Slashdot Mirror
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?"
There's this thing called "two-point-six" or something that Bill keeps ranting about... I dunno... maybe that's it
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
This has to be the least welcome technology to have come to the public's attention in 2003. Thanks alot, Diebold.
Not Found
The requested URL
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"
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.
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.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
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.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
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
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
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
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.