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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."
Are Windows XP and OS X really "gadgets" though? When I think of gadgets I think of physical things, usually. Maybe I'm just out of touch with the times.
I think what bothered me with the 360 making the list versus the PS2 is the fact that Engadget editors measured the 360 based on Live, which is a service, NOT a gadget. Gmail was awesome, didn't make the list... neither did DropBox or a bunch of other ways to communicate data. The Dreamcast pioneered the whole console gaming internet thing a bit earlier in 1999 before the PS2 literally nailed the last piece in its coffin in 2001. Microsoft merely took the online idea and threw more money than Sega had to make it happen. Microsoft merely took Sega's evolutionary dead-end and sparked it back to life. PS2 should get honors for standardizing DVD playback, moving forward game based storage to DVDs, and generally offering a baseline standard for what "next-gen" should of been back in 2000. Wii... should get an honorable mention because Nintendo took a dated and... well not a hot selling platform (GameCube) and MacGuyver'd it into something that would sell and drive Nintendo back into a profitable home console platform. The DS came in the wake of the dying PDA craze in 2004 before multi-touch. The pen/stylus setup probably was a risky direction to take since... say the Sony Clie was pulled out during the same time. DS proved that touch-based inputs could work for a massive audience... sparked the direction the Wii took. Today, we have Microsoft and Sony trying to catch up with their motion based interaction setups. Apple and other handheld makers have introduced touch-capable devices on everything under the sun. DS was engineered by people that liked neat things and this happened to be a hit. I mean, TWO screened handhelds seemed a bit unrealistic too. The DS success made Sega's VMU and Nintendo's GBA-GC two screen system link ideas feel like they didn't go to waste. Supplemental screens work if they're designed in every system.
The big thing about being an admin now, is that time is critical. One security exploit left unpatched for just an hour on a server facing the internet could be compromised. If something as small as a fileserver goes offline for an hour that could mean one hour that a lot of people, not just one or two, can't do their job. Back in the '90s, if the computer was down most people would just shrug and work on the things that didn't require the computer. Today there is very little that doesn't require a computer in an office setting. Entire meetings can be done over video conferencing, bills can be paid online, even trivial errands people might be sent on can be done over the internet. Most offices, schools, hospitals and even homes simply can't function without the internet today. Every bit of down time is now mission critical.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Really, the 360 as the video game console of the decade? The PS2 really changed things more than the 360 for the simple reason of the DVD player.
For that matter, the first Xbox was a lot more influential than the 360, because it was new competition for Sony. The 360 was just an incremental update.
... and then they built the supercollider.
So you consider 1990 to be part of the 'eighties'?
Long live the BSD license
I remember visiting Japan for the first time in 1999. Of course I wandered in to a video game arcade to check out the scene. I laughed at the poor Japanese and their imitative video games - look, that guy is just touching the controls in the exact way that the machine tells him to! What a retarded game! It's no game at all, he's just mindlessly copying what the machine tells him to do in exact sequence...no more "fun" than working on an assembly line. A children's game, really...we had the same thing called Simple Simon when I was a kid...these Japanese video games even have the same four colors. I mean, there could at least be a dozen colors or something, make it difficult. And the controller shaped like a guitar? Oh man, how pathetic: if you're going to be cool and play the guitar, be cool and learn the goddamn instrument, it ain't that hard. Only Japanese people, with their tolerance of tedium and their relentless drive to copy, could possibly "enjoy" such a "game".
This Christmas, I'm passed out from wine, and when I vaguely become aware, I hear these overplayed classic rock tunes accompanied by clicking. I go out, and sure enough, three family members are staring at the TV, imitating the colors on the screen, each lost in his own world with no communication. Just this eerie clicking, accompanied by this sound that I identified from when I was in marching band and the drummers had practice pads. There is no talking, no rocking out, no jumping around the room flailing at an ax like Eddie Van Halen on coke. Their faces are stone masks of concentration. The song finishes, and my family grins at each other, "Wow, we sure had a fun time interacting. What a great game that brings us together!"
Shows you how much I know. I also thought "Magic: the Gathering" was a stupid game because it was so wildly unbalanced. Who would want to play that, a game where you can win not by superior skill or even dumb luck, but simply by spending more money than your opponent?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The Nokia N900 is the first { Linux + X11 + phone } that works nicely (OpenMoko was a poor attempt), and it's Debian based! (Maemo).