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Dvorak on "Winners and Duds of the Millennium"
erikaaboe wrote to us with yet-another-end-of-year round-up. This time around
Dvorak has taken a look at the past year. Winners include Linux, dot-com millionaires, while WinCE and DIVX are flops. Interesting commentary on the dot-com millionaries though.
Every first person shooter is almost the same. Go and shoot everything you see. What fun can there be in that?
And can someone explain to me the difference between Quake 1 and Quake 3? What more monsters and better hardware acceleration? You pay money for this?
Ayee. No wonder the gaming industry makes so much money.
One of the things that I learned in my Industrial Engineering days is that people who work long hard hours every week are less productive in absolute terms. That is, they accomplish less work than people who put in a productive 40 hours per week. This isn't because they work less as they get tired, it's because more of their work is rework and the productivity of rework is always zero. Think how much programming time is spent fixing bugs that shouldn't have occurred in the first place. Now....I haven't meant a manager yet that believed that. I've always noticed that the hard workers who spend 70 hour weeks fixing the code that they didn't get right the first, second or third time generally have bright futures.
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knout (n) - A leather scourge used for flogging
Exactly the point. It's stupid to try and have exact accuracy on this point. Exact accuracy demands 1997, which no one will accept, so why not go with the round number, which is the most useful definition?
*sigh* Your exact accuracy is based on the assumption that the Christian religion is correct. Not only that, but also that the more accurate idea of when Christ was born is also correct. For that matter, we shouldn't have the year start in January, but rather closer to April. And what about that whole "Sabbath is the 7th day of the week" thing? Shouldn't we start the week off on Monday then?
Of course, that's why many scientists tend to use CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before the Common Era), instead of A.D. (Anno Domini) and B.C. (Before Christ) when they use dates. And in that respect, the Common Era began in 1 CE. This is a lot nicer to people of other religions (and there are a lot more non-Christians out there than Christians), providing an arbitrary break in the calendar.
As for the start of the millennium, I figure Jan. 1, 2000 is a good date. It will certainly be the first day of a millennium. You know, August 12, 1954 was also the start of a millennium. However, the 3rd Millennium (proper noun) will begin on Jan. 1, 2001. (As will the 21st Century, but no one seems to care about that.)
Some of those Silicon Valley startups expect you to work 16 hour days and sleep at work. I know some guys who have beds right above their desks. What do you think? is it worth it?
Hmm....I think he forgot "lots more users, lots more production servers, a few more paper millionaries, lots more code" and a bunch of other things. Dvorak has never been a friend of Linux, but his spin on this makes it look like Linux was just vaporware instead of something people are using all the time in production, at home, and at play.
If anything, I'd say the Dot-com millionaires is more hype then anything else.
He hit the nail on the head with DIVX though.
I think that the quick turnaround of game technologies was incredible this year. Unreal Tournament and the Q3 demos let us get hooked on the games, and then all of a sudden they were on the shelves, finished. This is not just a great way to develop their software, but a cool marketing thing as well.
Mr. Dvorak thinks that either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs should have been Person of the Year in Time? I mean, c'mon, Jeff Beezos (sorry if spelled wrong) isn't worthy, but in all honesty, he's more worthy than either of those two. *puts on asbestos clothing* At least he did something innovative. To my admittedly limited knowledge, Amazon helped kick off the e-commerce revolution. I still don't agree with his being chosen as Person of the Year, but c'mon, John...Bill Gates or Steve Jobs? You've got to be kidding me...
IEEE-1394 is FireWire AND iLink. Those names are just marketing blather from Apple and Sony, respectively. The license fee for all parties is only $.25 per system.
The 6-pin and 4-pin ends of a 1394 cable are part of the same spec. The 6-pin ended cables are capable of running bus-powered devices using the 12VDC supplied by the port on the host system, while the 4-pin ended ones are data only. If you use a 6-pin to 4-pin cable, the bus power is ignored. A Sony DV camera w/iLink works great with a G4 or iMac w/FireWire, BTW.
Hope this clears some things up,
Marc
- Semper Ubi Sub Ubi!
I didn't say NT was crap. I said its "clickety-click" approach to server management made for badly managed servers.
If your sysadmins aren't draftees from the desktop helpdesk, then NT can indeed be run well and crash much less than NT run by recycled end-users.
As for the tired old "can't sue Linux" BS, go read your commercial license agreement. You can't sue MS or Sun or HP or any other vendor if you lose your data. Maybe you can sue a VAR but you can't sue the big guys, they have protected themeselves from product liability suits in their product licenses.
What's the matter, can't you read?
> That, in a nutshell, is why Linux is not making headway into the corporate market.
My God it amazes me how out of touch some people are!
-M
Really, come on, what is this drivel? Workers are exploited, period. Most "geeks", as you call them (and by which I suppose you to mean young introverted males (becuase it is mostly guys, isn't it?) with an interest in technology, particularly computers, bordering on the obssessive) work in well-paid hi-tech jobs, and are a hell of a lot better of than, say, a Uranium miner in South Africa or a textile worker in the Philipines. Yes, they are exploited; of course they are; but have a bit of perspective.
http://www.atg.com/c ustomers/driven_by_dynamo/driven_main.html
Dynamo is just an app server, so you can say that the database and the web server is not Java. However, all page generation is done by the product using JavaBeans and JSP. A partial list of their customers is linked above, and it includes BMG, AT&T Customer Service, JCrew, and Sony Online Entertainment.
This is just one product that allows Java to be used for page generation -- take a look around, and you'll find that there are literally dozens. And before you say you meant a custom solution utilizing Java, no major company that I know of wants to build their own app server -- the investment would be huge with no real benefit. Yes, Yahoo and eBay do use custom solutions, but eBay is having all kinds of problems and many of Yahoo's services are now delivered via packaged solutions.
JAMWiki Java-based Wiki engine
That's not the point. FireWire is a high-speed high-bandwidth data transfer technology and it's doing quite well exactly where it was originally aimed: digital content capture/creation. There's a reason the iMacDV has FireWire: content users demanded it. I'm less clear on why they're using iMacs, but what the hey, I'm sure they know what they need better than I do. He's not slamming USB for the time it took to take off, and it's much more consumer oriented and had a much greater push for adoption from MS. Bit of a double standard, that.
Time Magazine is owned by Time-Warner, the same company that owns CNN.
Apple is owned by Apple Computers Inc. Steve Jobs has way closer ties to Disney through Pixar than he does Time-Warner.
I actually enjoy his and the Register's commentary on things more than anyone else, specifically because they aren't out to make friends... just to report news and include their own insights. Dvoraks been reporting on this industry for maybe 20 years now... If he really knew/knows nothing, he'd have lost his job and audience years ago...
Just because he's not pro-linux is not a good enough reason to say he knows nothing...
According to Dvorak, "Linux: Lots of hype. Lots of hope" ...of I see. So this desktop that I'm typing this message in here doesn't exist? This GNOME desktop I configured is all vaporware? Who that's impressive. I must be running some kind of background process that makes me think I'm connected to the Internet all day since this Linux stuff I thought I was using really doesn't exist. Wow I'm suprised.
Bill Gates should be Time's Person of the Year? Well, yeah if you believe Microsoft's PR machine that mascot Bill has anything to do with what goes on at Microsoft. You may as well nominate this inanimate carbon rod for being repsonsible for nuclear power.
Dvorak didn't say that Windows CE was a flop, he said that Windows CE handheld computers were a flop. That's a huge difference, as anyone who read the Slashdot article "386 Based Linux Powered Telephone" can tell you. You know, the one where Slashdot told us of this wonderful phone that supposedly ran Linux, when everyone who actually looked at the company's site could see that it ran Windows CE and that Linux wasn't even mentioned. (Needless to say, another black eye for Slashdot reporting.)
But hey, don't let simple fact-checking and journalistic integrity get in the way of your anti-Microsoft zealotry, right?
Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com
It strikes me that Dvorak missed many of the most important events and/or people of the year by ignoring the advances in technology and science that took place this year. By focusing nearly entirely on the 'biz' side of things, he has a myopic view, especially for importance. Although I'll be the first to admit that the business side of a company is critical, when one looks at the past and attempts to judge importance, inventions and discoveries seem to rank right up there with savvy business dealings.
What about the first realization of a quantum computer (here)? Or IBM's advances in chip technology? Or any of a number of similar advances that are almost certainly important for the future direction of technology?
For that matter, I think leaving out the continued successful rise and development of cellular phones and the like is quite a mistake. When he puts network PCs and ubiquitous computing on the 'flop' list, he misses the most successful of the network ed appliances, the cell phone. The important future of cell phones (which I already had some good ideas about) was made utterly clear to me when, on Christmas this year, I ordered a book from Amazon on my new Sanyo-4000 using the mini-browser on the phone. Took about 4 minutes (including searching for a few things), and was amazingly easy.
Cheers,
David Andre
Dvorak is the Rush Limgaugh of tech rags. He turns out a monthly one-page rant that can't even come close to Pournell (I'd gladly wade through references to "Lucille, my Compaq Presario...") for the little insight Pournell gives compared to Rush^WDvorak's "future of technology" type articles. Blech!
I would say is this entire year. The so-called revolutions in e-commerce and communication have only lead to breakdowns in our social contacts with one another. I'm not necessarily a Luddite but I think before everyone jumps on the bandwagon of "oh how technology enriches our lives" they ought to take a logical look at how that technology affects them. E-commerce is nice and for the most part quick, but it has many inherent problems. If I'm sitting on my ass ordering WidgetPluses from ewidget.com I may be saving a dollar or two on gas but the ass I'm sitting on is also getting fatter because I never walk anywhere. Woe is to me if I dared think about returned my e-purchase not to mention woe is to me when I get my credit card statement. I'd really rather go to a discount store, outlet mall, or swap meat to find the big deal. I'm exercising, haggling on the price, and paying cash. Another biggie of this year which didn't make Dvorak's list were the mass media website outlet superstore commercial clusterfucks. The Go network is a great example, people are enticed to surf these huge mego-sites because they offer a ton of content, a ton of commercials and a big brand name. It's a matter of choice I suppose but it adds way too much of a commercial presence in a place that a handful of years ago was just for fun. Another point that made this year a giant flop was blatant journalistic sensationalism (big words, wow). Every tiny story was blown way out of preportion, especially when it had to do with schools and any kind of violence. Here in California it's been so bad I can't watch the news anymore. Everything seems to be a tool of the devil in the eyes of the media, they go around acting like evangelical patriots rooting the evil out of every story. No one tells you what happened anymore, no it's all commentary on how good or bad you ought to feel about a particular event. KCAL news I don't think I need to be told when something is "indeed a tragedy". Look at the hubub surrounding Y2K if you're skeptical of this. Back to the point of social contacts breaking down, it seems every business in the world wants to turn everyone into an overweight couch potato. You're sposed to start an e-business, buy everything through e-commerce, enjoy e-entertainment, and when that all gets boring plan an e-vacation by looking at some e-tropical island photos on someone's e-vacation website. Being able to communicate with the rest of the world is great, I get to rant on /. and e-mail my friends I don't get to see every day. But when I start staying home to do some low down e-living please jumpkick me in the face. This year was a flop because everyone seems to be caught up in the digital revolution the same way the Frenchies got caught up in their revolution in the 18th century, they ran around screaming things no one could understand and cut off anyone's heads who got in the way.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Is that slashdot keeps giving this fool airtime! I am not one to normally criticize slashdot's choices of articles to link to, but links to this guy's idiocy show up here on a fairly regular basis. I've yet to see any content in a single Dvorak column to justify this, particularly in light of slashdot's open-source emphesis.
If slashdot feels the need to have an anti-opensource antagonist, they should at least find an intelligent one to link to (if there is such a thing). The last thing an open-source forum should be doing is encouraging this sort of vapid tripe by increasing its undeserved readership even further by giving it broader exposure.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Applets are dead?
I think not.
They're just off the hypesters radar-screen.
First of all, a lot of things that people used java for were just plain stupid. The problem is like a lot of "hot" technologies, people use them because they're hot, not because they accomplish anything. A lot of web sites are entirely composed of slow loading fluff. The early fervor days were horrible -- people loading a half dozen animated gif and ticker tape applets per page over a 14.4KBaud modem link -- no wonder people hate java! And these stupid applications are better done these days with javascript and animated gifs.
But, there are terrific applications for applets, so long as you are reasonable about keeping them slim. My favorite is the VNC (the open source remote control utility); you may not know it, but VNC servers also respond to http requests, returning an HTML page with a complete java VNC client (pretty fast load time for something so cool, too). I added this to the open source freethreads discussion forum and voila! shared whiteboard. I put another java applet and voila -- a private chat room. Both these pages load very quickly at 56K.
Applets for the Internet drive by customer will make a comeback, as high bandwidth consumer connections become more common.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In the words of the tshirt worn by the ne'er-do-well irish geezer on Brookside (a british soap) -- "A new millennium starts every second".
Can't we celebrate new year 2001, though -- when all this y2k problem nonsense is ovre with?
Ta.
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I like the article... it was amusing. But I'm scratching my head here. Why was the Yahoo! version of this story linked instead of the original ZDNN version?
Dude, you weren't paying attention!
The new, yet-to-be-released 486 uberphone runs WinCE
The phone they do produce, based on a 386, runs Linux.
.sig: Now legally binding!
4. Microsoft Windows CE hand-held computers. When will Microsoft and its friends learn that building a lot of little computers around a portable OS that results in incompatibility from machine to machine for various reasons is not the road to success?
Sounds pretty anti-Microsoft to me. Hemos's take on this statement seems pretty accurate to me.
The fact is that Microsoft CE is not a good operating system for handheld devices. While the hardware also has problems (like short battery life because most WinCE machines, IMHO, try to do too much (256 Colors, MP3 playing, etc.)), the Windows GUI is just completely out of place in a handheld.
---------The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.
The solution is... uh, don't do it. Revolt against what? Are they chaining you to your desk? It's not as if it isn't a pro-worker environment right now.
I can just see you during the Great Depression, with your sign out saying, "Hey! I just got out of college! Where's my $70K/year job? Where are my stock options? I thought I was supposed to be a millionaire in my twenties!"
This perspective brought to you by the Clue Stick. Workers today are so incredibly spoiled.
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Everyone is discussing their "winners of 1999", so I thought I'd add my two cents worth. I know that the focus tends to be on technological advancements that make us all go oooh and ahhh, but here's something for us to keep in mind: WE are the real winners in 1999. Thanks to Linux going even more "mainstream" than before, the Linux gurus that were until recently looked at as wasting their time on an OS that would never go anywhere are suddenly a marketable commodity. People are starting to joing the Linux bandwagon in droves, bringing with them media attention and a newfound focus on Linux from some fairly big name companies. The added support, more applications, increased interest, and sudden desire to find people with Linux skills to work fo r you helps make everyone associated with Linux, from the kernel hackers to vocal and written advocates the real winners of this year, and hopefully it will carry over to the next as well
Since some people are willing to put up with the conditions you describe, it clearly is worth it to them. Maybe they genuinely enjoy what they do, or maybe in their opinion the chance of becoming insanely rich is worth the short-term sacrifice. Whatever their reasons, don't assume they're wrong because you don't agree. There are plenty of jobs out there (like mine) that pay well and don't require 70-hour weeks. But then I won't be making millions in an IPO anytime soon. It's all about tradeoffs.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
First of all, I do think that Dvorak blows smoke way too often, but he's interesting even when he's been using the ol' crack pipe. At least he has real opinions that were formulated by actual experience, unlike the average smarmy .com reporter who parrots the "corporate line". If ZD had more Dvoraks I'd respect them more.
.com millionaires have made that much of a splash (other than in a few ZIP codes). Yes, we're conscious of them, but more in the general sense of "hey! People are getting rich selling nothing!" than in the "CmdrTaco is a media mogul" sense. I don't think they were really that significant for the most part - just a side effect of the "Rise Of The Internet".
That said, I'm right with him on his first four picks for the big events (Linux may be proven to us, but most of the world seems to see it as "the latest Microsoft challenger", and Apple's return from the grave helps ensure that there will always be a "Pepsi" to Microsoft's Coke - regardless of Linux's future), but I don't think
No, I think number 5 should have been called "cutting the cord". The explosion of cellular phones, laptop computers, beepers, and Palm handhelds (and the coming 2-way pager boom) has been enormous this past year - cell phones and Palms are everywhere and people have accepted them as a normal part of society. Have any of you Palm people noticed that people don't look at you funny any more when you whip a Palm III out in the middle of a meeting and start taking notes? They're just part of the landscape now, along with the requisite micro-phone from Nokia, Motorola, or Qualcomm. Cellular, and digital/PCS cellular in particular, finally has the size, battery life, and pricing to be everywhere. So much so that the backlash has already started. The coming "no cell phone" railroad cars and restaurants are indicating that cellular is no longer for the so-called "elite" but for everyone.
As for the flops list - the jury's still out on Firewire. I think 2000 will be the "make or break" year for the technology, at least in the mass-market consumer end of the business. But the new digital camcorders are so cool and so cheap that I think Firewire will be just fine. But it's a niche technology until Intel puts it into PC chipsets. Firewire as standard on Macs, Sonys, and a few other small brands (PC-wise) just isn't enough.
Java is rapidly becoming "just another language", mainly because of Sun's incompetent stewardship. Soon it'll be thought of as "C++ with garbage collection" unless Sun loosens up the death grip. Stick a fork in Larry Ellison - he's done and doesn't know it yet. Microsoft's going to kill him on the low end and IBM will kill him on the high-end. CE was a dead man walking when it first shipped - as son as it became clear that a CE device would have the battery life of a bad laptop. Give up a hard drive for that? I don't think so. The fundamental crappiness of the Windows interface in a handleld form factor just made it worse.
And as for DIVX? I've forgotten it already. Although now that DVD's won, they're trying to get the horse back in the barn...
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
I'm sorry, but just because Windows 98 has poor support for IEEE-1394 doesn't say spit about whether the technology's good or not. I've used a VST Firewire hard drive at my office and I must say that is is the sweetest thing to come along in a long time. I plug it in and voila! The hard drive is automatically installed with no SCSI-ID crap to fiddle with, no extra power cable, no nothing. I can copy stuff from my computer to the Firewire HDD and if I pull out the cable while it's copying, it pauses and tells me to please reconnect the drive. I even played a Quicktime movie off the Firewire HDD and it did the same thing when I disconnected it. Plug it back in and it picks up where it left off.
Sony makes iLink/Firewire CDRW drives, which would probably be nice because as a rule of thumb they say to keep your source drive and your CDRW on separate chains. There's other stuff like printers and speakers that use Firewire, so it's not all just video cameras... although I must say that video editing with Firewire and MiniDV is sweet too.
Almost All the 51xx and the 52xx presarios have Firewire (all the PIII and K6-3's do), and some of them have 4 USB ports 2 in the back and 2 in the front.
>He's just another media fraud that doesn't know a thing.
I suppose this posting is flame bait, but this comment has already been moderated UP so I felt like defending Dvorak...
Do you have any objective facts to back up your statement? Granted, Dvorak is an opinionated bastard who has been wrong a lot, but he's also one of the first to admit that. I've been reading his columns on and off for years, and one thing I've noticed is that he's a guy who has a sense of everything that's going on around him. He doesn't want to tell you what everyone else is saying, he wants to put himself on the line and say what he thinks -- isn't that the kind of attitude that Slashdot normally defends or am I missing something?
Granted, Dvorak is an inflammatory, highly opinionated, and highly visible target, but" a media fraud who doesn't know a thing"? Is Linux not full of hype right now? Is it not the current hope to knock down Microsoft? What is untrue there? He could have also said that it's a solid OS with great potential, but that's not his style. If you want to attack him, fine, but don't take the easy route of throwing assertions with no backing at him.
My two cents...
JAMWiki Java-based Wiki engine
He's just another media fraud that doesn't know a thing
Actually, I think he did a good job of being well-rounded in this case, and was spot on with every item listed. Even rabid slashdotters shouldn't be upset with him: he trashed Microsoft twice, gave good mention to two underdogs (Linux and Apple), and spit on the grave of DIVX. Are you upset just because his comments about Linux we somewhat reserved? You shouldn't be; Linux is still getting to where it needs to be.
Yahoo uses Java servlets extensively for some portions of the site. Sun site is completely Java and servlets.
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