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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."
Wouldn't that be the "first post" ?? :)
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
The 360 for its inexcusable failure rate, then in the wake of Microsofts competitors constantly revising their models and offering updates Microsoft declares they will not create a version two or revise their hardware.
Then - while XBox 360's were new and failing in droves, Microsoft not only decides the old model will no longer be supported with new products they recall as much existing stock of the old model as they can and do their best to make it got away. Sort of like they wanted to do with XP when Vista came out.
Something all the game consoles need:
Older laptop style optical drives that can be changed by release a lever. Can anyone say failure rate?
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"If anything it's too cheap" That didn't go over too well did it now.
Ah that was good for a Laugh.
Steve Ballmer on stage at any time is always funny. :) Developers Developers Developers..... bahahahahahahaha
Sony root kit. I'm still finding PC's infected with this beast.
Zune. Do they still make this thing. I actually saw one in the wild once. Man that thing is UGLY.
The Kindle the most pointless electronic gizmo ever. It's not a laptop, phone, or book. You don't own the content. and it's UGLY. You want how much??????
All in all a good read. Thanks.
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.
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).
...among the /. comments. Despite Apple's blunders in this list being few and not really noteworthy, it naturally does not discourage the "grannies of /." to leap out from under their stones with their tag-sticks.
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
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No mention of the publicly available AOL search logs? I thought that was fantasticly funny. Stupid, but funny.
##. Twitter
Nothing else need be said.
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
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
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.
Wait, that was a mistake?
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
...but Verizon's decision to make Bing the only allowable search provider on Blackberrys on its network would have made 88 easy.
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.