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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."
Yeah, 30 odd people I don't know were killed in a country over 3000 miles away from me. I should be ashamed of gettig on with my life.
Yes, it sucks to be the families of those people who were killed today. Are you one of them? No? Then what the hell are you concerned about? It's just yet more media-induced false grief for people you don't know.
i vote for the "feature" of touch pads that emulates a click with every inadvertent touch.
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oops (f*ck), my cusor moved to some random place mid-sentence,
oops i selected and deleted a section of text.
oops, i clicked on something.
addesso touchpad-keyboards suck because you cant turn this shit off.
let's just say that doing taxes online with an adessa touchpad-keyboard is a bad idea.
Yeah. The list isn't well researched. Vista is on the list? I haven't tried it yet, but I doubt that it could top need to shuffle AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS entries on a per application basis. Realplayer is on the list? How could Realplayer possibly compete with Netscape 4.x in terms of annoyance? And what about some of the truly bizzaro UI experiences us Linux users had to endure in the late 90ies? I still get flashbacks from those.
The 1-button mouse was to keep developers from relying on extra buttons, thus adding to the probable confusion of the end-user. Unfortunately, a vast number of ports never bothered adjusting for that, so eventually Apple caved in and started bundling multi-button mice (and probably because of Boot Camp as well) which are wonderful in theory, and freaking annoying in practice. My Mac Pro came with a Mighty Mouse. The scroll ball is really neat, but the fact that if you hold your mouse like an artist tends to (only using your fingers instead of laying your entire hand on it) it tends to interpret left-clicks as right-clicks.
As for the puck mouse the original one sucked, but the one that came with the G4 was awesome. If someone made a multi-button version of it with a scroll wheel, it would be my favorite mouse. I had no trouble at all using it back in the day, as it had the dimple on the button so you could actually tell which end was the front, and it was a lot easier for me to work with due to its small size and light weight. I seem to be the exception to the rule, though; I also prefer modern Apple keyboards to the IBM Model M.
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