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2005 Foot In Mouth Awards

jollyroger1210 writes "Wired is running a story on the 2005 Foot In Mouth Awards." From the article: "Tech execs say the darndest things. And so do shuffling presidents, and disgraced scientists, and Wikipedia fakers. It's time to relive 2005's biggest spoken gaffes."

5 of 322 comments (clear)

  1. Re:foot in mouth? or the truth? by Osty · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, considering the Mororola RAZR phone is one of the hottest-selling out there, and the Apple iTunes phone is a flop, I'd say I believe the guy from Motorola.

    You know, the "Apple iTunes phone" is made by Motorola, and actually was the subject of that quote. The Nano and the ROKR (like the RAZR, but with iTunes compatibility) were released around the same time, and the quote is basically saying, "Screw the Nano. Get a ROKR and you can have your iTunes songs and a phone all in the same unit." Of course, the ROKR is sucking pretty bad, and the Nano has been insanely popular. Thus, foot in mouth.

  2. Re:did you see by robnauta · · Score: 5, Informative

    The "640K should be enough for everybody" quote was made by an IBM official. The first IBM PC had the CGA or MGA graphics at memory address 0xB0000 or 0xB8000. The EGA card which was introduced with the IBM AT in 1984 had its memory at 0xA0000, limiting system memory to 640K. The quote was made in response to accusations that IBM needlessly limited system memory to 640 K by putting it at 0xA0000 when it could also have used 0xD0000 or higher.
    It has nothing to do with Microsoft. MS-DOS would use up to 768 K without problems if you didn't have an EGA or VGA card.

  3. Re:The site is slashdotted... by philks · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" -- Thomas Hesse, president of Sony BMG's global digital business division The music giant responds in an NPR interview to complaints that anti-copying technology on some of its CDs creates serious security vulnerabilities in computers

  4. Re:"640K ought to be enough for anybody" by Zaatxe · · Score: 4, Informative

    I helped developing a operating system kernel back in my university years and we also had this limit and that's because of the 386 memory management. We had to remap all the memory twice, one half to be accessed by programs and the other half to be accessed by the operating system in a root level (sorry, it was over 10 years ago, I don't really remember the details of why it was really needed). Since the 386 can address up to 4Gb of memory, half of this is 2Gb. Don't blame Bill Gates this time, blame Intel. (By the way, is there anyone there who knows Linux well enough to tell us if it also has this limit or something like that?)

    --
    So say we all
  5. Re:foot in mouth? or the truth? by JonathanBoyd · · Score: 4, Informative
    Wrong, the Razr was released almost a calendar year before the Nano.

    But he was talking about the ROKR, not the RAZR.