Best of What's New 2005

mmoyer writes "Begin the onslaught of year-end roundups. Popular Science takes the early lead with their Best of What's New awards, a roundup of what they consider the top 100 products and technologies of the year. In addition to the obvious awardees like the PSP and perpendicular magnetic recording, there's interesting asides like the world's first programmable wave pool and colored toy bubbles made from disappearing dye."

Some just don't compare...

[mister_llah]

Comparing a PSP or a Jeep to Neuro-controlled bionic arms and perpendicular magnetic recording?!

haha!

Excuse me for being a cynic, but the PSP/Jeep portion of the 'grand awards' just feels like advertising...

Hmmm

[Ted_Bell111]

"Best of Whats New.... Sponsored by Microsoft" And I thought it was the XBox's slim and compact design that won it the Grand Award!

Xbox 360 according to PS

[Anonymous Coward]

"Its one-teraflops processing speed, fueled by three 3.2-gigahertz processors (think: three desktop computers), may make the 360 the most powerful computer you've ever used. Now all those flying chunks of decimated buildings and exploding monster heads can be uniquely generated based on your actions, delivering the most realistic console-gaming experience ever--and in a full 1,080 lines of high-def resolution. The 360 is also the first Media Center extender that receives and plays back HDTV from Media Center PCs. And it comes with a free lifetime subscription to the Xbox Live online service. $300"

What's wrong with this description?

Ahhhh yes... The annual Popular Science

[StarsAreAlsoFire]

Kiss of Death awards.

Honestly now, how many Best of What's New features have YOU seen in real life? Bet you can count them on one hand..... ;~)

Photography section is bogus

[toupsie]

Not one listing for Digital SLRs just some crappy point and shoots with superfluous features, printers and camcorders. Why not a video section instead of the camcorders? 2005 has unleashed some great SLRs from Nikon and Canon. The Nikon D200 and Canon 20D are two great examples of consumer level Digital SLRs that will blow the doors off a Kodak Easyshare-One or Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-R1 in image quality, speed, CMOS/CCD size and focal range. I would talk about the Canon EOS 1Ds but I would short out my keyboard from the drool.

Irrelevant

[wiredlogic]

So what. They are just ads in disguise. They awarded the lame ROM exercise machine ($14000 a pop) a few years back. It does nothing that you can't do for free or with $500 in equipment. Their basis for choosing the "best" things is pretty skewed.

Re:Greatest device

[AKAImBatman]

Except that it's not actually three processors. It's three processor cores. Just like on the IBM Power and PowerPC chips, AMD64 X2, and the late-model Intel Pentiums and Xeons.

Which isn't to say that the multicore SIMD design of this chip won't be impressive. It will be. But three desktop computers? I don't think so. Even the 1 teraflop claim is suspect. Just like how graphics card manufacturers can pump 3 trillion triangles a second, right? (*cough*underlabratoryconditionsmaybe*cough*)

Too Early?

[SnarfQuest]

Seem to me that declaring the XBox360 as a "best of" is a little bit early, as not a single unit has yet been sold, afaik.

If it turns out that it has any "minor" defect, like an exploding power supply that causes thousands of homes to burn down, then it will likely need to be dropped from this list.

I wonder if such an occurance is covered by their EULA? (873. Explosions and/or fires, including those involving lethal casualties, caused by this device, or any other devices supplied by MicroSoft, are the responsibility of said purchaser. Said purchaser hereby absolves MicroSoft, and its affiliates, from any legal action.)

I don't like how everything is oversimplified.

[fitchmicah]

This article seems poorly written to me. These pop science magazines used to be appealing to me but now I'd rather read real research or go to colloquiums even if I don't completely understand everything.

From the article on the "Emissions Neutral Vehicle..."

"It breaks down hydrogen into electrons, which power the electric motor, and protons, which interact with oxygen taken in through the ENV's nosecone and are released as Earthfriendly water vapor and heat."

They make it sound like fuel cells actually rip the proton from neutron, or like the electrons get "used up," or that the electrons are actually flowing through the motor like water flows through a straw. Something about the way these articles are written makes me feel uncomfortable. It's like they are saying "well, you and I will never completely understand, but at least someone out there does..."

The worst thing is that explanations of more complex ideas might be botched even greater and I would never know if I trusted this magazine. I think this kind of writing promotes dogmatic science. Potential is hyped but details are not; existence of great ideas is mentioned but the ideas themselves are completely ignored.

Re:How about the worst of what's new?

[Hurricane78]

> the EU trying to take over the internet

you sir are an asshole!
you did not even try to think about it before brawling out such obwiously wrong statements.

if you think that the EU wants to *take over* the internet, then you MUST think that the USA wants to take over the whole world and even acts like being offended when someone tells them that they don't have the right to!

face it: ALL nations except the USA that nowadays also use the us-controlled internet could easily set up their own root servers, cut access for the usa and then the usa would be very very alone in their own mud of a net while the rest of the world would simply continue to call the new net structure "internet" while the old net would be called usanet. Over shot time usanet would fall down, because it does not have any use for everyone who wants to be international and free!
Just like "chinanet"...

I thought slashdotters where poeple who surely understand why freedom is good... bu i guess there's still a moron here and there that got a /.-account...