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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."
nt
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Or does anyone even still remember?
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
I'm still waiting for that bug-free OS we were promised years ago. Should be the vaporware king for years to come.
Hal 9000 is already 2 years late. Damn Illinois people ;)
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
"And, of course, those that existed merely as a figment of someone's imagination."
Is that a joke, or can they read minds now? I could come up 1000 things that I planned to create but didn't tell a soul about, could one of them win?
This is obviously a clear winner...
sig:- (wit >= sarcasm)
I'm STILL waiting for one of these wonder computers Alan Alda told me about!
and spell checker on Slashdot
Biggest piece of vaporware of all time. However, I'll still put some faith in it on the slim chance that it really has needed and benefitted from being in development for ~20 years. Seriously though, can you think of any other piece of software that's been in development that long and is still largely incomplete?
i vote for infringing code by SCOG
How far back has the release date for doom 3 slipped? "When its done" seems to have become "When you're all too old to care". I really hope this doesnt become another DNF.
It's easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.
Doesn't this date push get MS into a lot of legal and PR hotwater? After all, one of the selling points of SA6 was that you could get upgrades every 2 years at a reduced price. If they push it back to 2006, they will dramatically miss their deadline according to the terms of the deal. I'm sure MS wrote enough escape clauses in the agreement to cover their butts so they won't have to fork over any money, but it won't make any of their customers happy. Some of them might start registering complaints to the FTC.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Nuff said.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
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.
HAL became operational in 1997:
I became operational at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997
Maybe the reason it has not materialized yet is that Latex2e works just fine.
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
2009 is listed as "an outside chance" from some Gartner analyst. 50% 2006, 40% 2007 and an outside chance of 08-09. Not to defend M$, but Gartner Group doesn't make their release schedule.
At this point it's less vaporware and more religion, since it is largely sustained by faith.
The Reg, well Gartner really, is full of crap. Nowhere in the article or the Gartner report does it state which version of Longhorn they are referring to and it is highly unlikely that the desktop version of Longhorn will slip that far behind. I'm guessing they are referring to the Server version of Longhorn which is more likely because the Server versions have been slowly slipping behind the desktop releases. 2000 and 2003 Servers were all released after their desktop counterparts (2000 Professional and XP Professional respectively).
Not only that but these dates keep creeping every time the story is retold. Gartner puts the release of Longhorn (likely the Server version) at mid-2008 at the latest and 2006 at the earliest however The Register states Gartner puts the date as late as 2009 but doesn't mention whether it's early or late 2009. I'd call that highly suspect. The 2009 date The Reg is reporting comes from the end of the article where Gartner suspects that if Longhorn ships in 2007 the EOL for 2000 will get bumped a year but in the event that Longhorn is released in 2008/9 they believe MS will force customers to upgrade to Windows 2003 Server first. Earlier reports about the shipping date of Longhorn had it slipping from late 2005 to early- to mid-2006 then suddenly to no earlier than 2007.
In the meantime this fails to take into account a number of issues, not least of which is where is the desktop version in all of this? There are far too many if's and way too much on the line for MS to let Longhorn slip beyond 2007 at the latest and with the shape the OS was in during the PDC is it quite likely we will see Longhorn hit the shelves in 2006.
There is no guarentee in there, you pay for SA, if an upgrade comes out during the term you get it, if not that's life. Sure people will get pissed off, but that would be their fault, for getting sucked into SA, not MS's.
"Windows Me offers tremendous reliability and stability improvements..." -- Paul Thurott
DoomIII is working on it. Somehow, though, I just can't shake the feeling that DoomIII is trying to fill DNF's shoes. It's like a kid who wants to be like his big brother. But one day, one day...BOOM!! Puberty hits, and DoomIII is the new king of vaporware!
Or not. I couldn't really venture to guess. I'd put good money on DNF never coming out, though.
So, after three years, only one of the top 10 vaporware products from 2000 failed to materialize. In fact, most of them went on to become successes as well.
Ironically, the GNU/HURD may well be more friendly to proprietary software and drivers than Linux ever will be! Being a microkernel OS, drivers would have a far cleaner separation from the GPLed HURD kernel than the current loadable module system in Linux does. Though I wouldn't bet on it, we may actually get a stable, usable Hurd kernel before Linux fixes the binary modules issue that was the topic of a recent story. At least the Hurd team IS moving towards making a stable release, but it does not seem to be a high priority at the moment in Linux dev to make even something like the Windows DDK for kernel modules.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
I nominate SCO Linux binary-only lisenced code. The only product supposedly on the market that no one has bought, no one knows what's in it, or why they should even purchase it.
TT
that has been "six months away" for the last three years.
Man, it is going to be SOOOO much fun watching you guys when we begin to uncover cache after cache after cache.
The "there are no WMDs" line is not the message.
The message is, secondarily, "Saddam was not a real or credible threat to the U.S. or its interests". Primarily, the message is this: "Regardless of the 'just'ness of this war, George Bush acted wrongly in initiating it. He acted wrongly in rejecting the real, basic, and relatively quick diplomatic solutions to the problem he claimed to be going to war to solve. He acted wrongly in not only going against the will of, but actively flipping off the United Nations, finally and unquestionably destroying the convention that we have tried to hold since the end of WW2 that countries don't just go invading other countries just because they feel like it, even if those other countries are "bad". And he acted wrongly in brazenly, openly lying to the people of the United States and the entire world about his reasons for going to war."
The "there are no WMDs" line is just icing. It's a "isn't this pathetic, not ONLY was Saddam not a real or credible threat to the U.S. back before the war when we THOUGHT he had WMDs, he didn't even HAVE WMDs". If you want to claim Saddam having WMDs would be automatic proof he was a threat, let me put it to you this way: I know where to find the WMDs. No, really, I do. I know where they are. I'll tell you: They're in North Korea.
I wonder how many ways you'll be able to say: Yeah, but America still sucks and I hate George Bush.
Probably the same way that Bush supporters manage to find so many ways (when it's the better part of a year now and there's still no credible reason why the U.S. went to Iraq except to be the world's unilateral playground monitor) to say: Bush didn't lie to us.
Besides, there are so many excellent reasons to hate George Bush, and only a portion of them have anything to do with Iraq.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I'm still waiting for History of the World: Part II. See! Hitler on Ice! Jews in Space!
Now I'm just beginning to think they're never going to release that one. Stupid media censorship.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
Said to be coming for decades, haven't seen it yet.
We know where they are. They are in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad.
- Donald Rumsfeld March 30, 2003
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
- Dick Cheney August 26, 2002
Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.
- George W. Bush September 12, 2002
If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world.
- Ari Fleischer December 2, 2002
We know for a fact that there are weapons there.
- Ari Fleischer January 9, 2003
Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent.
- George W. Bush January 28, 2003
We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more.
- Colin Powell February 5, 2003
We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have.
- George Bush February 8, 2003
Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.
- George Bush March 18, 2003
We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd.
- Tony Blair, Prime Minister 18 March, 2003
One of our top objectives is to find and destroy the WMD. There are a number of sites.
- Pentagon Spokeswoman Victoria Clark March 22, 2003
Before people crow about the absence of weapons of mass destruction, I suggest they wait a bit.
- Tony Blair 28 April, 2003
We'll find them. It'll be a matter of time to do so.
- George Bush May 3, 2003
I am confident that we will find evidence that makes it clear he had weapons of mass destruction.
- Colin Powell May 4, 2003
I never believed that we'd just tumble over weapons of mass destruction in that country.
- Donald Rumsfeld May 4, 2003
I'm not surprised if we begin to uncover the weapons program of Saddam Hussein -- because he had a weapons program.
- George W. Bush May 6, 2003
U.S. officials never expected that "we were going to open garages and find" weapons of mass destruction.
- Condoleeza Rice May 12, 2003
They may have had time to destroy them, and I don't know the answer.
- Donald Rumsfeld May 27, 2003
Link to source
Teamfortress 2
First hint was as an expansion for HL.
Then as a standalone.
Then an expansion for HL/CS
Then a standalone.
I believe the latest incarnation is as a standalone, running the HL2 engine.
It's been so long, I don't even REMEMBER if I pre-ordered it via Amazon.com - but that was when it was a $30 expansion. Do they still have my ticket? Did I pay? I truly don't remember.
-Styopa
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/
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."