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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.'"
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.
Somehow, that makes more sense.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
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.)
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
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.
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.
Great bits of technology this year:
Consoles finally hit their strides. This was the best year for videogames in a very, very long time.
The iPhone was released. Even if this particular phone has issues, suddenly everyone is talking about phone interfaces and features that aren't mired in 1993.
VOIP is really taking off. Sure, people are shutting it down, but it is doing well.
Amazon MP3 sales.
The ______ Agenda