Buzz. Hype. It’s what surrounds the advent of every new technology that comes down the pike and is hailed as The Next Big Thing.
It’s fun to look back in retrospect and remember the genesis of technologies that truly have become inseparable from our everyday lives. It’s even more fun to look back on the belly flops and have a laugh at the expense of others. It’s the basis of all comedy, really.
- JAVA The promise of “code once, compile anywhere” never really panned out. First of all, for a long time our hardware wasn’t really up to the task of JIT compiling, with Java apps needing a lot of cpu and displaying workstation-unfriendly behavior. Is it me, or now that we are using machines with specs that would have made our heads spin a decade ago, Java still leaves a bad taste in one’s mouth. An incredibly smart idea that was never really implemented in a way that made us all converts. Java is an important technology, it’s just not ever going to change our way of life the way they made it sound like it would back in the early days.
- Linux Yeah, linux. I use it, but only because it’s hardware support is better on laptops than FreeBSD. But I digress. Linux has failed in a lot of the areas where it really could have been a better mousetrap. As unix clones go, it has an enormous development community, and with more people having their fingers in the various parts of the OS broken stuff gets fixed fast and hardware support is above average. However, linux isn’t really any more than a free unix clone, and BSD has been around doing that job for a lot longer, and better.
Why does a 3D accelerated X desktop under linux eat over half a gig of ram on my laptop when the same accelerated desktop running on FreeBSD on the same machine only takes about 128 megs? I have always felt that BSD was lighter, leaner, more straightforward, and had better memory management than linux, and the above example kind of illustrates the point.Linux should have ditched X and come up with a new windowing system, should have mandated some sort of GUI standards that made the new interface compete with and/or surpass the mainstream computer desktops. Oh wait, Apple already did this with OS X. My frustration with linux is that it could have been more than just another unix clone, and in that department, minus hardware support, I believe that BSD is superior. They stayed inside the box with linux, and it could have been great if they had gone outside of the box.
I understand very well that linux is just a kernel, and the surrounding os depends on what distro you’re running. It doesn’t change my gripes. Linux suffers from being a really good unix clone that didn’t take any chances, therefore, there isn’t anything revolutionary about it.
- Microsoft Windows Despite being a unix guy, I was three quarters of the way toward my MCSA back when I was still trying to get an IT job, so I know more about the OS than you might think, given that I only ever use Windows at the workplace. I have never had a good relationship with this os, and it’s always frustrated me that it’s the status quo. Windows is just so lame in so many regards, but you’re probably on a Windows machine reading this, so they’re doing something right(It’s called a “monopoly”).
Being number one has a tendency to take away a lot of your drive, and Microsoft is no different than anyone else. Never one to innovate, they have managed to take some of the better os ideas being thought up and clumsily implemented them in Windows. As of Windows 2000, Windows has actually been useable, in the sense that you could turn your box on and leave it running. Might not sound like much, but hey, you couldn’t say that for previous versions. Vista pretty much undid the good work that Microsoft had done in getting their os fairly stable, and even die hard Redmond advocates didn’t have much nice to say about it.The Windows interface design remains unintuitive, clumsy, and hard on the eyes 14 years after Windows 95 hit the streets.
Administering a Windows network is so much more complex than it needs to be.
Why does this os still have a registry? Who thought that bs up anyway?
Who came up with the crazy filesystem layout?
Why does this os not have a complete and sane command line interface?
Everything that Microsoft has done to simplify this os has made it an arcane, bloated nightmare. And don’t get me started about the proprietary mindset in Redmond. Remember the Internet Explorer debacle from a few years back? How about Internet Explorer itself, that crap, non-standards compliant piece of ****. Oh, and I just love ActiveX. For God’s sake, we don’t have enough crap in the registry, let’s put web browser plugin stuff there too.
OK, I’ll take a deep breath and try to sum up my dislike of all things Windows. Being the dominant presence on the global computer desktop, Microsoft was in a position to lead, to innovate, to excel. Instead, the entire existence of Windows as an os and a GUI can be described as mediocre. I guess people don’t question it, because they simply don’t know any better, but for those of you who, like me, have been around the os and GUI block these last couple of decades, you know that there are better ways to skin a cat. Microsoft let millions of computer users down when they should have been leading the way.
- Bluetooth The only good use for this so far has been the PS3 controller, and even that sticks in my throat a little because I can’t use my universal remote to control the damn thing. What are these Bluetooth devices that are supposed to make my life so much better anyway, and where are they?
- AMD Remember when AMD gave Intel a really good black eye with the introduction of the Athlon? For a while there, AMD was THE choice for performance CPUs.
Prior to the Athlon AMD and Cyrix were spoken of almost apologetically by the people who used them, and were little more than commented-out lines in linux and BSD kernel configuration files for the rest of us. The Athlon knocked Intel on it’s ass, and that is always good for the end user. Look at Intel now. You wouldn’t think of using anything but an Intel,, and even Apple computers have Intel under the hood. That string of innovation was spurred by competition, and we all benefited from the results.ATI was a nice grab for AMD. Too bad it’s the only area they compete in anymore.
It’s tough to think of just five, I could write all day about this stuff. Perhaps you disagree with my inclusion of Windows as a technology, and I’ll just point out that nothing else on this list affects as many users.
In the last decade we’ve seen a lot of technology appear and become integrated with our lives in a way that seems inextricable. Developing new tech is like gambling, and picking the right horse will always be a hit and miss affair, so we’ll always have plenty of gaffs and missteps to laugh about.
