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The Best and Worst Technologies of 2003?

Phoe6 asks: "Last year, at Hexadecimals discussion group we shared a news that Worst Technology of 2002 was TIA (Total Information Awareness by DARPA). What is the Worst Technology of 2003? For the Best, Time Magazine seems to have adjudged Steve Jobs' iTunes as the Invention of 2003. What are your ratings?"

32 of 451 comments (clear)

  1. iTunes for Windows by deliciousmonster · · Score: 2, Funny

    let's make it two in a row...

    --
    I have a plan. Using mainly spoons, we'll tunnel our way out of the city...
  2. Slashdot Subscriptions by satanami69 · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'll not saying best or worst though.

    --
    I really hate Dan Patrick.
    1. Re:Slashdot Subscriptions by corbettw · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'll not saying best or worst though.

      It's OK, you don't have to.

      --
      God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
  3. Worst invention: OSDN Personals by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oh, the horror...

    1. Re:Worst invention: OSDN Personals by Dark+Lord+Seth · · Score: 4, Funny

      Shy, pasty, antisocial geek seeks like-minded sentient girlfriend to share parent's basement. Slashdot subscribers need not apply.

    2. Re:Worst invention: OSDN Personals by jeffehobbs · · Score: 4, Funny


      Hey -- don't say anything bad about Slashdot personals! That's where I plan to meet my future ex-wife.

      ~jeff

    3. Re:Worst invention: OSDN Personals by Geek+of+Tech · · Score: 5, Funny
      Must enjoy C, D&D, and be able to hold her own at Unreal or Battlefield 1942.

      --
      Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
    4. Re:Worst invention: OSDN Personals by k4_pacific · · Score: 2, Funny

      I dated that girl. She knew C, enjoyed D&D, swore by Emacs, and she was one of the most beautiful people I have ever known. I met her at a LUG meeting. After the meeting, I went up and started talking to her. We went out for drinks. A relationship developed. We were a couple in perfect harmony. We finished each other's #defines. But there were irreconcileable differences. She used KDE, I used Gnome. We fought over it. One day, it got so intense that we agreed it would be better if we parted. I haven't seen her in over a year, but I still think about her almost daily. So Crystal, if you are out there and you miss me, send me an email.

      Mike

      "Software is like sex, its better when its free."
      -- Attributed to Linus Torvalds

      --
      Unknown host pong.
    5. Re:Worst invention: OSDN Personals by TopShelf · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hold her own? The whole point is that you don't want to have to hold your own...

      --
      Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
  4. Worst Technology of 2003 by kawabago · · Score: 2, Funny

    It would have to be Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction! America actually fought a war against vaporware!

    1. Re:Worst Technology of 2003 by BiggyP · · Score: 5, Funny

      you're forgetting the true technological breakthrough that Iraq's technologists made when they perfected cloaking for said WMDs ;)

    2. Re:Worst Technology of 2003 by kawabago · · Score: 4, Funny

      I hope they don't sell it to the Romulans or we're all fucked!

    3. Re:Worst Technology of 2003 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      " They had better have had WMDs, because WE GAVE THEM TO THEM."

      I gave my dad an ice cream maker one xmas. It sat in the garage for years. Has the US checked Sadam's garage?

  5. The Slashdot DDos: What about the children? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    While I agree that the Slashdot DDoS attack caused many people quite a bit of annoyance and frustration, I think leaving the impact at that is very short sighted.

    Firstly, I don't think the blame for this DDoS can be centered on just one person or group. Obviously, those who attacked Slashdot are to blame, as are Slashdot's sysadmins, and the people at Arrowpoint. And secondly, the costs of this are much greater than you might think.

    I have an eight year old daughter. We had a family pet - a rabbit, black, named Midnight, and my daughter was very fond of it. Midnight, sadly, passed away about two months ago. A week or two after Midnight died, my daughter came to me in tears and asked me, "Daddy, why won't God bring Midnight back? I've been praying like Deacon Simmons told me to."

    Naturally, I had to think about how to respond to this. I finally answered, "well, honey, God is a little like Slashdot. He can seem arbitrary, cruel, and unresponsive, but he's really a nice guy who's just a little out of touch and is a little slow at responding to requessts."

    This was fine, and I thought that would be the end of it. However, when Slashdot went down last week, my daughter burst into my den, positively sobbing and wailing, and managed to choke out "Daddy! Daddy! I can't get to Slashdot!" "Honey," I said, "it's just a website." But, between sobs, she said, "but you said God is just like Slashdot, remember? Does this mean God is dead?"

    I tried to console her as best I could, but nothing seemed to work. When Slashdot came back up, she seemed to return to normal, but she hasn't been quite the same since. She doesn't ask me about God so much any more, and she seems less interested in Church.

    As a good Christian, I will turn the other cheek, and not call for the punishment of those responsible. But to the heinous criminals and negligents responsible for this, I must ask, how do you feel about destroying a small girl's sense of innocence and wonder about the world? About crushing her childish dreams and idealism? About shattering her faith in God and his benevolence? About possibly having crushed her soul and emotion forever, leaving her to live the rest of her days in spiritual agony as a broken, scarred husk of a person?

    I hope all of you think long and hard about what you've done. What is the soul of a child worth, next to a few double-checks of the router?

    Thank you.

    1. Re:The Slashdot DDos: What about the children? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Your eight-year-old reads slashdot? don't you think /. is a little too juvenile for her?

  6. Re:I'de have to say... by akaina · · Score: 5, Funny

    link here: http://web.media.mit.edu/~hayes/mas863/urinecontro l.html

    And remember, urine control

    --
    Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
  7. Bouncing balls... by Anonymous+Chicken · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...also known as "Beagle 2". I don't have to say which one this belongs to, do I?

    --
    This signature is intentionally left blank.
  8. The Worst is Yet to Come by handy_vandal · · Score: 3, Funny

    It's too soon to judge the "worst technology of 2003". Whatever it is, we'll find out later, when the side-effects have made themselves known.

    Probably it's some bio-tech invention we haven't heard about, which is going to render us all sterile and hairless, several years from now.

    -kgj

    --
    -kgj
    1. Re:The Worst is Yet to Come by biendamon · · Score: 3, Funny

      Sterile? That I can deal with. But hairless.... Ye Gods, people! Think of the children! Bald children!

      Oh, wait...

  9. MY 2 cents: by larry+bagina · · Score: 2, Funny

    CmdrTaco's gently-used sex-toy emporium.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    1. Re:MY 2 cents: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      CmdrTaco's gently-used sex-toy emporium.

      OSDN personals was already nominated.

  10. Singing Fishes by Capt_Troy · · Score: 4, Funny

    I'm just glad this year passed without further proliferation of those damned singing plastic fishes.

  11. Best and Worst by supun · · Score: 4, Funny

    Best: Super Model Cloning Kit

    Worst: GE Bathtub Toaster ( fresh hot toast while you bathe )

    --
    :w!
    1. Re:Best and Worst by skryche · · Score: 4, Funny
      Best: Super Model Cloning Kit

      So: the concept here is... what? You clone a supermodel, raise her from infancy to adulthood, then have sex with her?

      That's pretty fucked up. (Not to mention the 18-year wait.)

    2. Re:Best and Worst by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Agreed, the latency is a bit a high but it's easy to increase troughput with very high level parallelism. Plus models need hardly any food.
      And you only have to wait 14-16 years(incidentally also the best age for natural self-replication) with models. Unless you prefer women in their prime (30 yrs.)
      Nevertheless, the ROI is huge even if only 1 out of 10 model clones make it Super.

  12. Re:My Pick and Pan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    "Pan: SCO - do I need to list the reasons."

    No, because that would give them the opportunity to change. Only give the reasons to those who agree to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

  13. Worst invention? by PierceLabs · · Score: 4, Funny

    The evidence SCO invented to claim ownership of Linux.

  14. Network Solutions DNS Search by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 4, Funny

    Shudder...

  15. Re:PowerMac G5 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    So, this means you can completely saturate say, your hard drive bus while keeping your CPU to memory bus completely untouched.

    So if your hard drive is bursting full speed, but your memory bus is untouched, where the hell is the hard drive bursting the data to (or from)? Did they add some sort of quasi peer to peer 3rd party DMA transfers between hard drives? Perhaps the hard drive is just skipping the middle man and directly targeting the frame buffer instead.

    No, I'm afraid not. They only proved that idiot fanboys like you will spout of nonsense no matter how dumb it sounds.

  16. Politically Correct by Kenshin · · Score: 2, Funny
    Now I can only have ONE drive per bus?

    Hey, no worries about politically incorrect "master/slave" references anymore...

    --

    Does it make you happy you're so strange?

  17. SCO Doesn't Qualify by yintercept · · Score: 2, Funny

    This is about companies that actually create things...not law firms.

  18. the best technology is easy.. by kemster · · Score: 4, Funny

    Easily the best technology of 2003 was the Slashdot Dupe-Post-Checker(c). Using the up-to-now unknown technologies of "regular expressions" and "pattern matching", the wiz-kid staff at Slashdot was finally able to automatically check if a story had already been posted before.

    Oh wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.. that isn't due out until 2004, right? Or maybe it's just vaporware..