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Top 10 Disappointing Technologies
Slatterz writes "Every once in a while, a product comes along that everyone from the executives to the analysts to even the crusty old reporters thinks will change the IT world. Sadly, they are often misguided. This article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world, from the ludicrously priced Apple Lisa, to voice recognition, to Intel's ill-fated Itanium chip, and virtual reality, this article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world." But wait! Don't give up too quickly on the Itanium, says the Register.
I've got some barcodes that need scanning!
This first post!
Honourable mention: Ubuntu
Shaun Nichols: We're no doubt going to catch some flack for this one, but deep down even the hard-core evangelists will agree that Ubuntu has thus far been something of a disappointment. While Linux has definitely caught on in the enterprise server and database market, the open-source OS has never really been able to move into the greater market.
I don't know if I'm just easily offended or a fanboy, but I stopped reading the article at that point.
pcauthority.com.au
I honestly think if the VR headgear had been less expensive back in the 90's, VRML would have been a LOT more mainstream; I used some of the better goggles, with (IIRC) 480x480 elements, and they rocked. Bulky, uncomfortable, HEAVY, but cool & useful as hell.
Off Topic: Can anyone tell me what I can do to get back the "you have 3 replies to your last post" info at the top of my /. page? I thought I had just been particularly un-interesting until I checked my email notifications.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
Nanotech, virtual reality, minidisc...
That's what we really need.... another article bashing Windows Vista....
You know this entire article was just another excuse to do so.
Is he just complaining that Dell doesn't offer the same Ubuntu packages that it offers in the United States?
This is the first I have heard of the Tukwilla processor. With Intel not releasing a new processor in the Itanium line for such a long time, I thought they had abandoned it.
I think that maybe this article cross that line far too much. It really should have focused on technologies of false promise (virtual reality, voice recognition, biometrics) instead of products. Some of the ideas were interesting when they limited themselves to the technology over the product. So what if the Zune fails? It's not the end of a technology.
And for fucks sake, can we please stop beating on 10+ year old technology? I'm sick of hearing retards go on and on about Apple Lisa, Microsoft Bob and a bunch of morons who have to make a 640k joke because they don't understand anything more than that. These are the same asshats who've probably never even touched a machine with less than 128 megs of ram.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
At one point, I could write Palm better than block letters. I remember one class where I forgot my Palm. I took notes on a piece of paper. When I got home, I noticed that I had written in Palm!
Anyway, Palm is now a could-have-been. Lost out to Smartphones I guess...
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Though not specifically a technology, DNF is definitely one of my favorite failures. What other product has managed to keep fan boys clinging on to the dear hope that it will be released one day, only to be let down and tantalized with a tech demo the following year. If Vista was a train wreck, DNF was the barren wasteland of Mars where no life formed. Even now, after being shut down, it still taunts users with a rather recent trailer of partial game play. All I can say is: Hail to the king baby!
It's only now that Bluetooth is getting to be useful, and only then in very limited terms. Sure, it allows people to walk around babbling into headsets, but it could have been so much more.
Umm....the Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii make major use of Bluetooth technology. In fact those are the only devices I own that I use Bluetooth for.
I wouldn't say the Bluetooth being in the Dualshock 3 and Wiimote is a disappointment at all for both the creators and consumers of the technology.
Even if Bluetooth is underperforming based on its technological potential is it really one of the 10 most disappointing technologies currently?
Not following them on that one, and they have the chronology completely wrong. Jobs, in particular, knew the Lisa was DOA and knew that the Mac was the way of the future for the company, and pulled people off it all the time to work on the Mac. They are right, in that the Lisa was a very nice machine (I wanted to get my father one to replace his typewriter a few years ago - he needed and wanted no more - instead he wound up with a $299 Officemax Dell shitbox that still barely functions from day to day) but I think it certainly doesn't deserve a Top 10 list. It wasn't a big enough deal to matter. I would have put the Newton on there before the Lisa.
Brett
So the Itanic still floats? Or is it just a life vest that was tossed over the side?
"Outside of a few models of high-end video cameras, FireWire isn't seen much these days."
How about audio applications? If you want an audio interface for your laptop, you're almost always better off buying a Firewire model than a USB one; but also for many desktop applications Firewire can fit the bill over PCI/PCI-E. Plenty of the audio gear companies (M-Audio, RME, MOTU, Tascam) of course are still putting out new models using Firewire now and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
Look at some of the other awful shit this esteemed publication has put out:
The People's Republic of China claims to have invented the world's first completely unhackable operating system. The project, known as Kylin, is supposed to keep the evil running dog imperialist pigs from stealing all those glorous technological secrets that have made China the centre of technological development. Or at least those that its workers have used their superior technological skill to half inch from foreign servers.
Neat way to sum it up, but not accurate. Macintosh was nearly finished while Apple was still pushing the Lisa, and Jef Raskin's original concept for the Mac pre-dated the Lisa.
Of course, once Jobs got his mitts on it, he completely changed it from Raskin's vision, eventually provoking Raskin to quit Apple.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
In the end Apple ended up dumping nearly 3,000 Lisa's in landfill
Give me a good reason for doing this instead of lowering the price or even donating them
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
There are much greater fails. Fails of such epic magnitude their ripples are easily confused with the tides on the ocean of technology:
10. Floptical storage. Great stuff if you want to lose data.
9. DIVX DVDs. The ones that you could only buy at Circuit City.
8. VRML. Virtual reality is still around. But VRML was an abortion.
7. CueCat. The epic fail that made Slashdot famous.
6.iOpener. What happens when you try to sell a blade free razor using the razor blade model.
5. The Apple Pippen. You've never seen it, it's that bad.
4. Windows ME. Awful, bad, hideous don't describe this one.
3. Chandler. Mitch Kapor's been a part of lots of great things, but Chandler is the PIM we'd all like to forget.
2. MS Bob. Any top 10 tech failure list without it is not credible.
1. Windows Vista. One would think ME would have taught Redmond a lesson.
-- $G
Bluetooth isn't disappointing. I mean sure it's power consumption could be better. But it's used for more than just keyboard, mouse, and headsets. Console controls would be set back without wireless. I even seen bluetooth speakers.
What they need to do is mix wireless power with bluetooth to make it extremely useful.
What's the alternative? It's pretty much improved Radio. IR sucked. And Wireless USB hasn't seen any headway.
I see certain amount of trouble in the fact that Ubuntu is backed by a millionaire entrepreneur. They do this not like SuSe or RedHat to get into a stable business market but to follow a weird undefined "goal" of making Linux attractive for the home desktop crowd. The problem is, most of the people that are supposed to be their target audience couldn't care less WHAT comes pre-installed on their machine and since they usually "upgrade" with the hardware it's Windows indefinitely. Don't get me wrong. I run both of my computers with Ubuntu and got other people to at least try if not adapt it for full time use. The problem still is most of the folks that are the core non-nerd computer users have enough trouble figuring out what all the icons are for, let alone dive into "operating systems" and software philosophy. Unless someone manages to shove out a stable, user friendly attractive hardware solution that comes pre-equipped with Linux I don't see much hope for projects like Ubuntu to actually take up market share. There are several hurdles (games being a major one) that users would have to jump in order to use a Linux distribution for their every day needs and that just isn't happening while people get their OS with the new computer and barely manage to figure out how to use it.
Artificial intelligence. We have expert systems, neural networks, etc... but an "human like" artificial intelligence? The singularity that have more odds to happen near us in the future is a black hole.
The close second, if we include transportation are (antigrav) flying cars, of course.
what? mod me down because you are too god damn lazy to post a reply? its a fact if ubuntu wants to get onboard with major OEMs as a player like microsoft they better start thinking long term and not like some friggin ricer that wants to tweak their system or have to be playing the lab rat while the developers does the system tweaking, were talking about people that pay good money for an OEM system that want a stable platform to do their work on, some second tier dell offer on just a few systems dont count, i am talking front page baby!!!
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Agreed, it can drive you nuts when there's a regression , but for the most part, Ubuntu has been great. It's important to understand that there is a long term support version, and then all the other releases. If you want stability & reliability, stay with long term support. If you don't mind getting cut on the bleeding edge, then stay with the current version.
-- $G
Based on what appears to be their idea of how long widespread adoption of new technology should take before it is considered a failure, I'm surprised they haven't mentioned ripped on IPv6.
Isn't Segway the synonym for fail?
Of course, these ninnies had no idea what they were talking about, and they didn't know enough about programming to tell the difference between a documented API and the semantics of that level of communication between pieces of software.
Instead of the promised wonderland, we were lured into a dark alley where Microsoft beat us with a sock full of kruegerrands and then proceeded to do all manner of horrible, system destabilizing things to us.
Oh, the binary horror...
What is wrong is expecting businesses to pay for something they don't need.
That line can be used in many places at many times for many sides of an argument. It's my favorite argument for staying with Windows XP and Office 2003.
Less of a top-ten, and more of a ten-random. What is the domain of this list? It seems like if you can go from Zune to Bluetooth to Biometrics, you should at least touch on something like the Segway HT: the first thing that comes to mind when I hear "tech flop".
Well yeah, the Lisa might have been a failed PRODUCT, but it wasn't a failed technology. Whether the Mac is a parallel product or an evolved product, the point is that the idea of user friendly computer with a WYSIWYG, mouse based GUI was not a failure. This was an early unsuccessful attempt, but in the long run the problems and costs were sorted out. You are working on a machine right now, no matter what the brand of OS, that took those basic ideas and made something successful out of them. And the Newton... same thing. It's Version One of a new tech. The Newton failed, but the Palm arose out of it, and from there a whole world of handhelds and now smartphones.
I agree 100%, modding that flamebait was ridiculous, I can't even imagine what someone could be thinking....
"As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development."
What about the slow, decentralized models and the rapid centralized ones? Did he have anything to say about those?
One difference between Linux and proprietary OS's is that the former is really developing at least n software projects where n is the number of distros, so the collective power is diluted by "doing your own thing".
Back when a 16K x 1 bit RAM chip cost $40, and needed a herd of glue chips to keep it refreshed, bubble RAM was supposed to save us. It was fast, nonvolatile, and (for those early 80's days) dense. There were demo systems and ads and all kinds of hype. And then it just never sort of happened. Dynamic RAM kept getting cheaper and easier to use and the bubbles never came out at all.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Come on, everyone knows that moderation is just a lazy way to say "Right On!", "You're Wrong!", or just "Fuck You!"
On the other hand, I do get excited when people mod my jokes as funny. What can I say? I'm human.
I literally cannot buy a non-x86 desktop or laptop even if I paid $5000.
In the early 1970s, who could have guessed that the great-great-great-grandson of the 4004 would dominate 100% of the desktop market and a sizeable chunk of the rest of the computing market?
They did not mention DRM? What the hell?
Also this quote about Ubuntu:
Maybe it was just the overenthusiastic marketing or the fanboys who swarmed to the system but Ubuntu really was supposed to change everything, where as the operating system landscape looks very much the same these days.
It did lower the price of XP for netbooks down to a few dollars though... In a way, desktop Linux made netbooks possible - otherwise Microsoft wouldn't lower the price of their system enough for this class of machines to become viable.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
Talk about the most ridiculously overhyped invention in recent memory...for a damn scooter.
Some of the products, like FireWire, are in widespread use, although maybe not for consumers. I used to work in broadcast; we had a ton of FireWire equipment where I worked.
Itanium, similarly, has a place in certain markets. If you have an HPUX or VMS shop (like lots of government agencies), you're buying Itaniums. I know that Navy and Coast Guard have quite a few Itanium systems in production.
As for Vista, after three years of use, I am very impressed. The only major issue I've had was with the audio/network performance present in the RTM build. Only bluescreen I've had during that time was due to a stick of RAM that'd gone bad. I can't say the same about 95, 98, NT4, 2K, or XP. And it's poor short-term memory on most people's part; XP was a steaming pile when it was released. The shop where I was working didn't start adopting XP over 2k until SP2 came out. People just have forgotten how bad it was, because after several years, it became a stable product. Vista was far better at release.
Similarly, I've been very impressed with 2008 Server. Am in the process of implementing it throughout an enterprise, and haven't encountered any major difficulties. /UAC is annoying, though
"Everything is better with Bluetooth." -Dr Sheldon Cooper
An intriguing solution to a problem that should never have existed in the first place...
PointCast anyone?
My friend, Duke, just read the article, and man is he pissed.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm sick of top ten lists. Why do I care that some group at a magazine chose an arbitrary number of things in some category at their discretion with no real measurable criteria for entering the list? Get me if I'm wrong, but the whole point of a top ten list is to attract visitors to argue about what the magazine chose, and suggest things of their own that didn't make the list. It's a pseudo-event in pure form: a news story with no real news in it.
AI is just as hypothetical as VR.
While both will be technologically feasible in the future, they aren't now and as such AI should have been in the article too. It was just as hyped, though it wasn't attempted as embarrassingly in the public eye (Nintento Virtualboy anyone?)
These technologies in their most fundamental form are something that will be realized some day. The thought process behind this article is full of holes. Nobody thought VR was going to be fully realized in the 90s: people were just playing with early prototypes.
No list of tech disappointments could be complete with the Intel 432. Object oriented machine code and hardware-assisted garbage collection - what's not to love?
Many thanks to the more level-headed moderators who abstain from crack and hopefully enjoy a good beer, which I would gladly buy you! :)
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
Long before I got a Palm Pilot pro, I was writing exclusively in block letters. My teachers/professors hated it (despite its legibility), mainly the arts/English types.
When I got a palm, I adapted quickly to the new 'letters'.
To this day, I still write in block letters - and despite not having used a palm for almost a decade, now, my letter "T" still looks like a 7.
Then it could have included Wolfram Alpha.
I think their top picks are in the wrong order. Yeah sure Vista sucks (not a shocker). But both bluetooth and firewire suck on EVERY OS! The top 3 should have been (3) Vista, (2) Firewire, (1) Bluetooth
Arg. "rather *they're built based on a developer's notion of what comprises a logical interaction..."
- Microsoft COM, aka OLE, OLE2, DCOM, Active-X, Windows DNA, WOSA.... Kraig Brockschmidt, the author of the infamous "Inside OLE", wrote that this extensible architecture was quite likely the last one Microsoft would ever make us learn. Then Java came out...
- OS/2 (IBM, Microsoft).
- Taligent, Kaleida (IBM, Apple).
- IBM Microchannel bus.
- Lisp and AI. That was all the rage in the '80s.
Now, that's a more accurate title.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I've used Linux on and off for a dozen years but it wasn't until I installed Ubuntu, after trying a dozen other distros, that I finally ditched my Windows partition. It's not perfect and it still takes some tweaking to get everything working but finally I can accomplish just about everything I want to.
If you want to write about failed technologies, at least you should be able to tell the difference between 10GB and 10Gbps. Oh, wait, here is the quote:
No...
End anonymous moderation and posting on
seriously. whats the f'n holdup on that? I played a system probably 20 years ago at the state fair where you shot flying things and it was completely awesome even with the primitive graphics.
even if you had to scale the graphics down a bit from bleeding-edge to make something wearable (without much strain), the level of immersion would much more than make up for it...
must not be much demand for it I guess.
Since when did Microsoft start shipping NVIDIA drivers with their Windows releases, anyways?
I seem to remember Windows Update having the latest WHQL-certified build of each device's driver. So once you get your network card going (with a driver downloaded using another PC and a USB memory card if Windows doesn't autodetect it), you can install drivers over the Internet. But then drivers and Windows components are pretty much all you can apt-get on Windows.
IBM/Sony/Toshiba has no choice but to push CBE for everything they possibly can - including situations where it might not be the most appropriate choice. It's the only way they'll be able to get the ROI for the $400M they plunked down on design.
BTW PPC only rules large consoles. Handhelds are ARM/MIPS due to power/code density.
"I'm an old-fashioned type of guy. I worship the Sun and Moon as gods. And fear them."
Well, I suppose it isn't $5000, but...
By what name do you wish to be mourned?
Since the article is almost completely pointless (it could've been written at any point in the last decade, almost), here's my list.
1) The Linux kernel. Yes, I use linux almost exclusively these days, but what the fuck happened to the quality since 2.6 came out? ext3 performance issues, CFQ and general i/o issues (I could do things on my 550MHz athlon w/ 256M - with respect to concurrency of tasks - that made my 1.2GHz, 512M system grind to a halt); VM priority; potential libata problems with PATA disks; breaking and shipping a new version with broken drivers (acpi) or architectures (PCMCIA/bluetooth) when it worked previously, just because the architecture was being re-written to make it 'work better'. "Leave it to the distro packagers to fix".
2) Ubuntu. It has a lot of promise, but once you scratch the candy coating, you can see the rust underneath due to hasty product development. Part of this is due to #1, but the rest is due to simple negligence. There is absolutely no reason for basic SMB/CIFS filesharing to be fundamentally broken in a distro indefinitely; and there is no sane reason why a bug that's been fixed upstream should not be in a new distro release months after the bug has been fixed.
3) Xorg. I remember when it forked from XFree86 and thought "good, maybe they can improve it". It's being improved, but damn is it taking a while. I imagine an alternative could've been written in the time they've taken to get this far, with the ability to run Xnest (and still have all the features of today). Why is X taking almost a gig of memory?
4) "netbooks". I know they've only been out for a couple years now in any concrete form, and that they're "wildly" popular, but they're selling something which doesn't take advantage of what was learned 7-9 years ago when "HPC" computers were around. There were certain features which were almost a sure-thing sell: long battery life, decent display readability, touchscreen, and a usable keyboard. Current netbooks are awkward and lacking in all of these points.
5) ARM processors/SBC/SoC as offered to the 'consumer'. This directly, somewhat, relates to #4. In the last 3-5 years, their prices have gone up - but with no substantial improvement in their specs. Yes, you can get a SoC with a 400MHz ARM CPU and 512M and host USB and SATA, but it'll cost you over $400 to do so. And really, for the cost of a 200MHz non-Intel SoC, running at ~130-250MHz with 32-64Mb, it'll still cost more than an entire Atom system (WindPC).
6) Intel Atom. 40W power use with the Intel chipset, and (until just now, basically) you were limited to the Intel chipset. That's horribly self-defeating, making them only desirable on price.
7) "Smartphones". If they're so damn smart, why can't I use them to their full potential? Most of them have some awesome hardware, yet we're restricted to the horrid software stacks on them (Apple included). Why no host mini-USB? I can't wait for MS to release a WinMo phone, because at least then things would (hopefully) get stirred up a bit.
8) Anti-spam filtering. It's still a huge up-hill battle to try and deal with it, and there isn't a solution in sight.
9) SSD storage, and rotation-free storage in general. It is not living up to expectations or promises, never mind the crystal storage methods mentioned almost a decade ago that got some really nice density.
10) Duke Nukem Forever. Let's face it: everyone wanted to at least see if it'd be as fun as Duke3D.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
C'mon now, take some responsibility.
RISC had Intel on the run, but the combination of Moore's law and the Wintel PC monopoly bailed them out. The P6 and later generation CPUs are basically superscalar RISC machines. Those cute old x86 instructions like string scans have been relegated to (slow) microcode; compiler writers, for the most part, avoid generating them.
That much would suffice for near-parity with the RISC vendors, but then the huge PC market kept Intel as the high volume producer, by far, so their price/performance was much better than their non-x86 competitors. Even IBM with its PowerPC wasn't able to match them in the PC market, so Apple bailed and went with Intel.
...it would have included the Internet, since nothing good ever came out of it. Period.
They would be used in other servers if they came at prices you don't need a black ops military budget or shameless pork budget to afford. The day you have to justify the things to an accountant is the day you buy four 8 CPU x86_64 machines of similar performance for the same price as one of these. Just attempting to get a price for one resulted in a two week stupid game where the reseller was attempting to find the depth of my companies wallet and appeared to be trying to determine if I was bribable or gay - very slimy salesman.
This program epitomizes over-promising and under-delivering.
"This article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world, from the ludicrously priced Apple Lisa, to voice recognition, to Intel's ill-fated Itanium chip, and virtual reality, this article lists some of the top ten technology disappointments that failed to change the world."
For those who've played Tom Clancy's Endwar, the voice recognition is surprisingly accurate.
The real reason Apple went with Intel is that IBM couldn't deliver a G5 chip with low enough power consumption for laptops.
the entire desktop market is now owned by the x86 architecture
Is almost accurate, your assertion that all RISC chips are gone is not. There are still companies building systems (servers in particular) using the SPARC chip.
And the PowerPC is not dead, either. Indeed the PowerPC has permeated many a living room as the Cell processor in the PS3 as well as the "Broadway" CPU in the Nintendo Wii. For that matter, the CPU in the XBox 360 - which of course is sold by a company that not many people would expect to be a supporter of RISC - has a PowerPC chip in it as well.
So RISC is not dead, it just isn't in the same part of the market where it used to be. But if you really want straight-line number-crunching performance, I can tell you from experience that the DEC Alphas can generally outrun the Intel chips dollar-for-dollar. I had a single DEC AlphaServer (4 CPUs at 667 MHz) a few years ago that could out perform a 20 CPU Intel cluster (each CPU at 2GHz) at BLASTP/BLASTX/TBLASTN; and by a significant margin at that.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How about a $170 laptop that runs on a MIPS chip?
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=ALPHA-400&cat=NBB
Only if you're counting the desktop/laptop market. All three of the major consoles use RISC based processors, 3 of the 4 from last gen (PS2, Gamecube, Dreamcast), and a majority of the portable consumer devices market (iPods, cell phones, hand held gaming platforms). In addition, a sizable portion of the HPC market uses RISC based chips. I would in no way consider RISC failed.
Bluetooth has always worked great for me. For the last 7 or 8 years I've used it to sync contact/calendar data between my Mac and whatever mobile phone I've had (I'm still an iPhone holdout). Plus I use it for file transfers between the computer and phone, and to tether to the phone to use its WWAN connection.
And I'm a huge fan of Firewire and hate that it lost out to USB. Firewire is a lot more versatile and was designed that way from the start (comes in damned handy as a network port between two Macs sometimes, because you can run TCP/IP over it). USB was never supposed to be much more than a new connection for keyboards and mice, and now they're shoehorning other capabilities into it that it was never designed for-- which IMHO never leads to good things. This line from the article particularly annoyed me: "I know of at least three people who purchased shiny new portable video recorders and were stuffed when they realised they'd have to upgrade their systems to support FireWire." Oh, noes! They have to spend a few bucks on a PCI card! The horror!!!! Seriously? Is this a real gripe? I mean, the cheapest Firewire card at NewEgg costs $6. A really good one will only set you back $40 or so.
~Philly
For some reason, I wasted my time wallowing in the pages of schedenfreud. What I want to know is about the authors of these sorts of articles... Have they ever worked on a useful project? Sure, Lisa or the Zune didn't save the world, but what did the authors do for humanity?
no mention of the slashdot comment system?
SSD storage, and rotation-free storage in general. It is not living up to expectations or promises, never mind the crystal storage methods mentioned almost a decade ago that got some really nice density.
OCZ Z-Drive, Photofast G-Monster, Fusion-IO ioDriveDuo. Density and performance are doubling every nine months at the same time price is falling by half. What's not to love?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There is still a PPC workstation for about $1300 from Fixstars (us.fixstars.com). Very similar to the latest Quad-G5 PowerMacs (no sound nor Firewire however) but 4 hot-swap drive bays.
You can also run Linux on a PS3.
Being myself extremely allergic to the x86 monoculture, I hope that ARM based netbooks will succeed.
You all are twits, stop living in a dark hole and realize its all nice stuff.
I have a PowerMac G4 I'd sell you for $3000.00
I literally cannot buy a non-x86 desktop or laptop even if I paid $5000.
I'd be willing to sell you my 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 if you are really that interested in a non-x86 laptop.
Having been a teen through most of the 90's, I grew up under the assumption that VR would be the next big thing. Everybody was bragging about how great the world of VR would be once the price of the technology reduced to a point where it could be accepted by the public. Well... that thought came and went. I blame Nintendo. While I'm an 8bit and 16bit fanboy, the Virtual Boy came and went so fast and left such a bad taste in everybody's mouths that the term 'virtual' has been poison to marketability. Nintendo tried to push 'virtual' on to the market before it was good enough.
RISC had Intel on the run, but the combination of Moore's law and the Wintel PC monopoly bailed them out. The P6 and later generation CPUs are basically superscalar RISC machines. Those cute old x86 instructions like string scans have been relegated to (slow) microcode; compiler writers, for the most part, avoid generating them.
That much would suffice for near-parity with the RISC vendors, but then the huge PC market kept Intel as the high volume producer, by far, so their price/performance was much better than their non-x86 competitors. Even IBM with its PowerPC wasn't able to match them in the PC market, so Apple bailed and went with Intel.
I don't think Intel was ever on the run, but I don't see a single thing in there that qualifies for a flamebait mod. Modern CPUs are basicly RISC in drag, and x86 won because Intel was the best at pushing out chips - not because x86 is that great. Their mad prosess skills have let them make the Pentium IV and Itanium and still reign supreme while AMD even at the best of times has only barely been breaking even. And while they may be feeling the financial crisis, right now AMD has a flesh wound in the samw way as the Black Knight in Monthy Python.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sure you can, you can buy PPC desktops at Wal-Mart and K-Mart of all places, for the low low price of $399. Yes, they're PS3's, but they ARE fully capable of running Linux desktop applications.
As for laptops aren't there cheapo MIPS netbooks with Linux installed sold at various geeky tech websites?
Too soon?
This one is going in it. Well done, guise!
SPARC is very much alive, Sun has repeatedly claimed that SPARC is their majority seller.
I thought it would make all my dreams of picking cola off of carpet true, but it is just a smelly rag.
How the hell did this bunch of newbies get Ubunto on the brain?
Ubunto did nothing of the sort. Ubunto has a marketing budget is all. It is far from anything special.
Get out and see the real world of linux. Explore the other distros a bit. Chances are you will not still be using Ubunto.
Living in Chile
The brand (maybe) failed. But the tech didn't. Every x86 clone has a RISC at its core. It just makes more sense to have a simple instruction set, or actaully more importantly, an orthogonal instruction set.
Now onto that maybe- maybe RISC as a brand didn't win the laptop (but that war i still on) or desktop, but it sure as hell won everything embedded (games consoles, phones, PDAs etc.)
on MIPS, beware China!
Combining Linux with Wine, ReactOS and qemu is the basis of a Wintel killer.
The platform? LUK on Loongson.
Perhaps no match for Nehalem based desktops but a challenger for the Netbook market. A platform that runs Windows applications via seamless x86-->MIPS translation. Intel and MS may struggle to match the price point, which is good for consumers because Intel with be forced to considerably beef up the performance of Atom, to compete on value. (Not to mention multi-core ARM Cortex chips.)
The youth pastor at my church got a Macbook Pro. After having a Dell XPS 1710 and a 1730 which each spent as much time on his desk as it did on a FedEx truck, the money men conceded and spent ~$3,000 between hardware, software, and Applecare.
Two months later, the hard drive dies. The IT director and I admittedly had a little too much fun telling that to everyone, and they were stunned at the fact that the MBP isn't immune to hardware failures (although the looks of disbelief were so entertaining). He and I were fully aware that a Western Digital hard drive is a Western Digital hard drive, and the fact that it was in a Mac didn't make it magically immune to failure.
So, he and I backed up over 150GBytes of data from that drive (a task which required the purchase of third party software, since we didn't have another Mac handy to read the file system and thus had to tether it to a PC) and sent it to Apple to have the drive replaced. Yes, we could have replaced the drive ourselves, but Apple was going to give us the drive for free, and us swapping the drive probably would have voided the warranty (if not by consistent policy, by our dumb luck). We then proceeded to reinstall OSX, along with his apps.
The fun part came when we looked at each other and said, "maybe we should make a Ghost image of this machine, just in case." This is something that both he and I have done dozens of times before with Ghost, Acronis, and PING on Windows machines. It's nearly second nature to us. If this were a Windows machine, we could have had an image made in an hour. Well, we could find no working solution to make an image of this machine over a LAN. Apple treats all FTP and SMB shares as read-only, even with admin accounts. Their Disk Utility doesn't support file splitting, nor can it write to an NTFS formatted drive. No, the only way we were able to perform this task - one that is almost simple enough for me to walk my mom through with Acronis on a PC - was for us to rip another hard drive out of a defunct machine, put it into a USB enclosure, format it with their proprietary file system so no PC can read it, and THEN run Disk Utility's "Create Image" feature (which has no verify option).
Call this paranoia if you choose, the IT director and I call it planning for failure (especially given my youth pastor's track record with laptop longetivity). When something that takes 10 setup minutes on a PC takes 4-5 troubleshooting hours on a Mac, us on-site maintenance people have a rough time vouching for the "just works" selling point of Apple products.
but get back to me when the housewives and pensioners, not just the IT pros and college students, start dumping Windows for Ubuntu
Hey, you asked me to get back to you, so I am: my parents are on Ubuntu now, as are several of their friends. They like it a lot better than Windows because it's easier to use, works more reliably, and has more software installed.
make way for arm netbooks unless intel is going to come out with something less power hungry then the atom ;)
IT Journalists as a species should just be genocided I think.
This list is mainly wrong, and then turns into microsoft product placement near the end.
I don't know if this has changed but I installed Ubuntu on a older laptop about a year ago and after an unclean shutdown I was presented with the check disk during boot up, however there was no way to skip or otherwise quickly continue (no ctrl-c or anything; and it was slow). After reading on the forums a bit I found nothing but a few comments saying the check was a good idea and therefore an option for skipping the scan would not be made available.
I'd buy that like 99.9% of the time, but that 0.01% I don't need a developer telling me how he thinks I should do something. And certainly not hard-coding it in software.
Quack, quack.
so many times I have tried to make Speech Recog work without sounding like a 'Southern' Gentleman, I had a Lisa, I didn't get a Zune, and I notice that Win7 also comes in 32bit form, which it wasn't supposed to, a change that I put down to Vista. I occasionally install the latest Ubuntu, only to install something else a day later. To be fair, MS and Intel arn't the only people that fail, Apple promoted Sheec Recognition from the early days, and FireWire is there baby. I went back to corded Mice after using Apple Bluetooth mice, so it looks like the 3 of them have left us disapointed. Nice to see that someone still thinks that Linux is disappointing, free though it may be.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
The Lisa was a useful little machine. The 128K Mac wasn't. In fact, the 128K Mac was an abysmal flop.
The Jobs Reality Distortion Field tends to rewrite history here. Because Jobs wasn't behind the Lisa. He wanted it to fail.
The Lisa had enough resources to be useful - 1MB of RAM, a hard drive, and an MMU. Unfortunately, 1MB of RAM cost too much in 1983, Apple's hard drive didn't work very well, and because of a design problem with instruction backout in the M68000, the MMU (not a chip, one built out of smaller scale ICs) couldn't really do paging right; the compiler had to avoid certain instructions.
In comparison, the 128K Mac was a joke. The OS and all your files had to fit on one floppy. The machine only had one built-in floppy drive. Sales were very low for the first few years. The Mac was a failure until hardware got cheap enough that its specs could be built up to Lisa levels. The Lisa was just a few years too early.
RISC is a market failure for big general-purpose CPUs, but it rules the world the small embedded systems. One-chip flash micros are Harvard architecture almost by definition (flash ROM for program, static RAM for data, need different instructions to read/write each type). Microchip is very proud of the minimal instruction set used in their PICs. They aren't the high prfile devices of the latest from Intel, but without them very few electronic gadgets would work as we know them today.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1347
I just tested it myself too, I put an audio cd into my mac, iTunes opened, showed me the cd, and bottom right it has "Import CD".......
Debunked.
RE wifi,
I've never had ANY issue with my Macs and wifi, or networking AT ALL. I find it near impossible to get windows networks going, only tried it a couple times, but I can make a network any way you can imagine with any two macs. Hell, put a firewire cable from this machine to that machine, and it goddam works! Turn one on, hold down T and you can boot off one drive, "Target Disk Mode".
Theres no bullshit "workgroups", or IP addresses to screw around with. It just works! I recently plugged in a USB wifi adaptor into an XP laptop, god , what a pain that was! Compared to the same thing on the Mac, plug it in, it didnt need the drivers at all, and this was not a big brand wifi adapter, it just worked. I think it said something like "network found, connect?" then I put in the password and BOOM.
Any other Mac problems you'd like me to help with? :)
---
Not as many features as cheaper, older phones.
Of a quote from "Mostly Harmless" the final book in the Hitchhiker's series:
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
This is the case with the "just works" mentality in MacOS. When things are as expected, yes everything and just work with no effort and it's cool. However when something goes haywire, the tools needed to find and fix it are absent since it "just works" and thus doesn't need any.
As a historical example, take Appletalk. Appletalk was designed with the misguided idea that you could have a protocol that was both zero configuration and high scalability. Other protocols were either one or the other. You had things like NetBEUI, which was Windows' small workgroup protocol that basically consisted of machines in the same broadcast domain shouting at each other. Easy to use, but didn't scale past a single segment and the broadcast traffic could get intense. You also had things like TCP/IP. It scales to, well, the whole world as we are well aware today. However, there's some configuration needed, it isn't all automatic.
Basically you could configure routers to route it, but on the computer level there wasn't any config. You plugged in a bunch of Macs and they just went to town. This was accomplished in part through the idea of a seed router. One computer on a given Appletalk segment was promoted to seed router and then took care of handling various functions needed for computers to communicate. The users didn't have to set it up, and in fact were not aware of it. None of the computers noted who their seed was.
This was all well and good, until something went wrong, and you got two seed routers on a network. Then everything went to shit, and nothing would tell you why. None of the computers would tell you who they thought their seed was, the seeds themselves wouldn't tell you they were seeds, and they wouldn't back off and fix the problem. More or less you had to turn off every single computer, and then power them back on to fix the problem.
Thus today everyone, even Apple, uses TCP/IP. Maybe it doesn't "just work", maybe you need to configure it, but at least when something goes wrong you CAN configure it and fix the problem.
Obligatory:
Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all!
You know, if it wasn't for the fact that it was never really publicised, let alone hyped, I'd probably have put Windows XP 64-bit Edition on the list before Vista. I have nothing but bad memories of not being able to find compatible drivers for that; Vista at least all my hardware is supported. This is possibly more by luck than anything else though.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
Ah I'm so tired of these magazines that don't do any research and only publish articles based on what's on the top of their heads !! If you want to have real info about VR please read this article : http://cb.nowan.net/blog/state-of-vr/ And they don't even want to improve the quality of their articles; comments on articles *and* to authors are broken !!
Sorry it took me so long to read this article about the total failure of virtual reality. I've been busy, I spent the whole day in Azeroth.
Why is it that the reasons given for Lisa's poor performance in the marketplace, back in the day and even now, never seem to include the fact that it was hideously slow? The CPU had to go through an external MMU to access memory that was shared with the video generator. The OS was written in Pascal. It was so bad that BASIC programs would run slower on the LISA than they would on the Apple II! One could type in text more quickly than the characters could appear on the screen for heaven's sake!
1. RamBus What a waste.
And here I am, reading this article on my Dad's new computer, running guess which distribution of guess which operating system.
He's one of two relatively computer-ignorant older people I installed Ubuntu for in the last month or so and I've received no more follow-up questions than I'd expect to if I'd installed Windows.
The author's complaint is apparently that people like those I installed Ubuntu for aren't yet spontaneously asking for it at Fry's Electronics, but that's hardly something executives, analysts and "crusty old reporters" were predicting.
Property is theft.
Not products, technologies.
Grandma knew that Windows was not for her when she got broadband and her computer became not useful in under 24 hours. She has Ubuntu now two months, and not a peep. There's nothing she wants to do that Ubuntu can't give her. She's 90. She uses the computer to get online and chat, to process and print her photos, to play some simple games. Her son uses it to watch movies on Hulu and surf porn.
Neither of them is technical. They have Ubuntu - they don't need to be. Their computer has no antivirus, no firewall. It doesn't need them. It does what they want it to do and it keeps doing it and that's enough for them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I love it.
It makes me suspect that they made Ubuntu an "Honorable Mention" just to give it a little more publicity!
Streaming...buffering...buffering...video. Ugh.
I would guess the authors of TFA are trying to get Slashdot to heat their apartments.
Putting Ubuntu on that list was pretty much equivalent to holding their asses to the flames.
Though I have to say, I sort of agree. I have made several attempts at keeping that distro installed on my machines (ditto with Gentoo, but that's a different story), but every time I did so I ended up chucking it out and going back to Slackware, or more recently Arch, which is enough like Slack to be nice to use, but with a really effective and useful package system.
Shuttleworth knows that security isn't a "feature" that's variably graded option - it's a binary checkbox where the only acceptable answer it "yes, we have that". That's why Ubuntu has by policy no open ports to the network by default.
One of the most frustrating things about technology is that the right answer is not necessarily the most popular. OpenBSD has for decades offered a more secure operating system, just by not listening to strangers on the network and employing other networking best practices.
Here's an odd point: good practice doesn't prevent any of the cool (yes, some of them are cool) features that Windows provides. Somewhere along the way they abandoned good practice as a hard rule. That was the mistake. They take shortcuts because they think bad practice is "what people want". They've sold a billion copies, so there must be some merit to that opinion. But in doing so they've spawned a malware ecosystem that dwarfs Microsoft's sales as well as the rest of the top 5 in IT. Microsoft is more effective at selling rootkits and antivirus than they are at selling Office 2007 and Vista, and there's more money in exploiting and protecting their operating system than selling it. The entire antivirus industry is an integral part of the Windows ecosystem and it's completely unnecessary.
This is all crazy. We don't have to play this game any more. We have options.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
aj do nott ajgrii!
You literally have to jump through hoops
This phrase alone shows that you are a moron. Are you actually jumping through real hoops?
http://www.cs4fn.org/vlsi/billionsshipped.php
Over 10bn ARM cores have been shipped. If that's failure, I want some.
Lisa technologies DID change the world, they were just renamed to Macintosh for the 2.0 release (or 1.1 release depending on your perspective.
Similarly, Itanium REALLY changed the world - killing off PA-RISC, MIPS and Alpha. The type of change wasn't what was promised in the PR, but you can be sure that Intel management (and some of HP management) are 100% happy with the results.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I literally cannot buy a non-x86 desktop or laptop even if I paid $5000.
Whooa!, the ps3 should be really expensive in the US
...obviously the author of the article can't or just don't want to see some things that indeed HAVE been somehow revolutionary... i mean... bluetooth (oh, the people in sf are using tiny bt handfrees... scary *rolleyes*)... firewire (though not revolutionary, many people still use and like it)... the apple lisa probably had started the race for the GUI as we know (and most of us love) it... oh and voice recognition we'll see coming up in the next decade for daily use in all kinds of devices i think...
Can someone explain why Vista has always been considered terrible, while everyone loves Windows 7? Is it just me, or did everyone despise Vista due to someone saying vista was bad, followed by tons of media sources copying this claim? It seems like the exact same thing is occurring this time, but with someone saying Windows 7 is amazing. From my perspective, Windows 7 seems almost exactly like Vista from the end user's perspective, so what other explanation is there for the vastly changed views of this edition?
Wow, quoting P4 as a proof for Intel's skills. AMD chips at least in the later times of P4 _easily_ beat them, at a lower purchase price and without heating your room to cooking temperature.
I can't imagine even many people at Intel consider the P4 architecture as anything but a failure.
Unless you mean purely financially, but given the recent EU verdict, it is questionable if the reason for _that_ wasn't mostly consumer ignorance combined with illegal "marketing" by Intel.
The i7 would be a better example IMO, if it wasn't for the fact that they now implemented QuickPath and included memory controllers after ridiculing AMD for ages how useless such things are.
Intel sure has designers with great skills, but Itanium, P4 and the massive delay of QuickPath (still not available as server CPUs I think) sure greately reduced my respect for them.
It's kind of ironic that they give Ubuntu an honorable mention - but use what appears to be a screen shot from Ubuntu when saying that bluetooth was failed technology.
wolfram alpha
Your sister case might be a single case, but my experience is that it is not the generality. Once you have problem (not fully Ubuntu fault) like mounting windows partition, problem with network to connect to an ISP, problem with setting up the automated tool for update, and i pass many other, you are SOL. Sure for windows you have similar problem, but you are far quicker SOL for Linux & Ubuntu than you would be with windows where most stuff function directly.
When will people finally stop putting the words "Linux" and "market" in the same sentence. I'm not a big fan of Ubuntu, but somehow this person seems to think that this is a "product", and that is has to do well on some kinda "market". Since this is a community driven distribution, however, "it" doesn't have to care about the market share, or even how many people use it at work, or even it's overall popularity.
Leopard cub
as well as the basis for many of today's consoles.
So lets see, midranges, mainframes, and game consoles.
Not quite dead nor disappointing.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Better marketing.
Those Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfeld ads which cost millions and which everybody thought were monumental failures were part of the vital ground-work for the current wave of marketing success which is Windows 7.
--The two hidden messages in those ads were these. . .
1. "Vista was a failure because Bill went walkabout and left the ship in the care of others who are not awkward geniuses."
2. "See? Bill is an awkward genius who makes us cringe when he's seen on public TV, but that's okay. Investors don't want him to be cool like Seinfeld. Investors want him to be an awkward genius who will make them tons of money when he returns home and kicks that fat 'developers, developers, developers' retard off the MS throne."
There's a reason why public relations firms you've never heard of make and spend billions of dollars every year. I wouldn't be one little bit surprised if that 'developers' video wasn't quite as naturally "viral" as people thought it was. Essentially, if you can think of a clever way to manipulate public perception through the media, then it has probably happened faster, better and smarter than the thirty seconds you took to envision it. Professional PR guys are scary people paid to be scary people 24/7.
And of course, Windows 7 boots and runs fast on my crappy old laptop where Vista crunched it to a halt. PR isn't the only force at work.
-FL
From TFA:
"He and I come up with these lists over a lunch in the office in a convenient room..."
Must be true then.
Perhaps the fatal flaw of Itanium was that the chip did not support 32-bit code. Given that very little software at the time was optimized to run on 64-bit chips, this left many of Itanium's would-be adopters to hold off on upgrading until developers decided to optimize their software for the new chips.
Itanium's fate was sealed when AMD brought out the Opteron, a crossover 32/64-bit processor which, while not quite as powerful as Itanium, was a product IT managers could buy without having to upgrade their entire infrastructure. The market loved it and suddenly Intel was getting beaten like a red-headed stepchild by its chief rival.
So the only difference between CPU architectures is their bitness. I wish I'd read this gem of information before installing cross compilers for PPC and ARM.
(Posted on a 64-bit Intel machine, so it must be an Itanium, right?)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
It should "just work" and start ripping the CD, but it doesn't.
Sigh! You're one of these people who are so rabidly biased you will pick on any stupid little thing, some people don't WANT a CD to be ripped by default, I know I'd be pissed off by that, if it did do that you'd be citing that as a fault! I bet you moan about cut/paste using the apple key too.. As for wireless, I've had an iBook for 4 years and have never, ever had the problem you've described and i've connected it to a dozen different wireless networks. Mac's just work sometimes, not always, granted! then you have to start thinking just like on any other computer with it's own idiosyncratic faults!
Ubuntu offered to install those for me after starting up the system, I clicked a checkbox and it was installed - no issue.
It's nice to be able to just click a button. Though I had to click it about 6 times to get it to do anything. Once installed Ubuntu decided to start doing crazy things like set the refresh rate to 50 or 53Hz. I spent ages trying to get a decent resolution and refresh rate with no success. I gave up once I managed to get 800x600@60Hz.
ubuntu-restricted-extras is rather easy to install.
Agreed it looks a lot better than it used to.
I'm sceptical after you mentioned point one.
Well my experience in the last few days was one filled with woe :(
Kubuntu decided to uninstall the Nvidia sound drivers for no reason and I could not get pulse to work. Configuring windows shares is STILL a nightmare, all I want to do is share some folders through windows workgroup. Yet the configure share button did nothing. Hacking the Samba config file also met with no success. I have given up and will install windows 2000 tonight. Though I would rather have a more modern OS.
The most dangerous drug
If you ask nicely, these guys will sell you a Sparc laptop.
http://www.tadpole.com/Home.asp
http://www.boygeniusreport.com/uploads/Image/ipod-amnesty-bin.jpg
way to go for objective reporting
I can see 9 iPods and another 8 that are behind paper but you can see reflection.. 17 > 3
...but this "piece of news" sounds like one of those digg thingys: "The top 10 nintendo games played by my nephew during the summer holidays".
Worst than that, it's just based on the opinion of those who wrote it... (Spam?) Sorry for being honest. It's just not even interesting to read TFA!
They're all pretty consistently shite.
And despite being "low power", the ones you do have are all running out of juice after a work day's worth of use.
Weren't GMO crops going to stop world hunger?
And wasn't that WAY more precise and therefore WAY faster than common crop enhancement technniques?
That has been promised since at least 1998.
Has anyone noticed that the entire desktop market is now owned by the x86 architecture? It killed SPARC, PowerPC, Precision Architecture (PA), MIPS, and Alpha. PowerPC and SPARC held out until the very end about 2 years ago. Even they were shoved out of the market.
I literally cannot buy a non-x86 desktop or laptop even if I paid $5000.
In the early 1970s, who could have guessed that the great-great-great-grandson of the 4004 would dominate 100% of the desktop market and a sizeable chunk of the rest of the computing market?
Sure you can, for $5000 you can get a POWER workstation. That said, I take your point.
Your subject title is patently false.
RISC chips have not failed. In fact, the majority of CPUs shipped today are RISC chips. They are just not used on desktop machines.
Intel's x86 design has just three markets: desktops, laptops, and servers. It dominates the first two of these, and leads the third.
In all other markets, RISC chips dominate. The mobile phone CPU market alone dwarfs the desktop/laptop/server market. Mobile phones these days are almost exclusively powered by ARM chips - a RISC design. ARMs also get used in several hand-held consoles, and various embedded applications such as routers. Later this year we'll see several ARM-powered netbooks... MIPS also features fairly heavily in these markets.
x86 relies on Windows being the dominant OS... That is not actually a given.
Biometrics: Only disappointed the people who believe they're going to get a pony if they send in their UPCs.
Ubuntu: Added ONLY to get more page views and controversy.
VR: True.
Alternative Search Engines: Who ever expected them to not suck? I mean, Yahoo? Microsoft? Please, get real.
Voice Recognition: Also true.
Apple Lisa: Spawned the Macintosh, so it is most certainly the opposite of a failure or a disappointment.
10GbE: WTF? One or two companies pushing it suckered you and now your vagina hurts?
FireWire: True. I hope Apple has learned its lesson, but probably has not.
Bluetooth: Works fine for me. Does everything I was ever promised. Don't buy cheap taiwanese shit; I do have a GPS that's a bitch to pair. My cheap taiwanese memory card reader doesn't read CFs, so obviously wires aren't the problem.
Itanium: Only idiots expected it to fly, but I guess you could complain about it.
Zune: Nobody ever expected this to impress anyone.
Vista: 50% credit. Nobody smart expected this to impress anyone.
Why this article is stupid: Because in order to disappoint, you have to set up expectations. Most of these technologies did no such thing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think I would be more interested in a list of technologies that were expected to take off, and really did.
Granted, I'm sure there would be a few things like "cure for polio", "Increased food production", "faster computers", but I'm referring to things a little less obvious. What is the track record on technology predictions?
When they tried to make VR in the early 90's (talking from my experience of the video games like pterodactyl nightmare or whatever it was called and a few others i tried), they were trying this tech in 3d obviously on two screens, when 3d was just barely happening on one screen. The idea was way ahead of it's time.
Not only were these games super low resolution, it felt like 10 fps. It was so choppy and low res it ruined any sense of immersion.
Surely we can do two high res screen at a smooth 60 fps for each screen now. I would love to try VR again with today's tech. Surely, someone in the industry must realize it's not that it was a bad idea but that the tech wasn't ready yet?!
Funny no one mentioned it... Go see it flop here - http://wolframalpha.com/
There are more ARM cpus in the world than x86 cpus. By many times over.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
ummm....Let's see, the Lisa was the first computer to launch multiple apps simultaneously, and still the only one to save your programs and desktop automatically so it is just as you left it when you reboot. The only thing to come close is the current version of Firefox that gives you the option of starting back up where you left off. I would hardly call this a disappointment. The disappointing thing is that it took so long for the rest of the industry to catch up, even Apple.
I don't think I agree with the register's view on IBM's PowerPC being gobbled up by a bear. I suspect 20 years from now IBM will still be building systems with POWER chips in them. IBM's fabs are usually the world leader in terms of innovation (they swap places with the other big players every couple of years). I suspect IBM will be making mainframes until their final days, even if it gets to a point where they are no longer profitable to produce. And POWER is an architecture that can scale for many decades, especially in an application like mainframes. It likely won't be replaced before IBM's eventual demise. Maybe IBM can last forever, but I don't believe that a tech company can last forever.
It's sad that journalists view Desktops as the end-all be-all of computing technology. Since the mid-70s Desktops were the armpit of computer technology. Now that they have powerful and fast multicore CPUs people believe that they are just as good as a special purpose computer. As if FLOPS or MIPS was the only measure of a good system. Just having the right sort of proprietary I/O channels makes a hell of a lot more difference. Being reliable and physically scalable are some other metrics that are more important. Even being able to do 100% of the booting, setup and management remotely can show the huge difference between a Desktop and an commercial grade system.
As for x86 being the king. Who cares, it appears almost anyone can make an x86. You have Intel and AMD doing the high-end, and VIA doing the mid-range, and dozens of others doing very low-end embedded x86 clones (like the crappy little Vortex86)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
#12 Biometrics: Well, they're a failure allright, but not due to the technology, due to their failed implementation. Biometrics were NEVER intended to be a security device into themselves, but a SUPPLEMENT to a password. Your finger I can fake, your password i can steal, but getting both at the same time is a true challenge! A great idea that failed because people were idiots.
#11 Ubontu: Ubontu (desktop Linux in general) is simply ahead of it's time. Only with a fully supported industry rollout, targeted at specific uses, will Ubontu succeed in the future. Dell, HP, and others not only need to fully support it, and integrate a large number of their systems with it, but it also needs some standardization. As is the problem with most open source effoerts, it's a "we're not done yet, but lets put out another beta" cycle. An OS is not useful until we stop upgrading it long enough to get everyone used to what we've done. If we could simply polich off the OS, pick a FEW standard packages and default several of the tools and configurations, then STOP for 2 years, and only develop in the background, ubontu would get farther. The main reason we have never locked onto Linux desktops in our company is that they're a moving target. There's TOO much development in too many directions. If the community would simply work to finish off the core OS without adding gimmicky add-ons we might buy into it eventually.
10: Virtual Reality: It's there, and it's cool! Gone are the days of standing in that stupid ring thing, half the good 3D games out there fully support stereo 3D, and you can get a lightweight, comfortable headset for less than a 24" monitor costs. The problem is, the game content... few games really lend themselves to immersion other than FPS. The most popular games are all 3rd person or top-down views. Immersive 3D is actually boring after a while (and can leave a nauseating feeling as well). It's not a failed technolgy, it;s just that we developed it before we realized we didn't really want it.
9: Alternate Search Engines. This is not a failure of the industry, it's siomply because either MS Search or Google search are defaulted on everyone's systems. most people who use PCs are sheep, and only understand how to use what's turned on by default. IE isn;t the most used browser becuase it's the best, it's because many people just don;t know anything different... Also, Google actually produces good results quickly. Other engines do a good job, but they're graphic heavy, bloated with adds, and slow.
8: Voice Recognition: It;s not failed. It;s not gone. I use it every day, and it;s getting better fast. The problem is not getting the computer to recognize speach, the problem is getting people to speak in a recognizable fashion! I live in the south. Even I have a REALLY HARD TIME understanding people some days... However, I've been using the speech recco built into Word and also in my Mac for nearly 10 years. If you actually take the time to train it, use it consistantly (making it better), and speak with a normal (only slightly accented) speech, it does very well (99%+ accuracy, and the grammer checker picks up the rest). This is obviously something the reviewer used years ago and gave up on and has not seriously considdered since. We run several Voice Recco Websphere servers here as well, and they even do pretty good recognizing hard names, and a simple p% processor handles a few hundred consurrent voice calls, so the CPU is clearly not the bottlekneck.
7: Lisa: OK, so Lisa failed, but Lisa was NOT a product line, it was an introductory product. You could almost say the same thing about the Gen 1 iPods... They barely scratched the surface of the MP3 industry. but... the redesigned, cheaper Gen 2's took off! (aka Macintosh). The Lisa proved what computing COULD BE, then Apple took a step back and released commodoty hardware for the rest of us. Also remember, 10K was NOT out of line ofr a computer. In 1984 the only people looking at computers for home wer
There is no contest in life for which the unprepared have the advantage.
I am sure you know that all modern consumer CPUs consist of a RISC processor core with an x86 instruction set translator that provides a CISC x86 interface to the software. There are no more pure CISC consumer CPUs. In that way, RISC was the ultimate success story in terms of technology.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
I'm going to have to call them on that one! 10Gig Ethernet doesn't by any means belong in the same bucket as the Lisa, VR, or voice recognition!
Yes, there is zero takeup of 10GE to the desktop or even to the server (for the most part), but that's not where it's being aimed right now. Currently, 10GE is a great option for higher end switch uplinks and as a step up for a cluster interconnect. It's exactly where Gig E was at the same point after it's introduction, both in takeup and price.
It's perfectly predictable that the price will creep down and deployments will go up until we hit an inflection point. Then we will see server boards with inexpensive 10GE onboard and cheap dumb switches. About that time, we'll hear about real 100Gig E hardware being right around the corner. A couple years later, 100Gig E hardware will be on the market in the exotic and expensive when nothing less will do category and 10GigE will become available on high end desktop boards.
It's perfectly natural that 10GE on the server board is delayed, we had to wait for fast enough PCIe to get widely deployed.
You are the reason the fears about free stuff killing the web are largely unfounded. That was smarter and more interesting/entertaining content than provided by the original authors.
Somebody will soon take you out for a free cheeseburger and neither of you will realize exactly why. . .
Cheers!
-FL
Look at every OS alternative to Windows that has failed in the past. The vast majority fail for not having enough software alternatives available to match what is available for windows. Linux has been around for quite a while now, but main stream software is still hard to come by.
Application installs in Linux are difficult, and often require additional software that must be downloaded in one of several cryptic ways prior to installing the application you want to use. None of it is as simple as a application install in Windows.
Linux's usage model should be the automobile, but in actually they opt for the spaceshuttle.
The Mac OS is probably the directon Linux should be going in. Though I wish OS manufacturers could give us a way to have it both ways.
I also think the Linux community at large wouldn't want to beat Microsoft, they need something to be the counter culture to. /rant off
My Dell XPS M140 has a FireWire port on it (IEEE-1394 in the non Apple world).
I've never, ever used the port. It also has an S-Video input port but never used that either. Only thing I use is the XD/SD/MMC card reader.
punctuation. Use it.
One of the listed technologies is "10GB" Ethernet. If you're gonna list failing technologies at least write the names correctly. It's 10 Gbps or at least call it 10Gb and not 10GB.
But, said the manufacturers, if you buy our products there are no compatibility products. Go hang said consumers.
Many of the high-end features out of the realm of even some brand new systems.
Copy edit much?
Has anyone tried voice recognition on a Vista machine lately?
It can't capture everything, but if you want to use it to control the computer, like I do on my tablet laptop, it works just fine.
When I'm drawing on my tablet, all I have to do is say "undo", "zoom in", "zoom out", "copy", "paste" and these things all just magically happen. I would call that a success.
(ducks from inevitable rain of ms-hate)
VR and voice recognition are right on. As an Education Technologist, I STILL hear uninformed teachers referring to things on the computer as "virtual reality". It's not VR, and even if it were, VR sucks. Voice recognition is a huge steamy joke as well. Every day I fire up Dragon Naturally Speaking and fire off a funny-ass email to my wife. It's never even close, even though we have a pretty high quality microphone, in a sound-production room, and I've been training the stupid software for over 6 months.
I'm not sure Lisa could be considered a failure either, since it was the direct descendent of the original Macintosh.
The Electronic Program Guide on Digital TV and Radio is still deliberately inaccurate so recordings get botched.
Digital Radio will not allow you to skip crud or auto change on preferences.
And the Credit Card. Banks still take 2%, even though manual processing ended yonks ago.
The list bounces from specific product initiatives to new technologies that have yet to come of age. What is "virtual reality"? I was unaware that there was a universally agreed-upon definition for this. Some people may even say that modern video games demonstrate virtual reality. Others may even say that Pong is a form of VR. I also doubt that we've seen the end of biometrics and voice recognition. If they can be made to work reliably, a lot of folks stand to benefit.
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