Ten Gadgets That Defined the Decade 313
Corpuscavernosa writes "As 2009 winds down and we try to come up with new and clever ways of referring to the early years of this century, there's really only one thing left to do: declare our ten favorite gadgets of the aughts and show them off in chronological order. It's arguable that if this wasn't the decade of gadgets, it was certainly a decade shaped by gadgets — one which saw the birth of a new kind of connectedness. In just ten years time, gadgets have touched almost every aspect of our daily lives, and personal technology has come into its own in a way never before seen. It's a decade that's been marked the ubiquity of the internet, the downfall of the desktop, and the series finale of Friends, but we've boiled it down to the ten devices we've loved the most and worked the hardest over the past ten years. We even had some of our friends in the tech community chime in with their picks on what they thought was the gadget or tech of the decade."
XP and OS X? (Score:5, Interesting)
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I tend to think of a widget as more of a little (computer) desktop thing like a clock or calender. XP and OSX are really more like highly-evolved Widgets.
Widgeotto? Widgeot, even.
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Widget is a "window gadget".
It really has no appropriate use outside of a UI... but yea, people use it anyways because it sounds cool.
Re:XP and OS X? (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong. The term "widget" has existed for far longer than any real computer technology.
Re:XP and OS X? (Score:4, Informative)
Or, as Wikipedia has it: "An indefinite name for a gadget or mechanical contrivance, esp. a small manufactured item"
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Widget is a "window gadget".
It really has no appropriate use outside of a UI... but yea, people use it anyways because it sounds cool.
Is it not a common word in American? It's a common enough word in British (e.g. here used in a beer advert from the 1990s [youtube.com]).
Re:XP and OS X? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:XP and OS X? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh.... scuse me, but how or what did XP define? Maybe someone could shed some light on how XP represents such a leap ahead that it warrants being called a "decade defining tool"? Basically it's Win2k with more color.
Re:XP and OS X? (Score:4, Insightful)
It defined the end of the Win 9x line. For the first time most people's PCs became relatively stable. For those of us that were Linux or Unix users, it wasn't a big deal, but for the average user it was very significant. Windows XP, unlike the 9x line or Vista, focused more on being a stable operating system than being an application. After the optical mouse and the old 1980s Olympics game, it might be the best product Microsoft ever released. And for Microsoft, it was probably their hardest business decision: build an operating system that people won't feel they need to upgrade from or lose angry customers to Linux and Unix derived lines (like Mac OS X).
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It defined the end of the Win 9x line. For the first time most people's PCs became relatively stable. For those of us that were Linux or Unix users, it wasn't a big deal, but for the average user it was very significant. Windows XP, unlike the 9x line or Vista, focused more on being a stable operating system than being an application. After the optical mouse and the old 1980s Olympics game, it might be the best product Microsoft ever released. And for Microsoft, it was probably their hardest business decision: build an operating system that people won't feel they need to upgrade from or lose angry customers to Linux and Unix derived lines (like Mac OS X).
Win2k never happened.
Re:XP and OS X? (Score:4, Insightful)
IMHO, Windows 2000 is the "unsung hero" of this. XP provided new window decorations, a DRM stack (Trusted Audio Path), activation (for non VLK copies), a few EncFS improvements (no need for a recovery agent, multiple users have access to a file), and shadow copies. However, it didn't change the game as in fundamental OS mechanics like moving from a DOS "shell" to a true 32 bit protected mode OS has done.
Windows 2000 provided essentially the OS we are sitting on now on most Windows installs. The server side gave us Active Directory, IPSec, a decent privilege/ACL model mostly inherited from NT, user rights (user with versus without admin privs), decent crash protection (especially compared to 9x/ME). The workstation edition gave us a full 32 bit executables, additions onto a decent journaling filesystem, innate separation of users (versus the kludgy .PWL files from the 9x era), and so on.
XP is a decent OS, and has weathered the test of time, and this by in its own right gives it mentioned, but it would gain recognition for being evolutionary, not revolutionary. Windows 2000 was revolutionary both on the client and server sides.
Re:XP and OS X? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but the product that married the stability of the NT line with the flexibility and compatibility of the 9x line was Win2k. If any product deserves the "decade defining" title, it's Win2k. But not XP.
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Sorry, but the product that married the stability of the NT line with the flexibility and compatibility of the 9x line was Win2k. If any product deserves the "decade defining" title, it's Win2k. But not XP.
The Win 9x line wasn't dead when Windows 2000 was released. Windows Me was released later. Additionally, Windows 2000 wasn't a consumer operating system. It was sold to businesses and power users. There was no home edition. Finally, I would say Windows NT 4.0 met the same requirements that you claim Windows 2000 met. With this in mind, both Windows 2k and Windows XP are only updated versions of Windows NT 4.0. The only significant difference is that Windows XP was sold to consumers with the home edition, wh
Re:XP and OS X? (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Sorry, but no.
NT4 sorely lacked two core features that pretty much shot it for the consumer market. Namely, DirectX support past version 3.0 (IIRC) and USB support. Not to mention the fairly poor support for "legacy" products, i.e. products that didn't really care too much for MS programming standards, which basically meant that NT4 was entirely unsuitable as a game platform, which was (and still is) a core application for home PCs.
Win2k offered all of that (nearly every game that ran on a Win9x machine ran on 2k) and thus was the first true blend between the NT and the 9x line.
What I have to give you is that there was no "home" edition of 2k, which suckered far too many into using ME. This again, though, I blame on the way 2k and ME were perceived, especially by the relevant media who pictured 2k as the "office" system and ME as the "consumer" product.
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I dual booted Windows 95 (then 98SE) and NT4. With Win2K, I no longer needed 9x for anything - all of the games that didn't run with NT4 worked fine with 2K. Previously, the NT line lacked two features of the 9x line. One was PnP support, so installing and configuring devices was not particularly fun. The other was a full DirectX implementation (for NT4 it was often a release or two behind 9x and didn't have 3D acceleration support - my VooDoo2 provided 3D acceleration with OpenGL but not Direct3D in NT
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Fail, fail: First of all, plug and play is a standard feature of PCI, and NT4 couldn't support PCI to the extent that it does without it. Second of all, there is a secret but easy way to enable ISA PnP in NT4 [fredhanson.com].
NT4 is a gigantic piece of shit, and so is DirectX; Direct3D is an abortion which would never have happened if those assholes at 3DFX had gone with MiniGL from the get-go instead of going the egotistical route, and allowing their collective hubris to cause them to create a wholly new 3D API, something
Re:XP and OS X? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, they don’t need to be physical. But they are definitely toys.
XP for the drooling Playmobil playing retard. ;)
OSX for the gay hipster designer.
The iPod? (Score:5, Funny)
No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.
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360? (Score:5, Insightful)
Engadget's justification is rather lame
but Microsoft's audacious approach to charging people to play online with Xbox Live Gold actually ended up as the console's greatest strength, and a key to its staying power
Charging people wasn't its strength. Its strength was it was the one online service that didn't totally suck. Lets see, Nintendo's online service lets you play with friends if you send them a random string of letters and numbers as a "friend code", won't let you type messages on most games, oh and the one game that would have had online as a killer feature, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the online mode is so messed up because it compensates for lag on one player's end by making the entire match laggy for everyone. Yeah Nintendo sure raised the bar high. PSN is good, but has too many flawed features. For example, PlayStation Home. The idea is good, take human avatars to a new level, the implementation is flawed. It is nothing but ads.
Engadget also manages to glance over the RRoD issue that plagued early Xbox owners.
I mean, is Microsoft buying Engadget off? The 360 as the console of the decade? Hardly. The 360 as the console of this generation? Possibly. But not the console of the decade, not by a long shot.
Re:360? (Score:5, Insightful)
It doesn't even come close for this generation- its far behind the Wii in sales and in originality. Although I agree for the decade it has to be the PS2, due to its dominance last gen. Obviously written by someone with an MS hard on.
Re:360? (Score:5, Funny)
IMO that's about the most memorable and defining thing about the xbox 360
FWIW, "exploding" batteries from various gadgets were rather more common in this decade than previous decades.
Re:360? (Score:5, Insightful)
It really depends on how you measure it. By sales, the PS2 is definitely the winner, with the Wii a close second. In terms of innovation, though, the 360 had quite a bit more "firsts" than either of those.
Of course there have been failures. RROD issues, backing HD-DVD rather than Blu-Ray, continuing to use the DVD9 format for games rather than HD-DVD or Blu-Ray, lack of HDMI on early console hardware, the hard drive as an optional component, no built-in wifi, etc. But to say that there's no innovation, or that they haven't moved the industry forward by huge strides, is just completely wrong.
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Fixed that for ya.
Seriously though, very little good ever comes out of engadget, their technical writing is an embarassment, making slashdot summaries look like fucking shakespeare. Not to mention they probably have one of the heaviest websites that I know of, how many megabytes am I supposed to download just to read some shitty article? It's basically all that is wrong with slashdot, distilled, then magnified.
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I'd rather wait 30 seconds to read something worth reading than waste 3 minutes on a page and later find out it wasn't worth that time.
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Simple solution: avoid Engadget to begin with. You'll never have to waste 3 minutes (at Engadget) again!
Re:360? (Score:5, Funny)
But not the console of the decade, not by a long shot.
There's still 23 hours left for the PS3 to outsell it! Go, fanboys, go!
Re:360? (Score:5, Interesting)
Really, the 360 as the video game console of the decade? The PS2 really changed things more than the 360 for the simple reason of the DVD player.
For that matter, the first Xbox was a lot more influential than the 360, because it was new competition for Sony. The 360 was just an incremental update.
Re:360? (Score:5, Insightful)
Engadget.. (Score:2)
Put the gadgets in the summary! (Score:2, Insightful)
Hey Slashdot, when we get stories like this, just list out the gadgets from the article in the story summary that you submit to slashdot.
No one reads the article half the time. And usually, (not the case here) the story is split up among 3 or so pages, with the last page just a page of ads or links to other stories.
So, slashdot, what do you say? :D
Re:Put the gadgets in the summary! (Score:5, Funny)
I'll bite
Since you cant be troubled, the list is as following:
Rock Band
Tony Hawk: Ride
Wii
Wacom tablet
iPhone
Johnny 5
UTF-8
The Internet
Debian Etch
RIAA universal communication surveillance
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for someone with a relatively low slashdot member #, they are going to kick you outta here for not knowing what debian ETCH is or Johnny 5
GPS (Score:5, Insightful)
In the last 10 years, portable GPS navigation has become ubiquitous in cars.
They're so cheap nowadays that I got one as a gift.
I'm sure there's one that could be pointed to as the breakout device.
/I still have in the car paper maps for ~5 States
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Dude, it's on my phone. (Score:3, Interesting)
And it will find the nearest Starbucks for me and tell me if they're open.
Yeah! Why isn't GPS on that list?
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Which came first: The GPS enabled cell phone or the standalone GPS Nav unit?
GPS is in cellphones because the standalone market turned the chip into a
commodity item and showed that there was a very strong demand for portable nav.
The cellphone manufacturers also got a push from the post-9/11 E-911 mandate.
(It was cheaper for them to include GPS in every phone than to update their infrastructure)
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Maybe because neither Apple nor MS made one yet?
Let's be honest here, take a good look at the list and ask yourself why it's so Apple and MS centric? I can see iPhone and iPod, but the G4? XP? 360? Decade defining? C'mon...
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Google Maps wasn't an especially novel idea in and of itself, it was the implementation that made it notable.
The iPod didn't come of age... (Score:2)
...Until this portable media player reached the 4G iPod (20 and 40 GB hard disk model) and the iPod mini (4 GB hard disk model) in 2004. These were the first iPods with the modern Click Wheel interface only and full USB 2.0 interface support.
Interestingly, it's been said the best-sounding of the iPods are the 2G iPods nano and 5G/5.5G iPods with the Wolfson DAC chip. Mind you, the current "6.5G" iPod classic (120GB/160 GB), 4G/5G iPod nano and the 2G/3G iPod touch overcame some of the early issues with the
"Click wheel Only" (Score:3, Interesting)
These were the first iPods with the modern Click Wheel interface only and full USB 2.0 interface support.
What does that mean? I had the very first iPod. All it had was a click wheel. In fact it was better than a few later generations, since the wheel actually turned and thus gave more feedback.
As for "full USB 2.0 interface", well that was nice for Windows users but a step back from the Firewire400 the original sported. It allowed the original iPod to load songs just as fast as any later USB 2.0 model,
The list (Score:5, Informative)
Canon Digital ELPH (2000)
Apple PowerBook G4 (Titanium) (2001)
Microsoft Windows XP (2001) / Apple Mac OS X (2000)
Apple iPod (2001)
TiVo Series2 (2002)
Motorola RAZR V3 (2003)
PalmOne Treo 600 / 650 (2003 / 2004)
Microsoft Xbox 360 (2005)
Apple iPhone (2007)
ASUS Eee PC 900 (2008)
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So, there are three phones there and Nokia 1100 is not among them?! You know, the most popular...no, not only phone. The most popular single type of consumer electronic device in the history of mankind.
Though perhaps writers have really taken into heart the distinction between tools (1100 isn't much more than that) and gadgets...
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Thanks for posting the list. Unfortunately it only made me want to read the article to see what the hell they were thinking.
First of all, I think they were wrong by narrowing down things to specific models. That led to three of the spots being taken up by cell phones. This should have been a list of what types of gadgets defined the decade. After reading all the posts here, and thinking a bit about it, here's what I've come up with:
Digital Cameras - No more having to get your film developed, though this
Some of them are pretty cool (Score:2)
I hated my RAZR (Score:2)
The only issue was that if one used the flip to answer option, the early models did not allow a caller ID.
That was not the only issue. Not by a long shot.
I had the RAZR for a few years, near the end of its lifespan in the market (I replaced it with the original iPhone). In my time with the RAZR the only credit I would give it is that it survived be thrown across the room in sheer frustration three times. Sturdy, yes. But here's the things I hated:
1) Keypad. Almost unreadable and the slant of the keys
Gadgets (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometime in the mid-90s the guy I was training and I were having a discussion about the future of technology while we were driving down the road in rural south Texas. I had a bag phone and an IBM Model 70 portable (lugable). He had a Zarus. We both carried pagers. A big part of the conversation was about how someday, we wouldn't need to carry all that crap just to do our job. We both knew that someday all of this stuff would be a single device. Just not a clue what that device would be or how it could work.
Today, about 15 years later, we still work together. I carry a Palm Treo and he has a iPhone. Different job, but mostly do the same thing, just not consultants anymore. I don't think either one of us could do our job without these gadgets. The ability
to ssh into our systems is key to our jobs, and it doesn't really matter what device we use anymore. The gadgets are getting to be more than just a convenience for both of us. They almost define our function in the job. Even if we're out of the office, we still take care of issues, now, not when we get back.
The gadgets have raised expectations for a lot of positions. If I still worked like I did back in the 90s, people would be waiting either until I got there, or got where I could hit a phone line and modem. Now, with the internet (ultimate gadget) and a smart phone, I can fix most problems at 70mph running down the road (as a passenger, of course, not going to break any laws, ha). And that's become almost an expectation.
So, yes I kind of see this as the decade of the gadget, but the gadgets mostly control us.
God help us all.
Re:Gadgets (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you heard about redundancy? (Score:3, Insightful)
Just saying.
I fail to see why people should stop working if a file server fails.
trinkets or tools? (Score:4, Interesting)
If you said the 80's I'd say Rubik's Cube, Simon, and other toys. If you mean useful tools and not just novelties, the 80's is when the PC became more than just a hobbyist device. You had early brick cell phones but they truly came into their own in the 90's. Likewise, laptops went from being novelties to useful and only became more awesome in the 00's.
I think setting a round number to meet is kind of dumb. What if there weren't ten notable devices?
I think that the ipod and iphone are probably the most significant devices but not just for what they are but for what they presage. Ipod's music on the go is nice but Apple breaking into the music industry and becoming a major distributor has a far greater impact on the landscape. Iphone put a crack in the usual walled garden arrangement of US carriers and is showing competitors how to do things. Handheld computers have been around for ages but the ipod/phone is bringing us to the point at which there's enough market saturation to change the way we do things.
When I was a kid, only us geeks had computers. You went to school and you looked for other freaks and outcasts. That's where you were likely to find other computer people. And we used computers for the usual geeky stuff, socializing over BBS, playing games, and being geeks. With the arrival of the internet, non-geek households started getting computers. And the early social scene really sucked in the rest of the youth audience. By the time I was in college, everyone had their own computers. And the more ways there were to socialize on them, the more popular they got. Yeah, in the past you had phreakers who were into phones for the tech of it and you had teenage girls who spent just as much time on the phone but only for gossiping with friends. Still, the phone had an impact on society, the way people live.
I bring up the social sites because the phones are providing as much functionality on them as a standard computer. And all of this is having an impact. A lot of people in my age range are going without cable tv, they can download whatever they want to watch. They are dropping landlines since the cell does everything they need. Traditional media channels are going to get boned. And all of this will have a cultural impact.
I can shop on my phone. I can download podcasts, videocasts, tv shows, music, books, audiobooks, access the net, and this is only the beginning. I think we're seeing the beginning of the destruction of mainstream media. Yeah, many have made that call before but I see it happening. Change comes with the youth and ends when the old generation dies off. AM radio is on its last legs. I don't know anyone who listens to FM radio anymore, not anyone under 50. MTV continues to be a joke and sets no trends anymore. Authors are cutting deals directly with Amazon to publish on Kindle. Podcasts and videocasts are gaining wider audiences and network/cable television continues to flounder with their broken advertising model. The shows may have a huge audience but the Neilsen ratings cannot account for it. This is why Family Guy got cancelled only to shock Fox by being a top-selling DVD of all time. They had no idea the kind of reach that show had and brought it back.
Everything I'm mentioning above I think is setting the stage for uncontrolled culture. It took big bucks to fund mass media back in the day. Now any yabob on Twitter can reach an audience in seconds that would make William Randolph Hearst get wood. And the cost? Nothing! They say never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel. How much worse does it get when the electrons are free?
Now it's possible that the audience won't fracture that much. Give kids free reign in a supermarket to eat anything they want and you know they're heading to the candy section regardless of how well the veggie section is stocked. Give the masses unfettered access to all media and they might end up gravitating back to the old celebrities or create new celebrities who will take the place of the old. It might still be possible to shape and mold public opinion as easily as before. But I have a gut feeling things could turn out differently in the 21st century. If the 20th century was defined by mass media, the 21st could be defined by what comes next.
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I think we're seeing the beginning of the destruction of mainstream media... AM radio is on its last legs. I don't know anyone who listens to FM radio anymore... Podcasts and videocasts are gaining wider audiences and network/cable television continues to flounder with their broken advertising model.
I doubt it. What's happening is that podcasts and internet media are becoming "the mainstream media" - we only need to see what has happened to slashdot over the years to see how easy it is for the alternative to be subsumed into the mainstream.
It will all come full-circle, and FM radio may become the bastion of non-mainstream media with community stations and the like, while podcasts and online streaming come to epitomize corporate big media.
This is why Family Guy got cancelled only to shock Fox by being a top-selling DVD of all time. They had no idea the kind of reach that show had and brought it back.
Yeah, there's some decidedly non-mainstream media right there...
TiBook (Score:4, Informative)
Engadget mentions that the TiBooks solidified the presence of the widescreen display in notebook computers.
This isn't particularly accurate or true, as the TiBook's screen was only slightly wider (1.5:1) than the standard 4:3 (1.33:1) aspect ratio that has been ubiquitous on NTSC TVs and computer monitors for decades. These laptops appeared fairly square and unremarkable.
For whatever reason, the 15" aluminum PowerBook appeared a bit wider, particularly in the final generation of the model, although the aspect ratio evidently stayed the same. The 17" version always had a wide screen (1.6:1), although all of these fell short of the cinematic 16:9 (1.77:1) ratio also used in 1080p displays.
The 12" PowerBooks always had a 4:3 display, and were IMO some of the most impressive laptops Apple's ever produced, as they were the first laptops to successfully cram a full-featured machine into a tiny chassis without any major compromises. I might be biased, of course, as I'm typing this comment from one such machine -- even for an Apple product, the 12" Powerbooks retain a cult-like following.
If you wanted to ascribe any one model for being a forebearer to widescreen laptops, you'd have to go with the 17" Aluminum powerbook, the MacBook, or any of the PC industry's less-successful early experiments in this field.
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One killer "gadget" (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the 2000s will be remembered for cheap (in both meanings of the word) tech.
Re:One killer "gadget" (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheap is not new. Cheap already was part of the whole economy deal when Japan started cranking out cheap knockoffs of quality products in the 50s and 60s (yes, before they took over the electronics edge they essentially copied everything and flooded the market with cheap, in both meanings, copies).
The 2000s will be remembered as the decade of "nothing but cheap", though. Because even the "quality", brand named, products are cheap. Dropped from the same sweatshop conveyer belts than the cheap generics. Back in the 60s, you had the choice, going for cheap and knowing it will break apart in a few months, or investing into something with quality. That option does not exist anymore. Everything is basically cheap crap. The price difference does not mean that the product itself is of higher quality. At best, it means that your hassle when trying to get it replaced when (not if) it breaks down is less.
The 2000s will be remembered as the decade of throwaway electronics, with nothing of lasting value. And why not? By the time your cheap crap croaks the next gen version is here already anyway.
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Should we send a thank you note to the cheap Chinese (and other) workers in those Gulag-like factories?
P.S.: It’s so stupid. If the products were so expensive, that people there could live at a high standard, then they could buy so much stuff that by selling them that stuff, we could afford those expensive products anyway.
There was an interesting study, that showed that an economy can be in two stable states. The high standard and the low standard (of living) one. And the important part was, that for
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Cheap, fast, good. Pick any two.
Also worthwhile is the drop in quality in consumer goods. Even back in 1999, it wasn't uncommon to send a hard drive in for repairs instead of just buying a new one. When labor is $75/hr and parts only come from the authorized ($$$) dealer, you just throw away anything that breaks, and a lot of stuff breaks.
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Actually, pirating Windows is much harder now. In 1999, you only needed to enter a serial number printed on the pirated CD's packaging, now you need to make sure the software doesn't find out it's pirated during updates.
Playstation 2 = Gadget (Score:4, Interesting)
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I mean, TWO screened handhelds seemed a bit unrealistic too.
Hmmmm... they didn't seem unrealistic when we played with them in the 1980s. [wikipedia.org]
The decade isn't over yet! (Score:2, Informative)
Dammit, people. The decade runs through 2010. 2001-2010. Next year is the end of the decade. Not this year.
Re:The decade isn't over yet! (Score:4, Insightful)
2000 was so last millennium also, but welcome to post modernity where 10 "gadgets" include 12 things: 2 of them were not in this decade (OS X and Canon Digital ELPH) and 2 are not even gadgets (OS X and Win XP).
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You're a hardware engineer, aren't you. :)
No - if he was he'd understand about appropriate precision and wouldn't be arguing about a +/-1 year error on a datum point only known to the nearest 30 years or so...
Also, there may not have been a "0 AD" but, equally, there wasn't a 1AD, 2AD, etc. - at least not that people knew about at the time - since the numbering system wasn't devised until the sixth century.
So while you've worked out that a Roman coin with the date "52 BC" is probably a fake, I'm afraid your special souveneir "review of the no
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Re:The decade isn't over yet! (Score:5, Interesting)
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you're being pedantic and not even correct. The reasons centuries and millennia are starting with the year xxx1, is that they are numbered ("the fourteenth century", "the third millennium"). Because they are numbered, they have to start on a year that actually existed, 1CE generally, or any multiple of 1000 /100 on top (+) of that.
No one numbers decades. If we did, it would be OK to call this decade the 201st and make it start on Jan 1 2001. But in reality, we don't number them, so we can make them start an
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Re:The decade isn't over yet! (Score:5, Informative)
Dammit, people. The decade runs through 2010. 2001-2010. Next year is the end of the decade. Not this year.
2001-2010 is a decade. So is 2003-2013. Or 1998-2007. However, the decade generally means a set of years such that floor(year/10) is constant for all years in the set. Or, as the New Oxford American Dictionary says in one of its definitions, "a period of ten years beginning with a year ending in 0".
Yes, I know, you are going to say something about there being no year 0. That has no relevance whatsoever to how we choose today to group our years into a disjoint set of decades.
The first decade (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm picturing your parent poster as some Roman nerd yelling at everybody that they shouldn't be celebrating the onset of Year 10 since Jesus Christ was born only nine years ago.
And I'm picturing an older, wiser Roman tapping him on the shoulder and pointing out that:
1) They're not using the birth of Jesus as the basis of their time system yet.
2) When the A.D. system is implemented, it will be miscalculated and land the birth of Jesus in 4 A.D.
3) Jesus wasn't born at midnight on January 1st. And the winter solstice isn't at that time either. So it's clear that the moment chosen to increment the year counter is arbitrary anyway.
4) If we use your definition of "decade", then what are we going to call the decade that includes the year 1985 A.D.? "I Love The 80's Including 1990 But Not 1980"?
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The decade that runs from Jan 1, 2000 through Dec 31 2009 is ending in less than a day.
But I've already celebrated the end of the decade... the one that ran from Dec 31, 1999 through Dec 30 2009. It was one heck of a new-decade party last night, let me tell you!
Say what? (Score:3, Insightful)
From the article:
If you had found me right after I'd installed OS X Public Beta for the first time in 2001 and told me how dramatically the OS would change over the next decade, I'm not sure I would have believed you. There was a gigantic difference in feel between installing Windows XP and OS X Public Beta -- with XP you got that fun sense of having a whole new computer, fast and ready to take on whatever you could throw at it, while with OS X you just sort of stared at the huge icons and wondered, "Now what?" It was clear Apple had a lot of work left to do -- although by 10.3 or so I'd deleted my Classic partition and wasn't looking back. But hold up: OS X 10.3 looks and feels dated by today's standards, while XP looks and feels like... XP. Where Apple did an fantastic job of relentlessly improving and iterating OS X over the past decade, Microsoft set the bar so high coming out of the gate that the biggest threat to Windows 7 is the installed base of XP users who are still happy with their machines. That's pretty amazing. - Nilay Patel
This guy/gal needs to have their head examined. Even talking about the mere aesthetic nature of XP vs. OS X 10.3 (Panther), I can't see where he's coming from in the least:
OS X 10.3 Panther [guidebookgallery.org] image vs. Windows XP [lions-wing.net]. I'm sorry, but I fail to see how XP looks anything but "dated", the hideous colors/theming aside. 10.3 looks, even now, clean and fresh compared to XP. (Technologically, XP is way behind 10.3 in many ways.)
All I can read there is rabid fanboyism. Sorry, but "staying the same" for the better part of a decade, when you're the computer giant's flagship product, is not a benefit in any stretch of the imagination.
As for their list... not sure why/how the Xbox made the list instead of the Wii. There's nothing special about the Xbox 360, whereas the Wii is a "game changer". Hell, and even Windows Mobile devices (which, aside from the slick Marketing functionality and App store, has been largely comparable for many, many years) should top the list over the Treo.
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I'm sorry, but I fail to see how XP looks anything but "dated", the hideous colors/theming aside.
My XP machines look even more dated because I have them set to the "classic" Win2000 style GUI. Those blue and silver themes literally gave me headaches, and my eyesight actually improved half a diopter after going back to the classic theme. Yah, probably a coincidence, but it makes a good story. :-)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
This guy/gal needs to have their head examined
As an enthusiastic OS X user, though, I'd conceed that the first few releases were not much use. However, that's mainly because of lack of native software support - it always looked a million dollars. Mind you, he does seem to have a revisionist history concerning the original reaction to XP...
The big achievement of OS X, however, was that in the space of a few years, Apple moved their entire user base over to a completely new, non-binary compatible, UNIX-based system. XP was always hamstrung by legacy iss
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You're an idiot. Did you not see me laud WinMo?
Those screenshots were the first I found. I don't own a Mac (in fact, I hate the UI). But XP has nothing on OS X in terms of UI. (Maybe 10.0 vs. XP. I'd call that a tie.)
I suppose the Xbox 360 might define tech in the 2000-2010 range moreso than a Wii does if you're in the 15-25 and childless demographic. But if you're over 25 and/or have kids (especially if you have kids), a Wii is much more significant.
Also, why would I want to play games online with a dumb c
Microsoft a Big Client of Theirs? (Score:3, Insightful)
eeeeeeeee PC? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The Eee PC showed that there was a market for small, cheap computers (netbooks). I would be hesitant to say Asus invented the netbook with the Eee PC (mostly because of the XO children's laptop), but I don't think it would be totally wrong to say so either. They sold beyond anyones wildest expectations then, and continue to do so today, likely singlehandedly making the difference between unrecoverable losses and bare minimum survival revenue for some computer manufacturers in the current world economy. It b
I am shocked and amazed... (Score:2)
Simple Simon games (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember visiting Japan for the first time in 1999. Of course I wandered in to a video game arcade to check out the scene. I laughed at the poor Japanese and their imitative video games - look, that guy is just touching the controls in the exact way that the machine tells him to! What a retarded game! It's no game at all, he's just mindlessly copying what the machine tells him to do in exact sequence...no more "fun" than working on an assembly line. A children's game, really...we had the same thing called Simple Simon [bigredtoybox.com] when I was a kid...these Japanese video games even have the same four colors. I mean, there could at least be a dozen colors or something, make it difficult. And the controller shaped like a guitar? Oh man, how pathetic: if you're going to be cool and play the guitar, be cool and learn the goddamn instrument, it ain't that hard. Only Japanese people, with their tolerance of tedium and their relentless drive to copy, could possibly "enjoy" such a "game".
This Christmas, I'm passed out from wine, and when I vaguely become aware, I hear these overplayed classic rock tunes accompanied by clicking. I go out, and sure enough, three family members are staring at the TV, imitating the colors on the screen, each lost in his own world with no communication. Just this eerie clicking, accompanied by this sound that I identified from when I was in marching band and the drummers had practice pads. There is no talking, no rocking out, no jumping around the room flailing at an ax like Eddie Van Halen on coke. Their faces are stone masks of concentration. The song finishes, and my family grins at each other, "Wow, we sure had a fun time interacting. What a great game that brings us together!"
Shows you how much I know. I also thought "Magic: the Gathering" was a stupid game because it was so wildly unbalanced. Who would want to play that, a game where you can win not by superior skill or even dumb luck, but simply by spending more money than your opponent?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
but simply by spending more money than your opponent?
It's worked out well for the NY Yankees, and they seem pretty popular. ;)
Box Cutter? (Score:3, Funny)
It would be more interesting looking at influence instead of favourite. I am not normally a look backwards type person, but almost everything that we think of as key to this decade is influenced by this simple tool (or in this case do to intent weapon).
Only one (Score:5, Insightful)
The LCD display.
The only thing that's really changed is that we have finally gotten rid of CRTs.
Everything else is just a bigger or smaller version of stuff we already had.
Most of our new toys are finally possible due to cheap and tiny displays.
This list is leaving out the most important gadget (Score:4, Funny)
Argh! (Score:2)
No more best/worst of the decade stuff! No more, I tell you!
And you people pissing about the decade really ending next year- you people are worse! Look up the "astronomical calendar" already! French astronomers fixed the issue back in the 1700s by defining a year zero.
Argh! Hiss! Spit!
OK, better now. :)
Nokia N900 (Score:5, Interesting)
Hilarity (Score:2)
Let's just take a look at the items which definitely don't belong on the list. At the top of the "who are you kidding" list is probably the Powerbook G4. A look at the sales numbers alone would be sufficient to disqualify it. Apple didn't gain any notable market share until they went intel. Giving XP and OSX the same spot is hilarious, but I guess it makes some sense; this is the decade that the mass market operating systems gained some real functionality. The Treo is a fail, though, on the same basis as th
This list kind of sucks. (Score:3, Interesting)
This compilation is really short-sighted, though they seem to have gotten a few things right.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I will concede to your point that netbooks have made a more immediate dent than I thought, and especially to my fault in including the VAIO in that list (they were pretty high-end shit, should've included the Thinkpad X series instead). However...
USB Pen drives are not an invention of this decade. They all but killed floppy drives within their first year.
Incorrect; first commerical USB drive was released in 2000 [wikipedia.org], and increased in popularity as USB became more common. You can't tell me that it wasn't the proliferation of cheap "jump drives" that pretty much blew floppies out of the scene; if you were part of the cra
IED (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Obviouslyerer... (Score:5, Insightful)
The one gadget that DID define the decade. [wikipedia.org]
Re:Obviouslyererer... (Score:4, Insightful)