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The Complete List of Losers

America Online (1989-2006)

RealNetworks RealPlayer (1999)

Syncronys SoftRAM (1995)

Microsoft Windows Millennium (2000)

Sony BMG Music CDs (2005)

Disney The Lion King CD-ROM (1994)

Microsoft Bob (1995)

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (2001)

Pressplay and Musicnet (2002)

dBASE IV (1988)

Priceline Groceries and Gas (2000)

PointCast (1996)

IBM PCjr. (1984)

Gateway 2000 10th Anniversary PC (1995)

Iomega Zip Drive (1998)

Comet Cursor (1997)

Apple Macintosh Portable (1989)

IBM Deskstar 75GXP (2000)

OQO Model 1 (2004)

CueCat (2000)

Eyetop Wearable DVD Player (2004)

Apple Pippin @World (1996)

Free PCs (1999)

DigiScents iSmell (2001)

Sharp RD3D Notebook (2004)

 

Those Sony discs are mad:

 

When you stick a music CD into your computer, you shouldn't have to worry that it will turn your PC into a hacker's plaything. But that's exactly what Sony BMG Music Entertainment's music discs did in 2005. The discs' harebrained copy protection software installed a rootkit that made it invisible even to antispyware or antivirus software. Any moderately clever cyber attacker could then use the same rootkit to hide, say, a keylogger to capture your bank account information, or a remote-access Trojan to turn your PC into a zombie.

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My friend actually bought a cd last week and it has some protection on it and they CANNOT even put the thing on their ipod.

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hehe, already did a couple of years ago! MP3 player - a nice bit of equipment too. No complaints from me. I made sure I got one that handled mp3s as well though, not just sony atrac which their earlier ones did.

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How can you forget Bob?!

 

"No list of the worst of the worst would be complete without Windows' idiot cousin, Bob. Designed as a "social" interface for Windows 3.1, Bob featured a living room filled with clickable objects, and a series of cartoon "helpers" like Chaos the Cat and Scuzz the Rat that walked you through a small suite of applications. Fortunately, Bob was soon buried in the avalanche of hype surrounding Windows 95, though some of the cartoons lived on to annoy users of Microsoft Office and Windows XP (Clippy the animated paper clip, anyone?).

 

Mostly, Bob raised more questions than it answered. Like, had anyone at Microsoft actually used Bob? Did they think anyone else would? And did they deliberately make Bob's smiley face logo look like Bill Gates, or was that just an accident?"

 

lol.gif

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 Quote:
Originally posted by Bushpig:
hehe, already did a couple of years ago! MP3 player - a nice bit of equipment too. No complaints from me. I made sure I got one that handled mp3s as well though, not just sony atrac which their earlier ones did.
I think that the Sony players that 'handle' mp3 still covert the song into atrac. This means that the quality is lower than normal. My understanding is that if you have to use their software to load the stuff on to your player, it converts from mp3->atrac.
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not according to my understanding. The older ones converted on loading but the newer ones don't. That was one of the issues I was contemplating when I bought it. In any case, for my listening the quality is high enough to enjoy it. I don't have expensive headphones so I don't think I'd really notice the difference either way.

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Some interesting things lumped in together there... The Lion King CD-ROM & American online?

 

MS Bob was hilarious, I had almost forgotten that. lol.gif

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  • 2 weeks later...

Amazing how something like Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 which so so so many people use can get on a list like this.

 

 Quote:
Free PCs
I seem to remember a bit of a fuss about those. Didn't really take off did they? Not surprised.....

 

In the late 90s, companies competed to dangle free PCs in front of you: All you had to do was sign up, and a PC would eventually show up at your door. But one way or another. there was always a catch: You had to sign up for a long-term ISP agreement, or tolerate an endless procession of Web ads, or surrender reams of personal information. Free-PC.com may have been the creepiest of them all. First you filled out an extensive questionnaire on your income, interests, racial and marital status, and more. Then you had to spend at least 10 hours a week on the PC and at least 1 hour surfing the Web using Free-PC's ISP.

 

In return you got a low-end Compaq Presario with roughly a third of the screen covered in ads. And while you watched the PC (and the ads), Free-PC watched you--recording where you surfed, what software you used, and who knows what else.

 

We can't say whether this would have led to some Big Brotherish nightmare, because within a year Free-PC.com merged with eMachines. By then, other vendors had similarly concluded that "free" computers just didn't pay.

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