2nd Best: Windows XP Pro. Still King of the Operating Systems, and what every other OS is competing against and failing.

2nd Worst: Windows Vista and it's bastard son Vista 2, aka Windows 7, which is Vista minus a little bit of nagware. Outrun by XP Pro on the same hardware in every test and a downgrade from XP Pro however you look at it.

Best: Standalone Divx/Xvid/Avi HDD media players/recorders. Fill with avi's from your PC, play on your television without a computer. Priceless!

Worst: BluRay/HDDVD. Regular old DVD is still the king of the store bought media and DVDRW is king of the removable media drives for pc and will be for many years.

I vote smartphones for the best tech, I can't believe I used to carry a phone, a pda, an mp3 player and a gps and now I only need one device.

For the worst tech I vote the Nvidia GT250 GPU, for being too similar to the 8800GT and 9800GT and slowing down innovation on GPUs.

Best: Intel Atom for opening up the world of the netbook.

Worst" Ubuntu for becoming increasingly like a Microsoft marketing machine and rushing poorly written software out the door.

Best:
- Flash memory (SSD and USB)
- Open source coming of age (linux/Firefox mostly)
- LED/LCD (screens and cheap chinese gadgets)
- Smartphones
- Digital cameras (even my mom can take pictures now)

Worst:
- Anything web 2.0 (I don't want to know what you did last summer or in the bathroom two minutes ago)
- DRM ...
- no, nothing else approaches those two...

The Best: The Inquirer's vicious, humourous and well informed articles.

The Worst: The Inquirer seems to have almost died. Each week the amount of friction and humour is greatly reduced.

My real best:
GPS on a phone, email on a phone, camera on a phone, web browsing on a phone, I use them all regularly.

My real worst: Sony.

Sony's insistance on their own versions of technology at a 50% price premium. Sony memory sticks, Sony XL-DVD (bluray), even sony phones have their own memory card formats so you cannot view your photos on anything else. And even sony laptops don't accept these cards!

WTF has happened to The Inq in the past few months tho? Where are the snappy biting articles?

The best:

1) Wikipedia
2) P2P networks (Skype/general file sharing)
3) Google / Google maps

The worst:

1) Ubuntu and linux in general. It is still in the stage of "soon to take over the world" - which hasn't happened for 10 years because of it's lack of usability!
2) The gigahertz war and Pentium IV !
3) Smartphones and the countless applications on them that we never use but are forced to pay money for!

The worst tech has to be MS Office 2007.

It's incredibly slow (dear God is it ever slow), adds no significant new functionality, is incompatible with everything that came before it, breaks every user interface rule, kills every Office preference you had (did you really want those?), and takes up so much screen real estate that even a megapixel display feels like typing through a mail slot.

In short, it makes you feel like you are using Word for Windows 3.11 on a 386SX with 8 megs of RAM and a VGA monitor. Only slower.

My nomination for the 'best' technology of the decade would be:

Wikipedia

So many people, as much as they love to loath it, could not live without it.

For worst technology - I think battery technology seems to be the 'worst' technology of the last decade. We're in the 21st Century, but it seems sometimes it's just not safe to store your laptop in the boot of your car - because it will explode!

OMG, Best would be Pics of Staff that Are Undressable. For Faint, Other Things might be underneath....RADICAl.

Christmas Tie In. Take 12 items of Clothes Off Staff on German
Holiday card that Opens revelations thru Boxes, seeeing Human part of staff within Cut out. Yes,yes?

BESt is 5890 & 890G & 12 Gb @2000 Ghz, W/ BIG SATA+300Mb/s on -=7=-#18 dsl @2Mb/s w/ Atsc, till Summer
+condensed down to SetTOP Boxe. Worst Is Anything Old In hardware. NO 16 BIT ALLOWED.No More Drashek, ethier.

Oops, I'm eerrrr,STeWie....

Worst, for their "write us an article in the comments" articles.

Best:
Kinetic Energy devices that actually have a place.
The Electric & Kinetic Powered Vehicle
http://www.thekpv.com

Worst:
horrible webcams

or some other kilt that's driven you to distraction.

Best tech: HT/Media PCs, WMC or Mediaportal or your choice.

Worst tech: TV cards, all makes all brands have some sort of issue guaranteed to piss you off.

It's taken for granted, but I vote the modern optical mouse. Sure, optical mice had been around before, but only around 2000 or so were they available to the mainstream. I sure don't miss cleaning out lint, having my mouse skip around on surfaces, or other terrible aspects of mechanical mice. More of my mice were broken due to frustration than normal mechanical failure. Life is good now!

Best: SSD drives!
Worst: Vista

Dear Mr I. Nquirer,

I would like to thank you from the bottom of my heart.

I have just spent the last half hour of my working day trawling Google Images looking at the highlight of the noughties... no, the highlight of all time... Kylie's Hot Pants.

I can't beleive this wonderful image had managed to slip its way out of my mind for so long, and I would like to thank you for bringing it back to where it should stay forever.

Merry Christmas to you all!!

PS: My favourite is this one: http://www.kyliepictures.com/images/big/spinning_around_4.jpg

Worst tech:
- The Ageia Physx fiasco. Good idea on paper, horrible execution.

Best tech:
- The Mozilla Firefox browser, shaked the grounds of IE's monopoly and allowed competition and booming; in a once lost and hopeless masket.

Best:
Smartphones

Worst:
Ageia Physx Card
or BigFoot Networks Killer NIC
(*The ideas are great, products flopped)

I'm going to agree with others on the best tech. It's got to be the USB flash drive. It's a fairly reliable storage medium that has replaced all sorts of removable storage media (Zip, SparQ, CD-RW, floppy disks, etc). Ubuntu would come a close second, it's an amazing bit of software but it just hasn't changed the landscape enough yet. Maybe in a few more years Ubuntu will be worthy of the title.

For the worst tech, I'm going to have to go with the Intel Atom. It was a horrible thing to unleash on the general public. It may have made the netbook more accessible, but I just can't forgive the awful performance, poor chipset choices, lack of 64 bit support (at least in the early models), and the piss poor linux support due to the closed source PowerVR.

Flex fuel vehicles using ethenol. What a sham! Fact: Ethanon costs more to produce from corn then from suguar and thus since we make it from corn, fails to be solution for reducing foreign dependence on oil. Secondly, Ethanol packs a smaller punch than gasoline and yet we water our gas down with it requiring more fuel for the same drive. Third, Ethanol fuel stations are rare. I feel bad for people who paid a premium for these vehicles.

Best tech - Multiple core CPUs. Hands down.

Worst tech - Nvidia rehashing everythnig for the past three years.

best tech: katie price. best example of a fake human being - and hollow too!

worst tech: peter mandelson's car - for not exploding with him in it!

I nominate the demise of the DEC alpha. There's nothing like buying the competition so that it can be toyed with, then killed off.

ScottJ

I have tried a couple of new netbooks,theres windows 7 but for me the clear winnner is Ubuntu.For the first time I am running it full time and love it.
The freedom from virus scans and the shear speed of an os that actually works better than windows or os x in my mind.
Simple install loads of free apps, many of which I had to pay for in windows.
AND FREE.I even give it an edge over os x because it works on any computer I own and the numerous free apps.

Best: Facebook, although I'm unsure about whether it should actually be the worst, due to time-wasting and lameness. But you have to give it some credit simply due to its huge popularity. I have certainly connected with some old mates who I would just not have seen again without this tech.

Worst: Windows Vista? While Vista works ok now with SP2 and I'm actually using it both on my desktop and laptop, it certainly took its time to mature, and all in all must've been one of the biggest commercial failures as well.

"USB thumb drives" -- they also mark the failure of simple to use computer networking.

Anyway, my nomination for the greatest waste of time isn't WOW, but the Crackberry.

I guess this is going to be a iphone centred discussion

USB thumb drives!

Worst Tech nomination:
WOW - for most time wasted

Best Tech nomination:
WOW - for MOST TIME WASTED!!!!