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The Thrill is Gone
A few days ago, a former employee of mine from back in the days of Prophet, and now a friend/business associate, emailed me to ask if I'd be heading up to San Francisco for the Money Show. He lives in San Francisco, and Palo Alto is about a forty minute drive from there, so he thought that, if I was going, it would be a good opportunity to get together.
I hadn't really planned on going. Back when I was building Prophet, particularly in the late 1990s, financial trade shows were actually pretty fun. In fact, during the Internet boom, they were amazing, because there was a bustle of activity, and there would be hundreds of booths with the latest trading, charting, and portfolio technologies.
If you attended shows like Traders Expo, Money Show, and similar exhibitions during that time, you know what I'm talking about. I was usually there as an exhibitor myself, and although standing at a booth answering the same questions for three days in a row gets tiresome near the end, the shows were still exhilarating and interesting.
After the bursting of the Internet bubble, though, things started to change. The pace of cool new startups slowed quite a bit. Some exhibitors stopped coming. One by one, and Prophet was among these, companies decided that it just really worth attending these shows. After the financial crisis, the situation got even worse, and my perception was the cool companies (like Prophet) were being replaced by booths like, say, Procter & Gamble, which would be there handing out annual reports. B-O-R-I-N-G.
One show was quite unfortunately scheduled to take place in Monterey in early October 2001, and the nation had other things on its mind. I walked through the nearly empty exhibit hall, staffed only with depressed exhibitors who had spent good money to be showing their wares to the handful of people shuffling through. "When's your presentation?" I asked one staffer. "Whenever you sit down", he replied.
Anyway, back to the present: when my friend wrote me, I decided to at least check out the Money Show website to see if it would be worth making the journey. It didn't take me long to get the jist of things:
These little graphics, of course, are meant to suggest that all 55 exhibitors have a rather grand display, when in fact the majority of them will have a table with foldable legs and a piece of cloth draped over it with brochures scattered on top. If you're lucky, they might even have some hard candy in a bowl to tempt you into walking a little closer to their booth.
Some people attend these shows for the speakers, as opposed to the exhibits. That never had any appeal for me, even during the glory days of the late 90s. I would also like to mention that if any of you have ambitions to form a Museum of Middle Aged White Guys, rounding up all the speakers at one of these finance shows would be a real time-saver.
It makes me wistful for a much deeper memory, which is of my first visit to the West Coast Computer Faire in early 1980. I had first laid hands on a computer (the Commodore PET) in late 1979, and I sweet-talked my parents into buying me a TRS-80 Model 1 for my birthday in the spring of 1980. I had never been to a trade show in my life until then, and descending the escalator into the dilapidated Brooks Hall in the seedy Civic Center area of San Francisco was electrifying. The crowds, the excitement, the booths all seemed (quite rightly) to usher in a totally new age.
This little clip from Pirates of the Silicon Valley does a great job capturing what it looked and felt like in those halcyon days:
That's ancient history, of course. Thomas Wolfe famously declared that you can never go home again. The same goes for memories like these.
- advertisements -
"I had never been to a trade show in my life until then, and descending the escalator into the dilapidated Brooks Hall in the seedy Civic Center area of San Francisco was electrifying. The crowds, the excitement, the booths all seemed (quite rightly) to usher in a totally new age."
Ahhh yes, the excited, the hopeful, the dreaminess of youth. To be followed by the suspicion and the awareness that you've been had.
Its a lot like when electronic health records storage was sold to the public as a way to lower insurance costs, when in reality the net effect is now you never tell your doctor anything outside of why you're seeing him that day for fear it will be used against you at some later date.
And so it is with Smart Power Meter's to "help" conserve energy and be Gaaarrreeeen!...or cut your ass off because you decided to nuke something in the microwave while drying your clothes...lol.
"Should they fail to abide by instructions to reduce consumption, non-compliant residents will be disconnected remotely via smart meters.
"If your electricity is disconnecting for a period of 30 seconds, you would need to comply by immediately switching off your heavy current appliances," cautioned City Power."
http://www.fin24.com/Economy/Eskom/City-Power-pleads-with-residents-not-...
A brave New World, with the same characteristics as the old one, the young completely unfamiliar with how it really works.
I guess my doctor realized that I was not saying much to her, so she told me that she keeps "two sets of books", I felt then that I could begin to trust her.
Most people are keeping two sets of books before the Lord and they are about to be exposed... read His very sobering warnings about what will soon befall us all as His judgement strikes.... http://revelation12.ca
Nothing wrong with remembering a time before the murderous thugs gained critical mass in government and media. Sorry banksters, murderous thugs are what you have always been - no change now from then, you just operate now with impunity.
Anyhow, thanks for the article.
And before Tom Wolfe, Carlos Castneda laid out the very same concept in 'Journey to Ixtlan'. "Home", South of Lake Chapala, ain't there anymore... It's just another little town in Mexico...
Move along folks! Nostalgia is for Chumps!
Joseph Campbell described the Hero's Journey.
Let's go Zero's ! the young yearn to learn more, to find out what's what....why things are.... leave home on the intrepid journey.... the long, strange trip....
ZeroHedge has a fair number of Hero's and it's time to take our journey back home. Our home folks need us ....
Ah! Eroica von Heldenleben.
The Hero's Hero.
Dum Dum Dum Da De Da Da Dum (fortissimo)
There is plenty of juice in tech right now. You just ain't part of it. Give the kids a break/
"Tech" is just fake bs these days. Nothing much is going on besides hyping the old as the new. Intel has hit a wall in its CPU die shrink plans. "Thin client" is still slated to replace people's desktop PC's, just like it was 20 years ago. Web 2.0 is a program to give that printed money away to a few lucky kids who get useless jobs making bad webpages and breaking things that worked before.
This is a depression and tech will not resume its flight until we are past this ongoing crises.
Back before Apple adopted the obsolescence model, and software companies the current "leech" mode of yearly subscriptions.
Adobe has lost their fucking mind, but they'll make a lot of bank before they kill the golden goose.
In 2006 my Daughter's Kindergarten classroom still used Apple IIe's.
Don't think there will be any iPads in classrooms in 2038.
".. a former employee of mine.." I stopped wasting my time right there.
You do realise that some of us created real businesses with employees in our past. That activity is (unfortunately) beyond most people, yet essential to their prospects.
So why are you negative about it?
And, yet, found the time to respond and say "look at me; look at me; I am so precious and better than you". Indeed, an American reality.
Reminds me of the time sports memorabilia was big. then you could attend a show most weekends at different locations. Malls were often used for these shows. Was fun going through the different tables looking for that special card. Micky Mantle cards were going for thousands if you had the right card and card company like Topps. I still have some unopened packs of cards with that stale bubble gum inside. Still waiting for the craze to return and the value of my collection to rocket higher. As often is the case, counterfeit cards and doping ball players eventually killed that fun.
Also remember when fairs where fun. Anyone remember the diver who used to dive into a tank of water on the midway. I was a young pervert then and liked to peek into the tent of the girly shows. lol. Stock car races and sprint races and horse and buggy and motorcycle races on different nights. All that is gone. No more freak shows with the two headed snakes or fat lady. Now ofc we have fat ladies all over the place. Just visit your local Wallmart and you can find dozens of fat ones.
Two years ago I atteded a gpu conference by NVIDA in San Jose. Trying to entice users and investors I suppose, but the place was electric. I am a programmer and was there to get some tips from the experts, but the president of NVIDIA was the keynote speaker, and there were young people from all over the world, there to learn about gpu scientic computing like me, and gaming too,. The place was electric with excitement. I never anticipated such energy from the attendees and the presenters. The mostly asian and young character was most interesting, and you want to lose the steriotype of a reserved and asian this was the place to go. I found myself muttering about the music and crowd this is a vision of the future. I don't work for NVIDIA and this is not a commercial - just a fair observation. The US is not the center of the technical world anymore.
By all accounts, NVIDIA is a sweat shop, and I've been in the industry a long time. (The mostly asian and young character statement pretty much sums it up, their energy and enthusiam will be sucked up and in the end very few will have much to show for their efforts.)
Who is engineering the next generation of GPU? Are we going to get a new architecture ever, or are we going to continue to get a warmed over rehash of the old, just like its been for the last 4+ years?
Until people figure out a way to actually program with multithreading we are in a relative doldrum, especially compared to the explosive activity of the 1990's when simple iteration was enough to change the game and create a lot of excitement.
Until people figure out a way to actually program with multithreading
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Been done since the 1960's ,,, IBM's S360/370 MVS ... I had applications using all 2/4/6 cpu's simultaneously ... supporting 3,000 users on a single machine with 1mb of memory (no graphics) .. Microcrap keeps all the hooks to themselves and their stuff is beyond bloatware... They haven't made anything fast and light for multiple decades... I look forward to Win10 as then maybe MS will concentrate on fixing their garbage applications to multithread and release memory when they're done with it... but they'll never get that done with their H1b workforce...
>Until people figure out a way to actually program with multithreading
This entails an actual breakthrough in doing verification on multithreading to ensure it works. I was one of the few people that did work on multi-threaded verification (writing actual multithreaded assembly code is a nightmare, just try thinking in 64 directions at the same time) at SUN Microsystems back during the UltraSPARC T1/T2/T2+ days... simulation cycles grow exponentially...
Maybe it's the low hanging fruit rule, Tim. The good stuff has already been done.
Do we need another 200 computer dating services?
Did we ever need one?
You mean you missed all the Vintage Computer Festivals they held out there, Tim?
http://vintage.org
-Chumblez.
Great link -- Thanks, Chumblez.