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."

Re:The very lamest moment?

[Muskstick]

I was trying to think of something witty to write as a first post, congratulations on failing at it completely.

First Paragraph

[datajack]

When clocks struck midnight on January 1st and the dreaded Y2K bug turned out to be nothing but a mild irritant, it proved once again that the experts often don’t know what the heck they’re talking about.

No. The Experts were the ones working many, many hours in the preceding years fixing and updating things so that when the clock did turn, the problems were - for the main - no longer present. A job damned well done and the people fixing it should be praised, not ridiculed.

The people who don't know what the heck they were talking about are the media types like this guy who are quick to jump on catastrophic failures but rarely (if ever) give due praise when things are planned and done right. "Everything's fine" doesn't make good headlines for these people.

Re:obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Yay, another weirdly huge list.

[jault]

You know, if that number was smaller, I might actually click through & read the article. But 87? Really? A number that large makes me think that you just wrote down every single lame thing you could think of & didn't edit at all.

Personally, I'd prefer a much shorter list which someone made some effort to pare down to the moments that were genuinely the lamest.

Y2K

[ernst_mulder]

From TFA: "When clocks struck midnight on January 1st and the dreaded Y2K bug turned out to be nothing but a mild irritant, it proved once again that the experts often don't know what the heck they're talking about."

Well, that kinda hurts.

I was responsible for a newspaper ordering system that definitely would have stopped processing orders in 2000. Cost quite a number of man hours. The majority of the Y2K my team had to solve weren't for the year 2000 but for passing into the year 1999 because many ordering systems had stupid (year+1) counters internally. It was a very stressful period and I very happy it went the way it did without major disasters.

The experts that didn't (and don't) know what they are talking about are the ones thinking you can upper-limit a year counter at 1999 (or 2039).

Re:The XBox's need more coverage.

[pecosdave]

I'm not calling a working XBOX 360 lame. I'm calling a 54.2% failure rate [consumerist.com] and no plans to revamp the hardware lame.

Re:The XBox's need more coverage.

[timmarhy]

the xbox had a failure rate of between 3% and 5% in line with industry norms (MS claim). while it's not a stellar performace it's nothing special. typically when you dig into the claims of 50% failure rates, they are either online polls or of limited sample size (in other words fucking worthless).

KDE 4.0 and KDevelop 4

[tjstork]

KDE was flying high with its well regarded 3.x version, and then its developers disappeared with lustery promises of how great KDE 4 would be, and emerged to ship a completely unfinished product. Things are better with KDE 4.later, but, KDE 4.0, wow, you are rough. Meanwhile KDevelop 4 still doesn't work, and has been eclipsed by, well, Eclipse.

Agreed

[Viol8]

At the company I worked in at the time there were double digit year records used all over the place. If we hadn't fixed the code the whole system would have falled over come the millenium.

All these arsehats who go on about the Y2K being a load of scare mongering paranoia are the ones who don't have a clue about just how much work went on in 1999 trying to sort the issues out!

#83 isn't lame, it's accurte.

[pthisis]

From TFA:

83. And Taco Bell was never a taco company.
In an interview with the New York Times conducted in the wake of Yahoo’s decision to outsource its search features to Microsoft, Yahoo boss Carol Bartz says that Yahoo has “never been a search company.”

Carol Bartz is correct--Yahoo started out as a link collection, then a hierarchical directory (basically like http://www.dmoz.org/ [dmoz.org] then added a lot of portal services (including email, stock quotes, etc).

The thing that they never had, until 2004, was a search engine; Yahoo put other company's searches on their site (including Inktomi for a while, and then Google up until 2004). Doing that with Bing is just returning to what they've done historically.

Re:obligatory

[suso]

Or do you think the year 2000 was in the 90s?

It sure did feel like it. (reference to pre-911 life)

Re:First Paragraph

[Viol8]

You complete dick.

I was working in a bank at that time. If we hadn't fixed our systems then come 1/1/2000 every customer in our business area would have found all their transactions failed as the system would have thought they'd expired 100 years ago!

Re:obligatory

[dkh2]

Actually, he has it right. Our modern, western notion of a calendar is marred by the fact that the Romans had no concept of zero until the conquest of Spain and the ensuing interaction with the moorish people who lived there. Thus, we start counting dates with 1, not zero. Therefore, the '60's is the decade beginning immediately after the end of year xx60 but a person "in their 60's" has completed 59 years of life and not 10 more.

In our Christian era calendars you do not find a year zero. To our modern, mathematically educated minds that would have been the year before Jesus of Nazareth was 12 months old.

Of course, our calendars, while allegedly based on the birth date of this man Jesus, are flawed by many other issues. Among these are:

1) We don't actually have agreement about the precise year of Jesus' birth.
2) The 25-December customary date is a fabrication. Jesus was most likely born in the spring based on accounts of what was happening at the time.
3) Our calendar system has been changed a few times over the past two millennia.

Re:obligatory

[oodaloop]

So I guess the first decade ran from -1 to 0, and the second decade was from 1 to 10?

Re:I see a lot of Apple hate...

[Gadget_Guy]

If you see a lot of Apple hate among these comments then why didn't you post your message as a reply to one of them? Oh, maybe because there isn't a lot of Apple hate here. This just goes to prove what we have all been saying about you: you're paranoid!

Re:obligatory

[ShounenSuki]

Of course not, but that is why we don't work with ordinal numbers when talking about decades.

Re:First Paragraph

[smpoole7]

To this (and the other replies here): he's not referring to people like you. Don't think that for a minute. I was a Y2K Fear debunker myself, and I assure you, I NEVER attacked people like you who WERE working around the clock to ensure that the transition was smooth.

What I attacked -- and what he's clearly referring to -- were the outright fearmongers. "We CAN'T fix it all in time, buy beans, bullets and head for the hills!" ... and ... "embedded systems are the great unknown, we're all going to die, so buy beans and bullets and head for the ... etc., etc." Have you forgotten the "Y2K Crisis Center" (or whatever they called it) with Sam Donaldson, on watch over the transition? All of the newspaper articles in early 1999 about how the End Was Coming?

THAT'S what he's referring to. Of course there were bugs to be fixed -- some of them true showstoppers. Yes, a lot of people like you poured a lot of nervous sweat into fixing them.

But personally, speaking for myself, I'll never respect Ed Yourdon again. He was the ringleader of the "too many lines of code, it CAN'T be fixed crowd," and continued to ringlead even after it became obvious that it WAS being fixed.

Not you, poster. You did a GREAT job just so that "debunkers" like me COULD say, "it'll be a non-event." :)

Thanks to the Y2K heavy lifters!

[LaminatorX]

I for one want to celebrate the anniversary of the Y2K Bug's passing by thanking all the people who's hark work kept it from being far far worse than the few mild annoyances we experienced. The word I saw was some gas pumps that were locked up, and it could have been far worse if a whole lot of coders and analysts hadn't spent a ton of time pouring over reams of old code and fixing problems. Double thanks to all the Grampa Geeks who came out of retirement to show the kids how COBOL was done and why it's still so important even ten years later. A nod goes even to the suits at the top who looked beyond next quarter's numbers and funded the stitch in time would save nine.

Meta-answer

[dkleinsc]

#88 - the point when every news organization feels compelled to make really long lists of the top ____ of the last decade. It's like the annual "top ____ of the year" lists, only 10 times as lame.

Re:First Paragraph

[datajack]

mostly fairly minor consequences of the vast majority of non-mission critical computers thinking it's the wrong date

Taken individually and in isolation, it is true that the problem with many such systems is trivial. Howevr many of these trivial systems feed into or from other trivial systems and this makes the system viewed as a whole rather complex. It is extremely difficult to predict the outcome of even a simple looking system (see Conway's game of life for example) so there was no telling what would or could happen with all of these non-critical systems suddenly hitting faulty data. As close to feasibly possible to 'all of it' had to be fixed because otherwise there would be too many unknowns that could come back to bite us later.

Mail Googles

[RivenAleem]

Can anyone explain to me what is wrong with this? I don't understand why it's on the list. I think it's great.

Re:The XBox's need more coverage.

[sopssa]

But it needs to be from a truly random sample, not taken from some troubleshooting forum for 360, where people without problems never go.

Re:The XBox's need more coverage.

[TapeCutter]

"they surveyed 5000 people which is just 0.0178% of the total units sold, so statisticly it's a worthless sample size"

The statistical power [wikipedia.org] of a survey does not depend on population size, a sample of 5000 is more than sufficient to get a very good estimate of the real failure rate, (assuming the real failure rate is not extremely small).

However a failure rate is meaningless without considering length of time and under what conditions. And as you imply the sample must be random, self selecting readers of a particular mag is not at all random, so even though they have a good sample size the quoted numbers are complete bullshit.

In otherwords the only thing the survey demonstrates is that an unhappy customer is far more likely to take the survey than a satisfied customer.

Re:First Paragraph

[betterunixthanunix]

What this chapter completely misses is that the emergency spending on Y2K fixes was just the tail end of a long effort of companies updating their software. Journalists were not talking about the Y2K bug in 1991, but plenty of programmers were already aware of it and already working on solutions to the problem. By the time the story got interesting -- as the year 2000 approached -- the problem had been mostly solved without any prodding from the media or pushing from the president. This whole situation was compounded by the fact that most people, including the journalists covering the story, had no understanding of how computers stored dates, and the fact that companies whose products had nothing to do with the Y2K bug were advertising their software as "Y2K compliant," and everyone wound up thinking that there was impending doom.

For the record, the Y2K bug did actually threaten critical computer systems, many of which were mainframes installed decades earlier, but those systems were fixed long before the story ever ran on the news.

Re:First Paragraph

[betterunixthanunix]

I had an uncle working for MetLife in the early 90s; had he and his team not put in many months of work back then, the Y2K bug would have left millions of insurance claims unpayable, from business insurance to health plans. On any given day, thousands upon thousands of insurance transactions are processed automatically by a computer, which would have rejected everything as invalid because the claim dates would have appeared to be before the policies were opened.

People who think Y2K was not a big deal were either children when the problem was solved or never really understood the problem to begin with. Y2K38 is the next big date/time bug to deal with; many people here on /. will probably wind up working on fixing the problem long before it causes catastrophes, and we will be pretty old on January 1, 2038. I am also pretty sure that people like you will be saying, "There was never really a problem" for many years afterward, and someone like me will probably have to reply with a story about a relative who solved the problem before the press started running stories about the end of the world.

Probably too late to make the list...

[russotto]

...but Verizon's decision to make Bing the only allowable search provider on Blackberrys on its network would have made 88 easy.

Re:sony rootkit

[BlackSnake112]

Sine when does Apple make hard disks? The hard disks in Apple laptops and Apple desktops that I have seen are made by the same people that Dell, HP, and everyone else uses (I have seen Toshiba, WD, Seagate). The only difference is the hard drive has a little apple printed on the label. The hard drive specs are the same as the non Apple labeled ones. Apple has to have some way to see where the bottle neck is that is causing the beach ball. Saying it is the hard disk is jumping the gun a bit. Unless you put in a 5400 RPM (or slower) disk or a disk with no cache on it, I'd look else where.

I am saying this since I have changed 20+ hard drives in Apple laptops and desktops. There was no difference in performance with a non Apple drive vs an Apple branded drive. Usually the non Apple drive was bigger, had a bigger cache, and sometimes a faster RPM. Which usually made the machine more responsive.

Re:The XBox's need more coverage.

[Again]

- The Gamecube: everything about it. A nasty, tacky piece of junk with no games worth looking at that was put out with the intention of being a serious contender and rightly consigned to third place.

The Gamecube sold 22 million units and the original XBox only sold 24 million. Nintendo made money off of every single unit sold. I wouldn't call it a failure.

Re:The Segway doesn't deserve being on this list

[ig88b]

I don't see why there has to be anything in between. When I lived in Hong Kong, I wasn't thinking, "boy it sure would be nice to have some small device to get me from the MTR/KCR/Bus/Ferry/Light Rail to my destination." I walked the 5 or 10 minutes after the "arteries" ended. We shouldn't be thinking about how to improve after people get off the mass transit, we should be thinking about how to improve the mass transit.

Re:obligatory

[larry bagina]

The 60s ended in 1974.

Re:#83 isn't lame, it's accurte.

[ari_j]

I don't know much about TFA's author, but I definitely got the impression from reading his damn multi-page blog post (thanks for posting another one of those to the front page, kdawson) that he didn't actually know much about the technologies he was ridiculing. Yahoo was the most obvious example - anyone who started using the web when commercializing it was a novel idea will remember finding web pages not with an indexing search engine but with Yahoo's topical hierarchy of links. It was well-organized and really did a great job as the yellow pages of the internet - in fact, if I am not much mistaken, it seems to me that Yahoo linked to data sources other than HTTP in those early days. You could turn to Webcrawler for an indexed search engine, but normally you would only do that after Yahoo's categories failed you, as relevant links were much quicker to find through a hierarchy than a full-text search. It wasn't until the web exploded in size faster than Yahoo could keep up that a text search engine was really a daily necessity, and by then the geniuses at Google were on the path to doing it right.

There are other examples in TFA of things that were not at all stupid ideas. Failures in hindsight, perhaps, but the cat-herding "even we don't know what we do" Superbowl ads were certainly more stupid at the place and time they were conceived than Steve Jobs inadvertently hitting the wrong button during a product demonstration.

Re:Agreed

[crimperman]

> All these arsehats who go on about the Y2K being a load of scare mongering paranoia are the ones who don't have a clue about just how much work went on in 1999 trying to sort the issues out!

Hear hear!

I worked at a large manufacturers during 1999 and was tasked with the Y2K stuff. This basically included six months worth of work fixing the stuff that would have an issue followed by six months of sending replies to customers who were told they had to be concerned by the media and the industry that rose up surrounding Y2K.

Yeah there was an awful lot of largely unappreciated work that went on to make sure Y2K didn't happen but there was also an awful lot of unnecessary hype and faff that created the hysteria that in turn created the backlash when the predicted disaster didn't happen.

In the spirit of Apollo 13 I've always thought of Y2K as a sucessful failure. Successful in that we worked hard and avoided it. Failure in that we waited way too late to do anything about it in the first place and that we let the politicians and the media create the level of hysteria they did.