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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?"
I'd say the PowerMac G5. For one thing, its a completely new design internally, losing a lot of the legacy of old Mac OS machines. (Which they can do since they don't need to support a 20 year old BIOS or OS.) Another advancement is the attention spent on creating a case that can effectively, efficiently, and quietly cooling the new design.
Rutan's rocket ship! Broke the sound barrier in 2003, though it's suborbital spaceflight will be in 2004.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
How about Serial ATA drives which became popular this year. It was about time that the old fashioned ribbon cables were replace with something more modern.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
Linux Kernel 2.6
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Ok, technically it's not out this year, but they have started releasing beta copies to people.
Right before windows XP came out, the majority of home/business users were finally 'getting it' -- they were figuring out the filesystem, the menus, etc.
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. Not to mention new features integrated into explorer, like CD burning and MP3 playing. Quite a steep learning curve for XP's majority users.
Longhorn is going to come out, and users buying a new Dell or Gateway will get it automatically. Sidebars, and SQL data storage? Their world will be turned upside down once again.
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2B1ASK1
Just to touch on the other topic posted here about DVD burners the fact that there is multiple formats out has got to be the worst. I don't think the VHS/BETA fight took this long to figure out a winner. One format would help everyone in the long run and its about time we got to it!
Make me your friend. All my friends get +1 modifier and I need friends :)
Lemmie see if I got this straight. Inferior camera, none of the advantages of digital apply here, costs more than a disposable film camera.... what's the advantage again? Okay, I can see saving one use film strips, so it is 100% reusable, but that is the only benifit. OTOH, now that it can be hacked, there may be one benifit. A cheap digital that you can take in poor environemntal conditions and not feel bad about wrecking it. ALso, you can use it in situation where you know you will destroy it, such as taking close up pics of explosions, etc.
Extensible Firmware Interface EFI
Worst technology introduced. MS/Intel
Replaces traditional PC BIOS and Consumer Rights simultaneously.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
I woke up on Christmas to little kids driving up and down the street on gopeds and mopeds outside my parent's house. At first I thought they were battery powered and didn't go very fast, but I was apparently wrong. They honk at each other and idle them outside, polluting the air in more ways than one. They fly down the road faster than anyone without traffic sense should be allowed. And people wonder why americans are generally overweight and unhealthy.
So in evaluating technologies as best and worst, are there any personal feelings people rate these with? Personally I would say that improvements to communication and travel are good because it brings family and friends closer - 1200 miles doesn't seem as far as it used to, and it's a lot cheaper to get there (It was actually cheaper for me to drive home for Christmas than fly this year). On the other hand, people like my father refuse to use a self-propelled lawn mower because it forces him to get some routine exercise. He wouldn't say it's a bad technology, just not useful to him.
I nominate OnStar vehicle GPS system for both best and worst.
Best because (among other uses) if your car gets ripped off, they can find it fast.
Worst because it can be used as vehicle-embedded spyware.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
I would have to say your wrong on this point. Windows Server 2003 is the most complete Windows os to date. I'm not saying this because I'm pro MS in anyway, but the 2003 operating system is 100 times better then Windows 2000 and about 100 times better then XP (giving into the fact that XP is better then 2000 in many ways but opens many new problems that were are almost tottaly fixed in 2003). I enjoy the control and flow of 2003, and I praise them for locking it down in the install. This turned out to be a very valueable feature for our company that does Windows (as well as Linux and BSD) webhosting on both dedicated and shared systems (so we have 100s of machines to setup that we don't have to us an image system for that install right off the cd or over the lan without a hitch. Also as provider of distrubted LAN solutions for small to medium sized companies that can't afford full time IT departmarts, 2003 Server (including Small Biz Server 2003) simplifies setting up the distrubtied network and keeping it secure (all be it, it costs more for the hardware and software aspect to something that Linux could do with 5% of the resources required, but it still averages less then hiring someone full time).
Windows Server 2003 has the ability to do things that previous versions couldn't even fathum from a programming aspect. The networking aspect is about a thousand times better with the ablity to (not super dooper but good anough that anyone with experience with routing couldn't work something to just make it work).
Understand that I'm a born Linux user myself, and I end up installing Cygwin, Mozilla (Firebird mostly), GCC, Apache, PHP, Perl, TLC, and about a hundred other Linux tools on just about every windows machine I come across that I have to use for more then 10 minutes. I know that Windows has querks but I would rate it towards the top in this case.
No.