Slashdot Mirror
Ten Gadgets That Defined the Decade
Corpuscavernosa writes "As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do: declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets — one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness. In just ten years time, gadgets have touched almost every aspect of our daily lives, and personal technology has come into its own in a way never before seen. It's a decade that's been marked the ubiquity of the internet, the downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends, but we've boiled it down to the ten devices we've loved the most and worked the hardest over the past ten years. We even had some of our friends in the tech community chime in with their picks on what they thought was the gadget or tech of the decade."
Engadget's justification is rather lame
but Microsoft's audacious approach to charging people to play online with Xbox Live Gold actually ended up as the console's greatest strength, and a key to its staying power
Charging people wasn't its strength. Its strength was it was the one online service that didn't totally suck. Lets see, Nintendo's online service lets you play with friends if you send them a random string of letters and numbers as a "friend code", won't let you type messages on most games, oh and the one game that would have had online as a killer feature, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the online mode is so messed up because it compensates for lag on one player's end by making the entire match laggy for everyone. Yeah Nintendo sure raised the bar high. PSN is good, but has too many flawed features. For example, PlayStation Home. The idea is good, take human avatars to a new level, the implementation is flawed. It is nothing but ads.
Engadget also manages to glance over the RRoD issue that plagued early Xbox owners.
I mean, is Microsoft buying Engadget off? The 360 as the console of the decade? Hardly. The 360 as the console of this generation? Possibly. But not the console of the decade, not by a long shot.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
In the last 10 years, portable GPS navigation has become ubiquitous in cars.
They're so cheap nowadays that I got one as a gift.
I'm sure there's one that could be pointed to as the breakout device.
/I still have in the car paper maps for ~5 States
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Sometime in the mid-90s the guy I was training and I were having a discussion about the future of technology while we were driving down the road in rural south Texas. I had a bag phone and an IBM Model 70 portable (lugable). He had a Zarus. We both carried pagers. A big part of the conversation was about how someday, we wouldn't need to carry all that crap just to do our job. We both knew that someday all of this stuff would be a single device. Just not a clue what that device would be or how it could work.
Today, about 15 years later, we still work together. I carry a Palm Treo and he has a iPhone. Different job, but mostly do the same thing, just not consultants anymore. I don't think either one of us could do our job without these gadgets. The ability
to ssh into our systems is key to our jobs, and it doesn't really matter what device we use anymore. The gadgets are getting to be more than just a convenience for both of us. They almost define our function in the job. Even if we're out of the office, we still take care of issues, now, not when we get back.
The gadgets have raised expectations for a lot of positions. If I still worked like I did back in the 90s, people would be waiting either until I got there, or got where I could hit a phone line and modem. Now, with the internet (ultimate gadget) and a smart phone, I can fix most problems at 70mph running down the road (as a passenger, of course, not going to break any laws, ha). And that's become almost an expectation.
So, yes I kind of see this as the decade of the gadget, but the gadgets mostly control us.
God help us all.
The one killer "gadget" of this decade is price. Everything is cheap. Back in 1999, even a cheap desktop would have cost you a lot of money. Today, you can buy a new desktop with HDMI out for $200. You can buy a cheap laptop for $300, or less if you catch a good sale. An iPod touch that would have cost you over $1,000 back in 1999, now is a typical Christmas gift. HDTVs are now cheaper than their standard def tube equivalents were. Storage is now dirt cheap, back in 1999 1 TB of HD space would have cost a lot of money, yet now many desktops ship with that much. RAM is cheap with a gig of RAM costing no more than $15. Software is even cheaper, back in 1999, your choices were either to buy (or pirate, but again, it being 1999 it was a lot harder to pirate it than it is now) Windows, or get an expensive Mac. Today, you can have Linux which is actually easy to use and detects most hardware quickly and easily. Torrent sites are also a killer "gadget", the ability for decentralized downloads have made things much easier to download than back on shady Usenet groups. Openness has also shown to be a quickly rising killer "gadget" with an explosion in open or simi-open phones such as Android, WebOS and even Symbian is opening up.
I think the 2000s will be remembered for cheap (in both meanings of the word) tech.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Uh.... scuse me, but how or what did XP define? Maybe someone could shed some light on how XP represents such a leap ahead that it warrants being called a "decade defining tool"? Basically it's Win2k with more color.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
2000 was so last millennium also, but welcome to post modernity where 10 "gadgets" include 12 things: 2 of them were not in this decade (OS X and Canon Digital ELPH) and 2 are not even gadgets (OS X and Win XP).
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
It defined the end of the Win 9x line. For the first time most people's PCs became relatively stable. For those of us that were Linux or Unix users, it wasn't a big deal, but for the average user it was very significant. Windows XP, unlike the 9x line or Vista, focused more on being a stable operating system than being an application. After the optical mouse and the old 1980s Olympics game, it might be the best product Microsoft ever released. And for Microsoft, it was probably their hardest business decision: build an operating system that people won't feel they need to upgrade from or lose angry customers to Linux and Unix derived lines (like Mac OS X).
Sorry, but the product that married the stability of the NT line with the flexibility and compatibility of the 9x line was Win2k. If any product deserves the "decade defining" title, it's Win2k. But not XP.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The LCD display.
The only thing that's really changed is that we have finally gotten rid of CRTs.
Everything else is just a bigger or smaller version of stuff we already had.
Most of our new toys are finally possible due to cheap and tiny displays.
No. Sorry, but no.
NT4 sorely lacked two core features that pretty much shot it for the consumer market. Namely, DirectX support past version 3.0 (IIRC) and USB support. Not to mention the fairly poor support for "legacy" products, i.e. products that didn't really care too much for MS programming standards, which basically meant that NT4 was entirely unsuitable as a game platform, which was (and still is) a core application for home PCs.
Win2k offered all of that (nearly every game that ran on a Win9x machine ran on 2k) and thus was the first true blend between the NT and the 9x line.
What I have to give you is that there was no "home" edition of 2k, which suckered far too many into using ME. This again, though, I blame on the way 2k and ME were perceived, especially by the relevant media who pictured 2k as the "office" system and ME as the "consumer" product.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The one gadget that DID define the decade.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
More soberly, I would say the IED is the gadget that most "defined the decade" as Engadget's headline touts.