Indeed, although every one of us who have seen a tech hype train once or twice expected nothing less.
PDAs? Quantum computing. Touch screens. Siri. Cortana. Micropayments. Apps. Synergy of desktop and mobile.
From the outset this went from “hey that’s kind of neat” to quite possibly toppling some giants of tech in a flash. Now all we have to do is wait for the boards to give huge payouts to the pinheads that drove this shitwagon in here and we can get back to doing cool things without some imaginary fantasy stapled on to it at the explicit instruction of marketing and channel sales.
The trackpad and trackpoint of my aging linux laptop stop working if the thing gets its lid shut. The touchscreen continues to work just fine, however. It turns out that while two stupid things can’t make a good thing, they can sometimes cancel each other out.
Aren’t touch screens literally everywhere? What was the hype?
It’s always so baffling to me to learn about those things because I was way too young to actually experience any of the “hype” around most of those technologies. Touch screens are cool and they penetrated society so much there are at my grocery shop, what the fuck were they supposed to do if that’s not living up to the hype?
To add to the others’ comments, they were much less impressive before we had capacitive touch screens. Older resistive screens needed a good deal of mechanical force to register a press (great for longevity!) and required frequent re-calibration. They just weren’t very satisfying to use compared to any modern smart phone or tablet.
Xml also used to be a tech hype for a bit.
And i still remember how media outlets hyped up second life, forgot about it and a few months later discovered it again and more hype started. It was fun.
this reminds me of some of the more cursed things I know from that hype era
(see this for some others)
Sarvega, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance XML networking solutions, today announced the Sarvega XML Context™ Router, the first product to enable loosely coupled multi-point XML Web Services across wide area networks (WANs). The Sarvega XML Context Router is the first XML appliance to route XML content at wire speed based on deep content inspection, supporting publish-subscribe (pub-sub) models while simultaneously providing secure and reliable delivery guarantees.
it’s fucking delicious how thick the buzzwords are for an incredibly simple device:
- it parses XPath quickly (for 2004 (and honestly I never knew XPath and XQuery were a bottleneck… maybe this XML thing isn’t working out))
- it decides which web app gets what traffic, but only if the web app speaks XML, for some reason
- it implements an event queue, maybe?
- it’s probably a thin proprietary layer with a Cisco-esque management CLI built on appropriated open source software, all running on a BSD but in a shiny rackmount case
- the executive class at the time really had rediscovered cocaine, and that’s why we were all forced to put up with this bullshit
- this shit still exists but it does the same thing with a semi-proprietary YAML and too much JSON as this thing does with XML, and now it’s in the cloud, cause the executive class never undiscovered cocaine
and then spent the entire Metaverse hype pretending Second Life didn’t exist
Oh man, XML is such a funny hype. What if we took S-expressions and made them less human readable, harder to parse programmatically and with multiple ways to do the same thing! Do I encode something an an element with the key as a tag and the value as the content, or do I make it an attribute of a tag? Just look at the schema, which is yet more XML! Include this magic URL at the top of your document. Want to query something from the document? Here you go! No, that’s not a base64-encoded private key nor a transcript of someone’s editing session in vim, that’s an XPath.
JSON has its issues but at least it’s only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!
JSON has its issues but at least it’s only the worst of some worlds. Want to make JSON unparsable anyway, for a laugh? Try YAML, the serialization format recommended by four out of five Nordic countries!
fucking
this take is so dangerously real I’m pretty sure uttering it at work will earn you a PIP and a fistfight in the parking lot with the lead data architect
you know, normal startup shit
YAML is great if you need to make simple configuration files
… which is why no one uses it for things like Kubernetes /s
Xml also used to be a tech hype for a bit.
Wha… What?
I’m trying to imagine a news anchor hyping about XM-fucking-L and I’m drawing a complete blank, is this a zen riddle
It didn’t jump out of tech media containment, so it wasn’t a mainstream hype thing, more a techworker hype thing. It was the data serialization standard which would save the web! Second life otoh, did massively jump containment.