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.

Re:startups

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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Lots of talk....

Linux. Lots of talk. Lots of hype. Lots of hope.

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.

Re: Netslaves

SON OF KATZ!! Just when you thought it was safe to go back on slashdot... (hmm, anyone remember any other Jaws II promo lines?)

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.

Re:startups

If they don't think it's worth it and complain, then they're just dumb... IF you don't want to deal with that sort of work atmosphere, get a different job and forget about the stock options... IF you do want to do that, then you are entitled to the big payoff - should it arrive....

It's all about what you value most - enjoying your time as it happens, or throwing away a period of your life in hopes that a later era will be much different.

Re:startups

What do you think? is it worth it?

If I'm really into what I'm doing, it might be worth it. But I see so many people (and many of my friends) working their ass off for what could happen "if we go public and people like us." If they become new paper millionaires, I suppose its worth it, but it seems like a lot of time wasted they could be using to live/enjoy life.

I work for a company that may or may not go public one day, but its been around for 20 some years. Its not a high glamor job, but I use cool technology, I work about 40-45 hours a week, I get paid well enough to get the toys I need. IMHO, this is more worth it. I'm enjoying my life NOW instead of hoping I enjoy it a few years down the line. I could die in a car accident tomorrow, then where would I be?

I may be hedonistic here, but carpe diem is pretty much what I live. Life's too short to waste it on something that might not pay off. Maybe this attitude will never make me rich monetarily, but I lead a full life and I'm a happy man.

And I've got all this wisdom at 24....wonder what the next 80 years will teach me.

Do Slashdot editors ever _read_ the stories?

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" [slashdot.org] 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,
[e-mail]

Re:Lots of talk....

Yup... I found that amusing...
I guess JCD's just another person who hasn't heard of linux until all the IPO's...
BTW: My favorite talkback comment:

Name: Bob Carmody
Location: Washington DC
Occupation:
Linux is in the wrong list! Doesn't linux feel like DOS except with even longer more obscure switches? And it's Unix all over again. Dvorak noted that himself in a column earlier this year.
Desqview for Linux is right around the corner, I can feel it.

It's hard enough to get an OS out the door of Microsoft or Apple with a team in one town. How on earth can anything get done with the entire world working on a project?

This is just too ludicrous to comment on right now.

Science is missing

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) [stanford.edu]? 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

What kills me ...

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.

Re:Java and Jini

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.

Do Slashdot posters ever read the stories?

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.

Dvorak has some good points here

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.

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 .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".

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