From the Zip Drive (which I had the displeasure of owning) to the Pippin, from Microsoft Bob to Internet Explorer 6, PC World tacks off the top 25 worst tech products of all time, products that either never served a purpose, were flops, were a bad idea from the getgo, or over time have proven themselves to be some of the worst scourge to ever happen to computing. I personally loved the description of the Macintosh “Portable,” which I’m sure Apple would love to flush down the toilet and pretend never existed, and the scathing commentary around Internet Explorer. Also among the list of horrid products to ever make their way to store shelves was the Sharp RD3D Notebook and the IBM PC Jr., and some software that presses our nerves like RealPlayer (oh how I hate thee) and Comet Cursor.

Make sure to check out the (Dis)Honorable Mention list too, there are a slew of products on that list that are equally upsetting, from the Apple “hockey puck” mouse that shipped with the iMac to WebTV, which some people out there are still faithfully clinging to for some reason. This list is comedy gold, especially if you’ve ever used any of these products.

[ PC World :: The 25 Worst Tech Products of All Time ]

If you have a ton of cash to throw around (and I most certainly don’t, so I get to live vicariously through these photos) I can heartily reccomend some of these gadgets and gear. At the same time, some of them are just silly, like the diamond-encrusted secret compartment cellphone, which admittedly is just lame; but for example the ArmedChair (pictured above) is just straight awesome-the chair, designed to tile and move and vibrate in time with a DVD movie being played is more like those cool chairs you sit in at theme parks than an actual relaxing chair to watch movies in. The chairs are pretty awesome, but it’s a shame that they run about $12,000 USD each, so it’s not something you’ll want to drag home on a whim…unless of course you’re as rich as Bill Gates.

Also included in the list are specially designed iPod speakers that run about $4,000 USD, a $27,000 USD movie server designed to hold all of your music and movies and serve them out to computers and home theatre and audio systems around the house, a $24,000 USD gaming computer, and much much more.

Some of the gear I have to admit I’d love to have in my house; like that gorgeous 71-inch Plasma TV (which will set you back about $70,000 USD) which would look wonderful in my living room. Anything on the list you’d like to take home? Check it out and let us know in the comments!

[ Sci Fi Tech :: Top 10 Gadgets for the Filthy Rich ]

Contrary to it’s slightly creepy and insect-thought evoking name, The Swarm has nothing to do with insects, but is instead an interesting new method of looking at the web. It’s a pretty interesting idea, and you can see the sites that people are visiting who are using the Swarm plugin for Firefox and discover new websites. People who are using the plugin essentially have their surfing habits displayed in a nifty auto-updating graphic showing connector lines between sites that users are viewing and then moving onward to, and then the rest of the sites in a pretty neat format. See the screenshot below, and click it to view a bigger version:

The site describes The Swarm like this:

Swarm is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connecting to each other. It updates itself every second with where people are going and coming from. As sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm and grow larger. Conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center and grow smaller.

Website traffic is symbolized with thin lines. Each time you see a line appear, it means someone has moved from one site to the other. You can gauge how many people are swarming around based on the number of lines.

It’s a pretty cool idea, and if enough people use it, then it would be easy to see the most popular sites that the community is using and go directly to them; it looks like a pretty nifty social website finding and discussion tool, but I can’t see it’s viable uses past that, but it doesn’t mean there are none. Right now it looks like the people using the Swarm plugin for Firefox look at a lot of porn, but you know, to each their own. As more people download the plugin, more useful and interesting sites will appear on the swarm list. That being said, people do essentially consent to allowing their web surfing habits to be monitored and relayed back to The Swarm while using the plugin-albeit anonymously and without any personally identifiable data. Still, if you’re interested in joining this burgeoning social site network, head on over and check it out.

[ The Swarm ]

(image courtesy of LifeHacker)

Today over at one of my favorite sites, LifeHacker, [ http://lifehacker.com/ ] posted an excellent how to to keep iTunes in sync with your music folder. If you’re like me (and Adam Pash, one of the lifehacker editors and the author of this piece) you like to keep your own music folder organized the way you like it, and you don’t particularly care to allow iTunes to organize it for you based on what could very well be bad id3 tags or its own preferences in organization. I let that happen once, and almost immediately put it back the old way (by copying the music from backup, since once iTunes reorganizes your music folder, there’s no “undo.”) because I couldn’t stand the way iTunes does it.

But this presents a problem. I like to keep a playlist called “new stuff,” that I sync with my iPod that contains new music I download, and when I rip music it creates its own folder, and sometimes I just want to sync the folder, or at the very least have it added to my library. Well, today’s Hack Attack at LifeHacker is just for folks like you and I. iTunes plus the iTunes Library Updater plus a little batch script already written (you just need to customize it) and you too can have the perfect, automatically updating iTunes Music Library. Head on over and check it out-it doesn’t require a ton of technical knowledge, but it’s definitely only for the folks who, like me, the lack of auto-updating really bugs. iTunes for Windows only, by the way.

[ LifeHacker :: Automatically sync iTunes to any folder(s) ]

Microsoft has rolled out Windows Vista Beta 2, which has a ton of improvements over the past builds and is just as feature complete, was released this past weekend to the geekly masses like myself who have been waiting on edge for Vista to go Beta 2. What does it mean? Well, first and foremost, we’re that much closer to Vista’s official release, and now that the OS is actually feature complete and for the most part finished, the beta program now is for feedback on bugfixes and integration of applications and user experience and whatnot now than it was before. It’s mostly finished, and you can expect only minor changes between Beta 2 and the actual shipping version when it finally rolls out.

Admittedly it doesn’t look horribly different from previous feature complete builds, but I can tell that the bugfixes and corrections to the code are under the hood, and the operating system is much snappier and more responsive than it used to be. Either way, interesitng tidbits like transparancy for the sidebar and the “widgets” that come with it (think Dashboard on the PC, like Yahoo! Widgets or Google Gadgets) shown above, make the OS something to look forward to from a geeky user-interface perspective, but how does it really function, and what does it look like? Well, ExteremeTech and PC World are here to give you their hands-on opinions of the new beta. First those, and then the screenshots of the new build.

[ Extremetech :: Inside Windows Vista ]

[ PC World :: Microsoft Unveils Windows Vista Beta 2 ]

[ Extremetech :: Windows Vista Beta 2 Screenshots ]

Where are those WMDs, anyway? Okay, okay, cheap shot, but I had to take it. Seriously though, this has got to be one of the coolest case mods I’ve ever seen. The case looks like a completely functional nuclear bomb, a-la the shiny silver kind with the massive LED clock on the front you’ve seen in bond movies and episodes of 24. The creator, Peter Dickison, posting at bit-tech.net [ http://bit-tech.net/ ] takes us through the step by step assembly and wiring of the case and all the gizmos and panels on the case mod itself.

He’s not quite finished with it yet, but it’s getting there-this article is part two and the case is really coming together. The photo above is how it’s looking now, but he’s not finished. I, for one, can’t wait to see what it’ll look like when the system is all finished and running. Check out his progress at the links below:

[ Bit Tech :: WMD PC Part I ]

[ Bit Tech :: WMD PC Part II ]

The topic of Net Neutrality is complicated enough, but as something of a public service, Save The Internet [ http://www.savetheinternet.com/ ] has posted several videos that cut to the heart of the matter and help explain it in a way that I think we can all agree and sympathize with.

The first video takes a broad swipe at the issue:

And the second video gets more in depth and tackles the issue in a more descriptive way, and fleshes out some of the important issues behind neutrality:

Hopefully that will help clarify the issue, and help folks get in touch with their representatives and senators, as well as sign the petition. Much has been written on the topic of Net Neutrality, but trust me, as much as the telecomms say that you and I should “make up our own minds” about the future of the internet and that we should reject “government regulation” of the internet, that’s not what this is about at all-it’s about keeping the flow of information on the net free and independant, not tied to who can pay the ISPs the most money; it’s about forcing the telecomms to leave the internet alone instead of sacrifice the voices of bloggers and media institutions for the sake of their balance sheets, and not to hold the growth and progress of the net hostage to their ever growing wants. Head over to Save The Internet for more information, and to sign the petition to keep the Internet safe from the interests that would lock it down and decide on your and my behalf what content we can and can’t view, read, or listen to.

[ http://savetheinternet.com/ ]

Okay, last MacBook post for today, I promise. A couple of new MacBook reviews came through today, and I for one am glad to see them, and for all intents and purposes, Apple’s refresh of its portable lineup with Intel machines looks like it’s created a bunch of must-have monsters that everyone should seriously look at if they’re considering a new portable in the near future, especially if they’ve been holding off on buying a Mac waiting for the transition to Intel architecture to complete. On the one side, Apple’s new mantra for it’s portables has been “Meet the [MacBook] family. Now complete.” which implies that we won’t be seeing an Intel Core Duo ultraportable notebook in the near future, or a return of the 12″ PowerBook in the form of a smaller MacBook Pro, but who knows what the future holds-there may be a “one more thing” in the future for Apple’s notebook line.

Either way, both Engadget [ http://www.engadget.com/ ] and Ars Technica [ http://arstechnica.com/ ] have both gotten their hands on a Macbooks and wasted no time in bringing the news to us on how they fared, how they benchmarked, and how well they feel and function. Check out the reviews, looks like Apple’s got a solid machine on their hands.

[ Engadget :: Hands On With the Apple MacBook ]

[ Ars Technica :: Apple MacBook ]

When I saw this video, posted today by MacWorld [ http://www.macworld.com ] showing how easy it is to upgrade the RAM and the hard drive in the new MacBooks, I was thrilled. It’s exciting that Apple has embraced some modicum of consumer-upgradability in its newest portable, and shown that they’re not entirely committed to closing off the innards of their systems as something magical and mythical that only trained AppleCare service professionals can mess with. And according to the video, it’s actually much much easier to work with than you might think:

If it’s really that easy to do your own upgrades, I think the MacBook very well be a winner on the consumer end, and it might prove itself to be a notebook that purchasers can rely on for a long time.

Microsoft has started its “Vista: Get Ready” campaign, and pulled the cloth off of the official Windows Vista System Requirements. The requirements themselves aren’t particularly hefty apparently, aside from the requirements of a modern graphics card and a full 1GB of RAM. here are the system requirements, between Vista Capable and Vista Premium Ready PCs:

A Windows Vista Capable PC includes at least:

* A modern processor (at least 800MHz1).
* 512 MB of system memory.
* A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable.

A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:

* 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor1.
* 1 GB of system memory.
* A graphics processor that runs Windows Aero2.
* 128 MB of graphics memory.
* 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
* DVD-ROM Drive3.
* Audio output capability.
* Internet access capability.

Essentially the major difference between “capable” and “premium ready” PCs is that the former will not be able to take advantage of all the shiny graphics and glass effects that Microsoft has included with the premium versions of Vista. Curious if your computer has a “modern” processor, for example? Microsoft has listed a bunch of questions and answers on the Get Ready website, and is also offering a tool you can download and run to see if your computer is vista capable or vista ready, and what you might need to upgrade.

[ Microsoft :: Windows Vista: Get Ready ]

[ Microsoft :: Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor Beta ]