2008 Year in Review
This is the best year-end review I’ve ever written. I promise. 2008 was a year of contradictions. Around May/June, when gas prices spiked, we were told to expect sky-high oil and gas prices…”forever”. I don’t recall anybody predicting $1.35/gallon gas, yet that’s about what I paid this morning.
In 2008 we learned…with no advance warning…that the entire financial industry was suddenly frozen and we’d be thrown into an epic depression unless we instantly printed $700 billion within DAYS! If we didn’t see it coming, why was it so important to fix the problem quickly? Somehow the people who were blind-sided are the same people who now claim to know how bad things will be without bailouts. WTF.
2008 taught us that people will stop buying SUVs if gas prices go up enough. And as soon as prices drop, people will lose interest in the shitty economy cars, because tiny cars with wimpy engines and boring designs suck. GM sucks. Chrysler sucks. Ford sucks. Stupid tax policies on diesel fuels prevent Ford from selling their 65 MPG diesel car in the U.S.
- On Jan 3, 2008, Blu-ray and HD-DVD were still locked in a battle for supremacy. HD sucked for consumers because there were two competing standards. On Jan 4, 2008, however, the war abruptly ended with this announcement from Warner Bros. On Feb 15 Wal Mart announced it would no longer carry HD-DVD, and on Feb 16 Toshiba halted production of HD-DVD hardware. Game over. You barely even remember this stuff by now.
- Best tweet of 2008: “Batman: EPIC BALE”.
- Funniest tweet of 2008: “Gordon Ramsay: one bad puffin eating mofo.”
- Best line in a technical article: “Along with the data processing framework, Doug Cutting also included a fault tolerant, replicated, distributed file system with Hadoop just because fuck you.”
- 2008 was not the year of Linux on the Desktop.
- 2009 might be the year of Android on the Netbook.
- Scala caught a lot of buzz during Jan and Feb.
- Python 3000 came out. Jython saw a resurgence. Sun even hired two high-profile Jython developers.
- Programmer of the year: Charles Nutter. Follow him on Twitter, he’s a machine.
- Apple kicked ass in 2008. MacBook Air, Apple TV 2.0, iPhone SDK in March, iPhone 3G in July, App Store, MobileMe, Solid Aluminum manufacturing process for new MacBooks, etc.
- Vista is about to die. Within the last few days, we learned Windows 7 beta is complete, and expect to see it released in mid-2009.
- Yahoo is dying. Back in June we heard a lot about programmers and management leaving the company. Yang is out. Microsoft failed to buy them.
- Google kicked ass in 2008. GWT 1.5 came out. Chrome 1.0. The Open Handset Alliance now boasts 47 members. Android 1.0 came out. They held their first Google I/O conference. Their apps continue to improve.
- In 2008, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after we found out he used a hooker.
- IL Governor Rod Blagojevich is caught up in a big scandal but so far hasn’t resigned.
- On March 12, a woman became fused to her toilet seat after sitting on it for two years.
- On March 14, Discover told us how the heck a woman became fused to her toilet seat.
- Jack Kevorkian was released from prison and ran for congress. He did not win.
- XM and Sirius merged.
- Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, is the least intelligent movie of the year.
- Grand Theft Auto 4.
- Midwest floods. Southeast droughts.
- Georgia Hillbillies invent another fake Bigfoot story, get front page coverage on CNN.com
- On Sep 10, they activated the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It swallowed the entire universe and produced an identical universe on the “other side”. We didn’t notice, although everything is backwards now.
- A bunch of iPhone Killers came out in 2008. Expect more in 2009. So far they all suck. The G1 is a good phone but it lacks multitouch. That’s weak.
- Word of the year: FAIL.
- Phrase of the year: EPIC FAIL.
- A man named HUSSEIN won. Scary shit. His middle name is HUSSEIN.
That’s about it. Nothing else interesting happened in 2008.
I say you are still missing a bunch of stuff, not the least of which is the global economic meltdown followed by massive infusions of government spending and guarantees (turning us socialist), a weak dollar setting the conditions for AB to be sold to Belgian brewer InBev, and for the first time in the history of this country the President was the target of a dual shoe projectile attack.
I stopped drinking AB/InBev beers. Instead I mostly drink Boulevard and Schlafly beers.
“A man named HUSSEIN won. Scary shit. His middle name is HUSSEIN”
hard to tell whether you meant this to be ironic or not but it does sound like a bad racist joke
I am making fun of people who used his middle name to scare people.
Perhaps this previous blog entry will help put the statement in perspective:
http://stuffthathappens.com/blog/2008/10/09/wtf/
The year of Android in the netbook? Look at the Asus Eee PC 900HA. Why would anyone want anything other than a perfectly functional xp-based 1.6ghz atom machine that costs and weighs a fraction of a Macbook Air ($325 versus $1799)? You can obviously install any OS you want into it. There really is no rational reason for a consumer to have Android in a netbook.
As for “Google doing a great job”, most of Google’s online applications are poor. Don’t get me wrong, there are some exceptions (Gmail is pretty good) but the marketing value of the Google brand is a lot higher than its real value; I expect to have another Yahoo! scenario eventually.
GWT 1.5 is a great app, but compare how long it takes to program an application in JS using mootools or jquery. The edit-compile-run cycle is so short, it’s no longer an issue. Again, GWT is a great idea but slow as hell in comparison.
To leave on a positive note… the woman fused to the toilet seat was hilarious. And I do like your blog. Happy New Year!
What, no fair-and-balanced mention of outed GOP toe-tappers? Wide stance always provides wide grin…