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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.
There *are* better things out there than the iPod. How is this surprising? And when you have such a generalized list...well, you will always get strange results. What was the criteria for determining a product that would make the list?
Over the years, PC World has becaome very toned down, and I see them only reviewing full PC's, never individual components.
To see products like:
NVidia GeForce 6600 GT Graphics Board
Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 SATA NCQ Internal Hard Drive
Plextor PX-716UF Rewritable DVD Drive
Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Motherboard
That was a nice suprise, and even though I may not agree with the list, it was still interesting to see what they picked.
Nothing for you to see here, Please move along.
Are we to believe that all those things came about in 2005? The wikipedia article on wikipedia, for instance, mentions that "Wikipedia began as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia on January 15, 2001. "
why do some of these products just seem like ads? Its hard not to laugh when you come up on something like this :
"Microsoft Windows Media Player 10 Media Player" . I have no idea how media player is the best media player. The article cant explain it either. hmmm
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Um, GMail? Now I know we love google and all, but its web-based email. Admittedly, it has more storage than its competitor, but I'm still missing the part that makes it thesecond best product of 2005. Are we that hard up for products? Of course when it comes to "Top Ten" lists such as these opinions are like armpits, but web-based email? I wouldn't have put it in the top 20, to be honest with you, but that's just IMFreakinO. Number two???? Sigh.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
They're confident that nothing good will be introduced in October , November or December?
I checked the list several times but I couldn't find "Slashdot using CSS" anywhere!
I'm a big tall mofo.
I actually clicked the link to RTFA for once. And then all I see is a list! Surely they should specify what the ranking is based on? For me, security and reliability is important. For some people, it's ease of use. And for others, it's whether the icons use cartoon characters. Free advice to PC World: put some context as to what the ranking is based on! What were the criteria? And, if the criterias didnt weigh equally let us know that too?
... 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
avant?... sorry never heard of it.
i dont have time to scour the web looking for cult browsers. my point is that for mainstream browsers - part of which firefox has now become - it is clearly a crowd pleaser.
"crowd pleasing" = doesnt use gay looking icons to enable lusers to click on the correct button in the toolbar (read: internet explorer's BIG gold star favorites button, and the hugely fashionable history button with a big arrow pointing in a counter-clockwise fashion, just so people remember history means in the past).
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.
What is the difference between sorting emails into folders and archiving messages with labels? If you want to know what emails have the label, you click the link ... they're all there and yet... none of them exist in your inbox. If you want to remove them from the folder but still be able to search for them... remove the label. If you quickly want to remove all the messages with that label from the inbox, you click the link, click all, and click archive.
Seriously. The Gmail interface is quite a bit different than a normal email client, in order to be happy using I think one has to abandon previous notions of how to get things done. Using labels is a very powerful tool and can easily be made to mimik the use of folders, all you need to know is how.
~Anders
Use labels. Labels can do everything that folders can, and more. (A message can have more than one label, but in a folder-based system, a message can't be in more than one folder at a time.)
JP
Why's an Alienware computer ranked so highly, even above Google?
God, that must be a hell of a computer... Or a hell of a sponsoring.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Which is cool and all, except on the other side of the pond (ie: not America) they've had this thing called USB-on-the-go for some time now. Quite simply, you plug in any camera that is USB Mass Storage Device compliant (the ones that you plug into your computer and it just sees a drive, or if you prefer - a decent camera as opposed to a cheap crappy one that requires some sort of manufacturer's application to retrieve the photos) into a USBotG device and the USBotG device is suddenly a host for the camera (or any other USBotG device, like say - another mp3 player) and poof, you've got a 1:1 connection going on.
So, I can take my iRiver H300 series mp3 player, hook it up to your iRiver H300 series player, and we can do sneakernet p2p all day long.
Why would you think Apple would restrict it to just cameras, hmm?
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
It's strange that you had such bad experiences them because you seem to be quite alone with that as far as I know.
...) and I haven't seen anything like you mention on there. And those forums are normally very quick in showing if a product has problems. Like they did when the first version had problems with the memory which finally got resolved by Palm. I have the GSM version, so maybe it's the CDMA version that you have problems with?
I have one for some months now and I absolutely love it. I occasionally read the forums for treo users (mytreo.net, treocentral.com,
Personally I think it is finally a usable pda-phone that works as it should. I can totally recommend it.
>And a PDA that needs a 30 meg update download?
Actually, you need 11 megabytes free on the device to upgrade the firmware. Arguably, execs on the go shouldnt even be doing this, their IT departments should be handling system updates. You wouldnt want them to upgrade from 2000 to XP on their own would you?
Granted, it is overhyped, but it does a lot of things people want. I just wish it wasnt so big and ugly.
In my opinion, PC World, and all the product reviewers, sometimes skew results in the direction they want them to go. Sometimes they do that by not reviewing the most popular product, but comparing the competitors only. Sometimes they change the results with tricky writing.
Very unfortunately, it has become entirely acceptable in the U.S. culture to take money to allow corruption. For an example, look at the U.S. government.
An example of what appears to be corruption is that magazines and columnists are recommending Sunbelt Software's CounterSpy. Until September, at least, CounterSpy would crash Windows if it couldn't get an internet connection. None of the reviewers noticed that, giving me the impression that they didn't test the software thoroughly. If they didn't test the software thoroughly, how can they say it is the best? Who supplied the collection of spyware they used to test?
Also, CounterSpy seems to try to take advantage of customers who don't have technical knowledge. For example, CounterSpy sometimes tags text (.TXT files) as serious threats, even when the text file has nothing but printable ASCII characters. Is this done to try to make customers think CounterSpy is more important than it really is?
What I say here about CounterSpy has been verified for me by Sunbelt Software employees.
Look at PC World's review of Roxio Easy Media Creator: "While version 7.5 remains a bit ponderous to navigate and threatens to overwhelm users with choices, this solid update pulls EMC even with Nero 6.6 Ultra Edition."
Why is Easy Media Creator first choice if it is "even"? Also, did the reviewer take into account Roxio's history of releasing buggy software?
The review of one of the most expensive APC backup power supplies reads like an ad to get customers to pay more for power they don't really need. Also, the reviewer did very little testing.
The reviewer says "Power surges and outages can impair productivity and damage expensive equipment." I've never known a power outage to damage computer equipment. (With the Windows 98 FAT file system, it is necessary to run Scandisk after a sudden power outage.) The statement seems like a sales message. Computers need backup power supplies, but a much smaller one would be fine for most users. That fact isn't mentioned.