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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.
The question is, are they wrong? Ubuntu really has remained for Linux hobbyists. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but it is, for the most part.
Brett
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."
The current 3D MMORPGs are virtual realities.... Millions of people spend the majority of their time in these virtual worlds. Just because they don't wear bulky helmets they're disqualified?
The article is a bit misguided on some of it's top 10 choices.
Presumably by nanotechnology you mean molecular manufacturing.. and that should hardly be on that list because it hasn't happened yet. The list is about shit that happened but fizzed. If an assembler was created tomorrow (and it could happen if Merkle pulls his finger out) and the entire fucking materials world didn't change in under 12 months, I'd be entirely surprised and put it at #1 on this list.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I installed Ubuntu for the first time last year, and man, I was disappointed.
Right out of the box, so to speak, there were problems:
1. NVIDIA graphics card drivers weren't installed because they were proprietary. Come on. Even then, dragging windows around and typing into text boxes had a minor delay that didn't feel natural.
2. All websites looked different and ugly as sin, because the package didn't come with the fonts that every other system used. Come on!
3. Multi-monitor use was difficult to set up without having to alter configuration files ( though I do wish taskbars on multiple screens would come to Windows 7). Some things I found simply couldn't be done without writing scripts: setting up a hotkey to send a window to the other monitor, etc.
To resolve most of these issues, I had to navigate a bunch of forums and wiki help pages. I couldn't imagine trying to show my mom how to do that, for instance.
Ubuntu has a lot of strengths, and many of its features made me go "OOOO, cool!" But the Linux learning curve is freakishly steep. To do something of medium difficulty in Windows generally requires advanced console command knowledge in Ubuntu.
The Dell situation is wonderfully illustrated with the rising number of netbooks out there. People buy them with Linux installed but marketing and brand loyalty blindness has taken care of making them oblivious to how to use a computer that doesn't have a "Start" button. I read stories about customers returning Linux systems because it doesn't look like they've grown to expect. I experienced that with my sister in law which wanted to get a Vista laptop instead of her Ubuntu desktop because it was more "familiar" to her. Sadly Linux COULD be a solution for many more people but they seem to be so used to Windows that they can't even figure out how to use something else.
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.
No, CueCat doesn't apply. You can only be disappointed by things for which you had some hope.
Ubuntu offered to install those for me after starting up the system, I clicked a checkbox and it was installed - no issue.
ubuntu-restricted-extras is rather easy to install.
There is a hotkey to do this on Windows? Please tell me what it is, because I have been getting very irritated recently with win7's multi monitor support.
I'm sceptical after you mentioned point one.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
But did anyone promise that ubuntu would kill off MS or something?
Ubuntu pretty much considers the fact that MS hasn't been killed off, or at least humbled, to be a bug.
Promise? No, but they're trying.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Maybe, maybe not.
However, I think that Ubuntu's a bit too young to call it a 'flop.' The project still has plenty of forward momentum behind it.
That it's the most popular Linux to date is certainly a feat, and major manufacturers have adopted it (albeit in limited circumstances). It may not have changed everything, though it did give things an enormous shove in the right direction. Currently, my eyes are on OpenOffice to clean up its act, or for a new competitor to emerge. The OS itself is no longer the limiting factor.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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?
Talk about the most ridiculously overhyped invention in recent memory...for a damn scooter.
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.
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's hard for telcos to figure out how to charge you for it, so they cripple the phone instead.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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.
I love Linux, but sadly I agree with him.
I don't.
"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."
You have to draw the line before you can cross is. KIA's not the first brand that comes to mind when citing car manufacturers that are prevalent in the United States, like Ford or Dodge or Mitsubishi, but it certainly exists and will continue to exist.
"Those who do use Linux as the primary OS for their home or work PC are still by and large tech-savvy users who comprise what used to be known as the 'hobbyist' market. The larger end-user crowd has not been able to warm up to Linux."
The large end market, no. Users who are not tech-savvy, yes.
"Ubuntu was supposed to change that. When the OS was launched, I remember all of my Linux-advocate friends predicting that this would be the product to make the jump and challenge Microsoft in the consumer and workstation spaces. Nearly five years after its release, Ubuntu remains popular amongst Linux users, but has yet to really pick up any sort of real momentum in the greater desktop OS market."
Number one on Distrowatch, Dell, System 76, massive consumer backing, fanatical support, extremely active development, et cetera...
"Yes, getting rave reviews from the Linux community is nice, but get back to me when the housewives and pensioners, not just the IT pros and college students, start dumping Windows for Ubuntu."
How can we know that housewives and pensioners aren't using it?
"But the more he explained his position the more I came to agree. 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."
Overthrowing Microsoft would have been nice but it doesn't have to go down to change anything. It's easy to think nothing's changed but under the waters the change really is there to behold.
"Don't get me wrong, I like Ubuntu and have it running on a home system. But unless a major manufacturer starts preinstalling it it's going to be confined to the Linux enthusiast and the hobbyist market."
Dell.
From wikipedia...
Total assets US$ 27.561 billion (2008)[1]
Not major enough?
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
However, I think that Ubuntu's a bit too young to call it a 'flop.'
Who's calling it a "flop?" The reason for quoting a word is because you're indicating that someone else said it. It's a disappointment, not a flop. It may still do great things, but before and just immediately after it was released, to hear a user talking about it you would have thought it was God's own OS.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
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.
Perhaps if it wasn't a solution in search of a problem it might have taken off.
There, fixed that for you.
...it would have included the Internet, since nothing good ever came out of it. Period.
No, MS Works does not count as a graphical Office suite because:
* it wasn't graphical until Windows arrived (unless you count colored DOS text as graphical) in the early 90s (nobody used it before then, and please don't revise history to suggest they did)
* nor was it a suite. It was an integrated app that did different tasks, like 1984's AppleWorks, at least through version 4.5 in 1995, a half decade AFTER Office arrived for the Mac.
In other words, MS Works was an AppleWorks clone.
MS Office recreated Lisa Office.
See a parallel there? Both were several years behind. AppleWorks outsold Works, and Apple forced MS to stop advertising that its Works was the top seller.
Had Apple continued to develop its own Lisa Office apps for the Mac rather than bending to third party developer pressure to leave the market open for them, Apple would never have needed to partner with Microsoft to ship its failed DOS apps for the Mac as graphical apps. Microsoft would not have been able to rip off the Mac, Bill Gates could not have used exclusivity Excel for Mac as a bargaining chip for obtaining a free license to Mac IP from Apple CEO John Sculley, and Microsoft would have fizzled out as a DOS vendor in the shadow of OS/2, without an application suite of Mac apps it could port to the PC to launch Windows.
But Apple bowed to its third party developers, Microsoft screwed the company over, and then killed off its own DOS third party developers (Lotus, Word Perfect, ect) and ended up as the company with a lock on both the PC operating system and the PC Office market.
Your final point is the key thing here. The OS is no longer the limiting factor.
The limiting factor is that the linux ecosystem is just not complete enough for a lot of users (accounting software, games, application specific software of so many types), and running a windows VM is mostly pointless if all you do is run windows apps (good for winding back, snapshots, image management etc).
Other thing that is not mentioned enough. Lots of users have struggled for years to accumulate just enough know-how to just get by with Windows. They simply are resistant to having to learn anything new. Total change fatigue dominates the user experience. Think how immense the effort Apple has put in and how long it's taking to win new customers, and it has a far superior ecosystem to Linux in the desktop world.
The great advantage in the server market is that the people making decisions have a clue, so you see Linux win on technical merit, and do very well indeed.
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