December 27, 2005
Best Tech Moments of 2005
It is the end of the year, and all of the media are prone to "year in review" type articles. Wired is no exception, with a countdown of the best Tech moments of 2005. While I don't particularly agree with the list, it makes interesting reading.
Posted by elkaim at December 27, 2005 10:51 AMIn the tech world, 2005 was a period of bold ideas and exciting breakthroughs -- shadowed, at times, by devastating reversals.
New software apps changed the way we looked at the world, while hardware got smaller, faster and more fun. On the net, blogs provided many of the most dramatic moments, sometimes courting lawsuits, other times taking us places we could not otherwise go: New Orleans, Iraq, even inside the twisted mind of an accused killer.
As we begin what's certain to be an exciting new year of Yahoo acquisitions and rising Google stock, it's perhaps a good time to stop and reflect on the highs and lows of the year that was. Here are our picks for the 10 best tech moments of 2005.
Michael Robertson hires DVD Jon: What do you get when you cross a maverick tech entrepreneur with a young genius who specializes in cracking content-protection schemes? When Robertson imported 22-year-old Norwegian hacker Jon Lech Johansen in October, he was cagey about what the twice-acquitted author of DeCSS would be working on in sunny San Diego.
Now we know it's a new music-storage service called MP3tunes Locker, eerily reminiscent of Robertson's late, great my.mp3.com, which was lamentably sued out of existence by the recording industry five years ago. Admittedly, the Locker hasn't yet raised a big ruckus in the post-iPod world; but with this A-list cast, who cares about the plot?
The $100 laptop: From the moment MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte unveiled the (mostly) working prototype of his $100 laptop at a U.N. summit in Tunisia, he was trailed by a plume of reporters and admirers eager for a glimpse of the lime-green tote. The appeal is obvious: Negroponte's noble, world-shaping ambition to put millions of the tiny hand-cranked learning machines in the hands of impoverished children around the globe, and the fetishistic draw of the rugged computer's nostalgic, toylike design.
Still, skeptics abound. Slate added up the retail price of the components and predicted the laptop would actually cost more like $300, and Intel chair Craig Barrett argued that discriminating children in developing countries would reject the Linux machines as underpowered gadgets. Less sillily, questions remain about the environmental impact of dumping the computers in developing countries, and whether the money wouldn't be better spent on food and medicine. We'll know soon enough: In December, Taiwan's Quanta won a bidding war to manufacture between 5 million and 15 million of the laptops, expected to roll off the assembly line in the fourth quarter of 2006.
Katrina, blogged: Ten floors above some of the worst devastation ever visited on the United States, the New Orleans hosting company DirectNic managed not only to keep its servers purring, but to pump out crisis updates and images to the net. A company webcam trained on the street captured pictures of survivors scrounging for food and looters pillaging neighboring buildings.
Company "crisis manager" Michael Barnett shared his firsthand observations on his LiveJournal blog, which reached 3,000 hits an hour as word of its existence spread. "I mean, it's Lord of the Flies out there right now," Barnett blogged Aug. 31. "There's no order at all. No respect for private property, no respect for life." When the worst finally passed, the blog morphed into NOLA.us, a community site still serving the Big Easy as it struggles to rebuild.