OSNews

> 2) Zip Drive -> I had one, worked great for 6 years
> (probably still works, but I sold it since I moved to
> different media)

I have zip drive which I have not used in years. The zip discs I had broke almost as quickly as 1.44 floppies. Piece of crap.

> 5) DivX --> hahahahha - I remember those :-)
> Amazingly enough, the lessons were not learned!

I remember those too!! Funny that I still watch them, dvds just take too much disc space.

He's talking about the DivX disc format, which were basically "rental" discs that were only usable for 48 hours after the first viewing. If you want to view it again after that time, you have to pay to unlock the disc again.

Not the compression/video format that lets you put a DVD-quality movie onto a CD-R.

@mini-me

They forgot MS WIndows 1.0 to VIsta - hehehehe

They forgot an even better than that... Linux Desktops and GNOME. lol

1) MS BOB --> Great idea, poorly implemented

Poorly implemented or not, MS Bob wasn't a great idea at all.

As for Comet Cursor, what we saw was good. Too bad what was behind the scenes was bad.

Ah, the Apple Macintosh Portable. I think Douglas Adams put it best, "I promise not to make any Mac Portable jokes - Apple made enough of those already. I ate my lunch off mine, as it was slightly lighter than carrying around a table."

A1 is somewhat (theorically) a still under developement platform, isn't it? There are probably so few of them that it couldn't be considered...

About the ST, I had a 520STe and GEM was fairly responsive. Not many functionalities, especially compared to the rich AmigaOS (with its more complete Workbench interface, its efficient Unix inspired CLI and its multitasking), but much more simple... The ST was a success in Europe among players. And it was used by music professionals (Jean-Michel Jarre... AFAIK first Cubase releases were for the Atari ST) or in publication (french newspaper "Liberation" used Mega ST with "Le Redacteur" for example).

I don't know where you saw that the A600 was less powerful than the A500... It certainly wasn't. OK, it lacked the numeric keypad and was of lower building quality, but it had 1MB or RAM (he A500 had only 512KB). Also the A600 had more functionnality, as it included an IDE port and PCMCIA slot. The A500 had neither of these... Other than that and a Kickstart upgrade, A500+ and A600 were the same : same CPU, same ECS chipset... Finally as far as I can remember, in my country (France), the A600 was cheaper than A500+ when it was released... However, the A600 release was a stupid decision from C=...

Or the Amiga A600 (more expensive than A500, less powerful)?

I had one of those (A600) and I think it was better than the A500 - had 1MB of ram, Kickstart 2.x/Workbench 2.x, was smaller, included a PCMCIA port and you could get one with a 2.5" harddrive pre-installed (the A600HD).

Only thing that was missing was the numeric keypad but back then I didn't use it all that much (they keyboard was there for typing in cheat codes anyway ;-) ). You could do anything just fine without it (and someone even wrote a software emulator if you ABSOLUTELY needed it's functionality for some program to work).

Yes we know you love minidisk Thom. But to be perfectly honest, the iPod is still better than most of the other MP3 players out there. And compared to WMP and Sony's offering, the connection between the player and the PC is ridiculously good.

Incidentally, how come we are suddenly able to mod you?

"Incidentally, how come we are suddenly able to mod you?"

I don't think we can, I thought his points were good and tried to give him a +1, and it didn't go through. Perhaps this is a recent change that still needs work.

"I don't think we can, I thought his points were good and tried to give him a +1, and it didn't go through. Perhaps this is a recent change that still needs work."

http://osnews.com/meta/read.php/1147896425/you_asked_for_it:_mod_th...

Wow, the whole thing about only being able to moderate them if you're at a certain trust level is bad.

OSNews UIDs go upwards of 7000, there are a few gaps for accounts that have been removed, and the first 19 seem to be reserved for OSNews staff. Of all those accounts the only ones with scores higher than 2 are ones where people have made no more than a small handfull of comments that got moderated over 2.

I've seen more than my share of people comming in, making one comment they know is an easy +5 score, and trolling while the high trust level lasts. All this staff moderation system is doing is allowing those people to inflict more harm while they have their inflated scores. I didn't see any long time OSNews members who were active posters with scores higher than +2, most of the good ones had scores around 1.5 to 1.8.

Really don't care about the celebrity endorsements. Main barrier for me is the price, which I can get around by getting older models (like the 4G color or Photo) on clearance.

Just set to play from a playlist or shuffle and you won't have to look at it.

The clickwheel's one of the most intuitive controls I've ever used, right up there with the Navi keys on my Nokia 3310.

The "weird scheme" is to placate the record comapnies. There are third-party programs that get around it pretty easily, though. Drag and drop for thousands of songs doesn't make much sense to me.

The screen does have power saving features to increase playing time.

Recording is possible with add-ons like the iTalk.

The battery is a good point. Most cell phones' batteries are user serviceable, and they have the same fits in you pocket form factor.

This is just my opinion on the iPod.. but I think that it is one of the simplest and easiest to use MP3 players on the market, and has been for quite a while.

Dragging and dropping 10,000+ songs as with the largest iPods? That doesn't sound like much fun to me. I'd rather have my songs in iTunes, place my iPod in the dock and have it go.
The clickwheel, IMO, is one of the easiest things to use. One finger and its all in a circle. Navigating on the Creative Zen is nowhere near as comfortable and quick to navigate.
Once you've had the iPod for a little while too, I've found that I don't have to look at it to browse through the songs. Mine is in a case with no cut out for the clickwheel or screen and I am able to browse through songs. Well I wouldn't do that through 10,000 songs, but then again - that'd take damn near forever without some way of seeing what you are looking for.
You can argue the screen is pointless for some smaller capacities, but then again, the ones that hold less songs, have a smaller screen.. or no screen at all. I know I would not want to browse through 5000+ without any type of screen. Plus, there are power saving options such as no backlight, so it really isn't to big of a battery waster.
As for the battery, if you're in warranty, its great. Sometimes they'll just send you a brand new iPod that is just as shiny as when you first bought it.

Now.. as for the actual article - I'm glad to see AOL as #1. What a terrible peice of software. I'll use the free trials while I'm on vacation for a week in the middle of a forest with only phone lines (very bad phone lines), and I just have to tell them to not ask me any questions because I REALLY don't want to keep continuing my trial.

Edited 2006-05-27 05:26

"Dragging and dropping 10,000+ songs as with the largest iPods? That doesn't sound like much fun to me. I'd rather have my songs in iTunes, place my iPod in the dock and have it go."

I don't see what the problem is with drag and drop, people use it every day to manage large numbers of files on their hard drives, why not MP3s on their music player?

If you have your MP3s sorted neatly into directories, then it's as easy to find the artists and albums you want using a file manager as it is with software like iTunes. Selecting a few directories and dragging them can be done in less time that it takes to start up a separate music management application.

I use a Rio player and while its bundled music manager seems perfectly good, I've always just used drag and drop to manage the music on it. Because it doesn't require any software, I can happily use it in Linux and other OSes without having to find any hacks. The best thing about this feature is that I can use it to carry around files, I don't need to keep a separate USB drive in my pocket.

Nobody is saying that iTunes shouldn't be available for people who want it, but even with decent music management software, drag and drop would be a very useful feature to have. To me this is a major disadvantage of the iPod compared with other players.

Dragging and dropping 10,000+ songs as with the largest iPods? That doesn't sound like much fun to me.

Just depends on if you're using a file manager that doesn't suck

http://www.pretentiousname.com/opus/bf1.html#f_flat

Anyway, instead of copying 10,000 files, if you're only copying over 20 audiobook files, iTunes is complete overkill. And unless you shop exclusively on Audible, the iPod is a pretty piss-poor player for audiobooks anyway. You're better off sticking with an iAudio instead.

50 Cent is the only compelling reason I've ever heard not to like the iPod.

You can't use any music player with thousands of songs blindly. You either leave it playing on shuffle or leave it playing on a specific album/artist. If you want blind control, your only choice is the Shuffle or some other low-end consumer flash device that holds maybe one or two CDs.

All of the files in the weird hierarchy are id3 tagged, so iTunes can sort them back into their original glory. If you really want to micromanage what you carry, it's easily done with an iTunes playlist, and if you just want more fine-tuned control, there are third party and FOSS apps to do it.

The backlight can be turned off completely.

It's a music player, not a dictation machine, but accessories exist.

I was paranoid about the battery, too, before I owned one, but battery life is hours and hours. It's doing more harm to the battery that I can't drain it fast enough. And Apple has started a pretty good system to take care of the issue. Every couple years, a hundred bucks for a new one. Not bad.

"your only choice is the Shuffle or some other low-end consumer flash device that holds maybe one or two CDs. "

Wow man, where do you go shopping? iRiver, Creative, RCA, iAudio and several other brands have several models ranging from 512 MB to double digit gigabytes. True, there aren't that many models out there that hold as much as iPods, but iPods alone are no more than a few models and all under one brand. Plus iPods are not cheap, most people won't use 60 GB for the music they actually listen to, so much cheaper mp3 players will provide them with all they need.

iPod is a choice, but not the only choice. And ya know what I like best about non-Apple mp3 players? They come in so many different shapes, sizes, and configurations. Some of them will even play OGG files!

"iPod is a choice, but not the only choice. And ya know what I like best about non-Apple mp3 players? They come in so many different shapes, sizes, and configurations. Some of them will even play OGG files!"

I use my Nokia 6630 for music playing needs, and with OggPlay it can even play OGG-files =P So it seems, mp3/music-players come in many different shapes, size and configurations, some even support calling other people =D

And yes, this is completely off-topic.

"It uses some weird scheme to store music so that you can't just drag/drop music into it."

Thank you, Thom, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.

I don't understand why no-one wants to make a digital player that would scan the ID3 meta-data without the help of some application on the user's computer. I already have a media library managing application, why do I need another one just for the digital player? I don't want to use a special application just to transfer the files to the player -- why can't I use my file manager?

In all fairness, I think iPod is a great device if you want to have a copy of your CD collection in your pocket -- then it works perfectly. Personally, I found it unusable for other purposes. Meh. To each their own.

"I don't understand why no-one wants to make a digital player that would scan the ID3 meta-data without the help of some application on the user's computer."

There are a number of players that can do just that.

I don't have to use any software for my Rio Carbon to sort the music by artist/album/genre/etc. When I drag and drop MP3s then disconnect it from my PC, it automatically reads the ID3 tags and organises the files accordingly.

That was one of the main reasons I purchased it rather than an equivalent iPod. Of course the sales figures indicate that marketing is much more important than features like this.

"It uses some weird scheme to store music so that you can't just drag/drop music into it."

Thank you, Thom, I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.

I myself have a 1st Gen Hi-MD recorder, and sadly, they do not allow drag/drop of music files yet. The 2nd gen and up do allow this, whether they be .mp3 or ATRAC. And crucial for me: direct digital recording via optic cables. It is so important to be able to record digitally at i.e. a friend's place without the need for a computer. Or, when I'm on vacation or something: I only need to carry my optic cable, and many CD players have an optical out so I can directly record a CD I bought while being abroad to a minidisc-- without the need for a computer.

Try that sort of stuff with your $300 white musical toy.

Edited 2006-05-27 15:49

Can you record ? NO
FM radio? NO
simple drag/drop? NO
ect...
http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=3025

Well, Thom did say the iPod is a "personal" nomination, so I can respect that - seeing how he simply doesn't like it. But, the idea of it objectively being in the top 25 is preposterous. The whole Apple/iTunes/iTunes Store/iPod matrix is what finally got the clueless music industry off its rear end. Note the two pathetic attempts at this that are in the top 25 :-)

I remember this piece of junk; somebody actually was pitching the idea of smell TV (smellovision) back then too. Can you imagine watching a war movie (or action, horror, or even comedies "oh look, a skunk") with this thing? Or maybe you can tell me what OSNews should smell like?
This idea is so bad I still think of it off and on, since you can't provide all smells (there are just too many) they would have to mix them somehow, what happens if you are out of one or two? They try at leather, you get old gym socks?

What about if you were watching a porn movie? There are just certain smells you don't necessarily want

smell o vision was that not a 60's movie and almost at the same time BBC played a
april fools day on their views about smell-o-vision.
viewers called in to report they actually smelled what was being air

"Sega dreamcast. What a flop that was. 'Nuff said."

What?! :O
The Dreamcast was just ahead of its time. I still own one and love it. If you want to talk about failed video game systems, there are plenty of others to choose from. Nintendo Virtual Boy anyone?

Maybe it should just be Sega, period...I don't disagree with you that it was ahead of its time, but Sega really screwed the pooch getting any sales. And look at Sega now. Quite disappointing actually. Most of the companies on that list are still doing good despite their flops, however Sega lost out on a huge market...consoles. They must be kicking themselves now.

Maybe it should just be Sega, period...I don't disagree with you that it was ahead of its time, but Sega really screwed the pooch getting any sales. And look at Sega now. Quite disappointing actually. Most of the companies on that list are still doing good despite their flops, however Sega lost out on a huge market...consoles. They must be kicking themselves now.

Sega is currently a quite succesful game creator for various platforms, and quite loved for that.

The Dreamcast? That may not have been as successful as Sega hoped, but it certainly wasn't a bad product. It wasn't even that much of a flop, not when compared with consoles like the Atari Jaguar or 3DO.

The best indication of a consoles success and quality is the games that were available for it, after all they are the reason why someone would own the thing. The Dreamcast had plenty of unique and excellent games, people who bought one weren't left without anything decent to play. In my opinion it's worth picking one up just to play Treasure's forgotten classic Bangai-O.

My personal console flop list (in no particual order):

- Sega CD32
- Sega Megadrive
- Sega Saturn
- Sega Game Gear (battery eater)
- Nintendo 64 (cartridge?)
- Nintendo Virtual Game Boy (my head hurts)
- Atari 5200 (not conpatible with most 2600 games)
- Atari Lynx
- Atari Jaguar
- 3DO
- NeoGeo (because of cost!)
- N-Gage (nokia, cost and no good games)
- Nec TruboGrafx-16 (bad timing than inept management)

That's about it, i'm sure their is more, but i've put the one most people will remember.

Surely you're joking when you call the Sega Megadrive/Genesis a flop?

Along with Sonic the Hedgehog, that was the product that made Sega a household name. It outsold its Nintendo rival is some countries and had a massive selection of games. If the Megadrive had been a flop then Sega wouldn't have been around to make the Saturn and Dreamcast.

Despite its cost, I definitely wouldn't call the NeoGeo a flop either. It actually sold pretty well, and until a few years ago commercial games were still being released for it. Calling it a flop just because of its price is like calling Ferrari a failure because their sports cars aren't as cheap as a Skoda. My definition of a flop isn't a console that was manufactured for the best part of a decade, especially when it had so many excellent games, such as the classic Metal Slug series.

Sega MegaFrive a flop?! Are you serious? Have you really no idea how popular it was? And those Sonic games that were released for...sheesh, people *still* play them! It wasn't as powerful hardware as SNES, but it was nevertheless a very successfull console with huge amounts of great games available. It's what really made Sega the big name it once was. From the wikipedia: it sold 35 million units! And another fact which should explain it's success quite well: "Sonic was released to replace former mascot Alex Kidd, and to provide the "killer app" that Sega needed. This sparked what was arguably the greatest console war in North American video gaming history."

More info on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Genesis

Yea, the Sega Genesis was most definately NOT a flop. The add ons for it might be considered flops.

I cant say for sure how many it sold and I just cant consider wikipedia a reliable source, but I think for quite some time it had outsold the SNES even.

OUPSS, MY BAD, SORRY.

So I made 2 errors in my list. Here are the correction:

- Sega Megadrive is also known as Sega Genesis.
- Remove Sega Megadrive
- Rename Sega CD32 to Sega 32X (Add-on to Megadrive)
- Add : Sega CD (Add-on to Megadrive)

That's better. The 32X and CD where flops in North America. Sega could not beat the Super Nintendo with the 32X add-on. The Sega CD cost too much and did not have many games.

As for the NeoGeo, for the time, it was the best console money could buy. Their was some great games made for it. But cost killed the console anyway. Another flop for SNK was the Pocket Neogeo, another great peice of hardware but again, cost killed it.

As previous posters mentionned, far for being a flop. Most Sega Dreamcast innovations were retaken by other consoles companies especially Sony division SCE. The games are still impressive graphical side due to PowerVR Series 2 putting to shame some Playstation 2 and early XBox game.

Sega dreamcast. What a flop that was. 'Nuff said.

It may not have been very successful, but as a friend of mine often says, the Dreamcast was probably the last console released that actually had a soul.

I agree. The modern ISP as we know it didn't exist when Compuserve and AOL were king.

I was wondering that too. There is no mention of the DEC Rainbow, the 8 inch floppy drive, or paper tape. How about a mention of PANVELET ( Copyright 1982 by Pansophic Systems Inc. ) which was "The Program Management and Security System" used on IBM Mainframes like the 3090 and earlier. This crap required an ordinary programmer to jump through hoops and sacrifice a cat just to get a Fortran program to compile and run.

The PANVELET and JCL language/control process was so ghastly that it was generally 90 lines of puke just to get a short program to compile. It made reference to "Card Decks" as if you were using a punch card system and DASD was allocated by cylinder blocks. The only thing that made the process worthwhile was that the IBM 3090 with a vector processor was the fastest number cruncher you could ever want.

But to boot a that mainframe ( IPL = Initial Program Load ) you needed to insert an 8 inch boot floppy into the 3092 front end processor and then dance a funny dance with your fingers crossed.

Sorry .. old guys can recall some fairly horrid technology that predates AOL and predates the web.

Dennis

ref : http://www.softwarehistory.org/history/pansophic.html

The PC World author shouldn't have been allowed to write a retrospective article on "worst products of all time." Apple was the first to create anything that even resembled a laptop, and for that, he wants to criticize it presumably based on today's standard for portability.

If the size of a computer followed Moore's Law, laptops should only be 0.0019 inches thick today starting with 4 inches in 1989. If that sounds unreasonable, so does calling 4 inches thick in 1989 too thick. Some of today's desktop-replacement laptops, like the Toshiba Qosmio, weigh over 9 pounds. That's not a huge leap from 16 pounds considering a 16 year technological gap.

Apple was the first to create anything that even resembled a laptop

Incorrect. There were computers which were arguably laptops available for nearly half a decade before the Mac Portable came out. For example I personally remember my dad, a journalist at the time, having one of the Tandy Model 200 laptops in the mid eighties.

'Tandy Model 200 laptops'

Except for one thing: storage. Try balancing the Tandy Model 200 with its external cassette drive on your lap at the same time. If you're going to try to sell the idea of fold-up design = laptop, then you could also look to all sorts of pocket computers even before then, however I won't join in on counting those as laptops.

A point of clarification: when I said resembled, I didn't just mean form-factor, I also meant functionally. For instance: the Osborne 1 had the functionality, but not the form-factor. The Epson HX-20 was just a glorified word processor. The IBM 5155 lacked the form-factor. If anything, the Compaq SLT/286 was really the only laptop that could be considered a laptop before the Apple Portable. It is my personal opinion though, that the Apple Portable was the first to truly conform to the image of a laptop as we know them today. The Compaq was missing just one piece of the laptop puzzle that the Apple had: a trackball. If you wanted to use a mouse on the Compaq, you had to plug it in externally, giving rise to the same problems as external storage: where do you put it on your lap? Today, every laptop comes with some form of trackpad or TrackPoint built right in.

VLC? I rather prefer MPlayer. It looks better and works like a charm. It even plays a whole bunch of broken videos, though I don't know how well VLC handles such..

As for the article: great reading! I remember very well the Comet Cursor..At school I used to take care of the computers in the computer science class (I knew a lot more about them than any of the teachers..I still do =P), and when I saw Comet Cursor there for the first time, I just got a hunch it wasn't a good thing..I removed it immediately, and later on found out that I was right. Idiotically the school's policy didn't allow me to do much more than remove it or just tell people not to install it. *sigh* Those were the times...Removing the CIH virus all the time was a pain in the *ss, and the losers using the computers weren't of any help: when they wanted to play Counter-Strike or Quake, and there wasn't enough free space to copy those games to the hard-drive, they made up some space by f.ex. removing the Program Files-folder on C:, or removing most of the files in the Windows-folder...Windows even allowed removing things like explorer.exe..

2- The Macromedia Flash based websites.

Unfortunately, Flash based websites have survived only because they are incredible when compared to Java applets.

Speaking of which.. why weren't Java applets on the list?

Speaking of which.. why weren't Java applets on the list?

There was only room for 25 products.