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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
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?
Sorry, I agree with the article. Gmail is the best web-based mail package hands down. I forward all my email to my Gmail account now.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
GMail is good web based email. That in itself sets it far ahead of its competitors. It's really the finest example of what a web interface can do.
10.4 is a lot faster in my experience , It works more swiftly on my old g3 iMac (400mhz g3) (turned off the widgets) .. but besides that . .. not to mention the user land programs .. though i do prefer the 10.2 look I don't think there are that many differences on the GUI front
It has a great number of functional improvements on the command line and in the system programs
On my g4 machine it simply flies . spotlight is also grand
I would rather that Ubuntu had placed higher though (not strictly a 2005 thing )
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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
It does require at least 512MB RAM but I have never had a problem with it (both my Macs have 768 , though it was not bad on a 256MB mac mini i had a go on .. till you open up too many programs , a ram upgrade fixed that little glitch) .10.4 has some noticeable improvements as a client computer and some great user level improvements . If your friend can afford it , tell him to get 256MB more ram in the machine , s/he will notice a world of difference . .. bars . I suspect the problem they are having is to do with Spotlight or running Dashboard .
I am more a *nix Zealot (though not really a zealot) than a mac zealot , but OS X is one of the best User level *nix's I have ever had the pleasure to use
Honestly though , the GUI has not really changed bar some of the removed um
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
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.
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.