Simultaneously Clueful and Clueless

Cringely, the PBS high-tech scribe, gazes into his crystal ball for 2003 - by his own (somewhat dubious) reckoning, he was 7/10 for 2002. I don't know much about the computer business stuff he discusses, but I find this prediction perspicacious:

12. Hollywood will come up with another new copy protection scheme for music and it will be defeated within two months. Even more significant is the fact that 2003 will see a whole new generation of peer-to-peer file sharing software. Remember, Napster required a central server and Gnutella replaces that with a zillion individual PCs, but this next generation will probably be some form of swarm computing — a distributed network file system that will chop up the music into a hundred pieces each stored on a different participating PC. So when the RIAA confiscates your computer, they won't be able to find anything stored on it resembling music.

And I find this one worthless and condescending:

15. And finally, with the continued (and to me totally inexplicable) rise of web logs, someone — maybe Google — will come up with an effective blog search engine to read all that junk for us and extract what we really care about.

Who is the "we" for whom he speaks, and what do they "really care about"? What "junk" does he feel compelled to wade through? This kind of generic, nonspecific swipe at an entire genre would seem to reflect the lazy, self-important thinking a certain kind of person: a dick.

Article Author: Eric Olsen

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