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I will definitely buy this. Stem cell research might be the one "world-changing" innovation that's happened since the dawn of the internet, but I don't know if

I will definitely buy this. Stem cell research might be the one "world-changing" innovation that's happened since the dawn of the internet, but I don't know if we'll have a clear view of that for another decade. Arthroscopic surgery is also pretty awesome. So maybe it isn't all bleak. Maybe it's just the tech industry that has failed to do anything but sell us more crap, invade our privacy, and advertise us into submission.

evgen 17y ago
Are you kidding? Let me rewind you to Y2K in case you were still nursing a collegiate hangover or two. Banner ads were everywhere, advertising was in your face, the marquee/blink tags had not yet been banished, and the only way to avoid it was to run an actual http proxy so that meant that only the tech-savvy could get away from it (and almost no one was blocking cookies or other "simple" tracking mechanisms.) In Y2K some of us were still worried about whether or not crypto would ever enter the mainstream (most people had no clue what we were talking about or why we cared) and while the crypto export laws had only been relaxed a couple of months earlier it was still recent enough that including strong crypto in a product was considered a political/legal risk. We were finally to the point where you no longer needed to use a generic crypto library API (so that users could link against a non-US crypto lib) but SSL certs were still rare for most web sites. The tech industry has changed significantly for the better in all of these areas.
- dnsworks 17y ago
  Cute. I've been building infrastructures for almost 20 years now. There's really nothing new under the sun. The last time I drank the koolaid was at Napster, since then I've never been really excited about a company. Fusion-IO is the closest tech that has even made me take pause. Web startups are the worst. I worked at idealab in 2000. We invented the me-too web site business model that is now Web 2.0. It's all kind of a joke. But at least we have new ways to advertise!

evgen 17y ago

Are you kidding? Let me rewind you to Y2K in case you were still nursing a collegiate hangover or two. Banner ads were everywhere, advertising was in your face, the marquee/blink tags had not yet been banished, and the only way to avoid it was to run an actual http proxy so that meant that only the tech-savvy could get away from it (and almost no one was blocking cookies or other "simple" tracking mechanisms.) In Y2K some of us were still worried about whether or not crypto would ever enter the mainstream (most people had no clue what we were talking about or why we cared) and while the crypto export laws had only been relaxed a couple of months earlier it was still recent enough that including strong crypto in a product was considered a political/legal risk. We were finally to the point where you no longer needed to use a generic crypto library API (so that users could link against a non-US crypto lib) but SSL certs were still rare for most web sites. The tech industry has changed significantly for the better in all of these areas.

dnsworks 17y ago
Cute. I've been building infrastructures for almost 20 years now. There's really nothing new under the sun. The last time I drank the koolaid was at Napster, since then I've never been really excited about a company. Fusion-IO is the closest tech that has even made me take pause. Web startups are the worst. I worked at idealab in 2000. We invented the me-too web site business model that is now Web 2.0. It's all kind of a joke. But at least we have new ways to advertise!