Uncov is a hot little site that posts cruelly funny reviews of the same Web 2.0 companies and products that appear on TechCrunch. People who read it think everyone else does, too. They're wrong. So: A newbie's intro to Uncov.

Ted is the site's star writer. A computer scientist by training, he's naturally repulsed by the flimsy, poorly executed software passed off as world-changing innovation. He's like Slashdot commenters, if Slashdot commenters were funny.

FAIL is Uncov's catchphrase. Rather than meticulously grade the fine points of yet another "browser-based operating system," Ted just stamps FAIL on a photo or screenshot.

Actual software design and development experience is what separates Uncov from generic trash-talking sites and the half-baked "technical" minds blogging away about the emergent we-future when Web 2.0 services will transform everyone into conference speakers.

Best Uncov reviews:

Zoho DB: Software as a Disservice

Believe me when I tell you that if Microsoft Access made you sigh from time to time, Zoho DB will make you want to paint the walls with your brains. It successfully imported 10,000 rows of floating point data. It did warn me that I couldn't import more than 25,000 rows, though. Great. A database that can't take more than 25,000 rows. Now that's quality.

LocateTV Won't Leave Us Alone

I search for Kevin Spacey and find out that K-PAX is on today at 1pm. Fantastic. On my media center PC, I could tell it to record the movie. Turns out, they haven't coded that feature into Ajax yet, so Web 2.0 can't do it. Fail.

Stixy: Thanks, I Didn't Need That Browser Instance

No Web OS. Why? To start, you don't even have native threads. In fact, Firefox has a single thread that interprets JavaScript and renders the page. Yeah. For all tabs. There's nothing exceptional about Stixy, but it can free memory like a champ if you try to do anything with it.