Slashdot Mirror
The Biggest Tech Mishap of 2013?
Nerval's Lobster writes "Some high-profile tech initiatives really crashed-and-burned this year. Did BlackBerry executives really think that BlackBerry 10 would spark a miraculous turnaround, or were they simply going through the motions of promoting it? That's the key question as BlackBerry 10 devices fail to sell. Then there's Facebook's misbegotten attempt at 'skinning' the Android OS with its Home app. Or maybe Healthcare.gov counts as 2013's biggest debacle, with its repeated crashes and glitches and inability to carry out core functions. What do you think was the biggest software or hardware (or both) mishap of the past twelve months?"
My company got bought by private equity. It's depressing to watch as the company is managed by people who don't understand our products and don't care.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
NSA leak was the most damagind and biggest tech fail.
They still don't know what was taken.
taco must be turning in his grave
They lost credit card numbers... pin codes!? and the c v v codes?!?!?!? what. the. fuck.
Why were they even storing those. at all. thats some world class fuckup that's going to cost many thousands of people real money. Theres no writeoff for regular people unlike businesses. People are Fucked...
Altho it's slightly more than a "mishap".
It's either that or the obamacare fuckup. But really who expected a goverment website to work right... Thats like a normal fuckup for us.
Or maybe the NSA being such treasonous completely useless wastes of space and money who should all be swinging at the end of a rope.
But that goes beyond just this year too. They've been shitheads for a long time. We just now know about it for sure.
"Some high-profile tech initiatives really crashed-and-burned this year. Did BlackBerry executives really think that BlackBerry 10 would spark a miraculous turnaround, or were they simply going through the motions of promoting it? That's the key question as BlackBerry 10 devices fail to sell. Then there's Facebook's misbegotten attempt at 'skinning' the Android OS with its Home app. Or maybe Healthcare.gov counts as 2013's biggest debacle, with its repeated crashes and glitches and inability to carry out core functions. What do you think was the biggest software or hardware (or both) mishap of the past twelve months?"
Healthcare.gov? That's a junior league fuck-up... I nominate the NSA for getting pwned and punked by one Edward Joseph Snowden who walked out of their secure computer facility with all of Americas dirty laundry on a USB stick.
The NSA's exfiltration detection system...
I'm pretty sure it was hiring Edward Snowden as your SharePoint admin.
The year of the Linux desktop. But, dammit, 2014 is DEFINITELY going to be THE year!!!
For demonstrating that forcing a tablet interface on desktop users does not help your bottom line.
No contest. It's got everything: hubris, cronyism, bureaucratic bungling, political idiocy, numerous huge IT errors, hundreds of millions of dollars. Once all the details come out, this massive fail will be studied in universities. Books will be written. The political consequences will last for years. Coming soon: the doctor shortages. And does everyone know that in 2014, the health plan tax kicks in? I don't mean the "Cadillac plan" tax, or the tax if you don't have insurance. I mean the 2% tax on every health plan. Yes, in order to make health insurance more "affordable," they are taxing health insurance! Words fail.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
How soon ye forget.
Arguably, the mistakes RIM made with Blackberry go back about 7 years or so. When they didn't react smartly to the advent of the iPhone and Android devices, they started hammering the nails into their own coffin.
What else can happen when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object?
I'm gona throw in a nomination for EA and the launch of Sim City. While probably not the largest screw up, I would say they had the most warning. With security breaches or even building a new Health care website, there are unknowns. You can't predict when someone is going to steal your data or how they are going to do it outside of a few tech guys that know how their systems work and whos warnings go unheard. EA had everyone screaming at them to not use DRM but they did anyway. They were warned that if they did use DRM that servers would be maxed out on launch day. They claimed that they were prepared for it but obviously they were not. They were warned and people begged for them to listen but they didn't and come launch day, everything they were warned about happened. It wasn't a minor hiccup either as it took a month for everything to be sorted out.
If that's not a screw up, I don't know what is.
I know, it's a slow motion train wreck that started in 2011, but the death by Elop was consummated only in 2013, with the fire sale to Microsoft.
Without a doubt, the biggest tech failure of the year is slashdot's new mobile site, and the horendous beta desktop site. I can't imagine the motivation behind the flashy, slow, non-functional mess. If classic.slashdot.org ever goes away, so too will I.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The implementation of which (if you can call it that) is just as useless as not having one at all. MSFT basically said "fuck you" and gave us a useless little button that doesn't do anything new.
Apple basically threw away everything that made iOS look approachable and polished.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
"Tech Companies" for allowing the NSA infiltration for fear of the federal and state governments frowning upon them and shifting their privileges to other industries and companies. It's like a no-choice NDA; it's just put on you without your agreement or consent, but with an expectation of fulfillment or consequence. For shame no decent leaks came from Google, Apple, Microsoft, random users/hackers/crackers, designers and manufacturers, etc. before Snowden. Only now companies position themselves with the product/customer, saying they were forced but are glad they can admit to (and hopefully reform) it. Strange and mistrustful times.
Buy your next Linux PC at eightvirtues.com
If you set it up to use the same background as on the desktop the transition is less disturbing. After tweaking the location of the little squares I find it usable, although not an improvement. I set a few updating columns to left, then a couple of columns of static icons related to different tasks and now along with the win+q (which doesn't open the whole modern UI anymore) can find/open stuff pretty quickly.
I still dislike the way right button is handled in the modern UI. Give me my context menus back. Unnecessary useless movements are unnecessary.
It is what it is.
Well, ISS weighs around 400 tons, a bit more now. One of it's coolant pumps spontaneously developed undocumented features recently, and the crew mounted a fix up mission with somewhat makeshift EVA suits and other merryness right around the time when everyone was stuffing their faces around christmas tables.
So if we are talking about big mishaps, thats pretty big, coming in at 400 tons and whizzing about at 7km/s overhead. Fortunately, the fix worked.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
2013 is notable for being the year the technology industry did not learn from its mistakes. There's no one single worst mistake. It's like the year Time magazine put a mirror on the cover - the entire industry is to blame!
Windows 8. Gnome 3. Unity. iOS 7. What is the lesson? Users do not want gratuitous change that destroys workflow patterns and muscle memory, and yet technology companies keep cramming them down our throats. In 2013, Windows 8.1 came out and it was just more of the same. iOS 7 destroyed everything we knew about Apple's "it just works" usability, and threw in a snow-blindness photo browser with a white background just to put salt in the wounds. The only thing we can look forward to is more change for the sake of change.
Healthcare.gov is just a symptom of a dysfunctional system of outsourcing to contractors who skim their money off the top, and then hire technology experts with whatever is left, insuring any technology project is going to fail. No one seems to care about quality. That's why software projects fail. Until structural changes are made in how technology is created, nothing will change.
Lessons were there to be learned from, but in 2013, forget it - no one cared.
Wish it was just that.
Page source = 128KB.
ctrl+a, ctrl+c, ctrl+v of page yields 16KB.
Is that other 112KB of CSS really necessary?
I come here for the love
I have the Z10. I don't play games. The phone was built around communication. E-mail, face book, phone calls, BBM. I feel sorry for anyone that chooses Android or iOS over a new Z10 or Z30 if they use it primarily for communications.
There are less games/apps but I can do everything I want to do with it. There are enough games to keep me entertained. And with the exception of no Netflix, it does everything most would want. Thing is, you can install Android apps on the phone and support for that improves with every OS release.
The phone's user interface also shows how last gen Android and iOS are.
I have noticed that when you buy a new laptop here (Japan) most shops offer to either pre-install or sell you software to bring the start menu back.
To be fair to MS they did listen. I was surprised when they brought the start button back and allowed booting directly to the desktop. The start button fixes the biggest UI problem with Windows 8, which is that it wasn't obvious how to get back to the start screen. Okay, it's not exactly what people wanted, but it's not as offensively bad as the original implementation.
What really pissed me off about Windows 8.1 is the fact that it wouldn't let me log in without a god damned Microsoft account. I made one years ago to take advantage of the free 25GB Skydrive they offer (no personal details given, drive contains only a massive encrypted container and some ISO images of MS operating systems I sometimes need to download and install) so logged in, then prompty detached my local account. Still irritating though, almost as bad as the way Google is trying to drive YouTube users to G+ by forcing them to have a G+ account.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Whether you agree w/ the Affordable Care Act or not, it is legally required that everybody have insurance. When you've got a government mandate to use a website* and that website doesn't work, that's a pretty big problem.
* Yes, I am aware there are other ways to sign up. But a) have you ever had to wait for service at any office run by the government? and b) isn't this 2013? almost 2014?
The political consequences will last for years. Coming soon: the doctor shortages.
Spoken like a true TeaParty ideologue. While the initial rollout of healthcare.gov was an unmitigated mess, the recovery will in time be recognized as one of the greatest tech successes. The initial design goal was for the website to be able to accommodate 50,000 simultaneous visitors. On Monday December 23rd the website was supporting 83,000 concurrent users. About 2 million people have enrolled into healthcare plans, 1.1 million through healthcare.gov. Quite a substantial number from those six people that enrolled the first day!
Regardless of what you think of the individual mandate or health care reform, that is a remarkable tech turn around - taking millions of lines of pre-alpha code in October to production status by the end of the year. Here is a short video interview with New Relic, one of the companies behind the turnaround.
For all the bad politics our government might have, do not underestimate its propensity to solve a technical problem.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power plant continues to be mismanaged. Incompetence and corruption abound and give a giant black eye to nuclear power in general.
healthcare.gov is a great example of corruption in government contracts and the cost of rolling out something that isn't done. Maybe nerds around the world will now have another line for over-eager managers: "Do you want another healthcare.gov?"
- Jasen.
The start menu is one of the most sadly hilarious case studies I've seen recently. In Windows Vista, Microsoft made changes to the start menu that everyone complained about.
Then in Win8, their metrics said no one was using the start menu, so they removed it. Facepalm.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'd still rather hit myself in the face with a hammer than use Win 8.1
Were these tech debacles or management debacles? Healthcare.gov was a management debacle. As for the rest, I'm not familiar enough to judge but most sound like management debacles as well.
A tech debacle is when the technical people have everything they need to do their jobs and they screw it up.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
FWIW, similar reasons got into demise of Nokia as well.
That's the responsibility which comes from taking on a contract that pays so well. If you can't get the resources together for such a thing you are not supposed to bid. If you don't have the expertise to communicate with the stakeholders then you are supposed to get people in who can or you are not supposed to bid.
Whoever accepts the bid has only the track record of the bidder and their word to go by. Unless the bidder has a terrible, or complete lack of reputation, you can't really blame the person accepting the bid. The above poster has gone far beyond that - blaming the person that employs the person that accepted the bid of the people that fucked up. That's an insanely long chain of blame. As such it tells us that the above poster has an axe to grind and is grasping at straws to do it, or has been been conned by someone doing so.
So just cheerleading.
A complete waste of time on a technically leaning site where plenty of us don't give a shit about Republicans or Democrats but would like to hear about which contractors to avoid like the plague (or SAP, or IBM).
The latter didn't affect the rest of the world. People outside of the US don't give a fuck about Healthcare.gov... and I bet it's not even close to many of the mayor epic fails that populate the pages of The Register and similar.
You should just see the mess we have here with our digital travel cards (OV Chipkaart) which is ongoing for a few years right now and which is like a pearl necklace of fuck ups one after the other, from the hardware (easy to crack, 100% error rate) to the software and ending in the administration and politics.
Of course, we are only 1.7e7 inhabitants in this country but it this happened in the US you would be rioting in the streets.
-- 29A the number of the Beast