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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?"
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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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
watch this
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.
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
Fortune Magazine agrees. It named paperless voting the worst technology of 2003. Runner up was a skin-implantable RFID chip from Applied Digital Solutions.