2005: The year in disappointments.
So, I’m surfing around quite a bit, as usual when I’m bored at work, and since it’s the end of the year, I’m seeing a lot of year-end wrapups and predictions for next year, and I feel inexplicably compelled to join in.
In retrospect, 2005 has been a year of disappointments.
extreeeeemely long writeup follows
Where to start? How about … linux. Linux is a good example. While the kernel has seen a few improvements, none of them were as dramatic as last year’s. The 2.6 line was launched in december 2003, and between dec ‘03 and dec ‘04, progressed to 2.6.10, during which time we saw massive improvements in drivers, scheduling, hardware support, architecture support, pretty much across the board everything the kernel does got better. Compare to 2005, where we saw 2.6.11-2.6.14. Now, granted, 2.6.11-2.6.12 were very stabilizing, and the 2.6.13 obseletion of devfsd and subsequent forced migration to udev wasn’t terrible. However, there just wasn’t the degree of fundamental architectural improvement we saw in 2004. Most mainstream distros finally moved to defaulting to a 2.6 kernel this year (probably as a result of that stabilization), which is a good thing.
So what’s bad about this year for linux? For one, legal battles haven’t gone away. Xorg hasn’t seen a whole lot of improvement, and the things that have been improved go largely unused by common window/desktop managers. Gnome has made progress, but has more open bugs than ever, plus seems to be embroiled in its quest to remove all configuration options from everything. Feature requests are going rejected left and right because they’d involve allowing users to change the default behavior, which violates gnome’s philosophy: “Our way is the Right Way”. Even the usually even-keeled Linus Torvalds felt motivated to chime in on that, advocating that people just use KDE. While gnome has a standard counter-argument: “Most people don’t even know how to use those features”, it doesn’t mean that they should systematically exclude those who aren’t willing to live with their defaults. Disappointing.
KDE, meanwhile, continues to march on, growing ever larger, but getting a bit better. It’s still not as feature-rich or polished as Explorer, and isn’t quite as fast as the increasingly-minimalist Gnome is, and overall still feels kind of like a toy, lacking some key features that would make it a nicer desktop.
Meanwhile other desktop environments/window managers have done some interesting things. Enlightenment is working on E17, which, disappointingly, isn’t release quality yet (but seems like it’ll be damned nice when it does get released). Flux and Openbox have pretty much sat still, but Blackbox has released a new version, breaking with the Commonbox compatibility in favor of adding features. Blackbox users the world over rejoiced, apparently — all forty of them. XFCE4 is still where it was, which is both good and bad … it’s good for me in my uses, but it’s just not up to par for people who want a full desktop environment, because it doesn’t have a functional drag-and-drop desktop system like nautilus or kdesktop or explorer.
Into the more generalized distro-world, we’ve seen Ubuntu gain popularity and credibility over its mainstream mother, Debian, and Redhat’s Fedora is coming nicely into its own (while still not getting past certain redhat-isms). But, all of that is just incremental changes. Things are certainly getting better, but they’re getting better at a slower rate than one would hope, because the people it’s moving to cater towards aren’t exclusively crazy programmers anymore, they’re real-world end-users. It’s no revolution, it’s scarcely evolution, and it’s not inspiring the awe of the masses, nor is it inciting a mass-migration of people to linux desktops, which is a bit disappointing to the linux zealots of the world, I’m sure.
On a personal level, not even I found a happy medium in the linux world, and not for lack of trying. I just found windows xp sp2 to be a unabashedly better at being a desktop OS than anything I could find in linux.
The OpenDocument fiasco is another shining example of the disappointment that was the open source community, as well. Massachusetts tried to adopt OpenDocument as its standard format for storing and exchanging information, and got itself embroiled in a long series of hearings and legal fights. Ultimately, the whole issue got stalled on whether a particular IT manager correctly documented his trips to consult with field experts, and while that manager has been cleared of any wrongdoing, it served to turn a clean, relatively simple argument into an impassable morass, where it still sits today. And, of course, as with any thick, sticky mud, it became largely impossible for anyone to move through it — the issue is stuck.
OpenOffice came out with a shiny new version, OpenOffice.org 2.0. Lots of new features, as a whole it’s really just incredible as an office suite goes. Except that it’s slow, and bloated, and inefficient. Oh, and very much a stellar breakdown of the Open Source development model, having been publicly available source for quite a while (5 years or so now, according to the linked article), and yet having not a single code contribution from people outside of the professional “code on openoffice” groups within the confines of Sun, IBM and Google. Nobody’s sitting in their garage putting together OpenOffice featuresets or bugfixes, because the code is just too big and too complex. Sure, it’s become a much better office suite than you’d expect the Open Source community to cobble together. Except that the Open Source community didn’t. Sun and IBM and Google did.
But OpenOffice isn’t alone in its failure to attract serious unpaid developers, or even to keep the developers that started the projects. SourceForge hosts somewhere in the neighborhood of 125,000 projects (if there’s no overlap in their topic listings, anyway). Many are either orphaned or dead, for lack of developers, or because someone else scratched the itch better than the original starry-eyed project leader did. With all of those dead useless projects to choose from, why would anyone waste their time on something that full-time people work on?
Then there’s the HP Linux Media Center PC — or rather, lack thereof — NewsForge ran a story on the fact that HP’s planned launch of a consumer media center PC was scrapped when HP “changed direction” — shipping only windows media center pc’s instead — and a million of them, to boot!
But f/oss wasn’t the only disappointment in IT. AMD, which has produced a technically superior product in the amd64 platform, has met with utter failure both at gain market share from intel at marketing their superior products effectively. On top of that, they’ve failed to get peripheral manufacturers to get behind them and produce drivers for windows xp-64, which all translates into a flat failure to put 64-bit computing home in a substantial way.
But AMD is not alone. Intel’s failure to break 4ghz, even while milking die shrinks and netburst’s cheapness to the extreme is another disappointment to the chipmaker. On top of that, they’ve failed to produce a more appealing, technically better product than AMD, despite consistently spending many times more in the R&D field. They’ve made failed attempts at producing a viable dual-core chip, responding to AMD’s and IBM’s, and most recently even Sun’s presentations of multicore chips, and they’ve generally fallen behind the times in everything chipwise they do. Or rather, they haven’t caught back up. On top of that, intel is the target of an antitrust lawsuit from AMD, and has been shut out of the console market in favor of IBM Power and Cell processors.
To top all of that off, smaller chipmakers like transmeta are dropping out of the silicon market altogether, crowded out by the hard-hitting giants of the industry.
And Microsoft’s not in a much happier position this year than AMD or Intel, after being plagued by substantial flops (like windows XP-64’s utter absence of consumer-device drivers), and their repeated removal of announced features from the upcoming Windows Vista, which seems to grow more unstable and distasteful at every beta release. Then there was the oversold, underproduced, and overall underwhelming launch of the xbox360. People lined up around the blocks for a chance to get one of those 50 xboxes per store, hoping to be the first kid on the block to have one. But due to the artificial shortage of them, the console has largely missed out on the Christmas rush, and its launch can pretty much be seen as a failure to meet the market’s demands.
HD-optical media hasn’t made it to market yet, despite the hype, and consumers aren’t really any worse off without it — because media companies are just going to continue to exploit their monopolies, to the detriment of consumers.
Apple’s susceptibility to antitrust lawsuits for creating an artificially closed loop with itms and the ipod, stifling competitors was another disappointment. And then, to top that, they disappointed both die-hard risc fans and amd64 fans by announcing their upcoming move to Intel chips.
Infosec saw bad times, too. Even with SP2 (which came out in 2004, and was a great improvement in security), XP is still critical, remotely exploitable flaws in a LOT of components, like the recent zero-day WMF vulnerability.
But windows isn’t alone — mac os-x, mozilla firefox, and various linux apps have seen an increased presence in black/greyhat attention, and more and more holes are poked in the “my pet software is secure” theory every day. Meanwhile, Symantec is retiring the venerable L0phtcrack auditing tool, Nessus is going closed-source, and you can’t even find a good freeware PGP implementation for outlook these days.
Automatically expanding botnets and micro-scale targeted virii are all the rage, and are getting to the point of being almost impossible to contain. The spam epidemic is getting worse. And the Sony DRM nightmare! It’s just an endless succession of horrible horrible things.
On top of all of that, the infosec world saw not only expanded MD5 breakage, but new SHA-1 breaks as well, demonstrating that we really don’t know much of anything about hashing.
And that’s just a little corner of the IT world I’m aware of! Big disappointments all around.
Then there’s the rest of the world. FEMA disappointed millions with its failure to properly manage hurricane Katrina. And the aftermath of that December, 2004 Tsunami lasted well into this year too. Gas prices increased, while more signs emerged pointing toward a clear and accelerating global warming trend. And, as if those things weren’t bad enough, medicine is artificially limiting its own growth for the sake of profit.
Moving more towards the social/political issues, there’s also the various successes (Kansas) of the Intelligent Design movement (the main front of the war between the fundies and common sense and personal responsibility), disappointing to scientists around the world for its clear convolution of science and faith. Which brings us to education, which as a whole is also a disappointment. And the government, in order to try to approach a balanced budget, is giving the axe to nearly $13 billion in college loan programs.
Why? Because of Iraq, mainly. A war that has cost us $205 billion, as of the end of fiscal year 2005, and will top $250 billion by the end of Q1 2006, not to mention having cost nearly 2200 american soldiers’ lives. And, despite all of that, the iraqui security forces we’re supposed to be training aren’t up to par or capable of taking over their own defense, in the face of growing insurgencies and increased violence, as the democratic process is disrupted time and again by the concussions of exploding mortar shells.
But does that win the war on terror? No, not really. We still don’t have a clue where Osama is. But the NSA has a pretty good grasp on what you ate for dinner… their domestic surveillance program has gotten what amounts to a presidential carte blanche to spy on American citizens on US soil. And if you don’t like it? Or if you don’t like the un-American parts of the Patriot act? Then you, comrade, are un-American, and support the terrorists. Either you’re with Bush, or you’re against him.
How about that economy? Well, it hit a nice uptick for a while, but then got a bit hammered by the explosion of gas prices after the majority of the nation’s refining capacity was disrupted by a single hurricane (hint: name starts with a K). And on top of that, rising interest rates are threatening to burst yet another economic “bubble” — this time, the housing bubble. The consumer debt trend continues to get worse, as well, with people in more debt than they’ve ever been in. That’s ok though, because your creditors can just sell your information to data clearing houses, which will sell it to marketers, which will, in turn, sell you more targeted products and get you into more debt.
Even the entertainment industry is disappointing. Not a whole lot of revolutionary games, and the gaming industry plagued by the anti-gaming movement (another major front in the war of the fundies versus common sense and personal responsibility). The movie industry is reduced to mainly cranking out rehash after rehash, scrapping (and panning) innovation whenever it can in favor of the same time-tested half-dozen or so storylines. It’s as if they’ve turned from having the occasional novel idea in order to snatch ideas directly from novels. And with the messy cancellations of some quality TV shows (Arrested Development, Enterprise to name two), it only gets worse.
Overall, for a lot of the world, it seems like this year is one giant ball of disappointment, full of unmet expectations, broken delusions, and generally unhappy things. But, you win some, you lose some. Plenty of good things happened, too, it’s just that the bad things are so incredibly salient.