The first decade (2000-2009) of the 21st century is drawing to a close in a couple of days. The things which I think defined the decade are-
1) Web 2.0
2) Rise of China, fall of the US
3) 9/11, the rise in terrorism & the war on terror.

Anything else?

I think you're being a bit premature claiming the US has fallen, rather than just that China, India and perhaps the EU as a result of its increasing unification have risen.

To the list, I would add as its own item Wikipedia. The change in the accessibility of information it represents is one of the greatest changes we've seen this decade.

Not to mention the Barti Trilogy '03-'05 Woot!
Of course that doesn't really define the decade. There is however the last HP books though...

The rise of emphasis on and interest in "green" products and eco-friendly ways of life.

The formal rise of the internet (far more so than in the previous decade; this ties into the accessibility of information Sentynel mentioned with Wikipedia)

Cultural movements.

The iPod...

Apollo wrote:Cultural movements.

Nero wrote:The iPod

I'd say the spread of digital music, TV, etc, driven by mp3 players, filesharing, and suchlike.

The Iraq War

the rise of social networking sites

those are the only two I think of at this point.

Jordan and Peter Andre splitting up.

SevenPentacles wrote:Not to mention the Barti Trilogy '03-'05 Woot!
Of course that doesn't really define the decade. There is however the last HP books though...

Bleh! They defined MY decade. :P :P

Hmm... MJ's death? I mean, I wasn't his biggest fan, but...

Isn't Wikipedia a part of Web 2.0? Or are you saying it deserves special mention (if so, I agree)?
HP & BT don't define the decade. But they (esp. the former) did give rise to many fantasy novels. A shift.
Yes, green products, increasing awareness & eco-friendly lives do deserve mention.
Technology (like iPod, digital music) too. But doesn't it keep improving & spread to vaster populations every year? I mean, every year, we get a better model. So do they deserve mention? But yeah, I get it. They did define this decade.

political correctness

What? You think that defined this decade? I see no political correctness anywhere. Well tbh, people in some way have become less prejudiced and in other ways, more.

nathanielandbartimaeus wrote:Isn't Wikipedia a part of Web 2.0? Or are you saying it deserves special mention (if so, I agree)?

That it deserves a separate mention. Wikipedia is important beyond Web 2.0 for the easy availability of enormous amounts of factual information. Wikipedia puts at our fingertips things that would have taken hours of research in a library a decade ago.

For a detailed list of the events of the years of the later half of the decade, see JibJab's year-end review videos.

^Fits in with the web thing. :D

I've spent most of my life in this decade, now it's almost over...

Storage, and efficient ways of getting it to people.
DVD's, Blu-Ray, Netflix, torrents, the internet video movement.
Youtube was only introduced Feb. 2005, people.

Miniaturization.

Rise of China, India. <-Long in coming.

Good, or failing that, popular (Twilight: a poor girls choice between necrophilia and bestiality) literature that revived interest in reading for my generation. I read a lot, but not many other my age or younger did, it seems.

I'll third the wiki mention. It's singlehandedly the biggest resource for my knowledge.

IM, Videochat, and texting (good or bad, it's a new, more-or-less efficient way of communication).

Moore's Law-like increase in computing power.
*Note: due to the BIOS not being able to boot from a partition larger than 2TB, 2TB drives are about the plateau. EFI all the way. Otherwise, ditto the storage.

All hail NAND flash and it's uses, from iPod shuffle to Crucial's C300 SSD.

HTML and CSS upgrades, again info to the people.

Fuel economy.

Dailytech wrote:It wasn't long ago when 90's era Ford Crown Victorias used 4.6-liter V8 engines to pump out a "measly" 210 hp. Nowadays, your typical 3.5-liter V6 Camry, Accord, or Altima can pump out 260+ hp without breaking a sweat.

And that's for a random I4, non-hybrid.

Info to the people: Media. Biased or not, it brought us the wars world over, Tsunamis in India and Indonesia. 9/11 to the July '05 London Bombings to Mumbai.

Film tech - things have come a long way since Star Wars and Alien. LotR, with Golem; Sin City, 300, and Sky Captian with extensive green screen; Animation, in terms of Pixar and Dreamworks; and CGI, from Transformers to History Channel.

That stuff, with some other stuff. Then with more stuff. And then your lawyer calls, and your aunt's died, and she leaves you all of her stuff. So go stuff it, and have a good Thursday. Or Friday, for... a lot of the forum.

Hmm, well said. I agree with nearly all of it.

I disagree with the vast majority of it. It's not decade defining stuff. It's the same stuff as the 90s (and for some items, much earlier), just more advanced. Increases in computing power and storage, shrinking of technology, more powerful and efficient cars, more advanced HTML styling, better film special effects, this is *all* simple evolutionary changes started long before this decade.

Also, "*Note: due to the BIOS not being able to boot from a partition larger than 2TB, 2TB drives are about the plateau. EFI all the way." The problem isn't the BIOS as such, it's that the MBR doesn't support partitions of greater than 2TB. Excluding that, a bootloader could easily be run from a small partition, calling an OS on a larger partition. You can also have up to four partitions on the disk, each of 2TB.
The reason EFI is different is it allows GPT rather than MBR disk partition tables, and GPT doesn't have the 2TB limit. I suspect EFI will rapidly become more common, though, long before your typical personal computer is likely to be sporting a >2TB drive. There are consumer machines around with it already. Linux has supported it since 2000. Windows Vista onwards support it (and Itanium versions of Windows server OSes supported it before that). All that's missing is more common personal computer hardware using it.

That's the thing, though, a lot of motherboard manufacturers don't have it, and won't anytime soon. Longer waits, longer waits.
And hey, they still defined it.
Even if their origins are earlier.

wrote:The first decade (2000-2009) of the 21st century is drawing to a close in a couple of days.

And none of you nitpickers told her that this is untrue. Pfff.