It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment of our “TenYears” list. We already did the biggest losers in the tech industry but why not talk about the biggest product flops? Here are a few of the biggest failures of the decade, starting with one monster release from a fairly well-known company. → Read More
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment of our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner: Half-Life 2 Valve’s follow-up to the revolutionary Half-Life is our game of the decade not just because it’s a fantastic game, but because it is a fine example of modern gaming. It exemplifies DLC done right, community support done right, and comes part and parcel with Steam, which has helped revolutionize digital distribution for games. All this while still being the standard by which other FPSes are measured. → Read More
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment in our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner: Resident Evil 4 (GameCube, 2004) This decade saw a lot of “big” games, but how many of those games were any good? How many do you think you’ll even consider replaying in five or 10 years? If there’s one, and only one, game of the decade it has to be Resident Evil 4. The game resurrected a waning franchise, justified your purchase of a GameCube, and was actually fun to play. How rare. The lackluster Resident Evil 5 only reinforced how well made Resident Evil 4 was: perfect controls, probably the best graphics ever to grace the GameCube, and, yes, the best single-player mode of the decade make this the game of the decade. It’s pretty much non-stop fun, which is really all you can ask a video game to do. → Read More
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment of our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner Loser: Brick and mortar stores Once consumer trepidation regarding e-tailers wore off, it was really only a matter of time before physical stores with limited stock and pushy salespeople bit the dust. Among the fallen we have Circuit City, CompUSA, and Gateway stores among others. Sure, for sundries, your Wal-Mart and Big K are doing just fine, but they also sell sweaters and apples. Best Buy is doing all right, but they’re really the Alamo of tech retailers. Poor bastards know what’s coming to ‘em, too. → Read More
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment in our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner: Apple iPod and the iTunes Store No matter how you feel about Apple products, there’s no denying that the original iPod – released in October 2001 – made a huge impact on the digital music world. Before the iPod, MP3 players were clunky, had atrocious interfaces, and awful battery life. Geeks like us had the early models from Archos and Diamond but you’d never see a common luddite carrying one around. Then came this stark white, minimalist music player with – GASP! – a wheel? And a program called iTunes that made it easy to transfer music? → Read More
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present the first installment of our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner: The Trek Thumbdrive In 2000, something strange happened. Overnight, we changed the way we carried data. Those of us coming up in the 1990s first used floppy disks then CDs and then Zip drives and generally the transfer of large amounts of data was a Sisyphean task. I personally still remember sending our entire university newspaper paper to the printers on a Zip disk. That year marked the launch of the Trek ThumbDrive, the world’s first usable USB storage device. You could slip it into a computer, drag over a few files, and pop it back out. You could drop it into a bag or pocket and it was cheap enough to lose – at least in theory. Thumbdrives would max out at about 256MB in 2000, but that soon changed. Now we can carry 32GB in our pockets – more than the entire computer system running that selfsame student newspaper back in 1997. → Read More
