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The 87 Lamest Moments In Tech, 2000-2009
harrymcc writes "The last ten years have been an amazing era for tech — and full of amazingly dumb moments. I rounded up scads of them. I suspect you'll be able to figure out which company is most frequently represented, but Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Sony, and many others are all present and accounted for, too."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit
never forget, never forgive
decade = 2001-2010
But at least they didn't make it a 87-page article.
Ceci n'est pas une
Mod parent up. Anyone who says the whole Y2K thing was hype is either an idiot, a n00b or both. The author of TFA is quite possibly both.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Could you please point out a single example where a catastrophe was avoided due to fixing the code handing year changes?
How would we know? It is not as if people are going to publicise the bugs that they fix. "Hey everyone, we almost nuked Poland!"
Anyway, the worst of the hype that went around did not come from the experts. Nobody who knew what they were talking about would have said that there would be starvation in the streets. That said, there were definitely some people who tried to cash in on the paranoia. We had some consultant come in and try to sell us software to fix our systems because they were not Y2K ready. Sure enough, when the year changed the computers wrapped back to 1981. However, resetting them to the correct year worked fine.
But just because some unscrupulous people jumped on the bandwagon doesn't mean to say that there were not real bugs to fix. The main software that we wrote had a Y2K bug in it, but we fixed it back in 1997 without fanfare. Just because you never heard of it being fixed doesn't mean to say that it was a made up bug.
##. Twitter
Nothing else need be said.
Meanwhile Microsoft actually has a good reputation for turning a blind eye to people making roms for Windows Mobile.
Turning a blind eye to piracy and other stuff you'd expect them to fight against is a standard Microsoft tactic in markets they want to take over. In their mind, as long as you're using a Microsoft product, even if you stole it, that's better than you using a competitor's product.
Once they are the de facto standard in a given market, that's when they begin finishing off their weakened competitors and turning the thumbscrews on their users. That's why you could pass around Windows install keys for years with impunity, and then XP got activation. Once the activation-free corporate XP keys got out, they had to turn the screws some more, and now even corporate copies of Vista and, I presume, 7 require activation of a sort. People might find ways around that, but the point is Microsoft is making it more and more difficult to avoid paying them for Windows now that they've sewn up the OS market.
Of course, I could have made this post a lot shorter by comparing them to drug dealers: "First one's free," then once you're hooked, up goes the price.
~Philly
The issue was MS told hardware makers for a long time what the minimum spec for Vista. So they designed their PCs around it. The minimum was going to be more costly if they didn't use Intel's GPU. However at the last minute they changed their minds under coaxing from Intel who would have a large inventory that wasn't compatible. This infuriated hardware makers as their plans were suddenly changed. Internally some MS employees knew this a huge mistake but no one with any authority did anything about it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
If we're picking nits, you're both right.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decade