Slashdot Mirror
Dvorak Looks Back At 'Another Crappy Tech Year'
twitter writes "The Vista Death Watch is PC Magazine's most popular column. That is just one of many items in Dvorak's review of yet another 'disappointing' year in Technology. 'I was not a fan of 2007. It was another crappy tech year--just the latest in a string of bad years dating back to 2000. Let's see some of the highlights and lowlights in no particular order ... The whopper for Intel, though, was its Viiv initiative, which was a dog from the get-go and was dropped--finally. Somewhere along the way, Intel bought into the Silicon Valley crock that CPUs were not important any more. What a laugh. Luckily for the company, it refocused on processor chips and found itself in the driver's seat once again. Of course, Intel will fall off the path again, of that you can be sure.'"
are bored by another dvorak troll article
It's another bad year, Dvorak is still writing.
He writes about how it's such a miserable year, but half the stuff he writes about is about companies being uber-successful. Google, Apple and the Wii come to mind.
Honestly, why does Dvorak still have a job?
"What is all this Windows Vista stuff we're hearing about? After so many years, it seems like Microsoft finally discovered that Windows are clear. You can see through 'em. Isn't that nice? But what if you are trying to read something in those Windows? My 4-year-old grandson writes on he windows all the time, and gets a good spanking for smudging the glass. Which reminds me: It seems like Microsoft has entered the Windex business - something they used to leave to real technology companies, like Symantec and Johnson Wax. Speaking of which, why doesn't Microsoft just start learning from Dow Corning, if they want us all to have clear windows in Vista?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It had to happen eventually. IT has become middle-aged, mass-market, everyday stuff. Everybody and his mother (and grandmother) are using computers so the majority of the industry is driven toward low-cost, lowest-common-denominator products.
Yet, that doesn't mean that there can't be excitement at the margins of technology (e.g., RFID, GPU processing, ubiquitous mesh networks, MIMO wireless, GPS-everything, or cloud computing). Fun stuff is happening even if the core of the technology has settled down into a workaday existence.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Another Dvorak article posted by Zonk. The only way this could suck more would be if it were posted by Roland.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
just the latest in a string of bad years dating back to 2000.
Translation : "I hate the 2000's, take me back to the late 90's! At least back then we were closer to the release of Duke Nukem Forever than we are now, somehow!"
You just got troll'd!
Somehow, that makes more sense.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
The tech industry looks back at another crappy Dvorak year.
"I'm certainly not going to be a happy camper if I have to switch to a Mac or Linux system full-time, yet that is exactly where this scatterbrained company seems to be sending me."
Why would that be so bad? As someone who uses all 3 operating systems daily (XP, not Vista), this new iMac way outshines the rest. What a dork. If MS is that bad than stop using it.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
It astonishes me how people are capable about bitching about every single year, and never notice the contradiction of every year being crappy, while this year is better than the one several years ago.
IT and tech is the worst. Oh, piss piss, moan moan, life sucks... except for the surprisingly affordable HDTVs, the free fall of per-gigabyte hard drive costs, the near-inability to buy non-dual-core CPUs, $200 laptops that do really useful things, the "gigabyte" being the new standard measurement of a RAM stick and the $10 bill being the new standard increment of its pricing, entire hardware categories like "MP3 players" that didn't exist a few years ago and in another couple of years will be given away free in cereal boxes, and on it goes.
Crappy year after crappy year after crappy year... yet somehow, here we are and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming back to the year 2000's technology. Somehow, the "crappy year" math doesn't add up.
(This applies in other domains too, but that is left as an exercise to the reader to avoid topic drift. Note that only tech has the exponential improvement, though.)
Stop posting Dvorak's crap here and stop going to his website and we can finally pick this leach off of the computer world's underbelly. He only exists to stir up shit for web hits. If we stop giving a damn he'll have to go somewhere else for food!
God is real unless declared integer.
With all this talk about the imminent death of Vista I'm beginning to believe that Microsoft based it on BSD.
How can you say such a thing? Services are reliable! Everything is reliable these days. The network never goes down, the servers never go down, the drives never crash, the equipment's never taken offline for maintenance, the certificates never expire, the DNS hosts never get redirected, the security policies are never changed in the middle of the freakin' day (oh, that's a fun one!), the databases always replicate, the bandwidth is never saturated, latency is always zero, and the application software itself is flawless.
Hang on just a sec, there's a unicorn taking a leak on the rainbow on the next cloud over. "Get off my damn cloud, you freaks!"
John
...so I can skip reading without remorse.
But can you honestly blame him? unless you're one of those energy drink sipping geek who bounces around the office like some sort of hyped up 8 year old who has just been given a new toy - I've yet to have a single year when I've looked back and thought, "wow, that was one hell of year" then look at awe over all the great products released that year.
1) The iPhone delivered only to the US and using GSM 2G - and people are hyping it? I'm looking around New Zealand; at the bottom of the world, sitting at the crevice of the ass crack when it comes to technology availability, and yet, I'm seeing far superior smart phones being delivered, CDMA and 3G GSM.
2) The PS3 - Sony just don't get it. They didn't get it with BetaMax, they didn't get it with MiniDisc, and now they're repeating the same mistake with BluRay - apart from the mouth frothing PS3 zealots/fanboys - PS3 and BluRay have been a resounding failure.
3) Windows Vista has only made inroads because of it being the default installation on new computers; the better view is this; look at the rate at which Apple's Mac sales are growing compared to the rest of the industry. If Windows Vista was such a resounding success, Apple's market share should be staying static of shrinking. Neither have happened.
I could go on and on, but you get the basic idea; nothing to do with 'maturity' - just people willing to tolerate technology thats 'good enough' rather than expecting the 'fuck thats awesome!' factor.
Nobody is surprised that Vista isn't a success (perhaps with the exception of one or two Microsoft employees).
XP did/do the job for most people. So, why upgrade? The only time Vista is worth to consider is if you buy a
new machine. But even then, Vista makes you machine more expensive, both in terms of hardware and software. Then
there is the question if it will work well with your old existing network of XP or even win2k boxes.
Microsoft had the same problem to get people to upgrade from win2k to XP, but XP didn't look like such a total
failure. The reason for that was that there were a lot of win9x users that left that platform for XP. Unlike the win2k users these customers actually got good value for their money, so it was not so hard to make them upgrade.
Another factor is that the competition is much harder now than when they released XP. Apple is starting to get
back in the game, and Linux looks better and better and evolving fast.
God is REAL! Unless explicitly declared INTEGER
lets see, what law was passed in 1998, then used as a cudgel as the internet matured into 2000?
lets see.. duuuh... D... uuuuh M.... errrr C.... what was that last letter what was it.. oh yeah.. A.
and as long as that law allows hollywood to dictate the design of all tech, it will continue to be a crappy year for tech year after year.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I do agree that 2007 was a crappy tech year, but not for his reasons.
thereason that 2007 sucked for tech and 2008-2010 will suck is because of laws. Honestly we have the technology right now to do some amazing things with media. But the old business models refuse to adapt so they instead make everything illegal. I have an incredibly illegal (as far as the law is concerned) system in my home that makes everyone that sees it gasp in awe. I have every DVD i own on my own On demand system in every room, I also have all recordings from TV available in every room as well. Music, Video, News, media.. we have the technology RIGHT NOW to make the "star trek" universe as far as media is concerned. I should be able to from my bedroom TV call up a copy of last nights 11:00pm newscast FROM that station over the internet. but no, they believe that that newscast is more valuable than 90 pounds of platinum and i'm going to share it with 20,000,000,000 people and make it so nobody will watch the news.. So they put DRM on it and make it useless to me.
Media needs to be in open NON DRM formats and via RSS feeds so I can automatically collect what I want. I SHOULD be able to buy a download of a movie and play it on MY HDTV using whatever system I desire to play it.
Information, Video, Audio, news, all of it should be on-demand at any TV I have and it is not because of the silly delusion that this media is incredibly valuable. When in reality it is not.
And that is not even covering the incredibly retarded IP laws that stifle innovation.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
What's wrong with MiniDisc? Before the advent of mp3-players MiniDisc was the way to to for either the ones with style (who didn't want to run around with a large "portable" CD-player) or the amateur artists (easy digital recording options).
All the siblings in my family (from my 9 year older sister down to me) have had a minidisc (and my sister still uses it for easy piano recording).
The thing that actually killed MiniDisc was the late adoption of native mp3 playback on Hi-MD's though... A great mistake by Sony.
...that the Russians during the communist era were willing to experiment on their people in a way that would be completely unthinkable in the US".
I propose another topic of discussion, specifically a question raised by my dad after I read him several of the current comments:
What individual piece of tech do you use that you've used for the longest period of time?
For reference, he's got a computer he's happy has lasted 6 years, and some woodworking tools he's hoping will last 50.
--
That said, I have to agree that the thrill is largely gone. Even slashdot, the stories all seem to be something I've read before, and so do the comments. The late 90's, they were fantastic. But like the hippies after Woodstock, this is not the low point of a cycle -- it's over. Whatever "it" was, it will only return in a different form, and it will revolve around people other than us.
That's a fantastic analogy, Abe Simpson. Let's try not to be so annoyingly self-indulgent as the Baby Boomers. The internet revolution, which the older of us experienced as teenagers, college students, or even adults, was one of the biggest transformations in the exchange of information that we'll ever see. The kiddies talk about how different "2.0" will be, but these little bastards have never used a card catalog system to know how different the internet is that what we had before. Things are good now. We're spoiled.
So expecting the changes of 1995-2000 to keep going would be stupid. But that doesn't mean what we're getting now is actually bad. Device creators are focusing more on UIs now, so that the stuff we have is actually, you know, not a pain in the ass to use. That's good. Online services continue to get better, if not in a "blow your mind" kind of way. That's good.
I can't be bothered to read Dvorak's drivel any more. The man should have been made redundant ten years ago.
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
1) OLPC starts shipping; sales under G1G1 program exceed 150,000 units (number does not include sales to governments).
2) Dell ships Ubuntu loaded PCs.
3) Other computer manufacturers follow Dell's lead in preinstalling Linux on inexpensive laptops; Wal-Mart sells out of the 10,000 units of the model they carry in less than two weeks
4) Samba/Microsoft agreement defangs Microsoft's patent FUD
5) MS-Vista bombs. After years of delays, MS-Vista finally debuts. Even those kind to Microsoft admit that Vista is bloated and buggy. Adoption is slow.The public demanded XP be installed by default. This is the first time there was such a major backlash against a major Microsoft release.
6) Even after shameless bribing and ballot stuffing, Microsoft loses the first round in the OOXML approval process.
7) GPLv3 approved. This should have put an end to the Microsoft/Novell scam. But it didn't, the Microsoft/Novell scam was "grandfathered" in.
8) Patent troll Acacia sues Redhat, just two days after two top Microsoft executives leave to join Acacia.
9) After more than four years, Federal Judge Dale Kimball *finally* rules that The SCO Group does not own UNIX. The plain language of TSG's contract with Novell made it perfectly obvious that TSG did not own UNIX, and Kimball could have ruled on this years earlier. Considering that The SCO Group never had any evidence what-so-ever, no standing, and no prima-facia case, the length of time required for this ruling is, in my opinion, inexcusable. This ruling has not stopped The SCO Group from claiming they own UNIX - maybe in another four years. Still, this is some progress.
10)ASUS eee PC.
Personally, I spent several hours this afternoon using a relatively low-cost computer, with 4 gig of RAM and four CPU cores, gigabit ether and Firewire connections to audio hardware capable of 24-bit, 192khz sampling and software that allows me to create 80 tracks of sound and MIDI goodness to make music that gives me great joy. When I finished a rough mix, I was able to sync that music to video in a program that lets me manipulate SMPTE time code as easily as tapping my foot, editing that video using special effects and image synthesis that would have cost a quarter-million when George Bush became president. Oh, and when I was at my mother-in-law's house for dinner last night, my Slingbox was serving my viewing needs from 45 miles away.
A crappy year is one when there's violence in my town that means my kids can't go to school and I can't make a living and there's nothing to eat. I guarantee that Mr. Dvorak has not missed any meals recently.
Sometimes, when I encounter the kind of lack of self-knowledge like Dvorak shows by having the temerity to complain about tech when a sizable portion of the world is unable to grow crops because of climate change, or when our own government is using a technology that is capable of making broad improvement in the lives of billions in the service of gathering information in order to limit our freedom, it really makes me think that there are certain overfed, overbred shitheads that don't deserve our attention and that Dvorak is high on that list.
OK, enough of the rant, now where's my drink?
You are welcome on my lawn.