Cringley Asking for 12 Month Predictions 390
sckienle writes "Robert X. Cringely is asking in his pulpit this week for help in determining what's going to happen in the tech industry in the next 12 months." I expect that robots will take over the world, and openly hunt humans in a post apocolyptic landscape. This will occur in January. For the rest of the year, technology will take a vacation.
February (Score:2, Insightful)
Cringley Category (Score:5, Insightful)
Tyranny of inaction... (Score:4, Insightful)
The over-caution is only going to prolong the depression, but for many people there's no alternative -- R&D is going to be hurting for better part of a decade.
Hold Envelope to forehead (Score:5, Insightful)
I also predict that 99% of the people that BUY that product will be unaware that those features exist and consequently not use them.
I preduct the people least likely to use those features will buy that product because 'It's pretty'.
Re:I wanna know... (Score:4, Insightful)
- Automotive industry
- Dock workers
- anything with manufacturing that can't be done cheaper in the 3rd world.
If you can buy a robot to send to work, then your boss can buy a robot to save you having to buy one.
What's going to happen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now the serious stuff.
As Cringley likes to say Wifi would be more wide spread, I believe 802.11g would come out and outdate all other wireless lan technologies. Along with that, we'd see increasing number of community free wireless networks (That might or might not be connected to the Net).
America would skip the whole little-phone-philia, instead we'd be into bigger more bulky gadgets. I believe, the PDA's would get better batteries and thus would slowly start replacing phones (probably the biz ppl and young kids first).
Satellite based radio's would die and we'd see some nice shows on the sky when they fall out (just like the Iradium). This means Sirrus and XM. The cause for this would be better compression technologies and the recent opening of a spread spectrum by FCC that lets higher bandwith be sent over the airwaves. Stations would start to pump out studio (not cd as a
We'll also see a revival of the Dot com like companies, but this would be a more apprehensive revial, companies would be more conservative and we'd see most invetment into technology related with Games (console) and Porn. The old sex and violence.
IPV6 would be postponned and in return we'd see the invention of more and more firewalling/masqurading gadgets, routers would come firewalling/masqurading built in, people would start living within private networks.
Laws would be passed to ban P2P and such similar technologies, but these laws could not be enforced due to jurastiction issues and technology issues. The ppl who'd get hurt in the end would be those sharing files, they might get raided and sentenced. Those who make these software would be out of harms way. We'd see a reduction in the amount of spy ware due to community backlash.
Superman hype would create more superman games and gadgets. (Seriously).
We'll go on war, but our military research facilities would create enough products to stimulate the stangnent information market. Even though this technology would come into the commerical maket 25 years from the time it's created.
We'd see a decline in movie goers... DVD's would be released region free, but with hardware copyright devices.
Slashdot would continue to post these stories. And Cringley would be just himself and ranting like this.
Here are my predictions (Score:4, Insightful)
In no particular order :
1. Ph.d's will start flipping burgers again to survive while desperately hunting for a buyer for their houses. (Yes, I know for a fact this actually happened in the early nineties when IBM decimated its plant in Kingston, NY).
2. Folks who had the idea of waiting out the tech downturn by going to college are going to graduate only to find out that the tech downturn isnt over yet. Worse still, now they have to pay off loans.
3. All challenges to the DMCA, Copright laws, etc are going to be beaten down. Consumers will have no rights whatsoever unless they all incorporate themselves.
4. Symptomatic treatments of security will keep increasing. This is what I refer to as the treatment of brain tumours by prescribing aspirin. For example, the banning of nail clippers and other small personal items on flights when it is the mental state of the terrorist that is the true danger - not the everyday personal effects that can be transformed into weapons.
I think what will happen is (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Major war - RIAA/MPAA vs Usenet (Score:5, Insightful)
I wonder why this hasn't happened earlier
I'll tell you why -- and it's a good lesson to understand about this battle.
The music industry doesn't care about shutting down every avenue of music trading, they care about music trading that is easy to use by normal people. Napster was the first application that made anonymous music trading easy to use by anyone. Usenet is NEVER going to be used by normal people, because there's no possibility for an instantaneous "search and download" capability.
Re:Mac OS X software to copy DVDs (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Major war - RIAA/MPAA vs Usenet (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure there is.
All that needs to be changed is there needs to be 'index' files uploaded with the descriptions of the files, then a client can just grab all the index's and search that. Of course this is a bit flawed, the *AA could upload poisoned indexes, but clients would be updated to ignore posts from their front companys.
Re:Where is technology going? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a link to the transcript of episode 217 [hankey.de]. Grep "profit" and you'll find the dialog.
Re:What about last years predictions? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cringley Category (Score:4, Insightful)
Why in hell was this story posted at all? Is Taco now Cringley's bitch? If Cringley wants people to send him their predictions, don't post them to Slashdot, send them to Cringley. If you already read Cringley you don't need Taco telling you this, and if you don't read Cringley you probabley (like me) don't read him for a reason. I don't need or want Taco or anyone else telling me what I missed in this week's column.
What in hell is on-topic for this story? If you post a prediction here, you're doing it in the wrong place -- you should send your predictions to Cringley. If you bitch about Cringley, as the parent did, you're considered a troll. So mod me down, I don't care, but this is an opinion, not a troll. A troll is looking to hook newbies, and I'm not.
Re:Major war - RIAA/MPAA vs Usenet (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats right, 95% of posts on usenet are spam
Predictions... (Score:1, Insightful)
We'll have to start with the Christmas season '02, in which small techy gadgets are very popular but COMBO devices (like cellphone/PDA combos) are not (as folks can get better values and better products buying them individually). The PC industry will have another slow season, scraping the barrel with the last of the folks who havent upgraded to 1Ghz yet. Tech prices will be better than ever, but no one is buying.
3G phones will continue to be vapor and/or SUCK monumentally. Telecoms will die slowly.
We won't see any real retribution for the evildoers of the Enron-esque financial disasters. 2002 will go down as the year that Gen X lost their shirts.
The War on Iraq will slowly fade away, despite frantic efforts by GWB, because no one wants to start WWIII over Hussein (ie, the UN will insist on inspections, not war). Inspections will resume, and be more effective. The American public will forget about it after the terrible Christmas season they had despite low tech prices.
Microsoft will introduce a new console summer 2003, after the current XBox gets completely emulated on standard PCs. The new console will suck, and no one will buy it. They will respond with a broken service pack for XP, in a bitter attempt to annoy everyone.
Lastly, near thanksgiving 2003, the Enterprise will mysteriously appear over Washington DC from the future, and the Slashdot servers will die in the ensuing chaos.
Basic Research (Score:3, Insightful)
For over 10 years I've heard that a lack of basic research is threatening to cause the United States to lose it's technological edge. As the technology industry continues to be battered, it isn't surprising that the amount of basic research that is being done is declining. Decreasing revenues and an uncertain future make new investment difficult to justify. This will change, as it always has in the past.
It's true that many of the behemouths (such as Bell Labs) have taken a beating, but other tech companies (for instance Micron) have started new research divisions. Biotech research has increased by leaps and bounds in the last few years. IBM research has had its share of increased and decreased funding, but continues to be a productive and profitable venture for IBM.
Although comercial oriented university research is something that has had an increase in the last few years, it is by no means dominant. For those with close ties to companies, the hassle of dealing with patents and trade secrets is going to be a price you pay for extra grants. Anything that stops research is bad, even if it ends up with more grant money. Fortunately, there are many universities in the US that would love to attract talented researchers. If all the big name schools mire their researchers in paperwork and IP nonsense, they will go elsewhere.
I don't want to undemphasize the importance of basic research. Deep cuts to the NSF and a _real_ decline basic research would indeed be something to worry about, as would a real, continued decrease in industry research. I don't think this is happening.
2002 Tech Predictions (Score:4, Insightful)
DRM will be gradually introduced into the core PC hardware. At first it wont do much, but towards the end of the year we will see more hardware/software that requires DRM to be present. Creative marketing pushes by DRM backers will ease any public discontent, having learned from earlier examples (ie, PIII id, DIVX).
Microsoft will start a campaign to improve it's image with Techie types by continuing to try to create a linux-like community of users/developers. They will publicaly open up small portions of code or create limited APIs that allow individuals to modify windows directly. These alterations would however be under very strict licenses, giving MS all rights to anything produced.
G3 will oh-so-very-slowly make it's way into mainstream use in the US. Cellular data services will become a lot more common in lower price-point PDA-like devices.
Linux will continue to grow in the server market, but more and more linux-targeted viruses will appear as well. Linux on the desktop will once again make an attempt, and be more successful than before, but still fail to gain a significant mainstream user base.
RIAA/MPAA will continue to make a lot of noise and wail that online piracy is killing them. The major difference is that this will start to become in a small way true. MP3 devices will continue to become more and more popular. More DRM Digital Music devices will be introduced, but because of the diversity of the companies producing these devices, will lose out to more open ones. No significant DRM/anti-digital-piracy laws will be actually passed.
Re:Yeah right! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cringley Category (Score:3, Insightful)
Why in hell was this story posted at all? Is Taco now Cringley's bitch? If Cringley wants people to send him their predictions, don't post them to Slashdot, send them to Cringley. If you already read Cringley you don't need Taco telling you this, and if you don't read Cringley you probabley (like me) don't read him for a reason. I don't need or want Taco or anyone else telling me what I missed in this week's column.
How far shall we extend this logic? Those of you who read LWN don't need things repeated here... those who don't, don't for a reason... How 'bout Wired, New York Times, etc....
You understand what Slashdot does, right? It links to news/commentary/stuff that exists elsewhere on the net. ALL of this can be viewed without Slashdot.
I know, we all want Slashdot to just post the COOL stuff, and not the LAME stuff, but guess what, that's different for everyone, so you're gonna get some of each. So just quit bitching.
What in hell is on-topic for this story? If you post a prediction here, you're doing it in the wrong place -- you should send your predictions to Cringley.
Last I checked, Cringley doesn't have a large-scale discussion board. There's no rule that says you can't do both. Besides, I wouldn't be shocked if the man reads Slashdot.