From Antennagate to WikiLeaks: the year in tech lunacy

In the tech world, 2010 was a year to forget. And that makes it all the more fun to remember. Once again, The Reg gives you its annual list of the year's biggest stories. And by biggest, we mean the stories most likely to make you sit up, take notice, and spew coffee all over your keyboard. Or chuck a laptop across the room. Or …

[Michael C]

wow

Some crazy stuff happened out there. Crazier still was that is the general public actually had a clue, much of this would not have even been major news. Anteannagate for example was a clear misunderstanding of the public that, yes, if you held it a certain way, it had a slight impact, but even impacted it was STILL better. If they had simply added a thin non-conductive clear-coat on the metal, no one would have ever noticed, and it probably would have been lauded as the best antenna on the market.

[Anonymous Coward]

titlemaphone

Don't be such a fanboy - The problem was very real and had a considerable signal strength/call quality impact on anyone holding the phone in their left hand (of which, I am one).

It was enough to make me stick with my increasingly failing (both calls and apps bombing out) 3G until there's a phone I like the look of.

I long for the days when the foolishness of brand loyalty goes away, sadly it'll never happen :(

[Jodo Kast]

why do you care?

Why do you care if someone is a fan of Microsoft or Apple or some other company's products? Then there are the folks who work for those companies: obvious fans!

So when you say you "long for the days when the foolishness of brand loyalty goes away", you sound like a child. Why do you care if someone works for or is an admirer of a company's products, and ignores a few problems that others see as show stoppers?

It's because you are immature. Try to live your own life, find the products that you enjoy, and get over the fact that everyone doesn't like what you like.

I long for the days when most internet users grow up and stop acting like selfish, clueless children.

[chr0m4t1c]

@ Jodo Kast

You seem to have come to the wrong website, we don't do balance and adult behaviour on the Reg.

When you're a Jet, you're a Jet (etc.)

[Ammaross Danan]

"Show Stoppers"

"...and ignores a few problems that others see as show stoppers."

Forgive me, but loss of connectivity seems to be a large "show stopper" for just about anyone (excepting you of course) for a connectivity device (ala "smartphone").

[Dave 15]

agreed

Several hundred pounds for a phone that can't do phone calls does seem a bit of a downside.

Frankly the apple fans would buy a turd if it had an apple logo on it.

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously

I like my iphone 4, but the antenna problem is very real... without the bumper, the phone was almost useless to me, and with the bumper, it's signal strength is still not as good as my 4 year old HTC WinMo phone.

There is no doubt the iphone 4 is an excellent phone, but you need to pull your head out of your arse and stop being an apple apologist because it just makes you look foolish.

[Destroy All Monsters]

Gb2 following Anna Nicole Smith on Twitter

"The 250,000 classified State Department cables uncloaked by Julian Assange amounted to little more than good gossip."

There's only a little problem with that statement. As every hack doing his homework should know:

"In recent weeks, NPR hosts, reporters and guests have incorrectly said or implied that WikiLeaks recently has disclosed or released roughly 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables. Although the website has vowed to publish "251,287 leaked United States embassy cables," as of Dec. 28, 2010, only 1,942 of the cables had been released."

So we don't "know" much yet.

[bexley]

i will not add a title to a forum repsonse

I'll bet that's because the other 249k 'cables' are out of date and irrelevant, we;ve seen the more recent ones and considering the amount of political / legal pressure they are under, if they have any significant bomb shells to deliver, now is the time, in fact a few weeks ago was the time.

Notice how it's all fallen out of the press of late?

They dont have anything, if they had they would have released it by now. Aside from some opinionated emails, those cables just are no the right forum for anything decent to be discussed in.

Talk of aliens, illuminate conspiracies, plots against the public etc just would not be discussed in those channels.

I bet all they have is more ambassador opinions on their international counterparts which make interesting reading for anyone interested in mindset and attitudes of the US political ambassadors, have little of substance to mount a serious challenge to the awful US foreign policy or whatever it is that they are challenging.

To return to topic, seems to me it's been a successful year for lawyers, with all those patent / IP law suites going on.

[Thomas 4]

Fail

Where the hell is Vulture 1's epic odyssey to the stars? It probably classes as tech and certainly classes as lunacy.

[bugalugs]

Mr Clarke

The journal you write for has, throughout much of 2010, provided its readers with the graphically enhanced no-holds-barred stripped-bare guts-and-all construction journal of an exemplar of the British technical modellers art. To wit, the PARIS* paper spaceplane. Have any of Assange, Zuckerberg, Schmidt, Jobs, Phillips, Hurd, Ellison, AMD, Intel, Oracle, Novell, Microsoft, Google, Verizon, Patent trolls, HTML5 et al, au papiere or otherwise, been launched into SPACE in 2010 ? More research this year please.

*alleg.PlonkArtistsReachingIberiaSomehow

[Tony Paulazzo]

All I can say

Is that if the alien interventionists don't arrive soon I'm gonna stop believing in the illuminati / Jewish conspiracy. Jesus wept, it's two thousand and eleven tomorrow and we still haven't learned to share Earths resources, or even set up a Martian colony.

Happy new year el reg, have a pint on me, virtually.

[Jodo Kast]

It's all in the software

I think we're coming along nicely. Back in 2004 when Web 2.0 really exploded, everyone talked about having one login and one profile.

Now we have LinkedIn profiles for business and Facebook profiles for friends and family and Twitter for fun. I can't wait to see the software innovations over the next 10 years.

Also we now have Captain Picard's iPad.

[Anonymous Coward]

lookalike

Is that Data from Star Trek on the cover of Time?

[Lars]

To sum it up

Every year is crazy.

Software patents are crazy.

Sex makes you crazy.

Rich men get poor or crazy.

Poor companies make crazy decisions.

Being revealed with your pants down makes you crazy.

Not knowing how to be open and shut at the same time makes you crazy.

Have a crazy new year.

(There is no way to avoid IT)

[Anonymous Coward]

I frequently get caught with my pants down....

.... But it ain't me who's crazy - it's all the people who don't approve and call the police.....

Happy New Year, regophiles!

[Ray Simard]

Microsoft (et. al.) and HTML5

Microsoft has a perfectly good reason to embrace HTML5, and it gets back to the abandoning of the requirement for an open codec for the <video> tag. Now that video encoded with the patent-encumbered H.264 codec can conform to the spec, patent-holder the MPEG-LA cabal, of which M$ and Apple are members, can hold video hostage to its whims. They must be thrilled that any platform for which they refuse to license an H.264 codec--think *nix multimedia--is out of luck. Whither libx264? As content creators gravitate more and more to H.264, more and more will be the video that refuses to play on anything but M$'s or Apple's browsers.

Imagine standard-conforming Internet content delivery depending on patented technology. Why should there be any surprise that Microsoft is eager to get hold of that handle?

[The Fuzzy Wotnot]

Eric Schmit

If there is one person who made my blood boil this year, it was Eric Schmit!

He is a boil on the bum of mankind and the quicker he is "lanced", the better!

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop showing Zuckerberg without NSFW

Really, that TIME picture is enough to scare the children. Rise of the Machines indeed.

[Martin Edwards]

Antennagate?

I'd have called it five-bar gate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Eric Schmidt

Funny: claiming privacy is only for micreants

Funnier: claiming surprise when documents are leaked to the public..

Miscreant Much Eric?

[Kubla Cant]

A woman named YaVaughnie Wilkins

OK, I give up. "YaVaughnie" has to be an anagram, but I can't work it out.

Then again... camel-case... is she a Java class?

There's a table somewhere (Freakonomics?) that relates exotic forenames to low terminal educational age in parents. I'd guess about 13 for this one.