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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."
I was trying to think of something witty to write as a first post, congratulations on failing at it completely.
No. The Experts were the ones working many, many hours in the preceding years fixing and updating things so that when the clock did turn, the problems were - for the main - no longer present. A job damned well done and the people fixing it should be praised, not ridiculed.
The people who don't know what the heck they were talking about are the media types like this guy who are quick to jump on catastrophic failures but rarely (if ever) give due praise when things are planned and done right. "Everything's fine" doesn't make good headlines for these people.
Uhh... no, decade goes from x0-x9. Or do you think the year 2000 was in the 90s?
You know, if that number was smaller, I might actually click through & read the article. But 87? Really? A number that large makes me think that you just wrote down every single lame thing you could think of & didn't edit at all.
Personally, I'd prefer a much shorter list which someone made some effort to pare down to the moments that were genuinely the lamest.
From TFA: "When clocks struck midnight on January 1st and the dreaded Y2K bug turned out to be nothing but a mild irritant, it proved once again that the experts often don't know what the heck they're talking about."
Well, that kinda hurts.
I was responsible for a newspaper ordering system that definitely would have stopped processing orders in 2000. Cost quite a number of man hours. The majority of the Y2K my team had to solve weren't for the year 2000 but for passing into the year 1999 because many ordering systems had stupid (year+1) counters internally. It was a very stressful period and I very happy it went the way it did without major disasters.
The experts that didn't (and don't) know what they are talking about are the ones thinking you can upper-limit a year counter at 1999 (or 2039).
I'm not calling a working XBOX 360 lame. I'm calling a 54.2% failure rate and no plans to revamp the hardware lame.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
the xbox had a failure rate of between 3% and 5% in line with industry norms (MS claim). while it's not a stellar performace it's nothing special. typically when you dig into the claims of 50% failure rates, they are either online polls or of limited sample size (in other words fucking worthless).
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
KDE was flying high with its well regarded 3.x version, and then its developers disappeared with lustery promises of how great KDE 4 would be, and emerged to ship a completely unfinished product. Things are better with KDE 4.later, but, KDE 4.0, wow, you are rough. Meanwhile KDevelop 4 still doesn't work, and has been eclipsed by, well, Eclipse.
This is my sig.
At the company I worked in at the time there were double digit year records used all over the place. If we hadn't fixed the code the whole system would have falled over come the millenium.
All these arsehats who go on about the Y2K being a load of scare mongering paranoia are the ones who don't have a clue about just how much work went on in 1999 trying to sort the issues out!
From TFA:
Carol Bartz is correct--Yahoo started out as a link collection, then a hierarchical directory (basically like http://www.dmoz.org/ then added a lot of portal services (including email, stock quotes, etc).
The thing that they never had, until 2004, was a search engine; Yahoo put other company's searches on their site (including Inktomi for a while, and then Google up until 2004). Doing that with Bing is just returning to what they've done historically.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
Or do you think the year 2000 was in the 90s?
It sure did feel like it. (reference to pre-911 life)
Actually, he has it right. Our modern, western notion of a calendar is marred by the fact that the Romans had no concept of zero until the conquest of Spain and the ensuing interaction with the moorish people who lived there. Thus, we start counting dates with 1, not zero. Therefore, the '60's is the decade beginning immediately after the end of year xx60 but a person "in their 60's" has completed 59 years of life and not 10 more.
In our Christian era calendars you do not find a year zero. To our modern, mathematically educated minds that would have been the year before Jesus of Nazareth was 12 months old.
Of course, our calendars, while allegedly based on the birth date of this man Jesus, are flawed by many other issues. Among these are:
1) We don't actually have agreement about the precise year of Jesus' birth.
2) The 25-December customary date is a fabrication. Jesus was most likely born in the spring based on accounts of what was happening at the time.
3) Our calendar system has been changed a few times over the past two millennia.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
So I guess the first decade ran from -1 to 0, and the second decade was from 1 to 10?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
If you see a lot of Apple hate among these comments then why didn't you post your message as a reply to one of them? Oh, maybe because there isn't a lot of Apple hate here. This just goes to prove what we have all been saying about you: you're paranoid!
Of course not, but that is why we don't work with ordinal numbers when talking about decades.
I for one want to celebrate the anniversary of the Y2K Bug's passing by thanking all the people who's hark work kept it from being far far worse than the few mild annoyances we experienced. The word I saw was some gas pumps that were locked up, and it could have been far worse if a whole lot of coders and analysts hadn't spent a ton of time pouring over reams of old code and fixing problems. Double thanks to all the Grampa Geeks who came out of retirement to show the kids how COBOL was done and why it's still so important even ten years later. A nod goes even to the suits at the top who looked beyond next quarter's numbers and funded the stitch in time would save nine.
#88 - the point when every news organization feels compelled to make really long lists of the top ____ of the last decade. It's like the annual "top ____ of the year" lists, only 10 times as lame.
I am officially gone from
Can anyone explain to me what is wrong with this? I don't understand why it's on the list. I think it's great.
But it needs to be from a truly random sample, not taken from some troubleshooting forum for 360, where people without problems never go.
"they surveyed 5000 people which is just 0.0178% of the total units sold, so statisticly it's a worthless sample size"
The statistical power of a survey does not depend on population size, a sample of 5000 is more than sufficient to get a very good estimate of the real failure rate, (assuming the real failure rate is not extremely small).
However a failure rate is meaningless without considering length of time and under what conditions. And as you imply the sample must be random, self selecting readers of a particular mag is not at all random, so even though they have a good sample size the quoted numbers are complete bullshit.
In otherwords the only thing the survey demonstrates is that an unhappy customer is far more likely to take the survey than a satisfied customer.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
...but Verizon's decision to make Bing the only allowable search provider on Blackberrys on its network would have made 88 easy.
Sine when does Apple make hard disks? The hard disks in Apple laptops and Apple desktops that I have seen are made by the same people that Dell, HP, and everyone else uses (I have seen Toshiba, WD, Seagate). The only difference is the hard drive has a little apple printed on the label. The hard drive specs are the same as the non Apple labeled ones. Apple has to have some way to see where the bottle neck is that is causing the beach ball. Saying it is the hard disk is jumping the gun a bit. Unless you put in a 5400 RPM (or slower) disk or a disk with no cache on it, I'd look else where.
I am saying this since I have changed 20+ hard drives in Apple laptops and desktops. There was no difference in performance with a non Apple drive vs an Apple branded drive. Usually the non Apple drive was bigger, had a bigger cache, and sometimes a faster RPM. Which usually made the machine more responsive.
- The Gamecube: everything about it. A nasty, tacky piece of junk with no games worth looking at that was put out with the intention of being a serious contender and rightly consigned to third place.
The Gamecube sold 22 million units and the original XBox only sold 24 million. Nintendo made money off of every single unit sold. I wouldn't call it a failure.
I don't see why there has to be anything in between. When I lived in Hong Kong, I wasn't thinking, "boy it sure would be nice to have some small device to get me from the MTR/KCR/Bus/Ferry/Light Rail to my destination." I walked the 5 or 10 minutes after the "arteries" ended. We shouldn't be thinking about how to improve after people get off the mass transit, we should be thinking about how to improve the mass transit.
The 60s ended in 1974.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.