The 100 Best Tech Products of 2006

prostoalex writes "You've read about the 25 worst tech products, now it's time to check out a list of the 100 best tech products of 2006 from the same publication. PC World named Intel Core Duo, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core, Craigslist.org, Apple iPod Nano and Seagate 160GB Portable Hard Drive the best tech products of this year."

Re:And now it's time... fooor.... completely OT po

[therage96]

Not to mention the score is now on the far right from the title of comments.

Usability was definately not considered here.

Craigslist

[alfs boner]

The real irony is that Craigslist tends to be, like Ebay (which was responsible for 3/4 of ALL internet fraud complaints), something you have to approach EXTREMELY carefully.

People on Craigslist tend to be really flaky- we're talking the stoned kind of flaky, or the "I'm going to try and cheat you because I think I'm clever" kind of flaky; I'm not sure which is worse. Then there are all the wierdos posting in the various personals section- if you want a great laugh (no matter your gender), read those sections; makes you think of someone walking into McDonalds with $2 and expecting a rare Filet Mignon with sauteed mushrooms. Or the ever popular "I'm hot. Send a picture. Sexiest one wins." I laughed for about 5 minutes so hard I couldn't breathe, and resolved never to look in w4m again because it was dangerous to my health, even if it was a fantastic laugh.

Top problem though, is that people are complete IDIOTS when it comes to listing their items. "Printer. Best offer." Inkjet? Laser? Dot matrix? Made this decade? God forbid they tell us what company made it. I also love it when useless, worthless stuff is offered up- like cheapo computer speakers. People, I'm all for the recycling bit, but take that shit to the RECYCLING CENTER, don't waste anyone's time putting it up for sale for $5. Round trip subway fare costs at least half that...

The hysterical bit is that Craiglist supposedly has an "advisory committee" that handles how the site is presented to users. When I complained that even basic instructions were never shown to users as part of the posting procedure and it was clear there was a problem, Craig just replied, "thanks, the committee will think about it".

Then there are the people who post the "free" iPod/plasma/whatever emails (which are usually flagged by the community)...the problem is that there's nothing to keep them from posting over and over, because (to my knowledge) there is no automatic blacklist after X number of posts flagged...so spamming is pretty easy.

Then there are the ripoffs. Go read your city's /sys/ for a few minutes, and see how many times you say "WHAT?!"...like people asking $500 for a Pentium 3 system. Go read /ele/ and see how many times you see "Theater Research" speakers being offered for $500; the more honest (or naive) ones admit to buying it from some guys in a white van...the others just think "oh well, I'll get some other sucker to buy 'em".

Classic example of the try-to-sucker-you-by-omission-and-feined-ignorance approach was a Phaser printer being offered for sale for a few hundred $ with no mention of WHY nobody uses wax printers anymore. In short- you MUST cover your ass like crazy. If it's too good to be true, it most certainly is someone trying to sucker you.

Typical, but when you consider it against Craig's motivations (community building and other crunchy-granola-ness), Craigslist has ultimately been a pretty spectacular failure. I used to report at least 5-6 posts a day to the abuse department for various reasons (all were accepted, and the abuse group IS very nice; they ALWAYS write you back! To the CL abuse staff, you have my sympathies and admiration), and I just got tired of it...it was like throwing a sandbag into a levee break and watching it disappear.

I also have a policy now, which I inform sellers of upfront. If the item is different from how it was represented in the post or follow-up emails, both of which I will have with me, I walk out the door- this is after several sellers presented something that was nothing like what they described (like a PC missing half its ram, being sold by a software programmer who played dumb. Riight).

Re:Seriously... Re:1st

[grub]

Nice way to use a non-story to introduce the new layout. ;)

They kicked it in at 9:30 my time (32 minutes ago). I was editing a journal entry, reloaded and thought I was having an acid flashback for a sec.

Re:Thank you for your opinion - now here's mine.

[masterzora]

if you don't like it then tell us some specifics on why you don't like it!
Gladly. The short version:

-The score being on the far right of the comment rather than near the title.
-The colors look like too sharp a contrast (not to the point of eye-hurtiness... just enough to look wrong)
-Newspost boxes separate all the info into small boxes without defining the newspost box (it just looks screwy)
-Overuse of gradients

And that's a small sampling. I couldn't tell you if any of them are real design faux pas, but I don't like them.

Re:Dual Core Processors

[wolrahnaes]

I love my AMDs, but the Core 2 Duo is making a better showing in preliminary benchmarks than the X2. Remember, the P4's NetBurst architecture was what made it such an abortion. Pentium M, Core, and Core 2 are all evolutions of the Pentium III's "P6" architecture, which was a much better competitor with AMD.

Re:Slashdot CSS

[Simulant]

This new look... it's making my eyes water. Looks odd on 1280x1024 LCD. Hard to focus.

Re:Slashdot new layout crashes my Opera 9

[residieu]

I initially had this problem but upgrade to the latest weekly (build 8455) and it now works fine. (The page is still ugly, but its ugly on all browsers)

Re:Craigslist

[colini]

My backside is parked on a couch I bought from craigslist (Austin) and I'm completely happy with it. I've never tried to buy any PC hardware from the list, but it sounds like you're the one following up on 'too good to be true' ads. If the seller doesn't provide enough detail you can email them and ask for more, or just ignore it. WRT to furniture, I simply ignore postings that don't include a picture.

For a "spectacular failure" it sure gets a lot of postings every day, in an awful lot of cities. Personally I think it's going to kill the traditional 'pay' market for classifieds. The alternative weekly here has already started offering free classifieds.

Re:Thank you for your opinion - now here's mine.

[nmb3000]

if you don't like it then tell us some specifics on why you don't like it!

Very well. Here's what I've got so far.

  - First up: Big pages load and render SLOW. Pages with a large number of comments like this one [slashdot.org] make IE crap it's pants
  - Score and 'Read More' on the right away from other relevant information.
  - The 'Sections' link is worthless and annoying.
  - Spacing in IE is flunky. Various elements don't line up with others. Yes, it's probably IE's fault, but you can't ignore IE.
  - Links in the navigational menus (left and top) have different colors for visited/not visited. Looks better if they are the same and it doesn't really matter if you've clicked them before.
  - Comments are not indented enough.
  - Arrows on left-hand menu get out of sync easily.
  - Method of changing item color (gray/green) in left-hand menu is slow in IE.
  - Element spacing on User page blows in IE.
  - YRO is still ugly as sin.
  - The menu that opens when you click 'Sections' is a nasty kludge. It's way too slow to open, closes by reloading the page (real stupid).
  - The boxes containing "what is this" blurbs in Preferences are too big and conspicuous. They're supposed to be a subtle help, not obfuscate the main content.
  - IT is still puts Janet Reno to shame.
  - Comment headers (containing the subject) seem too big and waste space.
  - It'd be nice if there was some indication the little arrows were clickable (like using the pointer cursor).
  - The 'Sections' section closes after going into a section, regardless of its previous status. Annoying if you're browsing sections.
  - An old bug still exists where the content of a page will sometimes start a full page lower than it should in IE. Stories and user pages are affected.
  - Bad things usually happen if you click the Sections header after IE starts navigating to another page.
  - Simple Design option + the Sections header box = nasty.
  - Too much whitespace. Reduce it or perhaps go with a real light gray in areas.
  - I miss OMG Ponies! Really.

Personally, I think we should get the option to use the old template.

George Lucas raped my childhood and CSS raped Slashdot *cry*

Re:Craigslist

[ThousandStars]

All that may be true, but one thing Craigslist has helped enormously is in real estate. It's now *vastly* easier to find an apartment in most major metropolitan cities. I was recently looking for one in Seattle and found five times as many ads on Craigslist as compared to the Seattle Times. On Monday there were many more still.

The problems you're describing have always been true about newspaper classifieds; the only difference is in scale. But the scale factor is transforming industries ranging from real estate to used cars. That's fundamentally a good thing, even if Craigslist has problems associated with it as well. But it does serve a useful function.

get yourself a userstylesheet, fixes it for me

[lixlpixel]

i added this to my userstylesheet (available in every decent browser) for slashdot.org

fixes (at least the frontpage) for me...

/* move the "read more" and "n comments" boxes to the left */
div#contents div.storylinks ul li
{
float: left;
padding: 0 0.2em;
}

/* put the "read more" link where it belongs */
div#contents div.storylinks ul li.more
{
border-right: 0;
float: left;
padding: 0 1.5em 0 0.2em;
background: url(//images.slashdot.org/read-more.gif) no-repeat 95% 50%;
}

/* normalize the link */
div#contents div.storylinks ul li.more a
{
background-image: none;
padding: 0;
}

/* get rid of the spaaaaaaces and make it a nic(er) font */
body
{
line-height: 1.25em;
font-family: Georgia, Times, serif;
}

Re:#1 & #2

[teg]

The Core Duo is the laptop chip released earlier this year, not Intel's next architecture released later this year. It's also used in some desktops, e.g. the iMac and Mac mini. A bit early for a 2006 list, isn't it? I'd expect the next Intel laptop chip to be better than the Core Duo, and the X2 might be better or worse than the Core 2 Duo - we don't know that yet.