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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
"If anything it's too cheap" That didn't go over too well did it now.
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.
The naughties.
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
technically a decade is any ten year period, doesn't matter when it starts
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).
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
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.
##. Twitter
Nothing else need be said.
#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
- 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.