The 87 Lamest Moments In Tech, 2000-2009

harrymcc writes "The last ten years have been an amazing era for tech — and full of amazingly dumb moments. I rounded up scads of them. I suspect you'll be able to figure out which company is most frequently represented, but Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Sony, and many others are all present and accounted for, too."

sony rootkit

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit [wikipedia.org]

never forget, never forgive

obligatory

[farlukar]

decade = 2001-2010

But at least they didn't make it a 87-page article.

Re:First Paragraph

[Hognoxious]

Mod parent up. Anyone who says the whole Y2K thing was hype is either an idiot, a n00b or both. The author of TFA is quite possibly both.

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

technically a decade is any ten year period, doesn't matter when it starts

Re:sony rootkit

[nstlgc]

You might be confusing "lame" and "horrible".

Re:obligatory

[rolfwind]

Uhh... no, decade goes from x0-x9. Or do you think the year 2000 was in the 90s?

The controversy stems from the fact that there was no year 0. The julian/gregorian calendar retroactively goes back to year 1 AD, and before that is 1 BC.

Human lifes on the other hand start at year 0.

So people who say the decade was from Jan 1 2001- Dec 31 2010 are technically correct although you can just say a decade is a 10 year period and arbitrarily start it whenever.

But since /. is full of programmers that have experience with arrays, especially in C type languages - none of this should be news or that hard to grasp.

Re:First Paragraph

[Gadget_Guy]

Could you please point out a single example where a catastrophe was avoided due to fixing the code handing year changes?

How would we know? It is not as if people are going to publicise the bugs that they fix. "Hey everyone, we almost nuked Poland!"

Anyway, the worst of the hype that went around did not come from the experts. Nobody who knew what they were talking about would have said that there would be starvation in the streets. That said, there were definitely some people who tried to cash in on the paranoia. We had some consultant come in and try to sell us software to fix our systems because they were not Y2K ready. Sure enough, when the year changed the computers wrapped back to 1981. However, resetting them to the correct year worked fine.

But just because some unscrupulous people jumped on the bandwagon doesn't mean to say that there were not real bugs to fix. The main software that we wrote had a Y2K bug in it, but we fixed it back in 1997 without fanfare. Just because you never heard of it being fixed doesn't mean to say that it was a made up bug.

Twitter

[jo42]

##. Twitter

Nothing else need be said.

Re:sony rootkit

[Stormwatch]

It's true, see here. [appleinsider.com]

Re:obligatory

[mcd7756]

The Moors invaded Spain in 711 AD. The Roman Empire ended in 476 AD. I suspect the concept of zero entered Europe in some other fashion. Perhaps until the Moors came into Spain, zero was nothing to write home about.

Re:Google C&Ding CyanogenMod

[phillymjs]

Meanwhile Microsoft actually has a good reputation for turning a blind eye to people making roms for Windows Mobile.

Turning a blind eye to piracy and other stuff you'd expect them to fight against is a standard Microsoft tactic in markets they want to take over. In their mind, as long as you're using a Microsoft product, even if you stole it, that's better than you using a competitor's product.

Once they are the de facto standard in a given market, that's when they begin finishing off their weakened competitors and turning the thumbscrews on their users. That's why you could pass around Windows install keys for years with impunity, and then XP got activation. Once the activation-free corporate XP keys got out, they had to turn the screws some more, and now even corporate copies of Vista and, I presume, 7 require activation of a sort. People might find ways around that, but the point is Microsoft is making it more and more difficult to avoid paying them for Windows now that they've sewn up the OS market.

Of course, I could have made this post a lot shorter by comparing them to drug dealers: "First one's free," then once you're hooked, up goes the price.

~Philly

Re:Intel making Microsoft lower specs

[UnknowingFool]

The issue was MS told hardware makers for a long time what the minimum spec for Vista. So they designed their PCs around it. The minimum was going to be more costly if they didn't use Intel's GPU. However at the last minute they changed their minds under coaxing from Intel who would have a large inventory that wasn't compatible. This infuriated hardware makers as their plans were suddenly changed. Internally some MS employees knew this a huge mistake but no one with any authority did anything about it.

Oblig. Dictionary reference

[Anonymous Coward]

If we're picking nits, you're both right.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/decade [reference.com]

Re:sony rootkit

[jo_ham]

I'm sorry, what?

I have rolled out Snow Leopard on multiple machines of assorted vintage and consider myself well-versed in Apple tech support issues and I've not even heard a whisper of the issues you have mentioned.

Although "uncountable bugs and slowness" is a little bit catch all - care to list some of the "uncountable bugs" - you only need to rattle off, say 5. If there really are that many. It should be easy.

I have not heard of the user account deletion on guest login - are you sure you didn't mess with UIDs?

Snow Leopard has been excellent. I had some minor issues with it and Safari until Flashblock came out, and I have to update some of my migrated apps that were installed under 10.5 and weren't touched during the move to 10.6 (I can't remember if it was an A+I or an upgrade) - this was usually little things like my ToDo list sync app and some menu bar widgets and so on, but reinstalling fixed those right away.

I think your sig gives away your bias - it seems you think a list that doesn't agree with you is "prejudiced" because it doesn't savage Apple for made up tech problems with Snow Leopard.

There's plenty of *actual* Apple content you could go after them for without having to make shit up.

Re:obligatory

[clarkcox3]

Um, no, there was no year zero. The year before 1 AD was 1 BC. The first decade ran from 1 AD to 10 AD, the first century ran from 1 AD to 100 AD. The 20th century ran from 1901 to 2000. The "90's" and the last decade of the 20th century are two different things. "The 90's" is 1990–1999, the last decade of the 20th century is 1991–2000

Re:obligatory

[ari_j]

Don't get too hung up on all that. Most of the people I know get confused when they celebrate their Xth birthday and I tell them that I hope their newly-begun X+1th year is as successful as the last. I literally went back and forth with one person for over an hour on her birthday this year, with her repeatedly insisting she had just turned X and not understanding why that makes the year she's in now X+1.

I've all but conceded defeat on the millennium issue. I'll never, of course, admit to having been wrong, because I wasn't; I am just tired from fighting the good fight for an entire decade and feel my efforts would be better spent correcting all the misuses of 'loose' that occur each day.

Re:obligatory

[skeeto]

I don't know anyone who would say "July 10th, 1990" is in the 80's. (Picked that date at random.)