Dvorak Looks Back At 'Another Crappy Tech Year' 253
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.'"
slashdoters (Score:4, Insightful)
He seems conflicted (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, why does Dvorak still have a job?
Grumpy old men (Score:1, Insightful)
Welcome to maturity (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet, that doesn't mean that there can't be excitement at the margins of technology (e.g., RFID, GPU processing, ubiquitous mesh networks, MIMO wireless, GPS-everything, or cloud computing). Fun stuff is happening even if the core of the technology has settled down into a workaday existence.
Troll indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would that be so bad? As someone who uses all 3 operating systems daily (XP, not Vista), this new iMac way outshines the rest. What a dork. If MS is that bad than stop using it.
Moan, moan, moan (Score:5, Insightful)
IT and tech is the worst. Oh, piss piss, moan moan, life sucks... except for the surprisingly affordable HDTVs, the free fall of per-gigabyte hard drive costs, the near-inability to buy non-dual-core CPUs, $200 laptops that do really useful things, the "gigabyte" being the new standard measurement of a RAM stick and the $10 bill being the new standard increment of its pricing, entire hardware categories like "MP3 players" that didn't exist a few years ago and in another couple of years will be given away free in cereal boxes, and on it goes.
Crappy year after crappy year after crappy year... yet somehow, here we are and you'd have to drag me kicking and screaming back to the year 2000's technology. Somehow, the "crappy year" math doesn't add up.
(This applies in other domains too, but that is left as an exercise to the reader to avoid topic drift. Note that only tech has the exponential improvement, though.)
Slashdot loves to feed 'em! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:slashdoters (Score:4, Insightful)
That said, I have to agree that the thrill is largely gone. Even slashdot, the stories all seem to be something I've read before, and so do the comments. The late 90's, they were fantastic. But like the hippies after Woodstock, this is not the low point of a cycle -- it's over. Whatever "it" was, it will only return in a different form, and it will revolve around people other than us.
Happy 2008!!
good that the first word of the title is Dvorak... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:He seems conflicted (Score:5, Insightful)
As for real revolutions, I don't believe in them. From airplanes to telephones, when I dig into the story of innovation, I find instead a series of incremental improvements. All we've really been missing lately is those OMG moments like a moon landing. I'm jaded too... when a 5-year-old boy gets to see the first moon landing, he expects amazing things for the rest of his life. At 44, I'm still waiting for a comparable moment. When I think about it, I feel let down. The trick is to step back and realize that the revolution has been happening every day, little by little, just without the OMG moments.
Re:He seems conflicted (Score:5, Insightful)
His job is not to write decent well researched articles on the state of the industry. His job is to get visitors to the site to keep the ad revenues healthy. He's laughing at us, he knows he's stupid. He's counting on your love of pointing it out to make him money. If you view Dvorak through this light, he is a very talented individual.
This raises the question as to why Slashdot continues to post his articles? Well, they're part of the gravy-train too. You see, Dvorak stories usually have a lot of comments on them because there a loads of posts from people who love to point out his deliberate stupidity. Slashdot is supported by ads too, so it makes sense for them to post stories that generate the most controversy. More page views equals more viewed advertisements which leads to increased revenues.
As such, the only way to stop these poor quality stories is not to react to the flame-bait. Don't go to the linked article, don't post against the article, don't even read the thread and mod down the stories in the fire hose.
Simon
Re:Slashdot loves to feed 'em! (Score:2, Insightful)
I went to TFA, now feel like a total asshole for giving this talking-head, professional troll and self promotor crankypants yet another click to notch into his bedpost.
Has this guy actually done anything, or just talked about what others do, and gloat over their train wreaks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dvorak [wikipedia.org]
Here's my vote for Slashdot not linking to Dvorak anymore.
Re:He seems conflicted (Score:4, Insightful)
2) Why should e-coli be on the beef in the first place if you are butchering the cow properly? i.e. What's shit (cow or other) doing on your beef?
The advance I'm waiting for is a far more reliable and safe way of attaching devices to brains. Then the blind would be able to see etc.
Of course the **AA and the DMCA might cause problems with that.
Not exactly news (Score:3, Insightful)
XP did/do the job for most people. So, why upgrade? The only time Vista is worth to consider is if you buy a
new machine. But even then, Vista makes you machine more expensive, both in terms of hardware and software. Then
there is the question if it will work well with your old existing network of XP or even win2k boxes.
Microsoft had the same problem to get people to upgrade from win2k to XP, but XP didn't look like such a total
failure. The reason for that was that there were a lot of win9x users that left that platform for XP. Unlike the win2k users these customers actually got good value for their money, so it was not so hard to make them upgrade.
Another factor is that the competition is much harder now than when they released XP. Apple is starting to get
back in the game, and Linux looks better and better and evolving fast.
Re:He seems conflicted (Score:3, Insightful)
You could have the most effective treatment of all time, but if nobody has access to it, it's the most worthless thing ever to exist.
Besides, the issue isn't that they've used it for that, the issue is that they've used it in the US on beef. The beef lobby is an incredibly influential lobby, and they are an important ally on things like this. The fact that they've managed to get approval to put these non-organisms into food is significant.
The reason for all the bad tech years has 4 letter (Score:4, Insightful)
lets see, what law was passed in 1998, then used as a cudgel as the internet matured into 2000?
lets see.. duuuh... D... uuuuh M.... errrr C.... what was that last letter what was it.. oh yeah.. A.
and as long as that law allows hollywood to dictate the design of all tech, it will continue to be a crappy year for tech year after year.
for once I agree with DVORAK.. kinda.. (Score:4, Insightful)
thereason that 2007 sucked for tech and 2008-2010 will suck is because of laws. Honestly we have the technology right now to do some amazing things with media. But the old business models refuse to adapt so they instead make everything illegal. I have an incredibly illegal (as far as the law is concerned) system in my home that makes everyone that sees it gasp in awe. I have every DVD i own on my own On demand system in every room, I also have all recordings from TV available in every room as well. Music, Video, News, media.. we have the technology RIGHT NOW to make the "star trek" universe as far as media is concerned. I should be able to from my bedroom TV call up a copy of last nights 11:00pm newscast FROM that station over the internet. but no, they believe that that newscast is more valuable than 90 pounds of platinum and i'm going to share it with 20,000,000,000 people and make it so nobody will watch the news.. So they put DRM on it and make it useless to me.
Media needs to be in open NON DRM formats and via RSS feeds so I can automatically collect what I want. I SHOULD be able to buy a download of a movie and play it on MY HDTV using whatever system I desire to play it.
Information, Video, Audio, news, all of it should be on-demand at any TV I have and it is not because of the silly delusion that this media is incredibly valuable. When in reality it is not.
And that is not even covering the incredibly retarded IP laws that stifle innovation.
Re:He seems conflicted (Score:3, Insightful)
Life's good (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, I have to agree that the thrill is largely gone. Even slashdot, the stories all seem to be something I've read before, and so do the comments. The late 90's, they were fantastic. But like the hippies after Woodstock, this is not the low point of a cycle -- it's over. Whatever "it" was, it will only return in a different form, and it will revolve around people other than us.
That's a fantastic analogy, Abe Simpson. Let's try not to be so annoyingly self-indulgent as the Baby Boomers. The internet revolution, which the older of us experienced as teenagers, college students, or even adults, was one of the biggest transformations in the exchange of information that we'll ever see. The kiddies talk about how different "2.0" will be, but these little bastards have never used a card catalog system to know how different the internet is that what we had before. Things are good now. We're spoiled.
So expecting the changes of 1995-2000 to keep going would be stupid. But that doesn't mean what we're getting now is actually bad. Device creators are focusing more on UIs now, so that the stuff we have is actually, you know, not a pain in the ass to use. That's good. Online services continue to get better, if not in a "blow your mind" kind of way. That's good.
Re:He seems conflicted (Score:3, Insightful)
Because, of course, the rest of the world doesn't count. It's only worthwhile when it finally makes it to America and becomes known to you.
Wake up. The rest of the world is passing you by.
Complete rubbish (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:slashdoters (Score:3, Insightful)
Given it's relatively unsubstantial and still from a Dvorak point of view, but Vista, Blu-Ray, etc. are certainly foul-ups and he does a decent job of identifying them as foul-ups.
The only thing I think it's really missing, even though it's not quite the tech you'd have in mind, is the damn Ethanol bullshit going around.
Re:Life's good (Score:4, Insightful)
More on point, I agree with your general conclusion - things are good now and technology only buys you so much. Who cares if you can search an encyclopedia a millisecond faster? When the vast majority of computer time is spent on email and word processing and web browsing, how much computer power do you really need? If a story is compelling, how many pixels do you need to convey this? Can you do it in text and let someone's imagination take over, or do you need 4x anti-aliased 1080p graphics to make it compelling?
The increases in computing power right now buy us UI improvements and make things easier for the user, a field that computer scientists pawned off on human-interaction specialists. What we need is a breakthrough on the computer science side of the fence. The problem here is that genuinely new ideas are hard to synthesize. The low hanging fruit (though I hate to call the last 60 years of computer science that) has been picked. We need a Copernicus, a Galileo, a Da Vinci, and a Isaac Newton to help us go on any further. We need someone to stand on the shoulders of giants. Unfortunately, software patents have stunted our intellectual growth in ways that will probably make our grandchildren shudder.
Re:slashdoters (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdotters, life is good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I spent several hours this afternoon using a relatively low-cost computer, with 4 gig of RAM and four CPU cores, gigabit ether and Firewire connections to audio hardware capable of 24-bit, 192khz sampling and software that allows me to create 80 tracks of sound and MIDI goodness to make music that gives me great joy. When I finished a rough mix, I was able to sync that music to video in a program that lets me manipulate SMPTE time code as easily as tapping my foot, editing that video using special effects and image synthesis that would have cost a quarter-million when George Bush became president. Oh, and when I was at my mother-in-law's house for dinner last night, my Slingbox was serving my viewing needs from 45 miles away.
A crappy year is one when there's violence in my town that means my kids can't go to school and I can't make a living and there's nothing to eat. I guarantee that Mr. Dvorak has not missed any meals recently.
Sometimes, when I encounter the kind of lack of self-knowledge like Dvorak shows by having the temerity to complain about tech when a sizable portion of the world is unable to grow crops because of climate change, or when our own government is using a technology that is capable of making broad improvement in the lives of billions in the service of gathering information in order to limit our freedom, it really makes me think that there are certain overfed, overbred shitheads that don't deserve our attention and that Dvorak is high on that list.
OK, enough of the rant, now where's my drink?
Re:Slashdotters, life is good. (Score:2, Insightful)