannot (by definition) slip.
The only dates that have slipped have been speculative dates made by publishers, game sites, and fans.
Why would he use the WMDs that he denied having? Hussein knew he couldn't win a war against the US, so his only hope was to have the US cave in because of worldwide criticism of there not being WMDs in Iraq. He figured that even if the US invaded that he could get them to back down eventually. If he used the WMDs in combat, he would instantly blow away his last line of defense -- world criticism of the US -- because the rest of the world would find out that he does indeed have WMDs and the US was justified in invading! That would change things dramatically, don't you think?
Unfortunately for Saddam, we didn't care about the criticism. Ultimately, his gamble didn't pay off. Saddam is going to fold like Chinese laundry and the WMDs will be found.
Oh come on...it's easy to hide a few vials of anthrax or nerve gas, but it's not easy to store all the equipment needed to make it.
The administration said there were WMDs. They said they knew where they were. They lied.
If Hussein really did have WMD's he would've used them.
Imagine you're Saddam Hussein. Imagine, just for a second, that you are also not an idiot. It's January, 2003.
You have a modest stockpile of chemical munitions left over from the Iran-Iraq war: artillery shells, mostly, with a few hundred bombs. The bombs are irrelevant, because you know you're going to lose every aircraft capable of conducting military operations within the first minutes of the coming war. So all you're left with is a few thousand artillery shells that can be loaded with pretty much any liquid-dispersal chemical agent: mustard, VX, whatever you have.
You've got a choice. Use 'em, and you become an international pariah. Your enemy's accusations are known by the whole world to have been true all along. Your international support, from illicit trading partners Germany, Russia, and particularly France, evaporates. Even closest ally Syria turns its back on you. But your enemy is prepared for that kind of attack, and they're numerous. If you use them, your chemical weapons will not be sufficiently effective to turn the tide of the war. You might succeed in making a few Americans throw up, but that's about it. No military gain, and a disaster of public opinion.
Option B: pack whatever's left--artillery shells, drums of agents, precursor agents, manufacturing equipment, whatever--into unmarked trucks and ship them across the border, through Syria, and into Lebanon. Or, even more terrifying, ship them from the fortifications around Baghdad to the state-sponsored terrorist camps of Ansar al Islam, basically handing al Qaida the keys. Deny that the weapons, which the ENTIRE WORLD already KNOWS that you had, because you ADMITTED having them in the mid-1990's, ever existed. Give up the shooting war and focus on the PR war.
Remember: in this little mental exercise, you are NOT an idiot. Try to imagine that for just a second.
Which do you choose? To show all your cards in a futile gesture? Or to risk everything in an attempt to discredit your enemies?
Remember: pretend that you're not an idiot before answering.
Half Life 2 is the new DNF..
Lots of demos's but no shipped product, and a ship date that keeps getting pushed back.. sure everyone loves valve so this will be an un-popular point, but it's begining to look like vaporware...
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
There is HARD EVIDENCE that he had them
No, there is SOFT evidence that he "had" them.
"Hard" evidence would be THE FUCKING WMDS THEMSELVES
Moron.
It fulfill the greatly-needed role of making the free-software-unfriendly Linux obsolete and ensuring that a kernel which fits GNU values becomes popular...
In what way you consider Linux to be "free-software-unfriendly"?
If I may quote the Free Software Foundation on the issue, "We use Linux-based GNU systems today for most of our work, and we hope you use them too." (source) And again, "if Linux were already available, and we were considering whether to start writing another kernel---we would not do it." (source)
The latter link is their page explaining why they didn't drop the Hurd when Linux matured. The reason is that they thought Hurd could become better than Linux, not that they had philosophical issues with Linux.
Sounds like the FSF thinks Linux fits GNU values. Why don't you?
Sorry to let facts get in the way of your conspiracy theories, but here goes... :)
:D They have enough cash to go for another five years, easily, even without releasing DN spinoffs. They made $20 million alone, IIRC, licensing the Max Payne character recently... They actually advertise how they are allowed to take their pretty time in their Want Ads. Pretty nice perk if you ask me, considering how crazy most game development is with crunch periods!
:D
Also, investors generally don't have bottomless pockets filled with cash. How long can they pour money into a game development team before they start demanding results? Two years? Three years? Five years?
Being an independent developer, 3DRealms can take as long as it wants.
In the meantime, 3D Realms has released a slew of other DN games, when they should have been working on DNF.
Since DN3D, 3DRealms hasn't worked on any non-DNF games other than in an advisory role, which hardly kills their ability to work on DNF. And the cash lets them keep taking their time.
Here's my prediction: 3D Realms will continue to be evasive on the subject, and will continue to release DN games... and when one comes along that they feel is worthy of the honor, they will rechristen it as Duke Nukem Forever. But only after they've almost completely exhausted the hype surrounding DNF.
Nah, DNF will be the first game 3DRealms actually develops and releases since Shadow Warrior. I expect we will see it in the next year (potentially using the Source engine, though it is a long shot). A media blackout isn't a bad thing, especially with all the fanboy ranting about 3DRealms 'wasting their time'.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
There is a difference between being wrong and lieing. The administration thought Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, so did the rest of the world. It appears they were all wrong.
I don't recall any administration ever saying that they knew where the weapons were stored. Back when this whole affair was being bandied about by the security councel I did a fair bit of reading on this topic. The closest this I can recall that was anything like you describe was some satelite intel phots that Sec. State Powel presented to the UN. Nothing that was said in relation to those photos approached willfull misrepresentation of facts.
actually, if you would take a few minutes to look at david kay's report, you'd see that he had extensive programs in development. whether he actually had them or not, and that was never in dispute among any intel agency, even the french, russians, and germans, what we DO KNOW, is that he did have them, did use them, did have extensive programs, did not allow inspections, did not follow UN resolutions after gulf war, did not meet his obligations under 1441, and now, heh heh, does not have to worry anymore. if you really think they are really a figment of someone's imagination i suggest you ask the kurds. to postulate, even for a moment, that he never had them, or they never existed, puts you at the extreme fringe of people. on credible source ever said this. in fact, what scared the french before the war, and terrifies them now, is the extensive relations between chirac and husesein. if/when he talks, lots of people are gonna fry. and that scares the shit out of the germans, french, and russians. where you think lots of his weapons came from?
whether we find them or not, is actually irrelevant. if we do, you, or dean, or martin sheen, tim sarandon, the dixie chicks etc., gonna say the war was justified? i doubt it. he was a real threat. you refuse to accept it. he ahd time to get rid of them due to the spinal flexibility of the UN.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Set this in context of what was accused... ...by the president in his State of the Union message. Anyone who listened to that speech would now reasonably expect our forces to be finding "25,000 liters" of anthrax, "38,000 liters" of botulinum toxin, "500 tons" of sarin,
mustard and VX nerve agent, and "29,984" munitions capable of delivering chemical agents -- along with a hidden nuclear weapons industry.
If these were "realistic" estimates of what Saddam had, and they were being honest about it, it's certainly not the kind of thing one smuggles out of the country under your shirt or hidden in your trousers. It's not the quantity that can be easily and quickly destroyed, especially without
notice.
So, was the imagery intentially deceptive? Was it intended to simply have shock value?
If these weapons DID exist, which, given the other statements and the credibility of the administrations, I don't believe they did - again, if they did, where are they now?
We'd better hope either that there were NONE, of that if there were, that we find them. Because if there were and we don't, then the only answer is "we don't know who has them."
Since the war was basically conducted to prevent the transfer of WMD to "bad-guys" or terrorists, then the very objective we used to promote the war was the outcome of it.
Frankly, IMHO, the President gave the whole world a bill of goods that was a total crock. The was was not justifiable on the WMD grounds. What might be a reasonable justification was the brutal dictator himself.
Yet to play that card, one would have to account for the US's part in arming and looking the other way when he did the dirty work for us. (Like attacking Iran and using WMD, which we provided intelligence data to make it more effective.) We forget how the US encouraged the Shia and Kurds to rise up against Saddam and then let them get cut down like wheat.
No, going to war against Iraq on humanitarian grounds wouldn't sell, certainly not for the hawks in this administration. And if we go to war on humanitarian grounds, then why was Bush so opposed to our involvement in Bosnia and the other conflicts around Serbia?
Oh, BTW, the assertion that the WMD could be in Syria doesn't fly. If the sat intelligence as Powell showed it, could supposedly pinpoint the presence of WMD so cleanly and clearly, then sending it to Syria wouldn't work either.
Cheers,
Greg
I wait and wait and wait :o(((
SHE does throw dice.
"Seriously though, can you think of any other piece of software that's been in development that long and is still largely incomplete?"
I don't think that's really a fair statement. If you are speaking of ACTIVE development, there has been very little for a long time. The pulse is there - some activity does exist - but not enough to tackle in any kind of reasonable time the production of something like Hurd. And Hurd does actually exist, by the way. You can run it. If you mean a stable, "world conqueroring" Hurd is vaporware, I'll agree with that.
Gnu/HURD is not likely to ever be a major player for the simple reason it does not have critical mass. BSD and Linux have critical mass, and they are currently the only open source kernels that do. Many more exist, and of those the Hurd is perhaps the most prominent, but it simply doesn't have the mindshare.
I'll tell you why Hurd is still a good thing though. Imagine this - the foobared US legal system makes free Linux impossible in the US. What then? Contribute to BSD, where SCO can grab all our hard work and turn it against us? Nope. GNU Hurd will rise in such a case. It is fundamentally a conceptual jump beyond Unix, and SCO cannot possibly establish any claim. If they monkey with it they will tangle directly with the FSF, and frankly that might be worth it just for the entertainment of seeing the FSF fully roused.
If SCO wins, GNU Hurd will become the new center of GPL kernel development. The direction to head is quite clear - complete the port to L4, flesh it out, clean it up, and introduce the world to a real world OS that is a generation beyond Unix or Windows. The potential has always been there, but the difficulty of implimenting something fundamentally new was what allowed Linux into first place. With the proper incentive, like smacking SCO across the face, GNU Hurd development could take a quantum leap. That is why it is good to have around, even if it isn't doing anything important right now. It is a second string to our bow, and greased up and pulled taught it could shoot a mean arrow.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
The US gave them the technology for missiles and the germ and gas WMD decades ago. The proof as I have heard some joke, the US simply kept the reciepts. The US has benefitted from providing weapons for wars in Iraq and Afganistan. The US provided weapons to Afganistan to fight the Soviets and to Iraq to fight Iran. That is a lot of blood on our hands as Americans and I wish people were not so shortsighted about it. I hear my friends say these terrorists simply hate us because the US is a successful world power, but they miss the point that these people have suffered greatly because of US policy to do whatever necessary to protect our monetary interests. The US will have to learn the peace should be the top US interest.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
The dirty little secret here is that chemical weapons don't really work. You require pretty high concentrations to actually kill people. A case in point here is the Tokyo subway sarin attack which lead to 11 deaths out of 5000 people seriously affected. Even in the highly confined subway spaces the actual deaths were relatively light compared to the deaths that could have been caused with a moderately large explosive device.
In a battlefield setting chemical weapons make even less sense, you can't use anything that you don't have a protective suit for or else your troops get killed when the wind changes.
There are a couple of chemical weapons like napalm that can arguably be effective in limited circumstances - e.g. dropped on civilians from helicopters. But conventional weapons can typically achieve the same effects more easily.
Nuclear is a completely different issue. The one concrete verdict the UN inspectors delivered is that they did not believe Saddam had nuclear weapons capability.
However as a direct result of the idiot in the Whitehouse's big stupid mouth the other two members of the axis of evil have either aquired nuclear weapons (North Korea) or will soon acquire them (Iran). And with the US army currently over committed in Iraq there is not the slightest chance that the US will be able to do anything about the fact.
OK Iran has recently made suggestions about inspections. Don't believe them, they would be complete and utter fools not to develop a nuclear weapon, if Bush is elected in 2004 the only way Iran will be able to avoid an invasion is by being able to plausibly threaten a retaliatory attack on Israel.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
There is a very simple explanation of why Saddam Hussein would have played the games he did with the UN weapon's inspectors and allowed the world to continue to think that he had developed WMD, when in fact he may have had none in any militarily significant quantities.
Any poker player could recognize the situation he was in. Saddam played what he thought was a very strong hand 12 years previously, anted up in a big way, and was called by US-led coalition forces. Now, he's stuck in the same game, with a much weaker hand, facing a very strong one, and he can't just fold. What would a poker player do? Bluff, of course!
The most reasonable explanation I have been able to develop was that Saddam was trying to bluff his way out of a untenable situation. He cared not one whit about "bloodying America's nose", or being "seen as a martyr". He only cared about surviving an invasion by the US and maintaining his hold on power, in that order. The best way to survive an invasion is to prevent it from occurring in the first place.
If I were Saddam in 2001, I too would have postured that I had WMD, and the wherewithal to use them (established many years previously when he gassed his own population and the Iranians), in the hopes that that would change the equation for the US strategic planners. (For recent evidence of the effectiveness of this strategy, I give you North Korea.)
The facts that
(1) the Bush administration put our troops on the ground and went ahead with it's plans for invasion and
(2) Saddam did *not* use WMD in a last ditch defense even when he showed no restraint in the past
indicates to me that the simplest and most likely explanation is that not only did Iraq NOT have WMD in any militarily significant quantities, but our government knew that to be true, even when they were positing the opposite.
I have heard every whacked out theory on Saddam and the WMD, and some well thought out, but very convoluted ones, but surprisingly, never ONCE have I heard this very simple bluffing explanation put forth in the media. How can it be that no official "analyst" has thought of it?
---anactofgod---
---anactofgod---
"Equal opportunity swindling - *that* is the true test of a sustainable democracy."
I can't tell you how many times I've called a company and they direct me to a lame ass digital receptionist.
Voice recognition was supposed to be the next big thing, but it doesn't work.
Lets make it a little more realistic. You have to make a biological weapon, hide both the weapon and the lab, and you have to do it with hundreds of people roaming Texas. Oh yeah, and you have to do it without equipment, money, or chemicals more deadly than pesticide. Oh, I almost forgot, you have to do this with periodic bombings, and ruthless murderers all looking for a way to get more power. I almost forgot, you have a country full of pissed off people dieing from diseased water and lack of medicine.
Look, Saddam lacked the science, equipment, and materials to make WMD. He couldn't even clean his water. Making biological weapons isn't easy. The best you could do is try to make mustard gas from the salt in the salt water the same way that subs do on accident. Which, if he could get chlorine, I think he would have at least used some of it to purify his water to at least make it appear legitimate.
I'm really sick of the analogy "It's easy to hide milk jugs in a place the size of Texas". It's not easy to make, and people were dieing all the time because he couldn't even make the SIMPLEST biological weapon (mustard gas/chlorine) for cleaning his water.
Karma Clown
Actually I'd rather we didn't go round picking fights at all. But then I'm old-fashioned like that when it comes to sending people off to die.
Fighting when you're threatened is different from 'pre-emptive defence' against countries that can't harm you.
Best wishes,
Mike.
He's not talking out his ass at all. Rumsfeld worked with the Reagan and Bush I administrations as a special envoy to Hussein back when we were propping him up in the Iraq-Iran war. Part of that deal involved suppling him with the chemical weapons he used to gas 20,000+ Iranians and a few thousand Kurds. This is old news that was vetted back '90. We've been seriously fucking with that part of the world since '45. Given that the Bush administration went on the defensive months ago over the apparent lack of WMDs I've got to wonder where all the armchair hawks have been getting their news.