8 Can't Miss Predictions... for 1998 125
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."
Bad headline (Score:5, Informative)
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)
Re:Mod parent up (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
good headline (Score:1)
maybe you're not so good at getting hints or so, but it was quite clear to me...
and if the headline didn't make things clear, the summary should be...
Re:Bad headline (Score:5, Funny)
-mcgrew
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And I probably shouldn't be making comments at slashdot this week because I got my nerd license suspended yesterday afternoon. I'd chronicle it in my journal but I got my nerd license suspended and they won't let me... will they?
Damn, now I'm in trouble. I hope I don't get pulled over and ticketed for commenting on a suspended license!
Re:Bad headline (Score:5, Funny)
In Soviet Russia, Natalie Portman uses a Beowulf cluster built by CowboyNeal to submit a first post with the comment "frosty piss".
There you go, you can scratch one off of your list. You're welcome.
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Wait, so does your post count?
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Wait, so does your post count?
Self-fulfilling prophesy?
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WWII will end
Hitler will commit suicide
A new explosive device will be invented that can obliterate a city
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Re:Bad headline (Score:5, Funny) by sm62704 (957197) Alter Relationship on Wednesday January 02, @10:13AM (#21882880) Homepage
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Predictions for 2008 (Score:1, Insightful)
Add to that: $7/gallon gasoline in the USA, unemployment rates rising to 15% or higher, major upswings in crime rates, further tightening of the grip by the police state mentalities, more erosion of people's rights and freedoms and govt intrusions into privacy, riots in large cities, rise of vi
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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)
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.
Re:Predictions for 2008 (Score:5, Insightful)
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But please remember that most europeans have access to decent public transportation... Poor gringos have to drive everywhere...
more to the point the average European car does 43mpg and the average American one does 29 (stats from first source I found [greencarcongress.com]) granted some of this may be due to differences in testing but up to now fuel economy has not been a major selling point in the US market.
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Gringo: 1. (literally) A foreigner. 2. (slang) A person who cannot trace their origins to Latin-America (e.g. not Latino/Latina). 3. (slang) Less commonly, any person who cannot trace their origins to Amerindian peoples, regardless of national origin (this includes White, Black, and Asian Latinos).
This would include Europeans (including the Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italians). While generally in Latin America the word "gringo" is used to refer to so
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And your definition is completely out of whack. A gringo is:
1- A native of the USA.
2- More rarely, any foreign caucasian.
UKians are crazy. (Score:2)
In many places in Europe most people live in the same town where they work, thus they rely in local transport that is far more predictable than trains (well, UK trains, trains in most other places run punctual, but hey, the friends of Margaret Thatcher made a real killing when they sold their shares in the privatized train companies. A real gravy train if there ever was one) and much faster than cars.
The UK has a love affair with cars t
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That's because your civilization was not engineered by oil and car companies.
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I imagine the average American has a further daily drive than the average European.
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I also expect Zonk to re-post this shitty article with a different shitty summary in three days.
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Re:Bad headline (Score:4, Insightful)
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Postdiction... (Score:1)
Altavista (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Altavista (Score:4, Informative)
Alta = something high
Vista = view
Translated to "high-view" and from my understanding it's some place in California.
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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)
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)
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."
Wow! That was easy. (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Wow! That was easy. (Score:4, Informative)
> 9. Liquid crystal will be discovered by Frederick Reintzer.
According to Wikipedia [1] that happened in 1888.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_crystals#History [wikipedia.org]
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I seem to recall liquid crystal displays replacing LEDs in watches and calculators in the 1970s.
Actually, LEDs and those super-cool bluish neon tube thingies. Not nixies, the little ones. What the hell were they called?
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Actually, LEDs and those super-cool bluish neon tube thingies. Not nixies, the little ones. What the hell were they called?
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All kidding aside, the technology needed for the Internet was 'invented' in 1973-1974 timeframe. The Internet, as it were, was officially rolled out in 1983.
Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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Even having 8 IDE devices onboard isn't enough when you just want to boot off your own USB recovery key.
Chainloader doesn't work until you have USB support, and VMware isn't always the best test environment.
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Still have a floppy drive on my current PC, though it is behind the front panel of the case - you have to open the front of the case to get to it. I did that because it was ugly, I wasn't using it, and i
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Re:Wow! (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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
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Cause that's the important feature of an computing device. It looks nice - well, er, nicer than a beige box. Cause Dell were just aiming at a different type of sheep. Maybe Apple can "innovate" handbags or fridges next. Hell, maybe Jobs should talk to NASA. I betcha a few "important" design modif
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oooooh (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Dupe somehow (Score:2)
It's Deja News all over again (Score:1)
Predicting the past? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Who knows? But it's popular - at least here in the US, our voting population does it every couple years.
tic!lock
A question - (Score:5, Funny)
Would that include anyone who took a 20th century history class? Why be mad at them?
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Buzz (Score:2)
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.
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Not computer related but..... (Score:2)
http://www.paullee.com/ghosts/bookofpredictions.html [paullee.com]
ten year predictions more interesting (Score:2)
Ten years out is a lot harder. In the late 1980s you had the feeling computer networks would be important, especially if you used them at an university. But the huge onrush in of the InterNet and browsers in 1994 was somewhat of a surprise. It was hard to foresee the quantum jump in use an
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What wasn't a surprise, though, is that _they_ have been promising us good quality movies on demand over th Internet since at least 1994, but that promise has completely failed to deliver.
Seriously. Why is it that we can watch movies on TV for "free" (ad or public funding supported), but if you want to do the same on the Internet, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops (pay fees, install wacky proprietar
To boldly go (Score:2)
DoJ vs MS (Score:2)
The U.S. Department of Justice will go medieval on Microsoft
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Re:Digg? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Digg? (Score:5, Informative)
Cheers.
Re:Digg? (Score:5, Funny)
Um WHAT? You're talking about slashdot? THIS slashdot?
-mcgrew
Re:Digg? (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly he is referring to the Slashdot of 1998
The good old days weren't... (Score:2)
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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.
O, I bite, so tell me where that leave the rest of us, I alway have like dig g, don't have no problem but what about the other one?
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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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Just a second there (Score:3, Informative)
Innovation (Score:1)
> Which of the items on that page represent innovation, rather than purchase or copying an existing system?
A priori, all of them. You can't prove a negative, so the burden of proof is on you to show prior art for each item.
[ The common claim here that Microsoft doesn't innovate is usually followed by prior art for all counter examples. Of course the claim is nonetheless false, Microsoft Research (kind of equivalent to
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A priori, all of them. You can't prove a negative, so the burden of proof is on you to show prior art for each item.
Heavens, man, think! A link to "everything that Google is playing with or has thrown into the wild recently" as a proof that Google innovates is of the same order as waving in the direction of the Vatican's archives for proof that God exists. "The burden of proof is on you to show that everything there in favour of God's existence is false."
Considering only completed projects, we have: