Dvorak Looks Back At 'Another Crappy Tech Year'

twitter writes "The Vista Death Watch is PC Magazine's most popular column. That is just one of many items in Dvorak's review of yet another 'disappointing' year in Technology. 'I was not a fan of 2007. It was another crappy tech year--just the latest in a string of bad years dating back to 2000. Let's see some of the highlights and lowlights in no particular order ... The whopper for Intel, though, was its Viiv initiative, which was a dog from the get-go and was dropped--finally. Somewhere along the way, Intel bought into the Silicon Valley crock that CPUs were not important any more. What a laugh. Luckily for the company, it refocused on processor chips and found itself in the driver's seat once again. Of course, Intel will fall off the path again, of that you can be sure.'"

Re:He seems conflicted

[hedwards]

Honestly, there's a huge amount of really interesting technology and science out there, more so even than I was a kid in the 80s. It's just that you've got to focus where the developments are happening. The OS world is largely dead in terms of innovation. What we do get from them is pretty consistent bloat, very little of which is actually new, and none of which is more useful than what we had.

Medical technology has made amazing strides in the last 10 years or so. Cryosurgery, Sequencing a human Genome, stem cell results, bacteriophage treatments for infections, using said treatment to limit the amount of e. coli on beef in the US, the ability to operate within a human heart without having to open up the chest, the continued rise of digital X-rays in hospitals, the realization that sleep is primarily regulated by 1 single molecule and the discovery of a method for converting all blood donations into 0- from whatever they were previously.

And that really isn't everything. Any one of those things is of more significance than the moon landing was. Even the space research that we have NASA scientists do is far more important than the moon ever was, the only reason why we think of the moon at all, was that we beat the Russians at the race from the earth to the moon, and key to it, back home safely. Apart from that, it really didn't contribute that much to scientific research in general.

Re:He seems conflicted

[Anonymous Coward]

this is such a ridiculous statement...

"I think we all know...

[Anonymous Coward]

...that the Russians during the communist era were willing to experiment on their people in a way that would be completely unthinkable in the US [wikipedia.org]".

Re:slashdoters

[tm2b]

It is a little bit notable that he's trolling Microsoft fanboys now instead of keeping it to Mac fanboys.

Re:slashdoters

[DECS]

Dvorak looks back at another crappy career year.

On the fault behind Vista's problems:
Ten Fake Apple Scandals: 7 - Apple's Hardware and Dvorak's Microsoft Branded PC [roughlydrafted.com]
"Microsoft, in the end, gets blamed for all the flaws while watching Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and other ungrateful recipients of its goodwill to make fortunes off the Windows platform." April 2007

PE U: The Mac OS X Leopard Windows API Myth [roughlydrafted.com]
Dvorak's great Mac Intel prediction in 2003 was that Apple would migrate to Itanium by the end of 2004.

Thoughts on the iPhone:
The iPhone is "trending against what people are really liking in phones nowadays, which are those little keypads. The BlackJack, the Samsung, the BlackBerry obviously pushes this kind of thing. The Palm, all of these. I guess some of these stocks went down on the Apple announcement, thinking that Apple could do no wrong. But I think Apple can do wrong, and I think this is it." January 2007
"there is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive," March 2007
iPhone only delivers "40 minutes of talk time" and "the interface fouls up constantly." April 2007
Why Dan Frommer and Scott Moritz Are Wrong on iPhone Sales [roughlydrafted.com]

"Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone." March 2007
"I no longer believe in the concept [of a pocket-sized computer], after being slapped by reality once too often. When the iPhone came along, I was already sour on the entire idea." April 2007
"Hitler got less coverage when he invaded Poland. Exactly what new meditation sequence Steve Jobs learned recently that could create such a flurry of fawning interest is beyond me." June 2007
What You Expected, What You Got: Apple and Microsoft in Consumer Electronics [roughlydrafted.com]

John Dvorak: How Wrong Can One Guy Be? [roughlydrafted.com]

Re:Life's good

[Schemat1c]

We need a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Da Vinci, and a Isaac Newton to help us go on any further.

Or just legalize psychedelics again, the dirty little secret of the scientific community.