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.
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.
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.
Too bad it's pretty much amounted to nothing positive thus far. The president hasn't done shit to change anything, congress critters NEVER do shit (except contribute massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere), and the general public pretty much doesn't give a shit. Don't get me wrong, Snowden's a hero in my book, but the revelations really haven't had a significant impact on US society as a whole, sad as that may be.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
Well, I'm assuming the goal is to use that money to provide health plans to those who can't afford them, obviously if more people get coverage than before and the costs per person don't go down the total will go up. Here in Norway it's a tax for employers when they pay me income, essentially for every 100 NOK I get they must pay 7.80 NOK to the government. If there's a street bum with no income, get still gets the same healthcare as me and obviously that's coming out of the pockets of everyone else. If we took away the tax and let everyone get their own insurance I'd be paying for just me, right? And the bum would probably die, but let's leave morality out it for a second.
By making sure everyone is in good health and vaccinated, we reduce the spread of disease and infection. If some of the uncovered people could get back into taxable work they could become an asset or at least less of a tax burden. Desperate people who need money for surgery can lead to crime and exploitation. And most of all, we don't throw hot potatoes around in the system trying to deny or revoke their coverage. The overhead is far less. I'm also fairly confident I will get an appropriate treatment based on medical needs, of course our doctors and nurses are just as human as anyone else but at least I'm not fighting a giant insurance company who want my treatment to be cheap as possible without getting sued and lose.
If you want to take non-tech mishaps then Obamacare is taking on all the challenges and costs of socialized medicine while providing little to none of the benefits other countries have. The Democrats sacrificed the soul of the system, while the Republicans have poisoned the apple so it's set up to fail. In a few years it'll be a disaster and everyone in the US will agree socialized medicine can't work, despite all the pointing to what happens in pinko commie land.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The only input the Republicans had was forcing Congress to have to use the same plan. Any claim they changed the bill otherwise is an outright lie, period.
The subsidies, to make it affordable, are tax credits. If you pay no federal income tax (47% of the country) you get no subsidy. If you make under $17K you get no subsidy. It caps out, so if you make over $43K you get no subsidy. The amount of tax you pay on $43K is not much because of our tax system and deductions, and if your subsidy is greater than what you pay in federal income tax you don't get that extra.
The subsidies will help some people, but the LARGE MAJORITY will get nothing from it. The 47% who pay no taxes, or those who make too much, will get nothing leaving only a small percentage of citizens able to qualify for anything. Those who do qualify will get tiny amounts, regardless of what was promised by the web site.
The DNC knows this and is trying to figure out how to spin it. One of their failed attempts is to blame the GOP for writing it bad, like the above poster did, but everyone knows the GOP had nothing to do with it and didn't vote for it at all. They even managed to call it Obamacare, and Obama himself said he was proud to have it called that, now he regrets saying that and people are spinning that its only called that because of the GOP.
Just watch over the next year as the GOP is blamed for every single failure despite it being 100% written by, voted by, run by, and owned by the DNC.
What's funny is that the person you are quoting barely even mentions the TECH mishap - he sums it up as "numerous huge IT errors" but then goes on a rant about things that have NOTHING to do with the fucked up launch of healthcare.gov, but you want to claim that other people can't seem to separate their politics from their ability to assess the success or failure of a tech project. What the ever loving fuck does someone saying there will be doctor shortages, or a 2% tax, have to do with the website sucking? Nothing. Stop projecting your partisanship onto other people.
Personally I hate the ACA because it isn't single payer and all it will wind up doing is delaying actual healthcare reform in this country by decades while simultaneously keeping a useless industry alive. In any case, this story isn't about politics, it's about tech fuckups in 2013. So:
As an IT project, Healthcare.gov was an abortion. You had project management that was behaving in a fairly schizophrenic fashion (namely, political leadership who were battling over the ACA trying to repeal/defend it) leading to delays in starting implementation, you had incompetent contractors hired to put it out, you had incompetent developers building it (my god, the amount of pointless data streaming up and down was staggering, the front end code we could see was incompetent at best, the whole mess was completely non-performant) and then to top it off, as a post-mortem it seems that most were trying to assign blame and score political gotcha points and throwing up all kinds of irrelevant shit rather than just dealing with reality and trying to do a solid job implementing the law of the land.
I do agree there can be no doubt that Healthcare.gov is the absolute biggest fuck-up of the year.
Though my vote for worst tech issue of the year definitely goes to the NSA stuff - I'll take a thousand shitty websites over big brother any day.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
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?