The Year's Best Gadget Ideas

valdean writes "David Pogue, the influential personal technology columnist for the New York Times, has chosen what he calls '10 of the year's best small, sweet improvements in our electronic lives.' Rather than your average pseudo-commercial list of branded devices, it's a list of improvements. As Pogue puts it at the end of his column: 'Come New Year's Eve, raise one tiny toast to the anonymous engineers whose eccentricities or idealism brought these sparkling developments to life.' They are (sans explanation): the folding memory card, the voice mail VCR, the front-side TV connector, the bigger-than-TV movie, TV à la carte, the outer-button flip phone, the free domain name, the modular DVD screen, the family-portrait burst mode, and the hybrid high-definition tape.'"

Comments

Can't read article, summary anyone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Usual NYT 'comeon' to get you to register with them to read the article.

Google 'trick' no longer works. They lost their NYT partner status?

Re:New Spin

[Adeptus_Luminati]

If I had mod points I'd give you some!!

The NYT lost my Email!

[DumbSwede]

I know there will be dozens of other posts about the NYT's registration policy. I however registered long ago and had to overcome an early problem with the NYT's system -- its password field used to accept 20 characters and I used 16, only to find out the registration got truncated to 15 characters. Using 16 characters would not get you in. Well that was 2 or 3 years ago, they have probably ironed out those old problems. BUT now my email no longer registers as a valid registration after having visited the site several times a year mostly from following Slashdot.org article posting links (which usually just painlessly whisked me to the articles without a login).

So they take a system users already hate and make it worse evidently by forcing you to reregister every other year or so even if you have visited the site frequently. I could understand if some cookie had been purged from my system forcing me to give my Email, but it says my Email is not on record and so have to go through the whole registration again. I know I'm using the right Email because the login screen tries to fill in the password (for the Email the NYT doesn't recognize!) This never happens to me on Ebay or Amazon, but it seems to happen frequently on non-retail sites.

Is this just sloppiness on their part or is this some (however inane) logic to purging older registrations from the system?

Other than a pipe for spamming what purpose do these registrations serve?

Re:New Spin

[ottothecow]

Just fucking suck it up and sign up already. You will never have to do it again and its the fricking new york times...they arent going to try to steal your identity or report you to the FBI for reading to many terrorist articles. It's not like its a link to some unknown source thats not worth your time. Think of it as what you need to do for the priveledge of reading one of the premier papers free...if you dont agree, walk down the street and buy a copy (dont even think about subscribing, then you not only give them your email and some bogus info but you give them your real address and credit card number...GASP)