The 87 Lamest Moments In Tech, 2000-2009 328
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."
The very lamest moment? (Score:5, Funny)
sony rootkit (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit [wikipedia.org]
never forget, never forgive
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The /. ponies day. I thought Taco had lost it completely then.
On the other hand, it was also one of the greatest moments of the decade too.
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Which version of Snow Leopard does all of that?
I've found it to be pretty good so far, on both my Mac and my wife's.
I've not heard of this other stuff. It sounds a little made-up, or at least cherry-picked.
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http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9139250/Snow_Leopard_bug_deletes_all_user_data [computerworld.com]
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story_id=031001SMSU6O [newsfactor.com]
http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/27/apples-snow-leopard-may-stop-you-from-doing-your-job/ [venturebeat.com]
I can go on forever....
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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 i
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I'd been rather pleased with Snow Leopard right until I got hit by the Hoefler Text glitch, which crashes text processors and fucks up a number of fonts. Still waiting for the fix.
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In the very first edition, if you had a guest user, and you used it, you would return to the administrator account and find all the data gone. Bad. Fixed in 10.6.1. We're now in 10.6.2. But some people just can't move on.
obligatory (Score:3, Informative)
decade = 2001-2010
But at least they didn't make it a 87-page article.
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Well doh, they say so on page 1. But I still think it's a little wierd since say "the 60s" for me naturally go from 60-69, so we are at the end of the 00s, which somehow sounds incredibly lame.
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Yeah, how /do/ people pronounce this decade?
The 00's - the 'ohs', 'double zeros', 'aughts', 'zeroes'....
I'll just do my best not to refer to it.
Re:obligatory (Score:5, Funny)
The naughties.
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Yeah, how /do/ people pronounce this decade?
The naughties.
Leaving aside the jokes, has anyone else noticed that "the noughties" as the supposed name for this decade only seems to have cropped up- or at least been "standardised" on- in the past year or so.
For most of it, there didn't seem to be any strong name, though IIRC "2000s" was possibly the most common. Of course, while that name may have been fine when we were within the first ten years of the millennium (*), it's possibly less precise once it has two potential meanings. Though it didn't stop the "1900s" be
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The lack of a trite name for this decade has been the coolest, because people haven't been able to call something the "blank of the blank", mimndlessly.
The next decade is even better!
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The noughties (or naughties). What I want to know is, what the hell are we going to call the next one?
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Brit here. Parallel with "Cool Britannia" (remember that?) I saw a lot of use in the press of the "Naughty Nineties" (modelled on the "Swinging Sixties"). So if the astonishingly imaginative trend continues, I imagine the next decade will be christened the Naughteens.
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Re:obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
Re:obligatory (Score:5, Informative)
technically a decade is any ten year period, doesn't matter when it starts
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decade = 2001-2010
You aren't a coder, are you? If so, I envision many off-by-one errors in your work.
Re:obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Even the Bible supports this.
Shepherds out and about in deep Winter? Hmm... even in Israel you get snowfall in Winter. Not the time to have sheep and lambs around.
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I've all but conceded defeat on the millennium issue. I'll never, of course, admit to having been w
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You lead a very full life there, Ari!
Re:obligatory (Score:4, Funny)
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You aren't a coder, are you? If so, I envision many off-by-one errors in your work.
Surely a coder would have to be more mindful of the correct definitions of things like a decade. Otherwise if they moved between languages that had either 0 or 1 based arrays then they would constantly make errors.
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Or do you think the year 2000 was in the 90s?
It sure did feel like it. (reference to pre-911 life)
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So I guess the first decade ran from -1 to 0, and the second decade was from 1 to 10?
These decades go to 11.
The XBox's need more coverage. (Score:2, Interesting)
The 360 for its inexcusable failure rate, then in the wake of Microsofts competitors constantly revising their models and offering updates Microsoft declares they will not create a version two or revise their hardware.
Then - while XBox 360's were new and failing in droves, Microsoft not only decides the old model will no longer be supported with new products they recall as much existing stock of the old model as they can and do their best to make it got away. Sort of like they wanted to do with XP when Vis
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I dont think Xbox 360 was really lame. It was actually pretty good. Granted, I only bought mine in 2007 but it has worked great and so have my friends ones too.
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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.
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i'd say the only thing lame here is your claim of 54% failure rate, it just doesn't sense check.
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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
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But it needs to be from a truly random sample, not taken from some troubleshooting forum for 360, where people without problems never go.
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Video gaming in general could have used more prominence in TFA. After all, it's undoubtedly a part of the tech sector. Thinking of 10 examples off the top of my head, in no particular order...
- The Red Ring of Death: as you say, should absolutely have been in there. Cost-cutting decisions lead to major customer frustrations. The issue is then compounded by lies, obfuscation and, once the problem is acknowledged, a massively slow response.
- The Gamecube: everything about it. A nasty, tacky piece of junk with
Re:The XBox's need more coverage. (Score:5, Insightful)
- 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.
Playstation 3 backwards compatibility and price (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm a little surprised that didn't make the list. It still irritates me, every time I look down at the PS2 I still have hooked up next to my PS3. Looking at the eBay listings for a $400 used 60 Gig console next to a $300 shiny new 80 Gig console just reinforces it.
MS? (Score:2)
I guess that's only because you're limiting yourself to actual tech decisions, not including tech companies litigating [sco.com].
(Oh wait. Let's make that "litigation companies litigating." I don't even know why I brought it up.)
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Talking of dumb... (Score:2)
... wtf is a scad?
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Dictionary [merriam-webster.com] - learn how to use one
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How does "any of several carangid fishes (especially of the genus Decapterus)" act in the role of a numerator in the context.
Perhaps the OP should also learn to use a dictionary too, I also thought WTF when I saw "scads" used as it was.
Nice find. (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah that was good for a Laugh.
Steve Ballmer on stage at any time is always funny. :) Developers Developers Developers..... bahahahahahahaha
Sony root kit. I'm still finding PC's infected with this beast.
Zune. Do they still make this thing. I actually saw one in the wild once. Man that thing is UGLY.
The Kindle the most pointless electronic gizmo ever. It's not a laptop, phone, or book. You don't own the content. and it's UGLY. You want how much??????
All in all a good read. Thanks.
First Paragraph (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Mod parent up, I was just on my way to come post the same thing.
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#88: Also note that Google's multiple outages this year (and last?) don't get a mention.
#89: No mention of Windows Mobile 6.5 and how MS threw away its last chance of ever competing with the droid/iphone.
#90: TFA
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Yes, Android feels like a beta, but then so do all Google products.
Even though WinMo is for power users (I agree), the problem with the popularity of the iphone is that the power users already want it in their enterprise environment and ferverently believe that it *IS* an enterprise phone.
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To be honest, I also prefer WM6.1 to WM6.5 (except for the Bluetooth stack which is somewhat better). But still, even WM6.5 is a perfectly usable multitasking operating system for portable computers (and I use my Windows Mobile devices as portable PCs since 2003).
Also, iPhone is not that popular in Europe, so you often see following messages in the smartphone boards:
"I am fed up with Windows Mobile, I have bought an iPhone now"
and a couple of months later: "I am fed up with iPhone, I am going back to Window
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Apple fanbois with mod points are very predictable.
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I believe you just posted the singularily most intelligent and correct response on Slashdot. Congratulations!
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"But you don't have dandruff."
"Exactly."
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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!"
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I think I heard of one embedded system that broke due to Y2K, but I've seen many more over the years that got confused over leap years. The year 2000 was especially good for that because that wasn't a leap year even though the common, oversimplified, every-4-year rule says it should have been.
Actually, it was a leap year, even though the common, not-quite-as-oversimplified-but-still-too-simple every-4-year-except-for-every-100-year rule says it shouldn't have been. The really dumb systems with the every-4-year rule lucked out.
Now we can all wait for the end of civilization in February 2100 as every single embedded system crashes....
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I suggest that all slashdotters join me in ignoring this article, since the first paragraph makes if clear it was written by a fool who knows nothing of what he speaks.
Anyone who actually worked in a Y2K project knows that if the problem had been ignored then the consequences would have been disastrous.
Re:First Paragraph (Score:5, Insightful)
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:First Paragraph (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:First Paragraph (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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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
Re:First Paragraph (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Yay, another weirdly huge list. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The Slashdotters will prove to you that we can come up with WAY more than 87 - you just watch. So many of them neck and neck it's hard to narrow it down.
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No doubt. I just have a pet peeve with huge lists like this. A lot of the value in coming up with a list is how & why you decide to either include a particular entry or leave it off. The longer the list gets, the more it appears that the author didn't put any hard thought into it, and the less value it has (for me anyway).
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Y2K (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Agreed (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
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> 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 u
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In 2001 we had several companies that wanted to donate System 36's to be museum displays. We ended up telling them that we already had 2 of our own!
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I see a lot of Apple hate... (Score:2, Funny)
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I don't have any problems with the MBA but saying you don't need a DVD drive to watch DVDs because you can just rent them from iTunes - wow that was good. Especially with those exorbitant prices.
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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!
KDE 4.0 and KDevelop 4 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
#83 isn't lame, it's accurte. (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
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.
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#88 (Score:3, Funny)
Slashdot Idle
Google C&Ding CyanogenMod (Score:2)
I'm surprised that Google sending a C&D letter to CyanogenMod didn't make the list. Google had been trying to market its cell phone OS, Android, as an open platform that welcomed innovation and contributions. Then they decided to threaten an immensely popular third party rom that did wonders for Android's performance.
The official distribution at the time had many issues. Performance degraded the longer you went without a reboot. You couldn't install apps on SD cards, only the tiny internal storage space
Re:Google C&Ding CyanogenMod (Score:4, Informative)
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
AOL Search Logs? (Score:2, Interesting)
Intel making Microsoft lower specs (Score:2)
Re:Intel making Microsoft lower specs (Score:4, Informative)
7. Audrey heartburn (Score:2)
7. Audrey heartburn
Bought two for my kids. Sold them on ebay *three years* later. I made $30 on the deal!
ebay rocks!!!!!
Twitter (Score:5, Informative)
##. Twitter
Nothing else need be said.
Thanks to the Y2K heavy lifters! (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
#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 #39,hard to pronounce names (Score:2)
Google's Malware Blacklist (Score:3, Funny)
Wait, that was a mistake?
Probably too late to make the list... (Score:3, Insightful)
...but Verizon's decision to make Bing the only allowable search provider on Blackberrys on its network would have made 88 easy.