Slashdot Mirror
PC World's 20 Most Annoying Tech Products
Craig Sender writes to tell us that PC World has compiled a list of the 20 most annoying tech products of all time. Topping the list was AOL's ubiquitous free trial CD's. "This list hardly covers every annoying tech product ever made. But where did this list of 20 come from? [PC World Readers] picked the worst ones by voting in our Annoyances Poll, and you'll see your Top 10 most annoying products flagged with icons. Just for fun, we've added 10 more products that didn't get enough votes from you in our poll but that we found particularly irksome."
Can they possibly cram any more ads and ugly navigation into that abortion of a website. Blech!
Blar.
I predict a cavalcade of Microsoft "jokes." God bless Slashdot.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
No reference to the Cue Cat?
That was one of the most annoying, dumbest, biggest debacles I can remember. For those that do not recall the Cue Cat was a bar cade reader in the form of a cat, that clever marketeers thought consumers would use by scanning barcodes on print ads in magazines and newspapers.
Cue Cat was mailed to *all* Wired magazine subscribers.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
There are a lot of really stupid ideas out there that I wouldn't put on a "most annoying" list because no one used them.
The Cue Cat is one of them. No one forced you to use it. The bar codes on the ads didn't cause leprosy or make your eyes bleed.
Of course, if I was one of the investors who paid to send out thousands of the things for free, then I'd have cause to be annoyed.
I'd put Microsoft Bob on the list too. The ads and promotions were annoying, but again, no one forced you to install or use it.
What about the other 100,000 or so people who die every single day, many of them senselessly? Should Slashdot be given over as a portal to count the dead, perhaps?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Too much emphasis on software, not enough on hardware, and non-computer items.
Also too much emphasis on marketing flops.
I am SO glad that floppy disks are just about finished with. I threw away hundreds and hundreds of them last year (3.5") and two years ago (5.25"). They still pop up now and then. I hope to eliminate all of them except for emergency boot CDs and the like.
That list is all Jacked up. Considering the Zune has been out for what, 6 months and it's ranked higher than the Apple Pro Mouse? That thing was beyond annoying. Where are "Jazz" drives on this list? They crashed every month and were garbage. Tape drives aren't on there either! I'm guessing he and his buddies got together and made up the list. I don't argue with most of them, but a product that's been out for 6 months is rated up with Windows ME? I just don't consider some of those "ALL time" annoyances, rather than "recent and minor" annoyances. Just because they're happening now, doesn't mean they're worth being in the all time annoyances.
"Please, shut up. Just when I think you can't say anything more stupid, you speak again." -Archie Bunker.
The "print" version puts grey bars at either side of the article to ensure that the contents are wider than your window (I didn't check what mechanism they used).
You can manually position the page so that all the content is visible, but then the text is hard against the edge of the window.
Nice trick to annoy people into reading through the ad-filled multipage version.
really puts things into perspective, doesn't it? We, as geeks, enjoy tech. But there's nothing more important than human life. It does seem odd to be complaining about things that don't really matter, when a lot of people have just been murdered.
And what will really bake your noodle - this is an everyday experience in the middle east.
That'd be my number one annoyance these days. The actual content of the article only takes up about one-third of the page and then they break it into 7 pages so you are bombarded with annoying adds and clutter. The other two-thirds of each page is full of adds and cluttered up links to other parts of their site. Their site is just as annoying as any of the 20 products they profile.
How about a nice clean layout that lets you actually read the article and not be distracted?
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
But there's nothing more important than human life.
If you're talking about "human life" in general -- get a grip, the species isn't going extinct just yet.
If you're talking about a (or even several) human lifes -- get a grip, there are plenty of things more important (to some people) than individual human lives, sometimes including their own; if not, nobody would risk their own life for anything.
-- Alastair
I think the caps lock key is one.
It takes valuable space on the keyboard and rarely gets used.
I like the old control key there instead.
I'd take links that don't work over PDF links anyday. You know, that sinking feeling when you just realised the link you clicked is not to another HTML page but to a 4MB PDF file, which then causes the browser to freeze and choke up trying to open it, and you can lose whatever is was you had in other tabs or windows when it crashes. Adobe Acrobat Reader has surely got to be one of the most annoying tech products for this reason alone - who ever thought making PDFs open in the browser was a good idea anyway??
Foxit and http://www.pdfdownload.org/ help a lot though.
Every day over 100 people (I think) die in the US alone in road traffic accidents. About 30,000 children die in the world every day due to poverty. This incident is pretty insignificant, really. It just gets noticed because it's an unusual sort of death.
More annoying are the automated phone systems that make you talk to them.
Although the article cited Office 97 as an "also ran" annoyance, I'd have to cite the entire suite in all its incarnations as one of the worst annoyances in my daily life. I have so many reasons for my conclusion, that I'm sure I could exceed the character limit of a /. post. But the top reasons for giving Office a Supreme Annoyance Lifetime Achievement Award include:
1. UI inconsistencies across the suite and even within products.
2. Bugs that have survived at least 7 years and 3 upgrades (upgrade = another chance to extract more money from the customer).
3. The fact that "Autosave" is a known cause of corrupted documents and crashes.
4. Automagical formatting and replacement wizards that you can't turn-off.
5. Word's horrible horrible outliner that singlehandedly killed off actually useable outliners.
6. The fact that O'Reilly was able to create an entire series of "Annoyance" books just from Office.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
But there's nothing more important than human life.
What a silly statement. Imagine a population of 1000 slaves. Suppose that by the death of one, the remaining 999 will be released to live free lives. You're saying that the life of that one person is more valuable than the freedom of the other 999?
Bemoaning the fact iTunes requires Quicktime to be installed ignores the fact iTunes is nothing but an XML front-end for Quicktime. It's a database and shopping app that offloads all of its media handling to the existing suite of software designed to handle such things.
If they had created another software package to replicate the services provided by Quicktime just for iTunes people would be lining up to say how it exemplified a lack of faith in the established suite.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
I don't know about you, I'd rather the tasks end themselves rather than windows kill9'ing them and losing all their unsaved data. But maybe that's just me.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
'nuff said.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
That's simply inexcusable. Those defective vents also didn't allow you to brew your coffee inside!
"I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
Annoying pop-over ads. Like in the article. Irony, anyone?
A couple of days ago, 62 people were killed in Iraq in a single day's "senseless mass killing".
I doubt either of you even noticed.
pop-up ads. Heck include pop-under ads too please. Why didn't they consider this? Given consideration, I bet it would beat out AOL hands-down. If you really want to go that route including things like antivirus software, why not just include a Viruses and a Spyware category? Maybe viruses wouldn't get a ton of votes but spyware? rock the charts.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Uh, hello? Spam? Anyone, Bueller? Spam is by far the most f*#cking annoying and should be high atop the list.
What if it took 5 lives, or 10 lives, or 100 lives? At what point would the cost outweigh the benefit? Why would that number be ok but one more be too much? It's easy to say it's worth it if you're one of the 999, but if you're that 1 then you might have second thoughts.
Lotus notes has got nothing on the toy car my two year old son has. It plays Wiggles songs when he pushes it around. It's almost as bad as the little iron that makes stupid sound effects when he pushes it around or the doll that plays twinkle twinkle little star when he sqeezes it's belly. He has a toy aeroplane that sings a song so annoying that even he couldn't stand it and asked me in whimpery toddler speak to remove the batteries.
Whenever I see these stupid lists on /. and then read all the "Tech product X is way worse" comments, it just re-enforces in my mind the stereotype that slashdotters don't have kids. I agree that AOL, Lotus Notes, Norton Anti Virus and anything by Microsoft are pretty bad, but if you want a real list of annoying tech products, take the inventory of a toy shop and cross out anything without batteries. Seriously.
I don't therefore I'm not.
Cell phone manufacturers beat them to it. You're right! How come my phone (v3) has to beep so damn loudly everytime I turn silent-mode on or off?
How can a list of "most annoying tech products" NOT INCLUDE THE CELL PHONE? #1 by far!!!
With the exception of the AOL CD, how many people have ever been "annoyed" by one of the products on this list? It can't possibly compare to the number of people who have been annoyed by a F#*&^%$ cell phone going off in the middle of a class, meeting, or performance event. Not to mention the annoyance of having to listen to 1/2 of an angry or animated conversation. At least the AOL CDs made good coasters, or could be tossed in seconds.
If the "boom box" counts as a tech product, that has to be a "top ten" as well.