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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?"

13 of 451 comments (clear)

  1. FREECIV 1.14.1, BABY, YEAH, BABY, YEAH! by James+A.+C.+Joyce · · Score: 3, Informative

    And the CVS now has AI diplomacy. All, right!

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  2. I'de have to say... by akaina · · Score: 3, Informative

    ... the pissing videogame from those kids at MIT

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  3. Re:PowerMac G5 by BWJones · · Score: 5, Informative

    The G5 is great technology that takes many aspects of architecture design ideas from other systems such as the SGI Octane. For instance, in the G5 (and the Octane) all of the busses are completely independent from one another. So, this means you can completely saturate say, your hard drive bus while keeping your CPU to memory bus completely untouched. This is hugely important to scientific computing (and other areas such as video editing) making the G5 system a much more cost effective solution that the SGI Octane. My Octanes were about $40-50k each while the dual G5s cost me around $5K each with 4GB of RAM and half a terrabyte of storage. Not too shabby eh?

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  4. TIA is not entirely dead -- it's being outsourced by GuyMannDude · · Score: 4, Informative

    I was reading an article in a recent issue of DefenseNews recently where they were reporting that a lot of TIA isn't being scraped, it's being given over to private contractors to perform. The feds still think it's a wonderful idea to track everything we do, they just don't want to so directly involved for political reasons. Private companies are not subject to these sorts of pressures and have considerable leeway on how much tracking of customer information they perform. So DARPA is looking to them to do most of the work and simply provide the government with the processed information.

    Remember folks, just because CNN says that TIA is over doesn't make it so, necessarily. The privacy vs. terrorist-defense war isn't over -- it's just beginning. And next time, the government won't be so bloody obvious about what it's trying to do.

    GMD

  5. The Best, the worst and the ugliest by MrsPReDiToR · · Score: 4, Informative

    Hardware central have a great review of the year here: http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/edi torials/5139/1/ Personally I cant decide what I would class as the worst. There's plenty to praise and plenty to whine about.

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  6. Re:DVD multiple formats... just have one! by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 2, Informative

    I don't think the VHS/BETA fight took this long to figure out a winner.

    The VCR format war lasted roughly from 1975 to 1985.

  7. I'm thinking Diebold voting machines by Kickstart70 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Removing democracy from the voters is about as bad as it gets.

  8. Re:Electronic voting machines by lurker412 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Fortune Magazine agrees. It named paperless voting the worst technology of 2003. Runner up was a skin-implantable RFID chip from Applied Digital Solutions.

  9. Re:PowerMac G5 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    Sheesh. Moderators, your standards are falling. Back in my day, a post had to be correct to be informative.

    Bullshit. I've been reading since before they even had accounts and I can tell you that moderators were always easily fooled.

  10. Re:DVD multiple formats... just have one! by osgeek · · Score: 2, Informative

    There's this really cool news aggregation web site called Slashdot.

    I heard that it even has an article about how there are yet more competing standards for the next generation of DVD.

  11. Re:Worst Technology of 2003 by cheezedawg · · Score: 2, Informative

    UN resolution 687 in 1991 required Iraq to produce an accurate declaration of the location, types, and quantities of all of their WMDs. That resolution was passed unanimously under Chapter 7 of the UN resolution that requires member states to enforece it. Iraq never complied with that resolution.

    You see, it was never a question of whether or not Iraq actually had the weapons. The world saw him use them, for cryin out loud. The question now is what has happened to the weapons. The UN told Iraq they had to show us their weapons and prove the were destroyed. The fact that the whereabouts of WMDs is still a mystery is proof enough that Iraq was not in complience with the UN, and that alone is enough justification for military action.

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  12. Re:SATA by ncc74656 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Windows XP doesn't play nice with Linux.

    The dual-boot WinXP/Gentoo box I'm using right now disagrees with you. I let LILO write itself to the MBR on /dev/hdb. The first block of /dev/hdb is then copied to a file on a floppy:

    mount -t vfat /dev/fd0 /mnt && dd if=/dev/hdb of=/mnt/bootsect.lnx bs=512 count=1 && umount /mnt

    Upon booting into WinXP, the flie is copied to c:\ and boot.ini is modified to add a Linux boot option...something like this is added after (or before) the WinXP boot option:

    c:\bootsect.lnx="Linux"

    On booting, the first thing you get is the NT boot loader, which gives you options for Linux or WinXP. If you select Linux, LILO takes over. If you select WinXP, it boots as it normally does.

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  13. Re:It isn't even the best of 2003! by HeghmoH · · Score: 3, Informative

    iTunes uses QuickTime to play its files, meaning that it supports any file that QT supports, which is a hell of a lot. Not only that, but QT is very extensible, so third parties can add more formats. There's already an ogg plugin out there, and anybody who wanted to could make whatever they wanted. Although as far as I know, it only supports arbitrary QT formats for playback, not for encoding.

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