The Year's Dumbest Moments in Tech

harrymcc writes "Over at TIME.com, I rounded up the year's dumbest moments in technology. Yes, the launch of Healthcare.gov is included, as are Edward Snowden's revelations. But so are a bunch of people embarrassing themselves on Twitter, both BlackBerry and Lenovo hiring celebrities to (supposedly) design products, the release of glitchy products ranging from OS X 10.9 Mavericks to the new Yahoo Mail, and much more." I can't think of anything dumber than the NSA's claims that metadata isn't data.

Comments

Mavericks was glitchy?

[mveloso]

Seems fine to me. You must have mistaken it for iOS 7.

Re:Mavericks was glitchy?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mavericks is glitchy.

It broke a lot of things in the Adobe suites that still haven't been fixed (yeah, I know this is partly Adobe's fault- but the backwards compatibility with Mavericks kinda stinks, especially for a closed platform). It introduced a lot of bugs relating to App Nap and the new memory compression, both of which are unfortunately opt-out rather then opt-in (as they should have been). There's still issues with ColorSync (going back to 10.7), which they kinda improved but also messed up with the way ICNS (icon) files are rendered (which now appear over saturated and darker then they should). Likewise, file labelling was replaced with that abomination called "Tags", which is such a horrible hap-hazard hack on top of Spotlight and the Finder that I'm surprised they even released it.

I'm sure a lot of this stuff will be resolved in the next version or two, but the unfortunate issue with Apple these days is that their operating systems are in a perpetual state of "almost working" and "not quite there yet". By the time you get 10.x.4 or 10.x.5, they're already working on the next major version that comes with it's own useless features that nobody wants or needs, and the existing features are basically abandoned and left to stagnate.

IMHO; their yearly release cycle is the worst thing to happen to OS X in a long time, and the effects of that are starting to become apparent in operating systems like Mavericks. It will only get worse until they decide enough is enough, and the next version will come when it's done (remember the days of10.6? We got all the way up to 10.6.8, and it was a damned fine OS as a result).

Re:Snowden was a dumb moment in tech?

[SpaceManFlip]

Snowden is the man. He accomplished what many previous whistleblowers attempted who were told "you don't have any proof, shut up." The shills who froth and scream traitor are on the side of evil, or they simply don't see that others had tried and failed and he did what he had to to expose the truth that needed exposing.

Big nerd with big balls, Snowden.

Re:The hands down winner

[Taco Cowboy]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass

Apparently your hands are not placed down enough.

The REAL hands down winner:

http://beta.slashdot.org/