Slashdot Mirror
The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time
Khammurabi writes "PC World compiled a list of the 25 worst tech products of all time. From the article: 'At PC World, we spend most of our time talking about products that make your life easier or your work more productive. But it's the lousy ones that linger in our memory long after their shrinkwrap has shriveled, and that make tech editors cry out, "What have I done to deserve this?"' Number one on the list? AOL."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
..this article is suspect!
Good list... where's X10?
And, if you include Windows ME, where's Windows 3.1? Actually, it might not be a bad idea to have an honorable mention "collection" entry and include all of the horrible Windows versions.... (95, CE, ME, NT)
Windows ME
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
I had a zip drive and at the time it filled a large gap between the floppy and CD rewriteable (which was very costly).
It was good in my opinion, it just never developed fast enough in terms of capacity.
But the "chiclet" keyboard should've been listed separately. When I saw the new MacBook laptops having a similiar design, I freaked out until I tried it out at the Apple store. You can count on Steve Jobs to re-invent an old technology dog.
You're just saying that because I signed up with AOL under you, and you got 10 free hours.
I am surprised that Packard Bell didn't make the list. They made some pretty crappy computers in the late 80s.
-Matt
The Apple laptop that boasted about its internal wirless card but was made of titanium and so there was no signal?
The Omnireader OCR. An early OCR scanner that read one line at a time, manually operated.
I don't think that the OqO should be rated so poorly, there were lots of products that were not so great the first time around, but got better in subsequent versions. It's far from the only portable computer that runs way too hot.
This space intentionally left blank.
Microsoft Bob continues to take a beating that I think is unfair. (I wonder how many of the people who talk about it have ever seen it.) It was pretty useless, true, but it was also an attempt to be genuinely innovative, and deserves credit for failing while trying to do something really new.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
AOL, Realplayer, WinME... These people know what they're talking about.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Soon MS bashing will be 3rd or 4th post on every thread...then where will Slashdot be?
I always look for the "Printer Friendly" link when I run into an article like that. It generally renders the whole article as one continuous chunk, but it doesn't print it. That's a tip kids. Write it down.
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
pretty myopic and self flattering of this age - I could pick up a 1950's copy of Popular Mechanics and find lots of stupendous techno-flops. One that comes to mind is a TV set with a built in 35mm slide viewer. You guys have no idea.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Do you mean the wireless video maker? If so, they're actually great for the extremely low price. We still use them in our store after 5 years.
I was tired of the old amber screen too, but CGA was just not what I thought of when I thought of a "color monitor"
I mean look at this crap.
I grew up playing King's Quest and think he was just sunburned, or embarrased all the time.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Ahh, the Apple puck mouse. What a pity it didn't make the top 25. I used one for a day. Instant RSI that thing will give you. Kudos to the person who designed that; you have to be really good to design a mouse that is SO bad.
-- Cheers!
The reason? It has trained at least one, and probably two, generations of computer users to expect the computer to be fragile. It has made those people afraid to simply experiment with the computer because they might do something to "break" it.
This is a big reason there are so many people who don't want to learn how the computer works. By training at least one generation of people that computers are fragile, Microsoft has in a single stroke managed to limit people's willingness to learn about the computer they use every day, and thus limited their effectiveness with it.
That Microsoft also tends to (or has tended to) write their software in such a way as to hide the details of errors that occur only exacerbates the problem. And the constant stream of critical security flaws only serves to hammer in the final nail in the coffin.
Hence, I have to nominate Windows as the worst tech product of all time.
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
Seriously, AOL shouldn't be #1... They just got in really good with the 90% of non-tech savy Internet users from the beginning, and gave them a nice little interface to the Internet, making it easier for them to move around.
Doesn't matter if it costs 2x as much as any other ISP, or that the interface is so kludgy that you need to upgrade your video card, or that they censor the Internet to conform to it's mass majority of users' tastes, or that the "You've got mail" sound that hasn't changed...(ever?) makes most people want to wretch all over their keyboards, or that their spyware/virus "protection" is a miserable failure and should be uninstalled, or that their "Here's your 20th CD-ROM this month" ad campaign is probably the worst landfill culprit since the pet rock, or.....
Yeah, I guess they deserve it. =p
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
2) Minivans
3) Pickup trucks
4) Cell phones
5) iPods
Guess why...
I agree with their bashing of Realplayer — except they only criticize its current flaws. They forgot to mention the buggy releases that would grab all available CPU cycles and render the machine unusable. They're also guilty of starting a nasty trend that every other media player feels compelled to follow: using fancy "skins" that make the app look cool, but much harder to use.
I hate Realplayer as much as I hate everything else.
But then, why do you forget that Apple Quicktime has the same habit of installing itself as part of the startup on Windows, and it can not be removed - even if you set the option not to start at the startup of machine.
Yes, registry hacks work, but then whats the difference between Real and Apple?
I couldn't agree more. Already reading many comments on this article in other locations that are crying foul over AOL. Not that AOL was the best thing since sliced bread. But before other dial up ISPs, they were the only bread in town, unless you logged in to text services or one-at-a-time BBSs. Looking at AOL then, you see where the leap was made from online computing before 1989 and after. Color, pictures, multiuser chat, news, message boards, and email.
Strange, that's pretty similar to what we have now. If you read what they complain about, it is painfully obvious that the writer is either some 16 year old AOL basher without a clue or worse, an old elitist that wonders, "Didn't we all have private (D)Arpanet connections?"
Here's their complaints about AOL:
"How do we loathe AOL? Let us count the ways. Since America Online emerged from the belly of a BBS called Quantum "PC-Link" in 1989, users have suffered through..."
1. awful software
2. inaccessible dial-up numbers
3. rapacious marketing
4. in-your-face advertising
5. questionable billing practices
6. inexcusably poor customer service
7. enough spam to last a lifetime
8. more expensive than its major competitors
"This lethal combination earned the world's biggest ISP the top spot on our list of bottom feeders."
It goes on to say:
"AOL succeeded initially by targeting newbies, using brute-force marketing techniques. In the 90s you couldn't open a magazine (PC World included) or your mailbox without an AOL disk falling out of it. This carpet-bombing technique yielded big numbers: At its peak, AOL claimed 34 million subscribers worldwide, though it never revealed how many were just using up their free hours.
Advertisement (This is an actual paste... sorry, PC world gave me IN-YOUR-FACE advertising.)
Now, there are some valid arguments. For instance, they are notorious for screwing up your billing and not cancelling accounts properly. On the other hand, this article is targeting the original AOL. In your face advertising? Nobody but geeks knew what the net was in the early 90s. In the 90s, you couldn't exactly download the AOL client (more evidence this guy is 16). But let's go back.
Awful software: What did you expect, it ran on Windows 3.1. It was probably the only useful thing a home user ever ran on Windows 3.1
Inaccessible dial-up numbers: I had about 4 numbers locally, and most problems were because I screwed with my modem baud trying to squeeze out top speed.
Marketing: Back then, you had to convince people that they had a reason to even buy a computer, let alone get online with it.
Spam: We're placing the blame on AOL for this now?
Expensive: That's certainly true. I remember a point when they charged over $6 an hour or there abouts. Let's just say that you used your AOL time wisely (downloading all the porn you could within an hour), hehe. Yes, it would be considered highway robbery these days. Then again, so many out there are willing to pay $2 for a tv show (free to watch on your very large TV) to play on a itsy bitsy iPod screen. I'd rather pay $6 an hour for my Internet connection.
PCWorld probably made hundreds of thousands of dollars from AOL to carry their CDs for them. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
I8-D
Not to troll but WinME was immune to many of the problems which plagued later versions of Windows. Does that not count for anything? Of course, it rarely stayed up long enough to be useful as a bot or much else for that matter...
But, my parents use Windows ME with no problem at all. They didn't buy it separately or anything, it came preinstalled, and it's actually much better than Windows 98.
Since i've installed Firefox as default browser, AVG Antivirus and AdAware, there have been no problems at all with spyware, crashes and slow loading times.
I run Win2000, and consider myself to be very security conscious. (I'll leave the obvious joke-line open.) I'm always up-to-date patchwise, but I've had at least two or three viruses just from being on the net (this was with dialup).
WinME runs Word, Excel and Firefox, and let that bitch of a Kodak program pull pictures off their camera. It does everything they need to do.
Would I use it? No. But i'd take it any day over win98 or even winXP!
Who has actually used it and found it to be shit? It sounds like most people just spread the goss about how crap it is, without actually trying it. I don't advise trying it... but really, give some evidence if you're gonna bitch about the OS.
How could they forget Bonsai Buddy. Actually I liked the guy, he was a steady stream of income for me during high school and early college. Removing him and spyware was good business for myself and I'm sure plenty of you as well.
I'm pretty sure this was on digg a few hours ago. Anywho, this is what I posted there:
Some of the items on here, while they suck in retrospect, they were awesome when they came out, but you can't judge the past based on today's terms. The impact of some of these spawned new products and ideas.
I disagree with some of their inclusions to the "Worst Tech of all time". Especially the items listed in the (dis)honorable mention category. True, some of the products sucked, but I can think of worse offerings.
What they got wrong:
- AOL "was" cool before there were many dialup ISPs... most of you have been AOL users at one point or another.
- Real "was" cool before they started hi-jacking the system and changing codecs nightly.
- The IBM 75GXP was an awesome hard drive for some. (I still have mine) It never cratered on me...
- The Timex Datalink watch was awesome. Period.
- The Newton was cool before Palm.
- Motorola Rokr. Was there a better alternative at the time?
- The Zip Drive held more than most people's HDs when it came out. If it weren't for the low price of CD-R/RW drives, more people might still be using them.
Some products were cool, but their exection was poor. In this category:
- 3Com Audrey it does have broadband support, you need a USB network adapter. I have one here.
- PointCast had a great concept. Poor management and marketing.
- CueCat sucked in reality. The plan was awesome, and they're a helluva lot of fun to play with now! (thanks eBay!)
I also don't like the use "of all time" in all of these online "Top/Best/Worst ___" Lists. I especially don't like how they sensationalize a short list of items that one guy dislikes... and "of all time" goes back to 1989? Is the author 17 years old?
If they put AOL as the worst - they're going to have to condemn all the latest raft of sites such as YouTube, MySpace etc - the only reason that AOL got a bad name on the Internet was because it flooded a bunch of morons into Usenet and IRC - these are now very much back seat technologies. The latest bringers of idiocy (and lots of great content, but generally idiocy) just haven't got the means to shove it in your face!
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGuBx6Xj-PE
I'm surprised Internet Explorer 4 and/or Windows 98 didn't make it to the list. It introduced the concept of "web integration," and that was a disaster by any account: It slowed performance down to the bone, replaced the Windows shell with itself, dropped advertising right on the desktop, brutally ironed over DLLs as if there was no tomorrow, and (especially at first) introduced a ship full of bugs, all while adding no functional benefit. Almost all of this made its way into Windows 98, which immediately cursed that version and everything since then.
Unfortunately, with Windows 98 and later versions having phased out earlier versions over the years, a lot of people have gotten used to this stuff by now.
and all their products are dropped from heaven itself. There ya happy now /. modders? moo moo moo moo.
Where's ADA?
Get your Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool Here for FREE! - http://fedora.redhat.com
As for DRM, well that is still around and doing a brisk trade. Expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
I think you and the article author mean two different things. He means tech that was a failure. Not tech that is hated.
Big difference.
Yes on a list of most hated tech DRM and popups would be serious contenders but that is a list for another time. Granted, IE would again be high on the list. Bill Gates must be so proud.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I use AOL. It's great! I also own a Packard Bell PC computer running Windows ME with 64MB RAM. I'm l337 as well and oh...I work for Radio Shack.
Hi -
I know it is now long forgotten, but I remember making many jokes about Friday! back in the 1980's. As I tell people, it was kind of the Microsoft Bob of it's time...
(Friday! was an early PIM, or Personal Information Manager written in dBASE II. The name came from Robinson Crusoe's helper who was named Friday)
TWR
The PC World article should have mentioned that Microsoft Bob was spearheaded by Melinda French (now Melinda Gates, wife of Bill Gates)...
:p
I guess Microsoft loves to reward failures
Clearly the article is flawed, neither Windows Vista nor Clippy appear in the list.
The advance of cd burners (and later usb drives) coupled with the click of death and the high cost of zip disks and their small capacity just made them obsolete.
It wasn't bad tech. Just had a very limited lifespan.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
And if it's a site from which you read content more than a couple of times, there's a better solution than manually clicking on the printer version each time: use the uri transmogrifier of your choice (I love Pith Helmet.) to automatically turn urls into their printer-version form.
Yes, I think AOL is out of place on that list. From the perspective of a hard-core internet user, maybe they are a bad influence. But they picked their market and served it well. And unlike most products on that list, AOL was a smashing financial success. (RealPlayer and ZIP drives couldn't have done too bad either)
count me as part of the absolute smallest minority But i had very very few problems with ME. Of course, I never had to roll it out into a corp. environment (thank god) but at least it wasn't vulnerable to blaster and sasser. Also, I had great luck with Zip drives. I owned a parallel port 100 meg that's still working, and had a ton of zip disks that were a decent way to move files until CD-R's came down in price. Both products got a bad rep, but probably weren't as bad in practice as advertised.
On the other hand, the honorable mention list has some stuff that should have easily been top 25. The Hockey puck mouse? how many bong hits did those engineers do? That thing was useless for fine control. DivX? Way to almost spend yourself into bankruptcy Circuit City. WebTV? yes, let's confuse people even further. All three of those products were bad ideas from start to finish. At least ME and Zip drives had some sort of market. WebTV, Divx and the hockey puck were examples of the "they'll buy it because we say so" school of marketing.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Dude! Same here! The first Pentium machine I bought was a used PB Platinum 166. It ran and ran - I finally donated it to a school where I used to work. I know they had a horrible reputation, but this thing would not die.
The MacSaber
The original Zip drives were really pretty nice. The SCSI and IDE 100 meg drives were relatively fast too (for the time). People remember those drives as being painfully slow because many people had the external versions that connected via the *parallel port* (shudder). They managed to get a lot of Zip drives pre-installed in to machines but then they came out with a Zip 250 meg drive and several other variations. Of course the newer media didn't work on the older drives, but the worst part was the old 100 meg disks worked slow as heck in the newer drives because it had to do something special to write to them properly. What I think really killed them eventually was that the Zip disks were very expensive and the prices never went down!
They really could have replaced the 1.44 floppy disk if they had tried hard enough. I still have my old blue iomega 100 SCSI zip drive chugging away but I don't use it as much any more now that USB flash drives are almost everywhere and can finally run on everything short of DOS.
Some of the items on the list, although we love to hate them, are things that really did help the tech world make strides forward. For example, say what you want about AOL but, if it weren't for them, I still probably wouldn't be able to send email to my mom. Zip disks? Yes, they had click-of-death but, at the time, a portable 100MB for $10? That was unreal. PointCast? PointCast was the first time where you could have your very own, customized scrolling ticker on your screen... just like the ones on the CNN screen... but it only had the stuff *you* wanted. When it first came out, it was a marvel. All of these items changed the way that people thought about what they could do with computers when they first came out.
Contrast that with some items on the list that were complete disasters from the moment they were launched: IBM PC Jr., CueCat, Microsoft Bob... THOSE belong on the list. The list probably should have included some other items that had lofty ambitions but just never "took" (like OS/2). But, like I said, some of the ones on the list, I feel, aren't getting their due. We look at them now and see how worthless they are by today's standards (you can probably get any of these items on eBay for $5, now), but that ignores the impact they had when they were first released.
Perhaps the overhyping has forever biased me but the segway has to be the most absurd tech product.
2k for a bizarre scooter that was supposed to change my life forever? huh?
I don't actually use it for... well, what the hell was it supposed to be for? But my theater troupe uses an online ticketing service, and it's kinda nifty to be able to just scan the bar codes when they present the tickets. And all it took was a trip to Radio Shack and a downloaded driver.
Uh, you complain about the article, but apparently failed to read it. The article is not about bad technology (who could deny that pop-up ads and DRM are terrible), but about bad technology products, i.e. discrete items and/or services produced and marketed by individual companies. The article discusses specific products, not general trends in broad sectors of industry.
There is a reason top 10/25/100 lists count down to 1. Now where's the anticipation?
I am billdar, and I approve this message.
+1 Flamebait... I know.
They dare? They DARE?!? They dare to disparage the Timex Datalink?!?!?
Heathens!
I wore the crap out of my Datalink until it finally died in a pool in Arkansas of H2O exposure. Show me another watch that could sync up phone lists, memos and TIME to a PC and under linux no less (yes sir!). Not too bulky and had all the needed features. I'm talking the blinkly light version here, not the USB.
Consider today's watchscape, the best that's out there are the "atomic" (*cough* radio sync) watches and for the most part none of them work quite as well or have the anywhere near the feature set of the Good Old Ironman Datalink.
The best part was holding your breath long enough for the watch to finish the transfer without crapping out. Good times, good times.
Anything is possible given time and money.
http://www.pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/ 0,aid,125772,00.asp
The whole article in one page with pictures. (Printer friendly link)
1 America Online (1989-2006)
2 RealNetworks RealPlayer (1999)
3 Syncronys SoftRAM (1995)
4 Microsoft Windows Millennium (2000)
5 Sony BMG Music CDs (2005)
6 Disney The Lion King CD-ROM (1994)
7 Microsoft Bob (1995)
8 Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)
9 Pressplay and Musicnet (2002)
10 dBASE IV (1988)
11 Priceline Groceries and Gas (2000)
12 PointCast (1996)
13 IBM PCjr. (1984)
14 Gateway 2000 10th Anniversary PC (1995)
15 Iomega Zip Drive (1998)
16 Comet Cursor (1997)
17 Apple Macintosh Portable (1989)
18 IBM Deskstar 75GXP (2000)
19 OQO Model 1 (2004)
20 CueCat (2000)
21 Eyetop Wearable DVD Player (2004)
22 Apple Pippin @World (1996)
23 Free PCs (1999)
24 DigiScents iSmell (2001)
25 Sharp RD3D Notebook (2004)
I wouldn't mind you in my head, if you weren't so clearly mad -Lews Therin Telamon
Inability to come up with something meaningful to write ineviably always leads to "Best ... of all time" or "Worst ... of all time" babbled passed off as articles. Editors (of "professional" publications, no less) should've seen this kind of busy-work garbage from a mile away instead of running'em...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
The shoe fitting fluoroscope was a common fixture in shoe stores during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. A typical unit, like the Adrian machine shown here, consisted of a vertical wooden cabinet with an opening near the bottom into which the feet were placed. When you looked through one of the three viewing ports on the top of the cabinet (e.g., one for the child being fitted, one for the child's parent, and the third for the shoe salesman or saleswoman), you would see a fluorescent image of the bones of the feet and the outline of the shoes.
The machines generally employed a 50 kv x-ray tube operating at 3 to 8 milliamps. When you put your feet in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, you were effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube. The only "shielding" between your feet and the tube was a one mm thick aluminum filter. Some units allowed the operator to select one of three different intensities: the highest intensity for men, the middle one for women and the lowest for children.
Naturally children loved this gadget and kids were getting months of radiation exposure every chance they could get! I know the list is all modern technology but this product is so magically horrid it should get honorary mention...
I'll continue the "Me Too!" posts. I've got a PB 166 too...though I stuck an 'overdrive' chip in it so it's a whopping 233 now. It worked very well for me for a long time. Now, its a foot rest under my desk.
1. The IBM PC. It was slower than many CP/M available at the time that cost less. It uses a brain-dead "16" bit cpu called the 8088 that was used a night mare of an addressing system. The default operating system was this bad copy of CP/M from Microsoft. And it didn't even follow the standard for the gender of the printer port or the serial port! What made it a total nightmare was that it sold in HUGE numbers and created a standard that sucked and managed to kill off better machines.
2. The IBM AT. Just when you thought their couldn't be a CPU worse then the 8088 Intel creates the an addressing system that makes the 8088 look good. Then IBM creates new standard based in this nightmare did I mention that they created an even less standard format for the RS-232 comport? But wait there is more Microsoft creates a now OS that has a bad habit of crashing hard drives and prevent you from creating any hard drive partition bigger than 33 megabytes.
And the ever popular Disk-doubler! A great program from Microsoft that they included with MS-DOS 6. Not only did it contain code stolen from Stac but it also could lost vast amount of data on your drive!
There are so many others that should be on that list.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
To be fair, XP and 2003 are easier. In roughly the same way that the last guy in the prison gang rape will probably be easier to take (if you catch my drift).
I was amazed by how many crashes I got. Granted linux gives me troubles during installs too but at least they are crashes I can work with and fix. How the fuck can Windows XP crash on a vm setup? It is not like it has any exotic fucking hardware to mess it up?
The funny thing, windows ME was not that bad. Not anyworse then windows 95 really. In fact that whole generation was the same, random crashes during install for no good reason and taking centuries just to get the files on to the fucking HD.
People who say Windows is easier to install then linux have never installed windows.
Next excersise, Install Slacw 1.0, anyone willing to take bets on when my head will explode?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
SPAM!
I blame Cantor and Siegel...
Curses unto them until the end of time!
Circuit City DiVX
How could they forget???
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
The Enron bandwidth market springs to mind. Never made much sense to me. And, hey, it's Enron.
My college SO had a Packard Hell.
We held the video ram in place with a piece of electrical tape. If we didn't, jostling the case caused the SOB to fall out, and we'd have to tip the case over to rattle the RAM chip out.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I was online with pictures, multiuser chat, news, message boards, and email in 1981, on both CompuServe and GEnie. AOL invented nothing. You have no idea what you are talking about.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
3 was good. 4 was very sucky. It sticks in my mind as one of the worst releases of any widely used software. I disagree about the zip drive. I never had one fail. Not that it isn't kinda irrelevant now.
I never clip my fingernails for fear of dangling symbolic links.
Inaccessible dial-up numbers: I had about 4 numbers locally, and most problems were because I screwed with my modem baud trying to squeeze out top speed.
OTOH, to be fair to the article, in the month or two following when they first went to unlimited time it was near impossible to get anything but a busy signal, especially in the evening, and at least where I lived. We actually took to dialing the AOL number with our phone and, when we finally didn't get a busy signal, quickly hitting the sign-on. Usually the program would get to the point where it tries to establish a carrier before the server timed out, and all you'd have to do was hang up. (Hey, it worked!) We did this because we could make repeated calls with the phone faster than the computer and AOL client would, so the dozen or so tries it usually took to get an answer only took a minute instead of five.
Ooooh. What did I do to deserve that?
Well, the irony is delicious.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
PC WORLD hits the top of my list :P
Founding member: He-Man Windoze Hater Club
Anyway, we could nitpick this list to death, but man oh man, that fact that DIVX players aren't on this list is a crime.
"To lead the people, you must walk behind them"
Any list of the worst technical products that doesn't mention The Coleco Adam is just wrong.
AOL was great back in the day of dialup modems, before the web. Compared to its closest competitor, Prodigy, it rocked. It just hasn't aged well, once it became nothing more than an ugly advertising platform with a ridiculously slow web proxy.
The Oqo is cool. Maybe not a huge success, but still a neat device.
And the Zip drives were wildly popular, even though some stopped working. The original Canon optical drives in the NeXT machines had a near 100% failure rate over two years.
Actually, I've never used an Amiga 600 , but the description makes clear that it was a huge fuck-up. Less powerful than its predecessor, and more expensive! Pure genius, no wonder Commodore went down.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I mean, they are the 'Happy Shopper' company of the PC World (pun intended).
The UNIX that makes UNIX lovers long for Windows. My first job in '89 involved working with a 286 Xenix box and it sucked in countless ways. I had to deal with it again 10 years later and it hadn't improved at all in that amount of time. It looked particularly inadequate sitting next to several AIX, Sun and Linux machines that it shared the lab with. Not even HPUX sucks as much as SCO, and that's saying a lot.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I guess this must be non-gaming tech gadgets. You could make another list of the top 25 worst gaming gadget, and they would all be worse than anything on this list.
While not being familiar with most of the products listed I can't agree more with the top 2 choices. RealPlayer (BUFFERING) with its hidden invasive system settings that were really hard to turn off (although recent versions seem to suck a bit less) would have been my choice for first place. And even though I live in Iceland and luckily have never had to use AOL the online buzz has made the name synonymous with poison. Many people have suggested DRM'd products should be on the list. I think it's too early to tell... I believe a decent DRM model can work out well in the future so while it's tempting shit all over DRM I don't think it's time yet.
Excellent points. On the 'expensive' issue, though.. GEnie was charging up to $36 per hour for dial-up connections for "prime time gaming". At it's worst, AOL only extorted $6 or so per hour.
I remember having to explain the $300+ monthly bills until I took an in-game "job" with SimuTronics (now Play.net ) so they would pay my net bill.
...it lets you install XP on a new build from an Upgrade package.
rj
http://www.sinclair-research.co.uk/c5/images/h-c5- l.jpg
It's the equivalent of viewing digital photos on your TV now (which my camera supports). It was probably overpriced at the time though. People didn't spend beyond their means back then.
Freedom: "I won't!"
Let's start with "popup ads..."
Did they include "annoying pop-over ads that obscure the article -- which, coincidentally show up in this very article, ironically enough"?
C'mon ... so many to choose from, the Black Watch and the QL just for starters ...
I was having trouble reading the article over the constant drone of the grinding ax.
Seriously, AOL was bloated and crashy, but it also didn't assume that the users (like your parents and grandparents) knew how to install Winsock or how to configure DHCP. Most of AOLs competition came from small time ISPs run by and for geeks. Much of the hatred of AOL stemed from them making the Internet a place for everybody (including the stupid people), not just the geeks. Of course there was Compuserve and Prodigy too, but for some reason those services don't seem to draw the kind of hate that AOL does.
Anyway, the rest of the selection is either obvious to Slashdot readers (everybody loves to pick on Bob), or something the columnnist was apparently bitten by (SoftRam is hardly the only $30 utility for Windows or any OS that is a complete rip off).
I read the internet for the articles.
It's a dishonorable mention...
Those bastards put my lovable puck mouse in dishonourable mentions! Bastards! I loved my little blueberry puck and it was not an ergonomic nightmare, it was easy if you weren't freaking brain dead! It's probably my third favourite mouse I've ever owned. I would use it today if it were both optical, and had some sort of scrolling feature... and if I hadn't stepped on it and broken it. Freaking anti-apple bastards!
Or IBM's microchannel PS/2?
Or Apple's version of Unix, A/UX?
or the First Virtual e-commerce payment system?
or SETS for secure ecommerce?
or the DEC rainbow PC?
My first guess would have been just about anything Gateway made. The Dells are running a close second on my list. What's worse than these is my cheap watch made by some China company called SPARK. It looks like SHARP, but SPARK? C'mon... "We are lost.. it's okay though for with my Spark watch, we can make fire."
Even though I use Windows on a daily basis, and even used to work for Microsoft, I have to agree with what you said about Windows making people consider computers to be fragile. I hadnt thought about it in those terms, but when I read your post, I thought about the hundreds of users that I have encountered over the years who are literally afraid that their computer will turn on them at any second if they strike the wrong key, and in one case, a person who was afraid of using the right mouse button, because their friend (mac owner) told them that it was the addition of the right mouse button that made Windows unstable, and that it should never be used.
Being a Windows user from 3.0 on, gives one the feeling somewhat akin to being a veteran of some inter-global man vs. machine war, from which there are many survivors but all with major injuries. As the cursor moves closer to the Outlook icon, the hand trembles, wondering if this is the day that Outlook decides to strike back!
Strangely, I haven't trusted MS since.
Compuserve was around long before AOL. I credit them with laying the table with all the bad manners AOL excercised later on when they bought them. I blame them for lowering the default intelligence required to participate online, which was the chisel cracking open the floodgates that was AOL. The lack of accountibility, idiocy, and random utter garbage that is the majority of the internet grew exponentially by the second after compuserve started up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes, a product that sold by the hundreds of thousands. Probably the most popular device to add radon to drinking water: http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/quackcures/revi gat.htm
Good times.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Have they ever made anything that hasn't been complete shit? They're even worse than Compaq.
web pages that should be 1 page, but get hacked up and spread over 12 pages to make you look at advertisements.
Ok, I'm going to go against the flow on this one.
Heralded as free computing it hasn't lived up to its' promise yet. You eventually spent so much time making it work that a license for a Microsoft operating system seemed like a steal. While proponents of Linux claimed Microsoft operating systems were insecure and fragile, Linux shipped broken out of the box.
Among other things Linux came with a friendly and knowledgable community which when you asked questions like "Why doesn't my mouse work?", or "What is vertical refresh rate?", you received helpful answers such as "It works for me!" and "RTFM".
After years and years of being "ready for the desktop" developers and disitributors finally came to an understanding that the average Joe would never use a CLI as his primary method to interact with a computer.
In recent times Linux has been copying succesful elements from more popular operating systems in an attempt to become less intimidating for new users. Unfortunately copying instead of innovating implies at best second place. Linux was dead last in implementing viable solutions for killer-features such as proper handling of removable media and wireless networking.
They should have blasted IE4 -- the first IE that really muckled itself into the OS. Install IE-4 on the user's machine, and run the risk of trashing their whole OS. I saw it happen in tech support, and it led to the whole mishmash of exploits that allowed IE to get into Windows and mess up your box. The integration is better now, but the idea remains suspect.
The whole list looks whacked. AOL may not be something I would ever use, but "worst tech product???". It's an intro to the web for newbies. That doesn't make it "bad tech".
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
AOL is a fine product. It was Mac-like (people that poo an AOL are almost certainly PC technoweebs or extra heavy testosterone laden, I humbly suggest)and is still by far the easiest way for actual people to get on the internet and use the darn thing.
1) built in email client
2) built in features
3) all the nasty parameters hidden (pop, proxy, smtp, DNCP, IP...) when people get off into browser preferences, they are rightly terrified.
I have used AOL as an installation diagnostic tool: if AOL doesn't work, then it is certainly an equipment error.
In the end, the only part of this WORST-3 ever products that could be shown to even work, was a reverse-engineered free PC Magazine utility (a dozen lines of code) that purposely fragmented memory below 640K so that no DOS TSR could grab more than about 10K of RAM.
Syncronys Softcorp stole its one functional component line-for-line ... including the worthless no-op instructions put in there just to identify the actual author.
I actually ran Pointcast on a spare laptop in the living room back in the day. I actually thought it was pretty useful.
Once in the middle of the night I got up and went out to the kitchen for a snack. Our cat was on the back of the couch staring at the Pointcast screensaver. She was transfixed. Everytime it would change, she would twitch a little. She loved to watch it while we were sleeping. I guess she liked the contrasting colors and movement.
I wrote a note to the Pointcast folks about this. They were quite amused. They sent me a T-shirt. I thought that was nice of them.
As others have noted, X10 products really aren't that bad. While I won't buy them (due to that ghastly ad campaign), I'll use them readily enough when they're given to me for free.
Most of the other stuff on the list, I wouldn't use if you paid me. For a few, I'd either open fire or call a HazMat team in.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
There hasn't been a good computer magazine since the early days of BYTE :)
or GameGear or Atari Lynx.
I don't know if you could qualify the NeoGeo as a failure either as it managed to stick around for quite a while despite the insanely high cost of the console and games. You could also add the Sega CD and Sega 32X to the list of tried and failed. Has a game console add on ever succeeded? *tries to think of one that has*
Anyway, the article completely missed the video game market for failed products.
I realize that not everyone was that lucky, and maybe including ZIP in the list is reasonable. But in point of fact, I never encountered a ZIP drive that didn't work. I sort of think that what kept people from using ZIP was the relatively high cost of the media, not the occasional spectacular device failures.
Now if we want to talk about crappy data storage hardware, let's bring up the subject of CD drives. I have four CDRW drives on the household computers and not one of them can be relied on to write more than a couple of hundred MB without an error. OK, CDR/CDRW have lousy S/N ratios because evey vendor uses their own proprietary recording layer formulation in order to avoid paying royalties (just another benefit of Intellectual Property laws). You'd think that commercial pressed CDs would read reliably. Not so -- not even on a PC that's only a year old or on a USB CD drive borrowed from my wife's sewing machine. In fact, when I have to load data from a CD, I often end up roaming around the house looking for a drive that will read it, copy all the files to disk and move them to the target machine via the household network. Back when I used to work with a lot of machines, we'd occasionally get a batch of machines with OK CD or CDRW drives. But most of the drives we got failed within a year or three and had to be replaced with other drives that failed within a year or three.
CD is a teriffic medium for music where an occasional error is tolerable. For data, it sucks. With the possible exception of magnetic tape, CD has to be the most troublesome and least reliable data storage medium since paper tape.
And maybe we should add PC magnetic tape to the list of really bad technology products. I can't tell you how many magnetic tapes I have found to be unreadable after the unfortunate owner's hard drive had crashed or been eaten by a virus. And that's not just Travan and similar junk. The last computer I had to deal with that used tape was a Netware server that ate three drives in three years under warranty. These drives listed for about $1000 each. Another, much cheaper, drive purchased after the warranty ran out lasted 18 months. It was on its fifth drive when it was retired. By then, I was buying used low end drives for relatively reasonable prices. Worked every bit as well as the classy drives (i.e. dismally)
After drive number four I stuffed a drive caddy into a junker (486SX33), installed Linux and backed up the system every night to a hard drive as well as to tape (on days when we had a functioning tape drive). The network backup was much easier to run. Infinitely easier to recover data from. ... and comperable in cost if one doesn't need many levels of backup.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Haha! I had one of those too, and it also taught me to dial with the cradle switch. Though as people responded, touchtone service came slow in many places.. hell my cottage still doesn't have touchtone. When you pick up the phone you are greeted with a 2 or 3 second silence followed by a loud snap as some relay flicks too. (though at least we aren't on a party line anymore...)
:x
...and the winner is
PC World's website.
I have no idea what tech they are using but all I got were ads, blank pages and registration forms (apparently at random). Are they slashdotted or just sucky? I guess I'll never know because I won't be back for a while.
Since I can't RTFA, here's some other nominees in no particular order:
Sony CDs w/DRM - possibly the only product on this list that someone should actually have been arrested for
MS ActiveX - because "sued" != "arrested"
MS IE - and you can't arrest a company
Trident video cards - the only hardware I've de-smoked...repeatedly.
IBM printers - products so bad they killed the brand.
MS Word - not because it is the worst but because it killed a far superior tool -> the productivity losses from this are literally in the billions.
I'm sure there's more but I'd better get back to making sure that my project doesn't end up on this list...
Free software will eat MSFT for lunch when people realize they paid all that money for nothing. If we weren't so busy using our GNU/Linux systems we could get out and win more converts. I passed a thumbdrive with OpenOffice2 to a niece the other day. She had no idea free software was legal and capable. Where have I failed?
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
I'm not real good with ages, but I don't think the author of TFA is 16...18 maybe.
The Diamond Rio 300 could make the "best" list for being one of the first MP3 players on the market, but as a product it completely sucked.
... Real Soon Now. It took more than 6 months from the date I purchased the player. (Which, given the poor quality of its manufacturing was well beyond its life expectancy.)
First, the battery compartment. It was so shoddily constructed that only Duracell batteries would work. Have you ever heard of anything so absurd? But it was true. The manual even mentioned it. (Since they obviously knew about this quite serious defect, did it occur to them to fix it?) I had to return to the store because it would not work with the Energizer batteries I had on hand. You would think that AA batteries are pretty much standardized, but apparently there are slight differences among manufacturers and Diamond managed to screw it up.
Then, the false advertising. They hyped the hell out of the fact that you could use this thing to play files from Audible.com. The packaging had an Audible.com logo on it. It came with Audible.com software. But the player *did not* support Audible.com's file format! When I checked with tech support they promised support would be available with a firmware upgrade to be released, urm,
Fortunately, the Rio 300 I purchased broke 2 days after I bought it and I was able to return it to Fry's for a refund. Oh, and this is how it broke: it got hot. Real hot. Like it was going to catch on fire. Ever seen the Star Trek episode where a phaser overheats, starts to glow, and Capt. Kirk has to throw it down a garbage chute before it explodes? That's what this was like.
All that said, Rio changed owners and management several times. By the time later versions of the Rio came out, it was made by effectively a different company. The Rio Cali I bought a few years ago was a decent player. But they continued their practice of hyping their relationship with Audible.com even though their players didn't support the file format until a firmware upgrade that came months or even years after the release of the player. To this date I've never listened to an Audible.com file on a Rio--the firmware releases always happen after I've bought a newer player.
I rule Slashdot! Woo Hoo!
I ran one app more useful than any other on 3.1 -- WordPerfect 5.1.
In Soviet Russia MS bashes YOU!
The parent must be referring to Linux 0.9. I have used GNU/Linux since kernel 2.2 and it just works. I have never met a PC on which I could not install Linux. I have set up so many systems that do magic like LTSP, software RAID, and OpenOffice. No more viruses!
A problem is an opportunity http://mrpogson.com
How did you make the backwards 'd' at the end of your post?!?
Anyone else notice that at one time or another PC Weak ran articles that gave good reviews to almost all of the things in the top 25???
See http://www.orau.org/ptp/collection/shoefittingfluo r/shoe.htm
"According to Williams (1949), the machines generally employed a 50 kv x-ray tube operating at 3 to 8 milliamps. When you put your feet in a shoe fitting fluoroscope, you were effectively standing on top of the x-ray tube."
I can't believe they rated the IBM PC jr as the 13th worse product!!!
I have many a child hood memory playing King Quest II on that thing... Jumpman, Ghostbuster, Gato, and Tapper... Oh those were the days. I'm sure it would suck for business apps and serious computing power, but it was fun as heck if you were a kid.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Well, not really, obviously. But from my brief AOL experience in '98 or so, I do remember hooking up a friend's computer to AOL, only to come back two weeks later and and finding her inbox swamped in dozens of Spam mails. In that respect, AOL was quite unique. At the same time, my email account was spam-free, and that only changed when I made the mistake of using it in Usenet posts (hey, I was still a kid).
At the time, AOL inboxes apparently managed to fill with Spam from the moment they were created.
And yeah, the billions of free AOL coasters in my mail and just about everywhere else were a definite nuisance. So, maybe AOL wasn't quite as bad as this article makes it out to be, but I think it does deserve a spot somewhere on this list.
IMO AOL sucked back as much as they do now. I really like Prodigy though, but they costed too much for an unemployed Jr Highschooler.
AOL was just wretched in the mid-early 90's. It only got worse.
Most BBS's were tons of fun and not too shabby. I sort of miss the BBS days, but then I think most people miss things that they did when they were growing up.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
AOL didn't begin giving access to tha intarweb until about 1993-1995 if I recall. Back then it wasn't the killer app. In fact, everybody had their own sets of 'killa-yer-wallet' apps. I would bet AOL's bread n butter back then were it's online entertainment services that were pay by the hour.
Everybody had those, Prodigy, Compuserv etc. The pay by the hour service model was all the rave. They were all pretty similar, with a few notable exceptions (TSN later INN was the most unique IMO). I ended up ditching all the pretty foo-foo graphical BBS's for Concentric Research back in 95 once they became a full PPP based ISP. The benefit of AOL over the other embrionic ISPs was that it did all the garbage Wintrumpet BS transparent to the user. The graphical garbage can that is AOL drew users in with simple graphics that said "mail" and "news" etc. It is/was information organized for 6th graders... which apparently is all the average American wants.
So, I guess in the same way the tabloid was a terrible invention, AOL is a very marketable product even if it is flavorless and tasteless for the discriminating user.
...in a PC magazine for geeks. AOL wasn't half as bad for AOLers as AOL was for the rest of Internet. See "Eternal september" and the like.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why isnt compaq pc's not on their? Those things are garbage. especially with there screwed up case design.
...gets the recognition it deserves. I pity anyone who bought one. I ran through many scenarios in my head and yet I could never find one where the cost-benefit ratio of a Zip drive made one worth buying. In almost every case I could think of it was better to use floppies, burn your own CD or install a removable HD kit (in the days before USB). They were horrible and clunky. I never trusted them enough for backups. They were never universal enough to make them useful for sending data to others. And byte-for-byte they were incredibly expensive.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
IE 6 and Windows ME? yeah, right...WORST..we're talking WORST technology products of all time and you list those two. Sorry, but that smaks of personal agenda...
try again, kids...
OK. It didn't exactly melt, but read on:
.
I worked as a sales trainer / trade show roustabout for HeadStart, a division of N.A. Phillips, in 89-90.
One of its most hyped products was a compact "dorm room" XT clone called the Explorer. It was actually pretty neat-looking. Folded up like a laptop so it could slide under the monitor stand.
One of the accessories was a 40 MB hard drive. It came in a plastic case and slid into a bay in the side of the unit. The drive was never widely distributed, but all of the display units sent to appliance stores got one. It came loaded with a fairly neat animated demo cartoon.
Good enough. But while the stores all got drives for their demo units, they didn't all get monitor stands and . . .
. . . oh, did I mention that the Explorer didn't have a COOLING FAN? This wasn't a problem if there was no hard disk drive. But if there was, the top of the plastic case got really hot. Hot enough to soften . .
. . . when the store personnel set the monitor directly on top of the unit running the demo, it SUNK INTO THE CASE.
Eventually, the heat killed hard disk drive, but not before causing trouble for me, personally, because I had to visit all sorts of stores to do a reformat and reinstall the demo software.
Ah, those were the days.
Although I hated the puck mouse on my Strawberry iMac at first, I've since grown to love it. The key was discovering the proper way to hold it. Once I started resting the heel of my hand on the desk and just moving the mouse with my fingers it actually was much more comfortable for me than a regular mouse. The other mouse I like now is a tiny wireless one that came for free from somewhere - I use it the same way - moving fingers only.
-- It only takes 20 minutes for a liberal to become a conservative thanks to our new outpatient surgical procedure!
Holy crap! I just tried it -- and it works! You rock!
"who could deny that pop-up ads and DRM are terrible"
PC World could! They picked Windows Media DRM as a product of the year in 2005.
Heh, Windows "ME".
Cool! Amazing Toys.
There's a Firefox plugin that takes care of that.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
There is also the bookmarklet. Of course, it doesn't work on this story.
r inter_friendly
http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html#p
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Can someone please explain to me what's wrong with Dell? They make reasonably good computers (as long as you pay over $1000, but I would say they are overpriced if you are paying more than $2000 (for laptops it is $1500 and $2500)). I have 5 dell computers and I haven't had any major problems or reasons to dislike them (except my laptop was slow because it was cheap). You can also think of them like AOL, allowing PCs to reach a large number of people.
Not that there is anything wrong with the PSP, aside from the lack of videogames. I mean, if Nintendo can port some of their old NES and SNES games to the Gameboy Advanced, why not do the same with the PSP? I mean, atleast have a Final Fantasy snuck in.
The other flaw that the PSP has is a lack of internal memory. When you watch Magical Trevor 2 in Flash format on Newgrounds on the PSP browser (pending you've upgraded to PSP v2.70 with Flash 6) the music cuts out then the animation. It appears someone in Japan does not like Magical Trevor.
Everyone Loves Magical Trevor cause the things that he does are ever so clever!
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
I saw one at a trade show once.. they were really cool. The angle on the 3d was not bad either. I consider it a pretty revolutionary product actually.
I hereby propose a sister law to Godwin's Law which shall heretoforth be referred to as Quinn's Law stating that as a slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of a Microsoft bashing approaches one.
Expensive: That's certainly true. I remember a point when they charged over $6 an hour or there abouts. Let's just say that you used your AOL time wisely (downloading all the porn you could within an hour), hehe.
I used to game AOL all the time for free service, back in the day. When they gave out those "x free hours!" promos that had codes on them, I would use them to sign up as a new user, with all ficticious info. In the early years, they didn't actually run the credit card number you gave them at signup, they just verified the number was valid according to the algorithm for creating them. I had a little app that would generate valid CC numbers, so I used that.
Presto, free AOL account. The trick was, when I got close to using up the free time, with only like 5-10 minutes of it left (you could check at any time how much of your free time was remaining), I'd end the session. The next time I signed on, I'd make it a marathon downloading session of anything and everything. I'd use up the remaining free time and head far into paid territory. Once I disconnected from that session, that was it. They'd try to charge the time to the card, find out it was invalid, and kill the account.
I don't think AOL was that bad and I have used it since 1996. It obviously did something right since it had over 30 million subscribers and the company was able to buy out Time Warner.
It was the MySpace before its time.
True, Iomega blew it all later with shabby manufacturing (and those extremely unreliable "JAZ"-Disks (while the Dawn of CD-ROM was finally at the horizon
P.S.: Iomega might have had the "Click-of-Death", but long before that SyQuest had the "Clank-Schlock-Rack-Shrack-Rack-Rack-Rack-Wheeeee
sig? Oh, that sig...
I ran one app more useful than any other on 3.1 -- WordPerfect 5.1.
;-)
Pah! That's the fool's way! Win 3.1 and WP5.1 were just options from a DOS batch file; you ran one or the other, not one from within the other. (Windows was for those strange things like MS Excel 2.2 or MS Project 1.0)
"She's furniture with a pulse"
tried to steer the customers to other brands because he said the Packard Bell return rate there was well over 50 percent.
And let's never forget that famous American Alexander Haig...
8 003/
General Alexander M. Haig, Jr. joins NewsMax.com advisory board
West Palm Beach, Florida - General Alexander M. Haig, Jr. (USA Ret), former US Secretary of State, NATO Commander and White House Chief of Staff, has joined the international advisory board of NewsMax.com, the company announced today.
"We are pleased that such a distinguished American statesman and business leader has joined us," Lord Rees-Mogg, Chairman of NewsMax.com, said.
General Haig has been at the forefront of the new economy. He was one of the founding board members of America Online and played a key role in making AOL the giant it has become. He remains as a director of Compuserve Interactive Services, Inc., an AOL-Time Warner subsidiary. In addition he is a member of the Board of Directors of MGM Mirage, Inc., Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Inc. and Interneuron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=6
I STILL have the same parallel port ZIP drive that I bought in 1992 to archive data when the 105mb hard drive in my 386SX16 filled up. And I still use it every weekend to back up a copy of my critical data for offsite (car trunk) storage. Other than wearing out a couple of disks, sufficiently that there weren't enough good sectors left to save 98mb of data it has performed flawlessly. I realize that not everyone was that lucky, and maybe including ZIP in the list is reasonable. But in point of fact, I never encountered a ZIP drive that didn't work. I sort of think that what kept people from using ZIP was the relatively high cost of the media, not the occasional spectacular device failures. Now if we want to talk about crappy data storage hardware, let's bring up the subject of CD drives.... CD is a teriffic medium for music where an occasional error is tolerable. For data, it sucks. With the possible exception of magnetic tape, CD has to be the most troublesome and least reliable data storage medium since paper tape. And maybe we should add PC magnetic tape to the list of really bad technology products. I can't tell you how many magnetic tapes I have found to be unreadable after the unfortunate owner's hard drive had crashed or been eaten by a virus.
:-) )? There was a time when SyQuest drives were used by publishing houses, as a way to transport big image files (and not have to span the file across multiple floppies, using PKZip or similar). Waht they never said was that once the it started hinting at dodgy sectors, it was time to ditch both the cartridge (which cost a significant amount, but only slightly less than 50 floppies), and usually also the drive (the two LEDs on the front had over 20 combinations of flashing to indicate drive failure of different types).
What about SyQuest drives (44Mb Hard Drive platter in a removable case, for the young
At least Zip drives were descended from the Bernouilli Drives, which used the Bernouilli effect to ensure that head crashes were unlikely. Indeed, I once saw at a computer show such a drive being bounced up and down to show how resilient it was. And then I noticed it was connected to a computer. A quick play with the machine, and not only was the machine (a Mac IIcx or similar) able to read from the bouncing drive, but it had actually been booted from it (and hence, in System 7 days, needed to access it constantly). As the bloke on the stand said, "try doing that with a SyQuest drive"
Never had any experience of tape drive failure (used QIC and the mini DAT size ones), although it was company policy to replace the 10 tapes used in a rolling backup every year (so each one would only have been used 26 times), so don't reckon they are any worse for reliability.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
Let's start with "popup ads..."
Popup ads are a bad use of a tech, not a bad tech.
Popup, the root technology behind this evilness, is an awesome idea which brought a z-axis into the 2-D world of web.
Gun violence is bad, not the guns themselves.. Flame on.
RSS is NOT PUSH. It's designed to look like it's push -- except it's implemented on top of HTTP that pulls. That fact alone renders it pretty useless compared to a bookmark folder in Firefox -- open in tabs.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Christ, I've only been complaining about this since 2001 in my /. journal.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
So I opened this page, and lo and behold: there's an ad for Microsoft Office on Windows Mobile. Coincidence? I think not.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
There were? And they did?
<GLOAT>
Funny... I didn't see any ads like that *cough*FF+AdBlock*cough*
</GLOAT>
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Some sites do print the "printer-friendly" page. Some even close the window afterwards. Bastards.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
What's so awful about the CueCat? Sure, the purpose for which it was intended was poorly thought out, but it turned out to be a perfectly usable and inexpensive barcode reader once it was appropriately repurposed. Who says a device has to be used solely for the purpose for which it was intended?
And the brethren went away edified.
The sony zip drive?
///?
Realplayer?
pathetic.
where is the Apple
Oh yeah, they put MS Bob on, a fucking baby knows that one.
This is the most ill informed list... done by people that are NOT AWARE of the true losers except a couple like Bob.
dBase IV?
and you know I got my hopes up.
-pyrrho
Putting the OQO on that list was flat WRONG. There has yet to be one device since in that category that is any better. I have an OQO and it is a great little device.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
this list is very ill informed, many of these products were not the worst, even when they had some of the worst bugs, or notable bugs.
-pyrrho
this is crap that i'd expect to find on digg
Most BBS's were tons of fun and not too shabby. I sort of miss the BBS days, but then I think most people miss things that they did when they were growing up.
:-)
Try this. BBSing like it's 1989 all over again.
/. zen: Imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulf clusters...
by worst tech products?
Do they mean "products that make your life miserable?" If so, all versions of Windows belong on the list. Do they mean "products that do not match up to marketing expectations?" If so, Segway is it. Do they mean "crazy, Rube Goldberg-esque contraptions?" You know, automobiles get pretty close. Such a complicated machine for the simple task of moving from point A to point B.
There are probably quite a few other definitions I have missed. But you can't get an accurate result without an accurate premise. Typical GIGO (garbage in, garbage out)
I had a very brief employement with AOL last fall doing their tech support call center.
ITs not in the past when things they did were rough. Today they are worse as they are freaking out how to keep their 7 million customers that are left and leaving by the day.
Its not billing problems. Its intentional fraud that we are supposed to do to prevent you from leaving and charging everything for. If I recall the most cancellations an hour you were allowed to do was 4 an hour. (I could be off? ).
Bad was not even the worst. They treat their employees and their customers as capital and objects to squeeze for maximum profit rather than people. Management brain dead to anything else with a strict bean counter mentality. THey dont need to know what they are doing. Just fire fire fire and if someone meets insane handle time then keep them.
The culture inside is just hostile as day 1 when you are threatened to be outsourced to India during your orientation if you dont perform and how we are all overpaid at 9/hr. so do your job or else bla bla bla.
Then on the floor on the first day we are reminded how quickly each of one us are about to be fired and perform or ELSE! People get fired within the first few days and are made light about it on purpose to set examples to meet handle time requirements.
Maybe I am just bitter but AOL is well deserved to be labelled low and I wonder how legal it is do things like prevent cancellations and intentionally be overly aggressive with marketing lies? For example they have subsidary names for certain call centers and they keep changing their name every year because they keep getting sued by former workers and states. Makes you wonder?
http://saveie6.com/
Man, I can't believe I never realised it all the while! Thanks for the tip :)
Sorry, early versions of AOL ran under a real operating system GEOS. GEOS ran windowed multitasking apps on an 8088 with a Motif interface. Of course, it wasn't compatible with Windows software. Then again, at the time, neither was Windows.
Support SETI@home
I was about to type the same thing.
I wrote a post about Windows95 with its 65k bugs as a big improvement and life changing event for all of us.
Sadly I was dead serious. Windows 3.1 was very very very bad.
Some of the younger slashdotters may want to hear how good they have it today after reading this?
How bad? How about ZERO memory management.
Also it had cooperative multitasking which is not real multitasking at all. That means if an app froze it would take down the whole system as Windows would wait for the token to be released to run the other apps. Obviously an infinite loop in a program you wrote would require a reset button hit.
All apps that multitasked shared memory and if anyone used a memory address that another app used then CRASH. I had GP faults by the hour when I ran more than 2 apps. It was purely defective in my eyes and I prefered DOS. It crashed almost every day.
My highschool ran Windows 3.1 with netware where we ran Borland C and GWBasic. WHen our apps crashed or when some of the geeks accidently made an infinite loop in their programs the whole system would be down for 10 MINUTES during the restart! Today you just close the app that is not responding.
I only used Windows to run mosaic then netscape 1.0 and AOL (shudder.. this was before the www was available).
My god WindowsME was so much more stable and nothing comes close to the problems of the early 16bit versions of Windows. I am still astounded Microsoft was able to actually keep making Windows.
I became a Microsoft hater from that day as I shook my head and wondered why people actually paid money for this when unix, macos, and os/2 were available and many many times better.
http://saveie6.com/
Has anyone ever seen a 16 RPM record? I haven't, although I remember for a while all turntables had switchable 78, 45, 33 and 16 RPM speeds.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
Oh come now... Those were just game systems that weren't very popular. By no means do they even come close to qualifying for "Worst tech product of all time". There wasn't anything inherently wrong with them.
(more evidence this guy is 16)
Ekshually, I know this guy (he used to be my boss), and he is exactly 46 years old.
I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
Jeez I've still got two of the bastards, a 33MB one and a 88MB one. Plus about 20 disks (discs?) for both. I just get them out whenever I need a laugh.
This space for rent
This is a troll right?
The list probably should have included some other items that had lofty ambitions but just never "took" (like OS/2). ????
While it was a retail failure due to the fact that MS stuck the knife in OS/2's back, it was a GREAT product on paper and in reality! It took MANY years for windows to catch up. I know of one company that was still using it for production work last year.
or try anti-pagination for firefox
Apple Macintosh Portable
Apple Pippin
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
maybe if housecats had better credit and could get paypal or an online bank account, then pointcast might have been profitable
Where's MySpace?
That's why you click... dun dun duuun:
Print view.
And I really wish I could forget them.
Tag lost or not installed.
Some computers have defective chips. Some have defective circuit boards. The Apple III was a true Think Different case, shipping with chips *falling out* of the circuit boards.
In the early '90's a guy who knew that I was into computers dropped by my room. He wanted me to take a look at his new machine and this great thing called AOL. He was actually proud about it. I took a look at it for awhile as he showed me what it could do. I was sad for this guy. At the time, I had access to all this new data through the standard internet tools of telnet, ftp, archie, news, mail, talk, gopher, etc.
AOL at the time could not even access the internet. It was a poor chat service with cheesy graphics. I could not understand how anyone could be excited about it. The guy was giving up all this great access to data because the other tools had slightly steeper learning curves. He was happy to have a little picture that represented him. He liked clicking on other screen names and talking about mindless things with people he did not know. I tried to show him the other tools, but he just could not grasp how much larger the world could be if he would just struggle a little more.
I must remember to keep struggling.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
We use them as barcode readers to do cataloging work (books). Very useful :-P
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Probably because Prodigy was never connected to the internet while it was a viable BBS, and CompuServe opened access to the stupid the right way: 25 cents per email. I'm not saying all users should pay more for email, just stupid ones.
Help us build a better map!
...who did all manner of computering running Windows Me, complete with network, never a hitch, never locked up on him, no problems shutting down or using fancy devices. All other first and second hand experiences considered, my only standing hypothesis to this day is that he played the install CD backwards.
Pardon me, but the whole concept from which sony-bmg music cd's spawned is what is flawed here.
Of course, everything pc-world reviews/advertises now is packed with the crap (and they spend a whole lot of time figuring out creative ways to avoid mentioning its presence at all), so peeceeworld won't dare slander itself and/or it's sponsors.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Strange... I still have my 1G Jaz drive (SCSI, I don't think they had other interfaces) and it still works fine. Must have been lucky...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
As in, overpriced interactive toys that manufacturers were gambling on J.Q. Public's willingness to allow Timmy to precariously dangle his sippy cup over the keyboard of their (then) very expensive PC. These include:
Interactive Barney (MS)
USB Microscope (Intel)
Any variety of bolt on keyboard toy for tool simulator (I forget the manufacturer, but it allowed kids to bang on a molded plastic "tool bench" with a plastic hammer, and the onscreen cartoon hammer would do the same).
While they were cute tech demos, they weren't exactly practical for parents.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
If I want to have someone read a webpage I usually send them the "Printer Friendly" page view.
-Eric
Well, yeah, but you primitive humans were dumb. Modern humans have no excuse. Well, other than MTV.
Basically the predescessor to the Zip drive (also designed by Iomega, later bought up by 3M), while disks were cheaper (with 20 MB more capacity), and backwards compatible (try loading a 3.5 floppy into your Zip drive, oh, wait, you can't), it was also a bit snappier due to its being a floptical drive.
Unfortunately, due to the time spent in refining the device/media, and problems with the SuperDisk drives' reliability, the SuperDisk failed in the market. The fact that they had to play catchup with Iomega's Zip drive was the final nail in its coffin.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Anybody notice the iTunes icon in an image of the Microsft Bob link?! Just below the picture of the dog sitting on a desk with an exit button on it.
g
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/bob7.jp
I've got three dead 1GB-JAZ-Disks sitting here, right next to a pile of 40/80 MB SyQuest-Cartridges... wating for the day I personally meet someone from Iomega or SyQuest --- to clobber them with those expensive chunks of now useless hardware.
P.S.: In my attic I've still got a 100MB-SCSI-ZIP-Drive, a 1GIG-SCSI-JAZ-Drive and even an old 80MB-SyQuest-Drive -- all in perfect working order. The only drive I've still got working cartridges for, though, is the 100MB-ZIP-Drive. I guess I was lucky with that one... so far no "Click-of-Death".
sig? Oh, that sig...
But tape drives are reliable ... for a time, if you treat them well.
Of course for PC backup people assume that they can reuse the tape that came with the drive forever; in that situation I tend to suggest something like a maxtor 'OneTouch' instead, when it dies they are told in no uncertain terms.
Still if you drop a tape out of a third floor window it'll probably be ok; try that with a disk.
Hummm, anybody know where I can get some slow but very high capacity Flash drives for a good price?
I'm still lucky. My 5 jaz disks are just working fine. I also have 90MB Bernouilli disks and those still work fine too. Amazing...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I've owned 3 of the products in that list. I thought my Zip drive was really cool when I got it during high school. It lasted a couple years, until it started clicking when I was in college. The clicking got worse, and eventually it could not write without going into a clicking fit. It destroyed most of my 15 or so zip disks, and I think I spread the click of death to some of the campus lab computers.
A few years later, I bought a 75GXP deskstar hard drive, the 60GB version. It died in less than a year. I still have another one of those that is still working.
I also used comet cursor, but I don't recall having any problems with it.
SproutWorks Software Design
I do understand that some people use them successfully for data backup in large installations, but I'll be damned if I can see how. Maybe there is a blank, postage paid, contract with Satan included in the materials shipped with classy tape drives? And the software ... I can deal with tar and cpio. No worse (or better) than most unix command line software. But BACKUP EXEC? Surely, it can't be as awful as it seems. There's some secret manual that they hid from me, right?
Anyway, for the subset of home and small business users who actually back up data, help has hopefully arrived or is on the way in the form of flash memory. And perhaps it'll scale in the future to enterprise backup applications. Maybe in 20 years IT folks will look at tape drives in computer museums with the same bemusement that the currently exhibit for punch card equiment.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
But it's not the tape that needs the contract; well not actually a contract as such; it's just the SCSI bus that connects the tape drive and it may look like it but "SCSI is NOT magic. There are fundamental technical reasons why you have to sacrifice a virgin goat to your SCSI chain every now and then."
Not that AOL was the best thing since sliced bread. But before other dial up ISPs, they were the only bread in town, unless you logged in to text services or one-at-a-time BBSs.
Back in the days where 2400 baud was FAST, nobody wanted to wait for images to load. BBSes were NOT one at a time. Plenty were linked up in FIDO or RIME, and other smaller networks.Prodigy and Compu$erve were available for those who didn't mind paying for what others had for free. AOL was certainly a ME TOO! service.
Then, dial-up Internet connectivity for people NOT in a university became available. Some of the FIDO systems set up FIDO<->Internet gateways. AOL remained an isolated community. If you wanted to get your windows 3.1 system on the net, you installed Trumpet winsock.
I guess you weren't there or just don't remember when AOL connected to the Internet.
YOU DIDNT HAVE TO LOOK AT THE FROM
ADDRESS TO RECOGNIZE AN AOL USER IF THE
ALL CAPS AND SOMETIMES 40 COLUMN TEXT
DIDNT GIVE IT AWAY THE POSTS QUOTING
1000 LINES FOLLOWED BY ME TOO!!!!! (CROSS
POSTED TO 5 IRRELEVANT NEWSGROUPS) WERE
A DEAD GIVAWAY OH AND THE EXCMALATION
POINT BEING THE ONLY PUNCTUATION
As I recall, AOL was considered (bad) training wheels for the 'net. I didn't have to buy floppies for several years due to the AOL carpet bombing.
Then, came the spam. Nearly 100% of it came from AOL. MANY MANY people killfiled all of aol.com and for a while, they didn't have to deal with spam at all. So yes, why not blame AOL for spam, they were the pioneers. Other than AOL, most on the net felt a certain sense of responsability for keeping newsgroups on-topic and finding out the ground rules BEFORE posting.
Usenet just kind of went to hell and got replaced by mailing lists, and finally, once major ISPs started rumbling about blackholing AOL, they did something about email spam (and promptly overcompensated).
I'm glad the IBM Deathstar 75GXP was included. Too bad I'm in Singapore and wasn't applicable for the class action suit. The 75GXP caused tremendous pain and effort over roughly a period of one year, where my 75GB drive (considered very, very huge then) was practically useless since I could not store much data in it, for fear of the Click Of Death. I must have gone through at least four 75GXPs, even going straight to the IBM office. You know how the problem ended? When I asked for my 75GXP to be changed to the 120GXP model.
I've only screwed up one Jaz disk, and I think that was a consequence of doing something I shouldn't--i.e. attempting to play a MP3 off one of the involved drives while doing a mass copy between a Zip and Jaz. It probably was a once-in-a-blue moon hardware slipup, but I don't try to push the envelope anymore when working with them (which isn't often anymore, owing to the semi-retired nature of the machine they're married to). Other than that, I've had no problem with them (although I understand that recently-produced Zip disks aren't as long-lived as their first-gen counterparts, hardware failures excluded).
---PCJ
I guess you weren't there or just don't remember when AOL connected to the Internet.
;)
I remember them quite well. I go back to the 300 baud days on a Commodore 64/128. I remember the first services like Compuserv, that only let you get on for 30 minutes a day, and watching text type itself out on my monochrome screen.
BBSes were NOT one at a time. Plenty were linked up in FIDO or RIME, and other smaller networks.
Maybe for you, in a large location. I lived in a medium sized rural town. We didn't have our first independant ISP until around 1996. The BBS's that weren't long distance were setup by guys who had an extra computer and phone line, and mostly ran either ACiD art sites, porn sites, or warez sites, or a combination of all there of. The only real use for them was to grab things like freeware and to play door games like Legend of the Red Dragon. And, with only 1 phone line in, all but the long distance phone calls were definately one at a time.
As for FIDO, it may have been great where you were, but only one board locally had it setup, was rarely updated because it meant using up the dial in number to do it, was a bear to figure out for most users, and pretty useless because the sysop didn't make any effort to give users info to contacting the outside world. Friends and I played around with our own Wildcat BBS for a while, but it was never exciting enough to keep doing.
As for AOL, one click and I was chatting to people around the world. It was not a tough choice over which to use. I tried Compuserv's CB, and it just wasn't as good imho. I left AOL just after I found a new independant ISP that was far far cheaper to use.
As I said, maybe this was a bad thing for everyone else, but AOL eclipsed everything else out there in terms of actually being useful. I wouldn't dare use them today, so it's a snapshot in time.
The point is asking the question of what makes a "worst product of all time". To me, it's how it's changed the world. And, like it or not, the Internet would not have become as popular as fast without AOL. The Internet got a lot of free publicity from them, and it let the average user get online. Make fun of the ALL CAPS people now, but A) that's elitist in that it's the idea that the Internet was some exclusive geek club and B) those people learned about the technology before the rest 99% of the rest of the population and went on to create many of the sites and companies today. I too have felt a bit of the elitist twinge, because I came from the BBS croud, the Tandy croud that had to program their computers from scratch to use them. But, it is elitist none the less.
Without all those "dumbass n00bs" that were there then and now on cable modems today... It may be the geeks that built the eBays and Amazons, but it's the people who don't even know what Usenet is that spends their money online that is the reason you even have a cable or DSL modem. Companies and investors are not out to build massive infrastructure for a few geeks.
That's the impact of AOL, because it was the first charge that really got those users online. It let anyone with a computer go out who could get a modem installed to find out what all the fuss was about the "Information Superhighway" politicians and CEOs kept talking about. It wasn't the easiest thing to install or configure, but from my experience, it sure was easier than COMiT or other programs at the time to access BBSs and other services available in my area.
I'm sorry if others feel it broke the sanctity of their little clubs. Yeah, damn AOLers, they completely ruined alt.fetish.
People blame AOL because of the types of users. Whether AOL or another service, they would have eventually gotten online. AOL just did it faster and better than everyone else.
nobody wanted to wait for images to load
Good thing services like AOL drove sales for newer and faster connection devices every single year until phone modems gave way to broadban
I8-D
I still have code written in the early 90s on my old 386SX-16, on overwritten AOL and CompuSpend floppies. They've been dropped, squashed, left in cars, left in damp storage sheds and otherwise abused, and they still read perfectly. Man, was I pissed off when AOL and CompuServe went to CDs. Still, they were good for hanging up in the garden to scare the birds away from my peas.
As an aside, why is it that modern floppies only last about two or three uses?
No, the worst was when Microsoft combined 3 of their operating systems to create a new product.
They combined Windows CE, Windows ME, and Windows NT to make:
Windows CEMENT!
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
A reasonable assumption, but no, in my case it was the drives. The heads quit reading and defied cleaning (I'm not a total stranger to cleaning helical heads. I kept a couple of VCRs going for a decade with cleaning tapes and an occasional manual cleaning).
You're right that SCSI is not magic. It's not engineering either as far as I can see. I really tried to take the technology seriously, but my experience was that SCSI problems usually defied rational analysis -- at least by me. Disconcertingly, what most often worked to solve them was experimenting with illegal terminator configurations until one worked. Occasionally tinkering with totally incomprehensible, poorly documented, SCSI BIOS settings helped also.
Will a goat fit through the tiny door of those tape drives? Never occurred to me to try.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
As for FIDO, it may have been great where you were, but only one board locally had it setup, was rarely updated because it meant using up the dial in number to do it, was a bear to figure out for most users, and pretty useless because the sysop didn't make any effort to give users info to contacting the outside world. Friends and I played around with our own Wildcat BBS for a while, but it was never exciting enough to keep doing.
There wasn't a fido node local to me either, but I had PC pursuit and a script to control the rv modem at the other end. Eventually, someone opened a RIME BBS locally.
It's not so much about bashing the n00bs as it is AOL tended to host 'perminant n00bs', those who simply didn't change no matter how many times someone said 'please do not post in all caps'.
AOL wasn't necessary to drive increased connection speeds at the time. Other ISPs were doing just fine with that. By the time DSL and cable connections were being rolled out everyone and his dog was a 'national ISP'. mostly through outsource dialup providers like megapop. All of that would have happened just fine without AOL.
In short, without AOL general access to the net would probably have been delayed by 6 months to a year but spam, the ruin of usenet, and other such sins might have been delayed by several years. Other ISPs were busy expanding their availability and somehow managed not to bring the same problems as AOL. Perhaps it's just that they had real admins who cared about the net and actually would track down SPAM and present new users with a simple guide to nettiquit before they went out and annoyed the world.
It's not elitist to expect people to behave in a non-disruptive manner, especially after telling them politely what is expected. Every single person who was on the 'net before AOL was also a n00b at one time and every one of them managed to learn 'the rules' readily enough. Most of them simply lurked for a week or so to get some idea of what was expected first. AOL certainly could have helped their customers a bit more by having them read a bit of introductory help before dumping them into newsgroups.
Even back in the BBS days, there were MANY people on there who didn't know much about computers. They borrowed someone elses at first, then got their own and some help setting up terminal software and a modem.
By the time AOL came out we were well past the point where you got online by using whatever crappy terminal that came with the modem (or rolled your own) just long enough to download Telix and/or PhoneMan.
Popularity does NOT mean a product is good. Everyone had an 8-track in the '70s too. Like the 8-track, a few years worth of perspective informs us that we would have been better off without AOL. Plenty of others would have done a much better job.
As an aside, I would like to inquire about your honest opinion about the Fossil Abacus. The reason I ask is that I have been looking for an effective replacement for my PDA (first a Palm-III, then a Psion Revo ... and finally a tiny paper notebook).
So, are they any good in daily use? Stability? Battery life? Does data die when the battery runs low? What OS/apps do you (can it) connect to?
"Good news, everyone!"
I hope you have at least backed up the ones that you care about!
I'm not sure when the change happened, but the quality of floppy disks dropped dramatically around 1994 or so. Of course, AOL and CompuServe bought the cheapest disks they could for the home mailers - they only had to be good enough to install once on your PC or Mac, and then they were as good as landfill. I worked at a university lab in the mid 1990's and I can't tell you how many people lost hours of work because they relied on these garbage floppies.
Then again, I still have an original set of AOL 1.0 5.25" disks for the Apple II that still work :) (yes, they're original, for "beta testers" of AppleLink, complete with original packaging, postage and letter saying "Hi, we're now AOL!". No, they're not for sale)
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I have 22-year-old 400k Ensoniq Mirage floppies that are just fine, and 8" PDP11 floppies (RX02) that are just fine. WTF gives?
SyQuest had a great rebate offer on their SyJet drives. They had 1.5GB cartridges when Zip was only 100MB and my machine had a 500MB hard drive. Well, they went bankrupt and out of business before I ever got my rebate check, dirty bastards. Now I can no longer use the thing with any machine/OS as the drivers don't work with OS 9 anymore and I have about 10 inaccessible cartridges sitting in a pile in a corner along with the drive.
Sometimes I fantasize that someday somebody will write drivers for OS X that will allow me to pull my data off them.
I don't understand how they still have a website after all this time...
So what's the first story I see with Slashdot's new layout? A dupe!
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Honestly? top 100 technology? When did a crappy cluttered website become a technology product? Why do people care about this website? Its just one of these buzz sites that everybody talks about, but a limited few really uses. Sorry, if I was writting an article about how NOT to write a website, craigslist.org would be at the top. For online classifieds, even newcomer Kijiji.com is infinitly more well designed then this crap site. For a blog site, myspace ranks far higher then craigslist.org.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.