Oi! You! Big Gob!!!

DeVore

Here, none of ye are ever afraid to hold forth on your opinions and for once I actually need them

A National newspaper is looking for opinions for one of those "Year In Review" things and they've canvassed the opinions of the great and the good. They wrote to me (cos like every shaggin' journo in Ireland they watch this site like hawks. Hawks with video cameras[1]). asking to get a flavour of what the Boards community thought about the year, particularly from a tech pov.

They ask:
I'm looking back at 2003 and thought a good way to do it would be to pick
people from different areas of technology life to talk about what they
thought the most important developments were in technology in the past year.

Obviously I've got the Microsofts and Dells and that, but I'm trying to get
a more representative mix of all of technology life, so I thought of you and
Boards.

I thought it would be interesting to get a sense of what the Boards
community thought were the big events/changes/phenomena of the year, and
obviously I can't ask hundreds of people, so I thought it might be possible
for you to summarise what set the boards alight during the year

I'm thinking of anything technology related at all: new research and new
technologies, new ways to commercialise existing technology, new levels of
adoption, new regulations or laws passed, new business models or new
attitudes on the part of governments, users or companies.


So, what have been the tech highlights of your year? (Please dont argue with a previous poster it'll just go off topic too fast... just your opinion/thoughts on the topic at hand.)
Thanks greatly I'll let you all know how it goes...

DeV.
[1] For bonus nothing... name the film.

Yavvy

big techno impacts for me
have been

Web communities ... such as boards and reservoirdubs
cable interweb from NTL
Blogs oe web logs
XP Pro and VPN's
Digial camreas
ans the Play station 2

but by far the big thing for me was cable internet it enables you do so much

Downloading, uploading, gaming, messaging, web conferacing, VPN'ing,
and stoping my wife ( who is from a land called canadia) feeling homesick

DeVore

FYI:
[11:23] <regi> ten most viewed threads...
[11:23] <regi> thread ids: 86912, 103928 (both satellite), 88182, 94956, 98480, 92350, 97850, 93441, 95197, 113882
[11:23] <regi> BBC goes FTA: 10th July
[11:23] <regi> BBC goes FTA: Lobbying the minister.
[11:23] <regi> Ever wanted to be a ninja?
[11:23] <regi> Member Image/Charades Game
[11:23] <regi> New IBB Product
[11:23] <regi> Broadband pings/download speed.
[11:23] <regi> Sexiest Irish Women
[11:23] <regi> BBC FTA Tests
[11:24] <regi> Broadband availblility. what and where.

So in the tech arena the top threads would have been the state of Free To Air television (this has been hot all year in the satelite forums which are always busy) and the impact of Broadband.

And then this:
[11:25] <regi> 10 most replied to threads created since Jan 1st:
[11:25] <regi> 113882 And then.....
[11:25] <regi> 94956 Member Image/Charades Game
[11:25] <regi> 26889 question, answer
[11:25] <regi> 127745 What do you know about the previous poster?
[11:25] <regi> 88773 Word of the day!
[11:25] <regi> 26801 Keep This Thread At The Top!
[11:25] <regi> 86912 BBC goes FTA: 10th July
[11:25] <regi> 26222 Pictures... (Real life ones)
[11:25] <regi> 112900 Rain or Shine -You may post it here
[11:25] <regi> 114351 Skangers


Again the BBC going FTA making a big impact there.

And finally....
[11:30] <regi> top ten polls:
[11:30] <regi> Matrix Revolutions - the super big all in one thread
[11:30] <regi> Legalise Cannibis?
[11:30] <regi> How happy are you with your Broadband ISP
[11:30] <regi> Thin girls or curvy girls!
[11:30] <regi> Ban on "Smoking" in licensed premises/Pubs etc, Right or Wrong ??..
[11:30] <regi> How happy are you with your Broadband ?
[11:30] <regi> Anal Sex. Have you tried it?
[11:30] <regi> Netsource - Have You Been Capped?
[11:30] <regi> Hairy Legs?
[11:30] <regi> "Recreational" Drugs
[11:30] <regi> 'Anal Sex. Have you tried it?' lol


Again Broadband showing up in no less then three of the top ten there.

So, thats a very broad view of what was happening on Boards this year.
I think the paper was looking for more tech related Big Events but thats a good start!

DeV.

Gordon

Be sure to emphasise the fact that the Anal sex topic is extremely popular.

seamus

Dermot Aherne's chewing up of eircom, and the generally more proactive stance of the new Comreg...

Maybe the surge in popularity of mp3 players...

2003 - Year of the Worm

DeVore

God bless Regis. Everyone should have one they're incredibly useful!

[11:40] <regi> top 10 tech threads:
[11:40] <regi> threadid title
[11:40] <regi> 92350 Broadband pings/download speed.
[11:40] <regi> 95197 Broadband availblility. what and where.
[11:40] <regi> 109120 Bad Pings Back Again!
[11:40] <regi> 76538 Young Scientist ot Year - ya wha ?
[11:40] <regi> 103327 Iol broadband sorted (nearly)
[11:40] <regi> 94874 Via. The verdict.
[11:40] <regi> 127556 Free ! 3.0 Ghz from Dell
[11:41] <regi> 101115 Netsource Slow
[11:41] <regi> 98187 Has anyone gotten IOLs broadband yet?
[11:41] <regi> 128910 show your PC cribs!


So, Broadband really coming through here too... (Of course... noone really wants it, remember!)

DeV.

parasite

what's the missing footnote in the original post ? video cameras[1] eh ?
*twitch*

european software patents ...kinda
ummm

oh, and the persistent evils of e-voting

Slydice

kernel 2.6.0 ?

It's a pity you can't tell them about the Santa Strike Force which did a great job.

I suppose Broadband would have been the big issue though this year.

patch

From the gaming side, censorship seems to have reared its head a fair bit this year.

WhiteWashMan

from less introspective point of view, a number if items that have peaked my interest are:

the increasing bandwidth of wireless networking.

the increased experimentation with Linux within large organisations.

the increased popularity of RedHat over the competition.

the crossover of the likes of High Performance Computing equipment such as Sun adn SGI with generic intel infrastructures.

high speed collaboration (100mb+) across continents.

memory sticks!!!!!! YES GODDAMN IT! memory sticks rule!

dvd burners become commodity hardware.

wildcat toppled as the kings of HPC graphics

SGI Altix 3500 kick arse in all Linux hardware tests and shows.

Sun ditches its 8mb L2 cache ultrasparc III chip to go with a crappy 1mb L2 cach ultrasparc IIIi chip. bye bye Sun. /me waves to Sun before they sink under the waves. Everyone buy Sun shares now before someone takes them over (im going for fujitsu here)

the arrival proper of the smart phone

x-box live. load it, live it, love it.

Network Appliances bold plan to consolidate SAN and NAS into one storage type, the SAN\NAS (although i think they need to work on the name a bit)

oh, id better say broadband, but thats so two years ago

Beruthiel

was there life before Boards?????
I can't remember.....

WhiteWashMan

Oh, and i forgot, the SCO and their lovely lawsuites against the world over open source.

ecksor

Originally posted by DeVore
(cos like every shaggin' journo in Ireland they watch this site like hawks. Hawks with video cameras[1]).
[..]
[1] For bonus nothing... name the film.

'Buddy's Song' starring Chesney Hawkes?

Yavvy

Network Appliances bold plan to consolidate SAN and NAS into one storage type, the SAN\NAS (although i think they need to work on the name a bit)

On the subject of storage I dont think you can give netapps too much credit for the plan to consolidate SAN and NAS .. infact HDS and Equlalogic made much bigger inroads into open networked storage.

so SATA and iSCSI ( and the TOE NIC) are the big movers in storage

as the biggest change in business computing I think the trun form SRM and virtualisation to a wider view of utility computing is extreamly significan

So, what have been the tech highlights of your year? (Please dont argue with a previous poster it'll just go off topic too fast... just your opinion/thoughts on the topic at hand.)

I know I know, just trying to add to wwm's comments with more stuff

WhiteWashMan

Originally posted by Alany
On the subject of storage I dont think you can give netapps too much credit for the plan to consolidate SAN and NAS .. infact HDS and Equlalogic made much bigger inroads into open networked storage.

so SATA and iSCSI ( and the TOE NIC) are the big movers in storage

sure, i agree with you there, i just like NetApp's 'appliance' approach to the idea as opposed to HDS or LSI's.

Originally posted by Alany

as the biggest change in business computing I think the trun form SRM and virtualisation to a wider view of utility computing is extreamly significan

thin client.... BIG CLIENT!

amp

Oceans Eleven.

BigEejit

[back on topic for a minute]
From an Irish point of view the biggest technological development has to be renting out the spectrum to all those companies ... it wont be felt this year, but next year there will be a big jump in broadband penetration as €ircon cuts the cost of broadband (dont think they will go much under €35) and the wireless companies undercut the shít out of them(I hope!)...

Another development has been (as previously posted by WWM) the increasing bandwidth of wireless networking and more importantly the proliferation of wireless ... its all over the place, I know a lot has been there for a couple of years but with WPA and other initiatives making wireless a great deal more secure you'll start to see it more and more.

Unfortunately one of the other developments (always been there but much more talked about and actually done more this year) is larger companies sending manufacturing and support jobs overseas to "maximise return for the shareholders", because lets not get it wrong here folks, if they think they can save a few € (or $) they'll chop heads all over .... its getting dangerous to be in electronics manufacturing, feck all jobs out there....
[/back on topic]

yossarin

{wireless networking, irish/dublinWAN, programmable phones} => ubiquitious computing

I'll also go with wwm: thin client.... BIG CLIENT!

on a smaller global footprint: me getting a job at samsung !

solaris

Originally posted by WhiteWashMan

Sun ditches its 8mb L2 cache ultrasparc III chip to go with a crappy 1mb L2 cach ultrasparc IIIi chip. bye bye Sun.

Emm, where did you get this from ? Nothing has been "ditched". USIIIi is for the entry level (low cost) servers/workstations, USIII is for the high end servers. Nothing new here - it was the same with USIIi and USIIe vs. USII. Not everybody needs or is willing to pay for the performance and scalability of the full USIII CPU.

http://www.sun.com/processors/index.html

(see table at bottom of page)

Sorry - I know we're not supposed to reply to each others posts on this thread, but the original post was misinformation rather than an opinion.

Silent Bob

The good

• 2.6.0 "the beaver is out of detox"
• Nice, kinda wide pipes to the Internet. Be better if they were cheaper though...
• AMD Opterons
• Bluetooth and 802.11 get widespread
• Optical DSP

The bad

• Poor implementations of electronic voting. Did the government consult anybody with a modicum of technical expertise before wasting all that cash on democracy-incompatible machines (the ones they bought are woeful)?
• Camera phones. Talk about orthogonality of functionality.
• The cost of data transmission.

The ugly

• Knee-jerk lawsuits by media firms unable to keep up with the modern technical world.
• The European DMCA (EUCD)
• The entire issue of software patents. Do they really want to put all small software houses out of business?
• SCO
• The Federation Against Copyright Theft. It isn't theft, it's infringement. Also I don't infringe anybody's copyright, so stop with the FUD

Paddy20

For me the most important computer related developments have been;-

1; The tremendous savings that can be had by using the ever increasing range of 'Online shops'. Gives a better and fairer deal to your average citizen.

2; The courageous introduction of fixed rate Internet access packages. Such as UTV's
flat fee Monthly offering of 180 hours 'anytime' online, for less than €25 per Month [Inc Vat] i.e. UTVip XL. It has saved me a small fortune, when compared to the rip-off online per minute charges that I had to pay Eircom.net.

3. Lets not forget 'IrelandOFFlines' campaign for a fair flat-rate Internet access service. Which proved extremely beneficial to all Internet users, and whose gallant efforts on behalf of Joe Public in the Broadband roll out should reap even more benefits for all in 2004.

P.:ninja:

mr_angry

Definitely:

1. Rollout of Broadband across the country, regardless of the suspect pings.

2. Relative strength of the €uro against the dollar. Cheap consumer electronics! Woop!

3. Seeing Microsoft getting continuely f*cked by viruses, and still refusing to even mention security when it comes to Longhorn! That's incredible stubborness!

Capt'n Midnight

Microsoft still advertising how fast ISA is rather than how secure it is sorta sums their security philosophy (it's their firewall) - for speed back in feburary 90% of all unpatched MSSQL servers were taken out in 10 minutes by slammer. - This is also relevant as it shows how vunerable the internet is to unknown holes and how fast it could be taken out..

Openoffice - again this is a microsoft story - they have changed their licencing rules again so that it is no longer possible to upgrade most products, which means for most companies thier previous investment in SW licences is worth zilch , the BSA are making noises , OEM means you can't transfer software. Guess what happens - there is a FREE replacement for word / excel / powerpoint. It's still not perfect but it just as good as Lotus at opening corrupt Excel/Word files that the microsoft product can't.

Knoppix - linux for people who don't want to know how it works - this is linux for the Desktop - works on all older machines I've tried it on.

davej

Some of the talking points of 2003 include:

The issue of P2P sharing coming to a head. The RIAA essentially deputising itself to go out and police the internet itself was certainly an alarming development.

Redhat pulling out of the consumer market is certainly a big deal, though the repurcussions won't really be felt until next year.

Obviously the whole SCO thing is interesting. They seem to have managed to make themselves more hated than microsoft by the opensource community.

The virus/spam synthesis. Funnily enough this (inevitable) outcome seemed to spur people on to actaully do something constructive. Up until this year it had been an arms race between spammers and ISPs and virus and antivirus writers.

The emergence of ip telephony (in the states at least) as a proper business is probably a landmark for the future. Many of the big players have started getting in on the act this year. There will be a convergence of video/email/text/voice fairly soon. Let's just hope that the spam problem is under control by then.

davej

po0k

The beginnings of a move towards SMP on the consumer desktop (Hyper threading, possibly dual Athlon64fx socket 939).
ATi's growth in consumer mid-range and high-end market share, might give nVidia a kick in the arse (Remember 3Dfx lads? Ye bought them).
The roll-out of broadband in more remote areas of the country.
120Gig 8meg 7200rpm IDE hard drives for under €100
Hardware stand-alone DiVX/XViD players
Bit Torrent
Ogg Vorbis
2.6.0
10/100MBit NICs, CD/DVD burners, and RAID 0,1,1+0 as standard on most new machines.
AMD getting their act together and seizing marketshare ahead of Intel.
XIII
BOINC, Internet2 and grid supercomputing.

Dr. Dre

1. Smartphones, and yet still not supported by any of the Irish networks, us early adopters have to get them from across the water.

2. The realisation of the masses that we are getting screwed ,across the board, in this country, when it somes to prices.
From (A)lcohol.......(Z)oo admission* we're not getting a fair deal.

3. The renewed controversy around p2p file sharing



* = Artistic license. I don't know how much costs to go to the zoo !

Cake Fiend

Slammer, Blaster, Sobig showed that noone is learning anything (apart from the virus-writers?). Decent security principles need to be forced on the average consumer, they can't be relied to learn anything themselves.

I support MS's apparent decision to enable XP's built-in firewall by default with SP2. The argument is that it will cause a lot of people a lot of problems at first - fu<k 'em, it'll force them to learn how the firewall works. At least MS are finally making a vague effort for once.

flamegrill

Originally posted by Sico
Slammer, Blaster, Sobig showed that noone is learning anything (apart from the virus-writers?). Decent security principles need to be forced on the average consumer, they can't be relied to learn anything themselves.

I support MS's apparent decision to enable XP's built-in firewall by default with SP2. The argument is that it will cause a lot of people a lot of problems at first - fu<k 'em, it'll force them to learn how the firewall works. At least MS are finally making a vague effort for once.

2003 - The year of the internet worm/email virus.

Victor

For a moment, I thought this was a thread giving out about me

So the year's posts were all about sex, drugs and well techie stuff. However, I think what boards.ie has certainly contributed, not just in the IOFFL forum is to a sense of ability to get heard, be seen and maybe, just maybe change things. People are watching us, people are listening. I hope these people understand we are coming to get them.

Originally posted by flamegrill
2003 - The year of the internet worm/email virus.

I didn't get any, other than two dodgy e-mails from "Microsoft" that I immediately binned.

Civilian_Target

The Good

Wireless things (w. broadband, w. mice, w. networking)
Digital Cameras no longer being made entirely of plastic
Pen-drives
64-bit processors
DVD finishing off VHS
OGG vorbis compatible DAPs

The Not Good
The EUCD, because damnit, I want my rights back
€ircom. Again.
Software patents. As if technology didn't already have enough problems
Half-Life 2 source leak

WhiteWashMan

Originally posted by solaris
Emm, where did you get this from ? Nothing has been "ditched". USIIIi is for the entry level (low cost) servers/workstations, USIII is for the high end servers. Nothing new here - it was the same with USIIi and USIIe vs. USII. Not everybody needs or is willing to pay for the performance and scalability of the full USIII CPU.

http://www.sun.com/processors/index.html

(see table at bottom of page)

Sorry - I know we're not supposed to reply to each others posts on this thread, but the original post was misinformation rather than an opinion.

im aware of what the difference is and what proposition Sun have made with the new chip. but since they are phasing out the smaller servers with any of the ultrasparc III processors and replacing them with the newer chip, they are cutting out a protion of the market that has servered them very well.
you are right, not everyone is willing to pay for the performance and scalability of the full sultrasparc III cpu, however, thats 'not everybody'. there are companies out there who do want them.

so, i feel that its a bad move becuase why would you make an intel compatable chip that is 3 times slower than an actual intel chip, because most things are being ported to linux anyway. so if it runs on solaris, it will run faster on an intel box. they are taking away any unique selling point they had. i know. i can see it happening in my line of work.

so id just like to say that that was all opinion, and none of it was misinformation. besides, my points were not meant to be 'be all and end all' information. we were just asked for tidbits of info. i gave. if you wnt to have a good old discussion on the subject, post up on the linux board or something. i would be happy to explain my remarks


oh, and see, the last person agrees with memory sticks as well!
they rock!