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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.
You should've read further, there's this hilarious bit:
You'd figure at least someone who likes Ubuntu and runs it themselves would have known that Dell has been offering systems with Ubuntu preinstalled for two years now.
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."
CueCat had a lot riding on it and lots of fairly high profile partners. Perhaps if it wasn't in the retarded shape of a big plastic cat it might have taken off.
But what's this about the "ludicrously priced Apple Lisa"? Sure it was $10,000 in 1983, but it wasn't targeted to home users. The only other graphical computing package available at the time, the VisIon hardware/software kit from the makers of VisiCalc, the killer app spreadsheet, was less impressive and just as expensive.
"the base VisiOn software and a mouse cost $790, each application cost between $250 and $400, and it required a $5000 hard drive upgrade on top of a $2000 PC"
It was not hard to price a $10,000 PC in the mid-80s simply by adding a little RAM and a hard drive. The Lisa pioneered a new class of hardware at a reasonable cost compared to its newness and the competition.
Apple's Lisa also invented the Office desktop suite, which was bundled into its price. If you wanted an integrated suite of Office software, you'd have to wait out the 80s for another seven years before Microsoft could reassemble its own Office suite for the Macintosh, and then later Windows.
Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly
It depends on your viewpoint. Has Ubuntu saved the unwashed masses from the evil empire yet? Not really. On the other hand, I think it's safe to say that Ubuntu has become the overwhelmingly dominant distro of choice for just about any Linux use case that can be classified as "mainstream". After Red Hat kind of went astray, Mandrake went bye-bye, and Debian (brought into the limelight by Knoppix) decided that ideological purity was more important than being popular, there really WASN'T any distro that was an obvious choice to recommend by default to just about anyone interested in Linux. Gentoo? Good god. I've personally had hours of good clean & wholesome fun with it, but there's no way in *hell* I'd suggest it to my dad... or use it for anything meaningful at work in a context that could get me fired if things went disastrously wrong. Slackware? Yeah, you never forget your first... um... well, you know. But it's just a little more retro than I'd prefer now.
I'm still undecided as to whether i prefer Ubuntu or CentOS for servers, but for desktop use it's no contest whatsoever -- Ubuntu. That's not to say it's the best in every conceivable way... but it's good enough in enough ways. More importantly, it's the one distro with enough market inertia right now to have books dedicated to its specific details. Someone who's been building their own copy of KDE for 10 years probably doesn't need to know the exact directory paths on ${his-specific-distro}... but someone like... well... my dad *does* need to have it given to him in explicit detail. And frankly, even if I don't necessarily need click-by-click details anymore, having the examples in the book actually *work* DOES make things a lot nicer and more enjoyable. In fact, IMHO the "book advantage" *alone* is enough to recommend Ubuntu to just about everyone. When the day comes that they understand the Linux multiverse well enough to stray from the well-marked, illuminated and crowded path known as Ubuntu, they'll know it and be able to find their own way. Until then, Ubuntu.
IEEE-1394b (a revision of 'FireWire') is used in the F-22 and F-35 fighters. This is because it is far superior to USB in real-time applications (isochronous modes). FireWire also uses far less CPU than USB, and has better transfer rates in practice (despite the 'theoretical' peak USB speed being faster [480 vs 400 Mbps] than 1394a). The real reason USB was invented was so that IBM and Microsoft wouldn't have to pay Apple for FireWire royalties. USB is the result of a business decision, not because it was superior technology to FireWire.
I do actually think that current MMORPGs should not be considered VR.
VR was never about creating a persistent virtual world populated by masses of real people, it's all about the sensory experience. The technology aims to replace all perception of the real world with the virtual, and make the user's interaction with the computer as close to interacting with the real world as possible. If the user is alone in the Virtual Reality or not doesn't matter, nor if there is any persistence between each session.
"Cyberspace" is the combination of Virtual Reality with a persistent, populated Virtual World, but just because MMORPGs are approaching that concept from one direction, it does not mean that they are VR.