Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2001 14:29:43 -0800 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@toybox.placo.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, jgrosch@mooseriver.com, Joey Garcia <bear@unix.homeip.net>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Anyone going to Comdex next week? Message-ID: <3BF04D57.3D67D78C@mindspring.com> References: <009301c16b5c$91458460$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > Today, the existing hardware is so good that there's not the drive to > upgrade as soon as the new stuff is available, so that removes a lot of > the reason of attending these trade shows for hardware people. I think this is false. There have always been two tiers of technology: heroic and mortal. It's only interesting when something slips from the former category to the latter. Right now, for example, there is a lot of hardware that I would put in the "heroic" category. Processors that need incredible cooling technology, etc.. And then there's the other end of the spectrum, where ther are no moving parts. Plotting on other scales works for this, as well: many of the "cool" technologies aren't useful, until you can deal with the battery life issue: they don't -- they can't -- become everyday objects until it's possible to integrate them into your life without heroic effort (ask yourself: why isn't every desktop computer a laptop? Why hasn't laptop technology totally displaced desktop technology?). So there is huge room for improvement in hardware technology still, and I'd certainly pay to go see someone doing it, only no one seems to be doing it these days. > And, also today, GNU and Free software is more and more important, and > Windows and other commercial software is getting less important, and > the new cool things in software aren't being introduced by people like > Apple, Microsoft and IBM anymore. Instead they are being introduced by > user communities around FreeBSD and Linux. I really think this is wrong. It's a nice bit of hedonism, but the cool things aren't happening in user communities; for the most part, they are still happening in industry and in the academic sector. There's just less money to pursue things deemed "impractical" these days: people are increasingly focussed on short term goals. There is less margin for having the ability to pursue long term visions and carry them into reality. > It would be even more interesting to plot a graph of Comdex attendance and > overlay it with a graph of Linuxworld (or whatever the big Linux tradeshow > is) I wonder if there would be an inverse relationship there? I can telly you have your tongue in your cheek here, but for those people who might not get that, let's make sure they see it being put there... There is not a direct inverse relationship. You have to realize that what attendence at these shows measures is on different, almost orthogonal, axis from each other. The user group pushed shows have a high "geek factor"; I include Usenix, and any other nominally legitimate academic organization that has had to add a "freenix" or similar set of tracks to keep the attendance up by pandering to "geekdom". I could also plot the stock market vs. LinuxWorld attendance; that would naeievely lead me to believe that the economy is going to hell because of the inverse relationship there, and that therefore banning such shows would be a good thing. We both know this isn't true. THe fallacy in implying inverse relationships is that it implies that we are playing a zero sum, not a positive sum, game; that thinking is incredibly limiting for anyone caught up in it. -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?3BF04D57.3D67D78C>