Everyone on the Tech Tips Team would like to wish you and yours a wonderful holiday season in the company of family and friends –
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Geeks.com!
 In last week's Tech Tip we looked at the Top Ten Tech Winners for 2009. Though some of the gizmos, gadgets or tech trends didn’t start in 2009 – some certainly culminated that year. This week we’ll look at the Bottom 10 in Tech, what we like to call the LOWLY LOSERS:
 generic viagra review border=”0″ width=”180″ height=”133″ align=”left” />10) USB 3.0 – Where oh where has USB 3.0 gone?
Demoed in 2007, 2009 was “supposed” to be when we could get über speeds from the super fast USB 3.0. Well, 2009 saw USB 3.0 delayed yet again. Plans for a controller in June, motherboards and external hard drives in September have been delayed…yet again. Now the latest news is that we’ll start (maybe) seeing it in 2010, but that it won’t be relevant until 2011. We’ll hold our breath on that one.
9) Intel gets called on the carpet – over and over again
 In a bid to freeze out the main competition (who really only owned a very small percentage of the overall processor business) Intel employed some “questionable business practices". At least that is how it came out when Intel settled the AMD lawsuit against them to a tune of $1.25 BILLION (yes, Billion – with a "B"!) dollars. When you add that to the fine that the European Union already hit Intel with ($1.45 billion) for the same “questionable practices" and that the US Federal Trade Commission just recently slapped a lawsuit on Intel for these same “questionable practices”, then you see that, though they make some of the world's best processors, Intel earns a spot on the Loser List for Tech in 2009.
8) U.S. wireless phone carriers – enough already! Just improve your service!
Do I need to say more? Wouldn’t it be better for Verizon and AT&T (and their little brothers T-Mobile and Sprint) to just improve their networks and customer service rather than snipe at each other in commercials? HEY GUYS! Where’s our LTE?!
7) Apple Snow Leopard
 Brought in a couple of months before the release of Microsoft’s Windows 7, Apple's newest Operating System upgrade (version 10.6 – dubbed “Snow Leopard”) had quite a different reception than 7. Amid complaints that it contained an unsecure version of Adobe’s Flash; that under certain circumstances it could erase user data; that it felt like a rushed effort and that it no longer supported any PowerPC based Apples – Snow Leopard hit the ground crawling. Not until November did Apple finally release a service pack, er, update to the OS that fixed the majority of the major issues associated with Snow Leopard – but not until Apple's "it just works” image was tarnished just a tad. BAD KITTY! BAD!
6) Intel Larrabee
Larrabee is the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) project that was started with so much fanfare. It was actually planned to be a hybrid marriage between a CPU (Central Processing Unit – the main chip in the computer) and the GPU to make what was dubbed a GPGPU (General-purpose computing on graphics processing units) it was set to revolutionize the graphics industry. Instead it was quietly put to sleep in 2009.
5) IEEE 802.11n standard
 This is actually a pretty good Wi-Fi standard – but makes it to the loser list for the year just for the sheer fact that it took so long to actually get the standard ratified. Mind you, this is a standard that they started talking about in 2002 – and whose ‘draft” version has been out since 2007. Molasses flows faster than the IEEE group.
4) Patent Trolls
It seemed like 2009 was the year of the Patent Trolls. Patent Trolls are companies whose sole purpose in life seems to be buying up patents, seeing how it can be applied (usually in some arcane way) to already existing things and then ask for licensing fees. Now we see some companies fighting back – but with companies still losing in court, will it be enough to stem the tide?
3) Time Warner/AT&T (and anyone else) who is upset that people think that “Unlimited” plans are, um, unlimited.
Roh Wroh, looks like Time Warner and AT&T don’t like people actually “using” their unlimited plans unlimitedly. With lots of talk already from Time Warner cable wanting to implement tiers countrywide (now in test cities), it looks like AT&T is joining the fray as well. Give us back our bandwidth!
 2) iPhone App. Developer – Molinker
Question – how do you get 1,011 of your programs removed from Apple's iPhone application store? Answer – by offering shill reviews for poorly written software. Maybe application developer Molinker can team up with Psystar (see below) for a joint endeavor?
1) Psystar
 Really? Really? Did Psystar REALLY think that they could build generic PCs and then stick a hacked version of Apple's Operating System on it and then offer it for sale in the U.S.? Not only did this violate all sorts of “that’s just wrong,” it’s crazy that the Pedraza brothers thought that they could do this and not get it slapped down in court like they did. What will be their next adventure – selling boot-leg DVDs on a street corner outside Paramount Studios? The two words that best seem to describe Psystar at this point? EPIC FAIL!
Unhonorable mention
– Apple Polizei – Sometimes, companies forget that people “work to live”; they don’t “live for work”
– Foxconn – Really, sometimes work related inquiries go a bit too far – see the comment above.
In this week’s Tech Tip we looked at the race to the bottom. We hope you have enjoyed the look at the 2009 year with these two Tech Tips. Please feel free to comment on the list or even nominate some new entries that could be clumped into the Lowly Losers for 2009.
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