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8 Can't Miss Predictions... for 1998

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Jan 02, 2008 10:05 AM
from the lot-easier-that-way dept.
Technology
alphadogg-nw writes "Tired of being wrong too often, a Network World pundit applies 20-20 hindsight to this list of prognostications for 1998, which if he's right will turn out to be quite a year. Among the forecasts: The U.S. Department of Justice will go medieval on Microsoft, Compaq will buy what's left of DEC, AOL likewise Netscape, Apple will introduce something said to look like an Easter egg ... and then there's the deafening buzz about this new search engine called Google."
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Submission: 8 can't-miss tech predictions for 1998 by alphadogg (971356)
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  • Bad headline (Score:5, Informative)

    by MSTCrow5429 (642744) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:12AM (#21882276)
    The headline is misleading. These aren't predictions for 1998, they're written by a guy in 2008 as if they were written in 1998. That's what the "hindsight" part means.

    My prediction for 2008: Major worldwide recession, due to the massive inflationary bubble bursting, an inability of the central banks to continue using inflation to create a false sense of prosperity, and stagflation.

    • Mod parent up (Score:5, Funny)

      by elrous0 (869638) * on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:18AM (#21882346)
      And tell Taco to RTFA too.

      • Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Pharmboy (216950) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:25AM (#21882420) Journal
        No reason to RTFA, its lame, and it appears it is a very slow news day and they needed something on the front page for this hour. I hate being so negative, but if you do REFA, you will see that this is really weak.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Forge (2456)
        Actually what's wrong with taco's post is the icon.

        This article should have had the "foot". Except that it was not that funny :(

        PS: In a side note, this journalist (Paul McNamara) is probably just training to become a stock market annalist. A profession dominated by guys who make a living by "Predicting the past" with moderate accuracy.

    • Re:Bad headline (Score:5, Funny)

      by sm62704 (957197) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @11:13AM (#21882880) Journal
      My predictions for 2008, all will happen (balls of crystal, I tell ya)
      • the earth will not be hit by an extinction-causing assteroid [wikipedia.org]
      • Someone will invent something. The invention may actually be useful
      • Somebody will launch something or someone into outer space.
      • Someone will post "FIRST POST! with the comment "frosty piss" and be modded "offtopic"
      • Someone will say something about the USSR, Natalie Portmen, a Beowolf cluster, or CowboyNeal and be modded "+5 funny"
      • I will continue to write slashdot journals about prostitutes [slashdot.org]
      • I will get at least one haircut this year. Maybe this afternoon.
      • CmdrTaco won't command her "taco"
      • Google [whatever] will remain in beta
      • Microsoft will keep pissing everyone off
      • 2008 will not see Linux overtake Windows
      • I'll be turned down and stood up
      • CowboyNeal won't get laid


      -mcgrew
    • My prediction for 2008: Idiots predicting imminent doom like they always have.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MSTCrow5429 (642744)
        Yeah, but sometimes, if you have even a dim understanding of economics and finance, and you follow current events, it doesn't take a Cassandra to sound the alarms. I've acquired something more than a merely dim understanding of economics and finance, mind you. As for imminent doom, such as Earth being blasted by a gamma ray burst (unless we aren't being told something), or global warming, yeah, that's the idiots talking.
      • Amazingly enough, 2008 will be the year in which everything collapses. All economic, social, and political issues will come to their inevitably horrible conclusions.

        No, really, it will be this year. All the portents are there. Similar predictions for all previous years were due to misinterpreting the signs.

        Of course, if my warning is heeded, we may stave off the collapse for another year. That just reinforces how correct my predictions were.

      • Re:Predictions for 2008 (Score:4, Informative)

        by wertarbyte (811674) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @02:40PM (#21885940) Homepage

        Add to that: $7/gallon gasoline in the USA

        Oh boy, stop crying: 7 (U.S. dollars / US gallon) = 1.2587328 Euros / liter

        We are way past that in europe (approaching 1.5 EUR here in germany) for some time now. And guess what? Civilisation is not collapsing.

  • Altavista (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hey! (33014) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:13AM (#21882294) Homepage Journal
    Y'know, I liked Altavista a great deal. It was a rare case of a great product getting its block knocked off by an even better one. Still, for some time I found Altavista's more bells-and-whistley approach useful for triangulatin Google results, at least until Google engineers seemingly perfected their MROIPP (Mind Reading Over Internet Protocols Protocol) technology.
    • Just wondering if 'Alta' and 'Vista' were actually meant to be two words, as in "Old Vista". Looks like they are doing equally well as the "New Vista". sort-of-ok start, followed by a quick demise once a real alternative shows up...

      • Re:Altavista (Score:4, Informative)

        by Ours (596171) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:40AM (#21882548)
        It's Spanish:
        Alta = something high
        Vista = view
        Translated to "high-view" and from my understanding it's some place in California.
      • Strange Coincidences?

        AltaVISTA was from DEC.
        A lot of the engineers who wrote windows NT came from DEC, Windows Vista is basically a reincarnation of NT.

        (PS: Yeah, I know, it's bullshit. And I am grateful that there is not a "-1 Stupid Moron" option, but you can use Troll or Flamebait as usual)

    • Re:Altavista (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Vellmont (569020) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @12:46PM (#21884202)

      Y'know, I liked Altavista a great deal. It was a rare case of a great product getting its block knocked off by an even better one.

      I liked Altavista too, and had a similar reaction about it being better than Google until about 2000.

      The only quibble I have is that AltaVista died because they started thinking they were a portal like Yahoo, and not a search engine. They didn't figure out targeted ads, turned their site into a Yahoo clone, and did a "me too!" with email. If they'd done what Google did, focus on the search technology, give away better email than Yahoo was giving away at the time, and stop trying to beat Yahoo at being Yahoo, I think Google would still mean "a really big number".

    • Re:Altavista (Score:4, Informative)

      by SharpFang (651121) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @01:22PM (#21884690) Homepage Journal
      Unfortunately, no, by the end, not.

      I stayed with Altavista quite long. I tried Google once, soon after it emerged, didn't feel impressed and went back to Altavista. And for the time, It Was Good.

      I kept using it for another 2 or 3 years and saw it go down the drain.

      First, they fell victim to spammers. People figured out how to position their sites with it, and any somewhat common keyword yielded many pages of commercial junk before you could get to content, and first 10 or so positions for mostly -any- keyword were occupied by spam links.

      Then they started adding ads. Sponsored links replacing first search results, some obnoxious popups, really bad junk. Remember these were times before Adblock. It was utter junk.

      Then it stopped keeping up with progress. Sites took months to get indexed, and 404s even more to get removed. The results were a total junk.

      I gave Google another chance and was hugely impressed. It was still before people figured out most of pagerank tricks and Google was almost totally spam-free. I had my results within first 3-4 links, not after 3-4 pages!

      Red Queen was right: "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
  • My predictions for 1988:

    10. MS-DOS 4.0 will ship, finally, by mid-year. It will be so buggy and crash so much that Microsoft will be forced to release an update, MS-DOS 4.01, by year's end.
    9. Liquid crystal will be discovered by Frederick Reintzer.
    8. Someone will introduce a simple network management protocol, probably called SNMP. Nobody will care.
    7. An alternative bus to IBM's Micro Channel Architecture will be introduced. Expect it to be called something like EISA -- Extended Industry Standard Architecture.
    6. An Internet Relay Chat system called IRC will be developed.
    5. A company called Creative Labs will introduce a sound card called the SoundBlaster, which will establish defacto standards for years to come.
    4. People obsessed with clocks will introduce the Network Time Protocol, which will allow computers to sync their clocks over the Internet.
    3. The first T-1 backbone will be added to ARPANET.
    2. Motorola will release a new processor, the 88000. No one will care.
    1. Apple will sue Microsoft over the trash can icon.

  • Wow! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Otter (3800) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:15AM (#21882314) Journal
    In a first-of-its-kind case, a California jury will convict a U.C.-Irvine dropout, Richard Machado, of sending threatening and hateful e-mail to students of Asian dissent.

    Between the timeliness of this story, his spelling, and his belief that Bill Gates is facing criminal charges, Paul McNamara sounds like he'd fit in well here as an editor.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ByOhTek (1181381)
      I like how the iMac revolutionized personal computing the most funny.

      It made it come in a smaller package, but hardly revolutionized given it's comparatively small takeup to other computer styles, and the fact that it didn't really change how a computer was used.

      • Re:Wow! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by MightyYar (622222) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:40AM (#21882542)
        About the only things you can give credit to the iMac for are re-animating Apple and popularizing USB.

        • About the only things you can give credit to the iMac for are re-animating Apple and popularizing USB.
          Don't forget getting rid of the 3.5" floppy drive. Those things were not going away in the PC world, even though they were good for nothing.

          I just with the iMacs popularized firewire instead of USB. USB for anything more than mice and keyboards (looking over at those external hard drives in the corener of the store...) is not nearly as efficient as firewire.

          • Don't forget getting rid of the 3.5" floppy drive. Those things were not going away in the PC world, even though they were good for nothing.

            is this supposed to be sarcastic? The loss of the floppy drive is one of the biggest pains in the butt as far as home/office computing goes. Without a floppy, there is no rewritable, removable, bootable media that you can use for recovery when something goes awry (at that time).

            Granted, cd writers have become ubiquitous...but there is nothing that beats a DOS boot disk in a pinch.

            • Um, on a Mac, and you could even do this with the old G3 iMacs that had firewire, any FW external hard drive could be used as the boot drive. For PCs, yes, you are correct, but we weren't talking about PCs...
        • I thought USB was popular prior to the iMac. If I remember correctly, it was Firewire that they helped bring to the forefront.
          • No, it was USB. (It had been in use before, but was poorly supported.) For years after, almost all USB peripherals were made of translucent blue plastic.

          • Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)

            by egomaniac (105476) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @11:12AM (#21882872) Homepage
            I thought USB was popular prior to the iMac. If I remember correctly, it was Firewire that they helped bring to the forefront.

            Nope, it was USB. Everybody on the Windows side of things was still using the legacy ports, it was hard to find USB peripherals and they were buggy. The iMac's popularity forced manufacturers to add decent USB support to their devices. Printers went parallel + USB, mice switched over to USB w/ PS/2 adapters, etc. Plus everything was available in your choice of five translucent colors.

            And the damned legacy adapters still won't die over on the PC side of things. Most KVM switches, for example, still only support PS/2 connectors, and I had to buy a USB-to-DB9 connector to be able to program my universal remote control. Love Apple or hate 'em, you've got to admit that they're good at getting people to drop the old broken standards and move forward. We need to put them in charge of getting the US over to metric.
            • I bought my USB (no PS/2) KVM several years ago. IOGear, it's actually a nice piece of equipment. When I got it there were several models out by several companies. There have been a number since.

              My current mail/web server runs off of a circa 97 (maybe '98? It's a Tyan Trinity S1598 motherboard) x86 box with USB on it (built into the motherboard), and it works perfectly.

              I've seen plenty of legacy, but in every case, both legacy and non-legacy have been available, in many both have been available in the same
      • The iMac tossed out the floppy drive and relied on USB instead of old connectors. If the iMac revolutionized anything It should computers didn't have to be a large beige box, that looked it like belongs in a cube farm instead of someone's home. It took Dell 5 more years to figure that part out.
        • Yeah, but the fact that it took Dell five additional years could also be interpreted in the way that the introduction of the iMac wasn't really that groundbreaking. The same could be said about the 3.5" floppy drive -- they continued to be included in many PCs for many years after that, and the real killer there was reasonably the CD writers and (USB!) flash drives, in addition to very widespread networking. The original iMac didn't have a CD writer, and as small USB flash memories were non-existent, I woul
      • The plastic on the iMac was pretty revolutionary. Even today, you still see several products that were inspired by the original iMac design.

  • oooooh (Score:3, Funny)

    by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:17AM (#21882336) Homepage Journal
    6. Prediction: Congress to pass Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

    The skinny: Congress will approve the DMCA by a unanimous vote and President Clinton will sign it into law, because, well, everyone favors copyright protection.

    Long-term outlook: The only possible trouble with this one that I can foresee would be if someone were to launch a Web site that allowed anyone and everyone to post video clips of whatever they pleased. That might get sticky.


    I thought pornotube was stickier than youtube, but I suppose both are up to their necks.

  • Isn't this somehow a dupe since all those were probably posted when they really happened?

  • Predicting the past? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Per Abrahamsen (1397) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:31AM (#21882458) Homepage
    Eh, I guess I miss something, what is the point of predicting the past? Poorly?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by katre (44238)
      We have this thing called humor. This article may be a sub-par example of humor, but that would seem to be its point.

  • A question - (Score:5, Funny)

    by banda (206438) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:39AM (#21882532)
    What exactly are "students of Asian dissent"?

    Would that include anyone who took a 20th century history class? Why be mad at them?

  • deafening buzz about this new search engine called Google

    Funny thing about that buzz [slashdot.org] -- other search engines of the time had equal or better results, such as directhit/HotBot [websearchworkshop.co.uk], which used click-throughs and dwell times to improve search results for subsequent users -- something Google is only now getting around to doing.

    • Re:Digg? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by AstrumPreliator (708436) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:17AM (#21882326)
      Slashdot has a much more focused story selection, the front page isn't rife with spelling errors, grammatical errors, and poor headlines, and finally the moderated comments on Slashdot are usually pretty good and I enjoy reading them. If I want to see some funny picture from 2001 complete with a terrible headline and mind numbingly stupid comments I'll go to digg. I'm not trying to bash digg too hard since I do visit it about as frequently as slashdot, but slashdot is definitely easier to read and the comments are really what makes slashdot special to me.

      • Re:Digg? (Score:5, Informative)

        by cHiphead (17854) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:54AM (#21882664)
        I "switched" to digg for about 2 months before it got excessively annoying. Ever since the interface change I've been 99% slashdot for comments, no more wasting my time on digg comments system, their useless trolls are nowhere near as entertaining as /.'s.

        Cheers.

      • Re:Digg? (Score:5, Funny)

        by sm62704 (957197) on Wednesday January 02 2008, @10:57AM (#21882682) Journal
        the front page isn't rife with spelling errors, grammatical errors, and poor headlines

        Um WHAT? You're talking about slashdot? THIS slashdot?

        -mcgrew

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by ericspinder (146776)

        Should Slashdot just redirect to digg and get it over with? How is this news?

        Why was this one modded 'troll'?

        Troll [wikipedia.org] - "is someone who posts controversial messages in an on-line community such as an on-line discussion forum with the intention of baiting other users into an emotional response." I think it fits, and would meta moderate it as such, if given the opportunity (and taking it).

        Seriously, Taco, you're letting the quality of /. slip below Digg.

        While I agree with you that /. editors could do a better job with some of the summaries and occasionally a particularly poor submission creeps in (slownewsday is often an appropriate tag for such stories), but it's hardy the me

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