Why do I do this to myself? Bob's first predictions for 2018 – I, Cringely | Hacker News Reader

Why do I do this to myself? Bob's first predictions for 2018 – I, Cringely

cringely.com

57 pointsrbanffy38 comments

I think the death of net neutrality is an act of desperation (clearly someone is behind it, because...why now, why the spam comments, why so fast, etc), because cable was a medium of control, but broadband is a utility with little opportunity for resource extraction. Here comes 5g and lots of wireless bandwidth for even more price competition which will either put incredible pressure on the ISPs to violate net neutrality to extract value or create a proliferation of ISPs, ala the 90s that race to the bottom, some of whom will offer net neutrality as a feature of their service. Curious to see how the increase in bandwidth affects the market in the coming years. Wireless presents all kinds of interesting possibilities.

"All the mobile carriers will begin rolling-out 5G wireless networking in 2018, though only about 22 percent of the country will be covered by the end of this year."

22% by population or by geographical area? (Yes, I think I'm funny.)

What exactly are the details of 5G? My understanding was of lots of short-range, very smart antennas. Which would require some kind of backbone, probably wireline, right? And which those of us who do not live in major metropolitan areas probably shouldn't expect to see, ever.

I've wondered for years now, who is the woman in the image with Cringely? Partner, coauthor, wife, daughter, model? (To be clear, I don't want someone to DOX her, just curious as to her relationship to Cringely's web site.)

It has a similar vibe to this box cover from the 70's: https://www.le.ac.uk/press/press/mastermind1.jpg

Brilliant. I played that as a kid and I remember wondering why on earth those two people were on the box cover.

Google image search guesses that it's his wife. It has no cited source for this information though.

(In no way trying to impact the perception of submitted text - just honestly asking for context.)

I have a better question - who is Cringely? It's the first time I hear of him. Is he some SV celebrity?

It's actually a neat story. Infoworld magazine made their authors write under pen names to prevent them from building up personal brand and moving to different publications.

Mark Stephens built up a following under the Cringely name then left in a financial dispute and wanted to keep the name. There was a lawsuit, for a while there were two people writing as Cringely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_X._Cringely

> Infoworld magazine made their authors write under pen names

More specifically, a number of tech pubs at the time ran sort of industry insider columns written under pen games. This was partly for practical reasons--they were sort of tech gossip columns and it worked better for the writer's real name not to be widely known. But you're right that it also allowed the magazines to rotate through writers. Another one was Spencer F. Katt at PC Week. There was also a longtime one in a DEC trade magazine although I forget the column's name there.

ADDED: A long time ago, Wired ran a profile on Stephens/Cringely: https://www.wired.com/1998/12/cringely/

Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires is his and is pretty good.

I must admit that the part with Steve Balmer talking about KLOCs is funny and true https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHI7RTKhlz0&feature=youtu.be

Short story: he was a big deal back in the day, has had a couple pretty big stories but these days he's much less influential.

Now he blogs very infrequently, largely concentrating on his slightly-creepy obsession with IBM. The fact that he so easily gets duped by scammers pretending to be Google[1] and then actually blogs about it is quite indicative of how far his finger is from the pulse of technology.

So, no, you're not missing anything.

[1] https://www.cringely.com/2015/09/07/evil-google-waiting-on-l...

His essays have been submitted 40 times as HN stories in the last two years (most with more than one person submitting). I have gotten useful insights from all that I have read. If you are going to be so dismissive you might at least give us your recommendations for who has a better bird's eye view of current technology.

I think he's reasonable enough although he doesn't write a lot. The world has changed to the degree that it's probably hard to point to a generalist weekly writer who is the equivalent of the columnists at the old weekly computer magazines. Today, you tend to get writers who are more specialized in AWS, IoT, virtualization, cloud, or whatever. And most of them are consultants, vendors, etc. rather than full-time journalists.

I appreciate articles with his take and scope. Better to have some variety than endless articles about which serverless lambda functions are the best.

I think there's a pretty good chance that said article was written in jest, and Bob then saw all the comments that didn't get that, and decided to go along with it by reverse-trolling/answering the comments as if he wrote it seriously...

This is required reading for anyone on HN...

https://www.amazon.com/Accidental-Empires-Silicon-Millions-C...

...more for fun historical perspective than anything else. Lots of great anecdotes and stories about founders. The book became a PBS series that become a movie with Noah Wiley as Steve Jobs. And useful insight:

"As inventive organizations grow and mature, they often convert themselves into maintenance organizations, dedicated to doing revisions of formerly inventive products and boring as hell for the original programmers who were used to living on adrenalin rushes and junk food. This transition time, from inventive to maintenance, is a time of crisis for these companies and their founders."

I'd only heard of him years ago because he made a TV programme about self-building a plane [1], which I think ended up with him building a kit rather than designing it from scratch. I found him amusing when watching it, although I don't know anyone else who has seen it, and info on it seems scarce. I'd wager it was shown on Channel 4 here in the UK, but I could just be making most of it up!

[1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164814/

I remember this documentary. It basicly chronicled him setting out too design and build his own airplane which devolved into chaos. It was kind of painfull too watch. In the end he had too purchase a kit plane and get outside help building it too simply have a show that ending in some form of success. An interesting example of how projects can go wrong. I can't remember the name of it though...

Short answer: no one knows. He, or someone using that identity, has been hanging around technology media since the dim mists of time. Sometimes insightful, but no good information on whether that is pure chance or not exists.

Long answer: https://www.cringely.com/bout-bob/

From the side bar next to the article:

> Who's the pretty girl with Cringely? Learn more about Anina and 360fashion

Both provided links are dead, but I was able to find a Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anina_(model)

Looks like she is (or was previously) a model.

> Both provided links are dead

HTTP works, HTTPS does not.

In 2010, Cringely promoted her "mobile-magazine-based-on-RSS" solution https://www.cringely.com/2010/03/11/the-94-percent-solution/ and included the statement: "this same content can be read today on two billion devices throughout the world. There will never, ever be two billion iPhones."

Seven years later, we're half-way there: "Apple has sold more than one billion iPhones worldwide from 2007 to 2016" https://www.statista.com/statistics/263401/global-apple-ipho...

He nailed it!

Fairly certain that's his wife. He's made a couple mentions of her as "the young and lovely" Mary Alyce and I vaguely recall once that he specifically discussed shooting the photo for that banner and mentioned her.

That's his wife, he mentioned it in one of his posts years ago. Sorry I can't find it but I read it originally as I have followed him going back to Mac-the-knife days in MacWeek.

What is buffer bloat and how do old routers contribute, how did new routers fix it?

Also I didn’t realize broadcasters can sell their frequencies and it can be used for non broadcasting uses such as data? Is that true?

1) Buffer bloat is an issue where too-large packet buffers break congestion control in TCP by storing packets that otherwise would be discarded and thus hiding the bandwidth bottleneck from the sender. Can be fixed by adjusting buffer usage appropriately, and mitigated by better control algorithms.

2) They can't just sell their frequencies as they like, but to make more spectrum available for data the FCC organized an auction allowing them to do so.

From wikipedia:

> Some communications equipment manufacturers designed unnecessarily large buffers into some of their network products. In such equipment, bufferbloat occurs when a network link becomes congested, causing packets to become queued for long periods in these oversized buffers. In a first-in first-out queuing system, overly large buffers result in longer queues and higher latency, and do not improve network throughput.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bufferbloat

Measure the bufferbloat in your connection:

http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest

Whatever ISPs will do with no more net neutrality (assuming its not overturned by Congress) may affect the prediction about streaming. Guessing what this will result in is impossible.

Guessing the result should be informed by the cycles of regulation and deregulation in the telecom industry as a whole. We have decades of history to pull from, if anyone wants to take the trouble to learn the history and apply it to the current scenario.

*Microsoft’s concentration is on: 1) Azure; 2) Azure services like storage and — to some extent — Office 365; 3) Microsoft Office, and: 4) Windows.

If something is your fourth priority it might as well not be on the list.

I sure hope my government still adresses things after #3 on their to do lists.

Well certainly maintained.

> 5G is interesting because it will bring a huge increase in wireless bandwidth that we don’t really need.

640K of RAM…

Correct. We (users) don't need that bandwidth. Advertisers and social media companies who consume us and market us as a product to be sold needs that bandwidth.

They'll be marketing all this "useless" bandwidth to consumers too, in the first place.

Don't be such a cynic. If you think the differentiator between 1G broadband and a 56k dial-up is ad bloat you're crazy. Significant bandwidth increases enable applications that weren't possible before.

I want that bandwidth to do cool things. And there's nothing stopping you from doing cool things with it either.

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