The 57 Lamest Tech Moments of 2010 123
harrymcc writes "When it comes strange blunders, failed dreams, pointless legal wrangling, and other embarrassments, the technology industry had an uncommonly busy 2010. I compiled a list of the most notable examples--including the lost iPhone prototype, the short life of Microsoft's Kin, the end of Google Wave, the McAfee security meltdown, a depressingly long list of lawsuits over mobile patents, and much more."
Welcome to the end of the year... (Score:4, Insightful)
Wake me up in January.
Re:Welcome to the end of the year... (Score:3, Insightful)
It should have been 58... (Score:5, Insightful)
...that way the article could have included itself as number one. Another meandering, poorly written summary of the year.
If you're going to choose an arbitrary number to attach to an end of year list, keep it to ten and focus on the writing. Seriously, 57? I'm reminded of the Jargon File comment about 17 [catb.org] being the "least random number". This is just a blatant excuse to generate ads by breaking up an article; I'm surprised it isn't 57 pages long, in slide show form.
Re:Beta Test on the public! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Ballmer is always a contender in the Lamestakes (Score:4, Insightful)
Polaroid is a shell of itself. It's just a holding company nowadays that licenses the Polaroid name out to various cheap manufacturers who make random devices under that name. This is why you see crap like Polaroid DVD players and whatnot. There is no Polaroid manufacturing, R&D, or marketing divisions - it just exists to license out the trademark to anyone willing give them a bag of cash.
That's why naming Lady Gaga as a Creative Director is bunkum. You can't have a creative director if the company DOESN'T CREATE ANYTHING.
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is the bullies, corporations and the police.
We planted a garden. A wonderful rose garden. And there were people stopping to look at it and say "hey, that's neat!" and we, the good natured fools we are, thought it would be great to open our garden to the public, so they can come in and enjoy it. And hey, who knows, maybe some of them might want to plant a few roses themselves? We can only benefit from it, right?
So we let them in, even showed them how to plant roses. And while they were not really too good gardeners, we handed them a few tools to make the work easier for them. And some of them (ok, a handful of them) actually went and built something nice. Most just wandered about and smelled a few roses. We even built them a few paths they could wander on so they don't accidentally stumble upon that field we built that camo net over, ya know, with our "special spices".
A few came in and trampled all over the roses. We shrugged and grabbed them and threw them out, because we not only know how to plant roses, we also know how to use their thorns to smack those bullies about and give them a wedgie on their way out. We build this garden after all, and we know every plant and every bush here, you can't hide from us! Well, ok, I admit, some of us thought it's fun to make fools out of the idiots that have no idea how to plant roses and snuck into their gardens when they weren't looking (and too stupid to close the door so people can only look but not touch), dyed their roses pink and blue polkadotted, mostly for fun and to ridicule them. It was good natured fun, hey, we did that to each other too and we really had a good laugh!
One cardinal mistake we made is that we built a few paths to the camo net patches, too, because, hey, they're nice folks and wanna have some of the good stuff too, what's the harm in giving them some? Well, there's not really a problem with that, but when the bullies trampled across our fields, they also trampled through the fields of those that can't defend themselves, and these guys started to call for the police. And they eventually stumbled towards our camo net patches and, well, erh... well, they decided that it's a problem, ya know? If we hadn't built paths to them, only we would have found our way to those "special places", through the hedges and the overgrown paths that need machetes to get to. Few policemen had those machetes...
Also along came the corporations who found out that people love to wander in our nice garden and started to built there too. At first, we didn't bother to worry. Like the native americans didn't worry when the first whities came along, we let them settle in our garden. Until suddenly we were told that we can't go to a few places of our garden anymore because that's now off limits. In our own garden! Not to mention that they were crying bloody murder if you went and polkadotted their roses!
And now we're sitting here, in our ever shrinking corner of our once wonderful garden, trampled down by the masses, broken up into lots by corporations with a policemen at every corner making sure you don't plant where you're not supposed to, and of course that you don't try to camo net anything.
If there's any lesson to learn, than that we should not let the masses in next time we build a garden. The seeds will be more expensive, granted, but at least we can grow what we want and keep the harvest.
Re:2010 isn't over yet... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Welcome to the end of the year... (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, it's no longer limited to the year-end roundup.
Probably 40% of online "journalism" is now listographies, frequently slide-show based, in order to suck up maximal clicks and spew scripted hoo-ha, delivering almost 100 bytes of actual info per 20 seconds waiting for the fucking page to turn.
It will be that way until advertisers stop falling for the dollars-for-page-views pricing model.