5 Biggest Tech Letdowns

It’s fun to look back in retrospect and remember the genesis of technologies that truly have become inseparable from our everyday lives. It’s even more fun to look back on the belly flops:
-> JAVA The promise of “code once, compile anywhere” never really panned out.
-> Linux Yeah, linux. I use it, but only because it’s hardware support is better on laptops than FreeBSD. But I digress. Linux has failed in a lot of the areas where it really could have been a better mousetrap. As unix clones go, it has an enormous development community, and with more people having their fingers in the various parts of the OS broken stuff gets fixed fast and hardware support is above average. However, linux isn’t really any more than a free unix clone, and BSD has been around doing that job for a lot longer, and better.
Why does a 3D accelerated X desktop under linux eat over half a gig of ram on my laptop when the same accelerated desktop running on FreeBSD on the same machine only takes about 128 megs?
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