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The 87 Lamest Moments In Tech, 2000-2009

Posted by kdawson on from the where-to-begin dept.

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."

12 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. The very lamest moment? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wouldn't that be the "first post" ?? :)

  2. sony rootkit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit

    never forget, never forgive

  3. First Paragraph by datajack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    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.

    1. Re:First Paragraph by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You complete dick.

      I was working in a bank at that time. If we hadn't fixed our systems then come 1/1/2000 every customer in our business area would have found all their transactions failed as the system would have thought they'd expired 100 years ago!

    2. Re:First Paragraph by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What this chapter completely misses is that the emergency spending on Y2K fixes was just the tail end of a long effort of companies updating their software. Journalists were not talking about the Y2K bug in 1991, but plenty of programmers were already aware of it and already working on solutions to the problem. By the time the story got interesting -- as the year 2000 approached -- the problem had been mostly solved without any prodding from the media or pushing from the president. This whole situation was compounded by the fact that most people, including the journalists covering the story, had no understanding of how computers stored dates, and the fact that companies whose products had nothing to do with the Y2K bug were advertising their software as "Y2K compliant," and everyone wound up thinking that there was impending doom.

      For the record, the Y2K bug did actually threaten critical computer systems, many of which were mainframes installed decades earlier, but those systems were fixed long before the story ever ran on the news.

      --
      Palm trees and 8
  4. Yay, another weirdly huge list. by jault · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Re:obligatory by Mononoke · · Score: 5, Funny

    Yeah, how /do/ people pronounce this decade?

    The naughties.

    --
    NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
  6. Re:obligatory by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    technically a decade is any ten year period, doesn't matter when it starts

  7. Y2K by ernst_mulder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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).

  8. Agreed by Viol8 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

  9. #83 isn't lame, it's accurte. by pthisis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From TFA:

    83. And Taco Bell was never a taco company.
    In an interview with the New York Times conducted in the wake of Yahoo’s decision to outsource its search features to Microsoft, Yahoo boss Carol Bartz says that Yahoo has “never been a search company.”

    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
  10. Re:obligatory by dkh2 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.