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PC World's 100 Best Products of 2005
insensitive clod writes "PC World published its top 100 best products of 2005. These include Firefox(1), GMail(2), OSX 10.4(3), Alienware Aurora 5500(6), Seagate USB 2.0 Pocket Drive(7), Skype(8), PalmOne Treo 650(10), Google(16), PSP(19), GeForce6600GT(20), Ubuntu(26), iTunes(34), Half-Life 2(38), Wikipedia(60), ThinkPad X41(67), Mac Mini(75), Acronis True Image(83), Opera(88). Surprisingly, iPod only has IPod Photo at 78."
It's OCTOBER. It's not news anymore. There was a big hubbub about Opera claiming the best browser award despite coming in at #88 compared to Firefox at #1.
Hey, Mac OS X 10.4 made number 3. That's honestly not that much better. An OS with more prettiness, and a much slower interface than its predecessors doesn't really count as top 100 material to me.
... only one of the PC World top ten is wintel dependent. Glad to see the blinders are off in this increasingly egalitarian tech world. Compare their 2000 list. And then there's this gem from 1998: "But you won't read much here about ADSL, Net PCs, or USB, among other hyped technologies." Yeah - glad to see we didn't get hoodwinked into that USB nonsense.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I wonder if they actually tried to use a Treo 650 for an extended period of time. If they had to deal with the constant hard resets and lock-ups, I don't think it would have been number 10 on the list.
I still want folders. The mass of mixed up emails kills me.
It's still useful to manually separate information without searching each time.
Other than that I love Gmail.
If tyranny and oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. - James Madison
They seem to stick to the big names, perhaps because they are the names that provide a healthy chunk of the magazine's advertising? Perish the thought.
Unless I've completely missed them, strange they've omitted Open Office 2 (even if in beta), Debian Sarge (on which so much other software is based) and the Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra nForce 4 motherboards which do what the tier one boards do only more stably and less expensively. Instead there is an overrated Asus board, a marque so beloved of the "independent" tests run in Tom's Hardware that it seems to win them all before even being switched on. In addition, HalfLife 2 may have been massive but arguably Battlefield 2 has given more fun to more folks without the Valve/Steam online nightmare.
Just my 2 cents.
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Ah, the perils of publishing. I remember in the early Fall of 1989 seeing a great many glossy books and magazines that celebrated the great events that happened over the past decade. Then the Berlin Wall came down. Oops!
On the whole you're right, PC World has long since outlived its usefulness... it focuses on the merchandising and mainstream products but usually only catches onto a new, cool device months (years?) after the fact. By the time PC World is trumpeting the 6600GT Graphics Board, the 7800GT is released making it obsolete.
At one point it was THE magazine to read if you were a home mod hobbiest, or you wanted to know what's going on in the industry. The internet has killed these types of magazines off for the most part... Wired got smart and went more for trend-spotting and reporting. But PCWorld is at the bottom of my list of consults after HardOCP, Anandtech, Toms Hardware, DriverHeaven, etc.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
Well I guess this should be take as a grain of salt.
I work for a large US cell carrier. I support devices across the data end, pda side, well everything on our network.
The 650 is the largest hunk of junk that EVER crossed the PDA world. About 1 in 50 work properly.
And the 650 is used mostly by non techies. Realtors, doctors, lawyers. And salesguys, and people who think it is cool to lug it around. Which is fine.
We have to replace them out at an alarming rate. Exchanges through the roof. One multinational manufacture of corporate jets, had to have 5 sent to him in one week. I personally oversaw the case, and each unit. Two screens died, one had the white screen of death, and another would not let itself be unlocked for international use..
Not to mention early models only supporting palm branded blue tooth devices.
And a PDA that needs a 30 meg update download? Try telling this to the exec on the go.
I am operating system agnostic, as well as eqipment. I am 35 years old and been in tech all of my life, and never NEVER has anything made me cringe when an escalation hits my desk, and it is usually a 650.
I wish these reviewers would not use it for a week and then write a review. They need to do a Car and Driver six month review. They would change their tune.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
I'd hate to come off as a fanboy, but the fact that PSP made a decent appearance on the list while the DS didn't touch it makes me question the research behind it. Shouldn't a device centered around software actually HAVE decent software to make this list? Sony's even been crippling homebrew, which negates its best use so far.
I've run Opera 8 (haven't run 8.5, as I've had no actual need to run a on 95 install, but there's no major changes, just bugfixes and removal of the registration features), just for kicks, FWIW...
One factor for Avant not running on 95 is that it needs IE, because it uses IE for rendering.