Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting 182
jeffdsimpson writes "PC World NZ is 15 years old this month and they've written a story looking back at some of the statements made in the magazine over the years. Some gems include 'The past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in clock rates, from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. This more than six-fold increase will not be repeated' from July 1989 and 'The Internet Connection Company of New Zealand (ICONZ) offers full internet access and charges $50 a megabyte for email, and $10 a megabyte for all other information sent or received' from April 1994"
nice (Score:3, Insightful)
Why?! (Score:2, Insightful)
From the article
Windows 3 is more than an update. In many respects it's an entirely new environment ... To really take advantage of Windows, you'll want either a fast 286 or a 386 machine, preferably with at least 2MB of RAM. Enhanced mode allows you to run multiple DOS applications.
So, why can't Microsoft duplicate this feat with Win2k3? I'd like to see them fit it into a 2 MB footprint, or 20 MB.
Reminds me that I stepped into the x86 world in July of '93. I bought an AST 486/25 SX with one meg. on-board and a 180 Mb HHD (compressed). What we have today was hard for me to imagine then.
I realize why I don't read PC world (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do people read these things, anyways? PC World is nothing but a catalog of buzzwords and hype. Always was.
Re:That's a lot of money (Score:3, Insightful)
Looking back, sometimes is scary (Score:4, Insightful)
Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting
In general, And still no expose on price fixing and monopoly abuse, still no coverage of fundamental research in both software and hardware, just the same copy and paste press release stories. No undercover journalism, no coverage of the spamming and malware writing "bad" parts of PC town. Still the same meaningless benchmarks and megahurts ads for articles. No coverage of the scary moves by the once garage operation and now mega coorporations. No credit where credit is due for real inovation, no mention of the real inventors of "the next cool thing", just of the latest guy to market a clone years later.
Overall I really hope that the dead tree coverage is better elseware in this world. Beside the likes of el`reg [theregister.co.uk] and vulture HQ [theinquirer.net] only C`t [heise.de] seems to have some grip with what is going on. At slashdot we often joke about the dumbed down (or plain dumb) coverage by "normal" news sources (cnn/nyt), but the dedicated dead tree rags basicly have no journalism/real news whatsoever.
Sure its more complicated then this, but when looking back, do you see improvement over the years?
Re:Dear God why does /. suck so hard? (Score:2, Insightful)
Formerly you studied and learned your knowledge once in your lifetime. In school and college, that is. After that you lived on and used the knowledge.
Everyday life was rapid and the knowledge stayed. Now it is vice versa. You probably can't tell if you had a brunette girlfriend year or three ago, or in which year you found your nowadays favorite band.
The computer world changes entirely in a few years. You'd never mistake a 2002 PC for a 1996 PC. The technological or professional time runs a lot faster than a private time, probably the first time in the human history.
Platform diversity (Score:3, Insightful)
In 1989 I had an ST I think. The Amigas were going strong, and the C64 was hanging on in there by its fingertips. The magazine awards best PC to a Mac IIcx. In the UK at least, there were things such as the Amstrad PCW range - CPM-based (I believe) green screen business machines that did well for themselves as straight wordprocessing devices.
Then slowly it all died away, until now we're basically on a PC-only world on the desktop, even if a few flickers of OS competition are stirring. Only the Mac remains outside the fold, and I say this as an OS X user. Even so, just two hardware platforms for personal computing is hardly the same as the plethora of makes available in the 80s.
Ah well. Fun while it lasted. Time to dig out the Spectrum vs C64 vs Beeb flamewars of the school playground...
Cheerss,
Ian
I see the same thing in arts coverage (Score:3, Insightful)
(I cut and pasted that text, incidentally.)
Back when I worked at a major modern art museum, we had the two large local papers essentially parroting back our press releases about new shows as "reviews." These were big time journalists covering areas in which their subjective opinions were an accepted, encouraged part of their columns. They showed less intellectual curiosity than most fifth graders I know, at least in print. It was mostly about playing it safe and cashing the checks, from what I could tell, though they all liked what they were writing about and could be very interested and opinionated in person.
I have lots of contact with music reviewers, too. They don't have canned press releases to work from, so they've resorted to their own convention-laced boilerplate reviews. (Period instruments? I will include a tossoff remark about how the orchestra was less squeaky than has been the case in the past.) Pretty often they don't even cut and paste correctly -- the performers' names are often wrong in the review.
And those are in artistic areas -- where you're supposed to have an opinion and inject it into your writing, and where taking risks would theoretically be less damaging.
Also -- more general point -- why do people even write "prediction" stories? They're totally lame even for sports, where you can almost immediately figure out whether you got it right. If I was a news editor, I'd forbid anyone from writing prediction stories. (Maybe that'd change the completely idiotic, inane, asinine, expectations-spinning political coverage we see. Horse race polls before an election aren't informing anyone of anything, they're just attempts to tell me what I supposedly think already. That's utter crap.)
Re:Interesting tidbit... (Score:3, Insightful)
And you have scientific evidence for this right? You wouldn't be spouting off your own personal opinions as fact now would you?
Re:Interesting tidbit... (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe...
Your beliefs in a soul or spiritual component to human existence are only beliefs. They are not scientific fact and should not be presented as such.
K
Re:Interesting tidbit... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting tidbit... (Score:4, Insightful)
That was then, this is now. Today humans constantly ask computers to do the thinking for them. My car has dashboard lights that tell me if my engine needs servicing or my oil need replacing; gone are the myriad dials that I would have to interpret myself. Stoplights are connected to sensors and to each other in order to optimize rush-hour traffic flow.
And that's just at the consumer level. Power plants and grids rely on systems designed not only to regulate power, but shut it down if necessary. PC software does "intelligent" background searches to locate information related to whatever I'm typing or reading. Most of the systems in a large airplane are automated because it would be impossible for a human to react quickly enough to maintain them.
The real problem with intelligent computers is that computers are still designed to live in a world of absolutes, truth and falsehood, and people never do. We don't learn about the world from logic, but instead we create logic to analyze the world. Human (and animal) brains learn by identifying patterns, and then observing when those patterns are broken. Computers are built around patterns and then, when those break, so do the computers.
Self-awareness is a property that the soul impinges on the mind, not an inherent property of neurons.
This is a metaphysical question, entirely unprovable, and one that real researchers try to avoid.