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?"

Comments

Hmm

[nepheles]

There's this thing called "two-point-six" or something that Bill keeps ranting about... I dunno... maybe that's it

Electronic voting machines

[twelveinchbrain]

This has to be the least welcome technology to have come to the public's attention in 2003. Thanks alot, Diebold.

THAT'S NOT A LINK, DUMBASS, THAT'S JUST A URL.

[Anonymous Coward]

THIS is a link. Remember, links are HTML and are clickable in a web browser. Otherwise, it's just text.

Re:THAT'S NOT A LINK, DUMBASS, THAT'S JUST A URL.

[Total_Wimp]

You are so very correct, yet I can't help but wonder if leaving off the "DUMBASS" might have helped.

It is possible that if you had left off the "DUMBASS" the poster whom you corrected might have seen your post and thought, "hark, a link _would_ be more useful than a URL. I shall use that next time." Instead, with your technique, the poster might think, "Oh my, I am truly a DUMBASS. Since I can't do anything right I may as well not post at all... sniff," and we would miss the benefit of his knowledge.

Thank you for your informative viewpoint, but please keep in mind that we all learn faster we use our polite voices. Have a nice day! :-)

TW

Re:SATA

[Dark Lord Seth]

However, isn't SATA150 itself faster then most modern HDs can handle? And for that matter, isn't PATA133/100 still far too fast for most modern HDs? Correct me if I'm wrong, please...

Al Gore invented it

[Anonymous Coward]

There is one technology that is the worst of 2003. It has brought us unprecedented spam, loss of privacy, identity theft, pop-ups, a playground for the worst trolls, virus propagation, and some things that are downright ugly (such as www.aintitcoolnews.com). Without it, we would not have ever seen the likes of Goatse.

I'll give you one hint: Al Gore invented it.

Re:Longhorn

[happyfrogcow]

Is this listed as a "worst" or a "best"? I'll assume "worst" in the context of slashdot, but it is irrelevant, so assume "best" if you want. Either way...

Even though I'll be marked Troll, I have to say this is the dumbest thing I've read in the past week. Longhorn is nonexistant as a operating system. It is a concept in the minds of project managers, designers, and a few MS fanboys/girls. They have some work done, maybe some betas that do fandangly something-somethings, but imagine all the cancelling of features and unintended feature creep that will occur between now and it's released date of 2006(?). Anything that exists as "Longhorn" today, will bare only slight resemblance to the "Longhorn" that will be released "whenever". So if you are calling it a "best" then hold your guns, it could diminish into a pile of steaming poo in 2 years and not ever be released. if you are calling it a "worst", then also hold your guns. It could improve into a top-notch computer operating system by learning from mistakes of the past.

Simply mentioning such a premature thing as the best/worst of 2003 it idiotic. Longhorn has not had any significant impact on anyone at all.

"Then XP came out and turned their world upside down. Sure you can revert the theme and menus back to win2k, but I don't know anyone that has done that."

I did exactly that on my parents machine. It wasn't hard. Most people who have used a previous version of windows to a moderate (daily) extent would be able to find information on how to go about doing so.

"Longhorn is going to come out, and users buying a new Dell or Gateway will get it automatically"

Have people you know buy locally. You'll get better support, better hardware and you can probably have them install whatever OS you want or do it yourself. "If it aint broke, don't fix it"

Re:iTunes for Windows

[AKnightCowboy]

Sorry, but iTunes seems to be pretty worthless to me. I can't find anything I like on it. I go to search for "Foo Fighters" and it suggests Too Fighters instead. What kind of online music store doesn't have Foo Fighters!? I open up Poisoned, type in Foo Fighters and voila. Tons of songs available for free. The problem with all these online music stores is selection and overpriced tracks IMHO. It's certainly not the best invention of 2003. Napster on the other hand probably was the best invention of its year.

Simultaneous - RFID tags

[xC0000005]

The radio tags for billing/tracking. There's a technology with a lot of promise for being very, very cool, and at the same time, possessing vast potential for abuse.

I can see the arms race now. RFID tags, RFID countermeasures.

Stores selling things by RFID, and claiming countermeasures are the providence of theives (echos of RIAA, MPAA).

Sigh.

Re:iTunes for Windows

[terevos]

Umm... are you serious? You ask the question, "What kind of online music store doesn't have Foo Fighters?" - Well I'm willing to bet that NONE of them do. You opened up Poisoned, which is not an online music store. It's a P2P program. If the Foo Fighters do not want to do online music, then no one can make them do that, not even Microsoft.

Re:Yeah But We WON

[be-fan]

Yeah, but we won the war.And most everyone is better off for it.
-----
I *hate* that argument. It's so stupid. Of *course* we won the war!!! We're the United States! Were we expecting to *lose*? It's like saying that the war was right because we found Saddam. Of *course* we found Saddam! We're the United States! Were we expecting not to find Saddam? Thinking that maybe one man would somehow elude the grasp of the most powerful nation on earth???

We went to war over WMDs. We went to war because we were lead to believe that there was an immediate threat to the saftey of Americans. If there were no WMDs, than we went to war for the wrong reason, and that makes the war wrong, plain and simple.

As for them being better off, that's an incredibly arrogant and paternalistic thing to say. Its their country. Let them run it. Don't assume that we are blessing them with our precious system of government, because honestly, they don't want it. Why do you think the reaction in Iraq has been: "thanks for getting rid of Saddam, now get the fuck out!" They don't want to become another America, plain and simple.

haven't found the weapons; did find the victims

[mschuyler]

Right. 250 mass grave sites have been reported and only 40 or so have been investigated so far:

+ 1983: 8,000 Kurds rounded up an executed

+ 1988: The "Anfal campaign" 180,000 Iraquis disappeared

+ 1986: Sarin, VX, and Tabun chemical weapons kill between 8,000 and 24,000 Kurds, injure thousands more. There are pictures of the attacks where you can see the gas over the villages and pictures of the victims, not to mention Iraqi documentation.

+ 1991: Tens of thousands of Shites killed

+ Iran-Iraq War: Up to 1 million dead. Numbers likely unknowable. Documented chemical attacks against Iranians. Iran estimates 60,000 affected.

+ 4000 Kurdish villages wiped off the map.

+ Human Rights Watch reports from 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds killed in the various attacks and purges over the years with 500,000 becoming refugees.

+ So far: 300,000 victims in mass graves. Some with hands tied behind their backs apparently buried alive.

And we also have credible reports of medical experimentation, beatings, crucifxion, hammering nails into fingers and hands, amputating penis and breasts with an electric carving knife, spraying victim's eyes with insecticide, branding with a hot iron, raping children and wives in front of parents and spouse, nailing tongues to wooden boards, extracting teeth with pliers, cutting off of tongues, victims shredded in plastic shredding machines.

Victims so far: approaching a million in a country with a population of something like 25 million.

Re:haven't found the weapons; did find the victims

[the gnat]

Actually you are not correct. One of the MANY reasons the U.S. and 60+ other allies declared war on Iraq was because of the weapons of mass distruction. The core reason the war came about was because of Iraq's unwillingness to comply with their U.N. agreement. Now I can't say that I blame them, because they got away without compliance for almost 9 years, and believed that the current administration would behave the same as the last.

This is correct, and some liberal commentators said that the war was justified entirely on these grounds, without the phony "imminent threat" that the Bush administration cooked up.

Perhaps the last administration didn't feel that a full invasion and nation-building was the appropriate way to respond, given that Hussein appeared to have been more or less neutered and Iraq was a far more advanced country than Kosovo or Somalia. (Look up the recent history of Kurdistan for an example of how continued Allied military presence kept Saddam in check.) It would, of course, be interesting to know why Saddam continued rebuffing the UN/US, if he didn't really have weapons.

Another point for war was that it was shown that there is a connection between O.B.L. and Sadaam.

Bullshit. This has still not been proven; the Mohammed Atta connection remains wishful thinking. The terrorists operating up near Kurdistan haven't been shown to be either linked directly with al Qaeda, or (as far as I know) directly supported by Saddam, and they certainly weren't operating outside of Iraq.

Another point was that Iraq was training terrorist for use against the U.S. and it's friends.

He was indeed supporting Palestinian terrorism on the side, but that's no justification for a US invasion. It certainly wasn't at the level of the Taliban hosting bin Laden. Hussein even had Abu Nidal, one of the founders of modern Islamic terrorism, killed because he became an embarassment.

I'm very wishy-washy on this subject, and I certainly don't care for the chorus of leftists that keeps comparing Bush and Saddam and thinks it's all about oil. However, the retroactive justifications from the right sound more absurd each time I hear them. Answer the fucking question, don't make up excuses about how you really had other reasons all along.

There are many places in the world where far worse human rights abuses occur (and where the US doesn't have as long a history of aiding or ignoring these issues, as HW Bush and Reagan did with Iraq); Congo and Sudan come to mind. I'd love to see us clean them up too, but I don't hear the neocons using those crises as a justification for invasion.

It isn't even the best of 2003!

[rtilghman]

I mean come ON, how many free rides does Apple get? I like Apple, they have great designers, but don't you think it's kind of retarded to give best invention/product to a product that is, in essence, just a rip off on numerous products already made? Not only that, but don't you think its a sad statement on Apple AND The industry if we give props to a program that is neither original nor all that great?

I mean let's see here. First you have the annoying fact that iTunes is sooooooo horribly limited from a technology perspective. AIFF is the testicle sweat of codecs, AAC is just Apple's way of invading your womb, mp3 is a blind man's bluff, and (jump back) IT HAS WAV CAPABILITY. Hold the phones, get Sony circa 1982 on the phone, WE CAN RECORD A CD IN A 20 YEAR OLD FORMAT! Point is I don't consider a measly four options for codecs very good, especially when adding in the rest is literally point and click.

But, you say, I have the iTunes store! You sure do partner, but its kind of a one way trip since AAC files are a pain to convert out of AAC (see capturing audio) and you can't shop anywhere else with iTunes. Yeah, nothing like the glorious method of using one product to force use of a second product, eh? Wait a second, that sounds like a similar plot I saw someone in Redmond try! ;)

From just a format perspective, how about the fact that winamp5 has like 10 codecs (haven't looked, but it supports everything I've trried including WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc.). True, I like the iTunes interface a lot more, but the program itself is more robust in winamp than iTunes.

So basically the grand point here is that unless you use an iPod iTunes isn't required reading, and while the program is snazzy it isn't necessarily the best and is definitely not original.

-rt

Re:PowerMac G5

[BWJones]

i'm nitpicking here, and i know what you meant, but you just described dma, not independent busses. for newbies, it's the same difference as between a ethernet hub and a switch.

So, I should have used more specific terminology describing point to point architectures that do not share a common bus, which is decidedly not dma.

Re:Yeah But We WON

[October_30th]

Actually, he's quite right.

The most dangerous people in the human history have been those who have an unwavering right in their own righteousness. Hitler, Stalin, Jesus, several Popes and so on.

Abandonware, maybe

[YrWrstNtmr]

Vaporware is a 'never has been'
Abandonware is a 'had it, but sold/disposed/threw it out'.

We know he had them, the UN knows he had them, *he* knew he had them. His Kurdish and Iranian victims certainly knew he had them.

Go back a few years and ask Al Gore about Saddams WMD's. Ask Hans Blix. Ask Tom Daschle. Jaques Chirac. John Kerry. Madeline Albright. See what they say.
They were all campaigning hard to go to war, because we knew (or they told us) that Saddam had, and was building more, WMD's. Now, because Bush says the same things and actually does something about it, suddenly it's all a falsehood. An 'illegal war'.
Why weren't you yelling "vaporware" when Clinton attacked with those cruise missiles?

The real question is...what happened to all that stuff? Did he, in fact, dispose of it? Well WTF didn't he provide unambiguous proof of that? Or is it merely buried out in the desert, like they did with some frontline aircraft.

"It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."
--Sen Hillary Clinton, Oct 10, 2002
"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

Give me a GXX DXXXXX break!

[Lord Kano]

Time Magazine seems to have adjudged Steve Jobs' iTunes as the Invention of 2003.

Steve Jobs is an asshole. His products are constantly being praised by the societal elite, but you know what? No one else cares! Apple has held a consistantly small market share for 15 years. The Apple faithful will continue to be, the rest of the world will continue to not care.

Personally I think that iTMS is pretty cool, but so what? How is it the best technology of 2003?

My vote would be for cheap ($100) dual format +R/RW & -R/RW DVD writers.

LK

Re:Yeah But We WON

[bnenning]

Of *course* we won the war!!! We're the United States! Were we expecting to *lose*?

Quite a few pundits were predicting a Vietnam-style quagmire, thousands of Americans killed in street fighting in Baghdad, etc.

We went to war over WMDs. We went to war because we were lead to believe that there was an immediate threat to the saftey of Americans.

No. We went to war because Saddam was a continuing (not "imminent") threat to the region and the world. WMDs were merely one aspect of that threat.

As for them being better off, that's an incredibly arrogant and paternalistic thing to say.

You actually think it's plausible that the Iraqi people were better off with Saddam in power? Not even Dean goes that far.

Why do you think the reaction in Iraq has been: "thanks for getting rid of Saddam, now get the fuck out!"

Yes, that's the general plan, as soon as we can insure that the remaining Baathist thugs won't be able to seize power again.

UN makes resolutions about lots of things

[billstewart]

I already modded myself down for off-topicness.

If you're going to use UN resolutions as a justification for anything, please enforce them in numerical order.... The US's ally, Israel, has never complied with most of the UN resolutions about their denial of civil rights to Palestinian residents. There are probably UN resolutions that the US is in violation of, as well as International Criminal Court actions the US ignored about their mining of Nicaragua's harbors, which is an act of war.

And besides, this isn't a UN war. That resolution was from the *old* UN, that did whatever the US told it to. The *current* UN has France and Germany in it, so this war was run by the Coalition of the Willing, which let the US do whatever they wanted to.

QuarkXPress 6

[Anonymous Coward]

After buying a legit upgrade, I ended up using a crack to get it to install anyway. Quark will get no more of my money.

BAD: Govt Surveillance

[rueger]

If there's one technological move that scares the bejeezus out of me it's the US government's rapid deployment of intrusive technology to monitor individuals, or to track their movements and actions.

Whether it's Patriot Two, and the far reaching powers that it gives government agencies to snoop at just about anything you can think of in your life, or the fingerprinting and scanning of people entering or leaving the country, or the increasing use of things like EZ_Pass by law enforcement, it seems that overall this is probably the worst abuse of technology that we can imagine.

Add to these the powers given to corporate interests by things like the DMCA, and it seems that technology is being used to strip away many, many fundamental rights that we should enjoy as citizens.

Worst Tech of 2003?

[gad_zuki!]

Unencrypted wireless keyboards. Oh man, how did that get out of the gate?

ActiveX Spyware. Looks like an official message from the OS, better click on it.

MP3 players under 256 megabytes. Look ma! I have the convience of spending over 200 dollars for something that barely holds more music than carrying around a el-cheapo CD player and two CDs, plus with the added advantage of lossy compression!

The Color T-Mobile sidekick. "Whoops, we screwed the pooch on licensing so we're going to remotely delete your games. Also, there is no software to download from developers. Enjoy your vendor lock-in!"

Anything targeted at "business people." "Oh hi IT department. I saw a cool ad for this treo/PDAphone/speech2text/etc but I'm too stupid to read the instructions so lets setup a time where you can train me on the stupid stuff I can afford to buy every week and then never use again."

Email to phone services. "Now I can get spam read to me by a computer voice on my cell phone!"

"Speed-up" dial-up web proxies that cost almost as much as DSL. Geez people, just get the damn DSL line.

Segway HT Has yet to revolutionize anything but has shown us how the media can be exploited for free advertising.

Red Hat Linux.

RH:Screw you guys, we're going corporate, you know, where the money is.

ME:But, but I'll pay you for updates! In fact I do!

RH:Too bad kid.

Lindows. Worst. Name. Ever. Its like a Sonyo or a Magnetbox.

Windows/Office activation. Pain for when you need to re-install and pushes people back to the 2000 products.

Cellphone earpieces with hanging mics. You look like a crazy person talking to yourself. No really, you do.

AGP 8x Thanks for making my old AGP cards obsolete and bringing back old PCI cards for PCs that don't need kick-ass 3D.

Best tech:

Alltheweb.com Google now has a kick-ass competitor.

The T-mobile sidekick. Once you get over the vendor lock-in its the best mobile browser out there, sans java-script.

The Treo600. Camera and all the palm apps you can handle and it plays MP3s.

Google text-ads. This should be self-explanatory.

Mandrake policy. Nice to see a distro care enough to say how long they're willing to support the product.

Gnomemeeting. Its like a big geek party.

DVD players that can play SVCDs. Finally.

Adapative spam filters. Just golden.

The Firebird/Thunderbird projects. Bye, bye IE/Outlook on windows.

Wifi everywhere. Love it.

The Worst List

[Valen0]

Here is my "worst" list:

1. TIA/MATRIX/etc. - The last thing we need is a "democratic" government starting up 24/7 survelience on everyone. The whole scheme stinks of facist and police state policies.

2. DRM/Palladium/Trusted Computing/etc. - This technology is appearing in more and more retail devices and computer software. When I buy devices or software, I expect them to work... Not lock me out because I might be some pirate.

3. RFID Customer Products - This technology might be good for mass inventory scans, but it starts becoming scary when it starts being implemented in the retail product. I do not like the idea of my good broadcasting what they are to anyone that asks.