Best and Worst of 2002

By Jerry Pournelle

January 27, 2003

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Column 270 (Continued from the Previous Week)

Orchids and Onions and the User's Choice Awards

When I began this column over twenty years ago, I decided that a year ended in December, which may not be astonishing, but in those days it wasn't usual: That is, most magazines, including BYTE, had a several month lag between column deadline and actual publication. Thus the January edition would have articles written in October, and most year-end awards didn't reflect items introduced at the fall COMDEX, which was then the most important computer technology announcement show of the year.

I decided that my Chaos Manor User's Choice Awards would reflect the entire year, which meant that my annual awards article would be written in early January and came out in the April edition, which appeared on the newsstands in mid-March. I still write my year end column in early January; now it comes out in January, or at least some of it does.

The Chaos Manor User's Choice Awards, and the annual Orchids and Onions Parade, are largely subjective, and based on what I am familiar with and have used. I don't pretend to have seen everything. I do say that anything I recommend is good enough and the best of what I know about. "Best" can include a number of factors.

SPAM and Worms

The Onion of the Year goes to worms and spam. It's hard to say which is more annoying, spam or continual attacks by worms, viruses, and Trojans. In either case there's no obvious spammer or virus writer candidate to receive the Onion of the Year Award, although it's pretty clear that the people responsible for these horrors deserve worse than a symbolic onion.

The good news is that there are remedies. The bad news is that most of the remedies require computing power. When Alex and I were discussing this the other night I whimsically said that maybe both spam and the worms were a secret Intel strategy to make us buy ever more powerful systems.

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