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What's the Worst Technical Feature You've Used?
kooky45 asks: "In an effort to make our lives easier and more entertaining, technology designers pack more and more features into electronic devices, but often they're more nuisance than they're worth. An earlier article on LEDs discussed some of these. Another example is my Nokia 6320i mobile phone which has a back lit screen that drains the battery life at an alarming rate. When the phone is not in use the back light is off; if the battery starts to run low, it gives me regular warnings by beeping and turning the back light on! What other examples of designer stupidity have you seen?"
Clippy.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
if you're in a noisy enviroment or listening to headphones beeping and turning the back light on is a great idea. It is better to be alerted your battery is dying, than to discover you've missed hours of important calls.
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
I think you might mean 6230i.. and charge your battery more frequently.
The daily upgrades kept making the machine slower and the system was overly paranoid with too many unwanted pop ups.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
My honda, and I think many others - have a security feature for the entertainment system. If the power is ever out to the unit, the owner must punch in a 4 digit code to turn it back on, after power is restored. If you forget the code, and don't have it written down somewhere - you can get it. You just need to remove the unit from the dash and call a dealer with a number written on the outside of it. This is not an easy process - and dealers will do it for you but it costs around $200 last time I checked. In other words - the only person who can easily get at the information necessary to the code is someone who already has the stereo out- like say a thief.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Ugh, the worst feature ever. It would turn on silently if you held down one of the outer buttons (which my pocket did, by itself, frequently.) Then, when a call came in, it would shout, over speakerphone, "Call from... <silence, because I hadn't entered any voice recognition names>"
Thankfully, they removed it from the more recent models. It was so damn disruptive...
I have a microwave that refuses to start cooking until it scrolls a 30 second message on a 1 line display.
I SO want to get out my jtag programmer
I always thought of Creationism as the Raving Right's version of the Loony Left's Anthropogenic Global Warming-brightmal
Or lack thereof.
-1, troll, here I come.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
There's a computer on my desk. Doesn't that make a metaphorical stack-overflow?
He painted a unicorn in outer space. I'm askin' ya, what's it breathin'?
I don't know about the LED thing.
I sometimes plug in my USB flash drive, which has a very bright blue LED on the end, just for the light.
that uses Windows CE or Palm OS to run. My wifes company keeps insisting these peices of crap will make them all more efficient. All I know is the interfaces make dialing a simple call a nightmare and who wants a phone that needs its battery pulled when it locks up?
Just last week here Verizone CE based phone continuously called me with the speaker phone on even though it was simply sitting on the cars center console! Government mandated spy feature hmmmmmm?
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
The sales person made it sound like a great feature. Never miss another call he said. Alerts you no matter how distracted you might be or how noisy the environment, he said. That may be true, but let me tell you, it is not nearly as useful and convenient as the sales people would have you believe.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
PC Load Letter? What the fuck does that mean?
My Motorola v260 beeps loudly ever few minutes when the battery is low. I know when it starts beeping I have another 12 hours. There is no way to shut off the beeping.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
meta-moderation
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Speaking of Microsoft (Clippy), back in the days of DOS 6.something (6.2 ?), when upgrading from a previous version of OS, if the Mircosoft installation program detected something besides a DOS partition, it would blithely inform you that it had detected something non-Mircosoft and it would take care of it for you!
That was a disappointment.
I lost a lot of work until I found the work-around.
Best regards.
> What other examples of designer stupidity have you seen?"
Windows Vista!
Gore-Tex in running shoes. The water will get in at the top of the shoe (as it is only 3cm high), and never get out, since Gore-Tex is watertight. Besides, when running, my feet sweat, so water will end up inside the shoe even if it isn't wet outside.
Handsfree with short cords. I still haven't found one that allows me to have my phone in my side pocket in my pants. And I still haven't found a bluetooth handsfree with traditional lanyard design.
DVD-covers. They are larger than CDs for no good reason.
Flatscreen TVs with grounded powerchords. Apparently they cause fires because the antenna is grounded too, only not to the same "ground".
I think that's it for now
My first sub-brick-sized mobile phone was a Samsung flip phone. The "flip" section was designed to only cover the keypad, leaving the screen, menu nav keys, and send/end keys exposed at all times. It also had a key-guard that, by default, would automatically engage when the phone was closed. Clever, right? (Well, for its day, it was.)
There was only one problem: To disengage the key-guard, you had to hold down the always-exposed menu select button! Worse, if the key-guard was disengaged while the phone was closed, it wouldn't turn on again until you opened and re-closed the phone.
I don't know how many times I killed the key-guard as I leaned against a desk or something. Most of the time, I just ended up deep in some unexpected menu, but I recall at least two accidental phone calls initiated while the phone was in my pocket. Eventually, I got a case, and tucked some paper under the button area to make it harder to accidentally kill the key-guard.
Samsung must have gotten the hint, because my next phone didn't have any exposed keys when the flip was closed.
This sig intentionally left blank.
Definitely digital controls for almost anything. I can't stand them.
If you're in your car and working the climate control, those controls are analog for a good reason. You can see what they're set to and change before you start the car. Stereo systems are another great example (quickly turning volume up/down, not having it reset all the time). Analog dials of all kinds also give you far better real-time feedback about a given signal (delta, etc.).
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
In Handspring Treo 180, there was a "World Clock" program that could display time in any timezone. It allowed to change my current timezone, but it would not change the time! So I move between timezones, I would need to update the timezone AND the time. Perhaps the software was not tested on real word travelers.
So a friend of mine (really) who was forced to use a Windows 2.0 based Video Editing program (back in 90?) probably with targa boards and all that jazz, wanted to clear out some files from a directory. .. files, and considering them as garbage (they are listed as directories in DOS even to this day) he managed to use DEL /S .. or it's equivalent to delete a filesystem.
While he was looking he saw the . and
So I would say, listing special symbols as actual files in a dir command, is and was a stupid feature.
----
Also, I love when I have to shutdown my Windows Machine by using the 'Start' button.
And ATM's that tell me to press Enter to Exit.
Graphical user intrerface!!!!
Fuck Context Menus /mac user
thats right, i said: "fuck context menus"
Mikey
I've always been the kinda guy to fall for the girl dressed like an eskimo.
My cell phone has a Camera button on the outside edge. Every now and then, I hear the fake shutter sound that lets me know my cell phone just took a picture of the inside of my pocket.
I'm surprised no one else has mention the worst feature ever: DRM.
Education is the silver bullet.
The phone with the crappy camera, oh yeah I really need that.
In fact most multi use items are crap.
Non open connections, if in doubt just use USB.
Battery life measured in minutes not weeks, totally useless.
California portable fuel cans, total crap.
American car designers, another ugly car with no style and they try and sell you it based on an engine with push rod tech. Give me a nice well engineered Japanese or German car thanks.
McMansions with 6 bathrooms and no space for a yard. No class at all.
In fact most anything with an American designer sucks. Or is it anything that needs a designer sucks.
Keyboards with ever more useless keys. Same for mice.
Nuclear reactors that aren't pebble based.
one size fits all
etc etc
Cancel or Allow? feature.
"The sales person made it sound like a great feature."
Well at least it's better than the previous version. "Pull ring and explode" (the phone, not you).
Press F1 to Resume...
He's a friend of mine!
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
In my day (I'm in my late 20s) we had answering machines, and you know what? They were good enough. If I left the house and came home a few hours later, I could see if there was a message, and I knew it was left sometime within the past few hours. Barring a few really specific and improbable scenarios, I don't need to know the exact damn time it was left, nor do I need the other BS like mailboxes, saved messages folders, varying greetings, and all the other claptrap.
Today? If you're the caller, you have to listen to the person's personal greeting, then suffer through another 20 seconds of "At the tone, please record your message. When finished, hang up, or press the star key for more options. To page this person, press nine. To listen to your personal horoscope..." Just shut the hell up and let me leave the message so I can get on with it, please?
If you're receiving voicemail it's even worse. "You have...two...new messages and one...saved message. To listen to...new messages...press one. To listen--" One. "First...message...received...at...ten...fifty eight...AM." SHUT UP. JUST PLAY THE GORRAM MESSAGE WITHOUT THE PREAMBLE. Christ. Why the hell do I need to know the exact freaking minute someone called?
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
Not sure which model, it doesn't even say on the case. I think it's somewhere under the battery.
Stupid feature #1: Lock sequence is middle button under the screen, *. The chance of it unlocking randomly in my pocket turns out to be pretty high, possibly due to the shape and positioning of the buttons, as well as the very light pressure required to trigger them.
Stupid feature #2: Under the screen there are two buttons. Left is configurable and usually displays the latest message, right is FIXED on WAP.
Stupid features #1 and #2 combined result in that sometimes the phone gets unlocked in my pocket, then with 75% probability, connects to WAP.
Stupid feature #3: Even though I don't use it, and don't plan to, not only the WAP button can't be changed to something else, WAP can't be easily disabled either. I finally managed to break it by specifying incorrect settings so that it won't connect.
I swear it must be intentional to get some extra cash from accidental connections. The only time I tried WAP 5 euro vanished in a few minutes, and all I managed to get before I ran out of cash was a crappy background picture.
(or at least I think it's them.) I work late on my home system, planning to come back to the task first thing the next morning. Only it's gone because Windows has received a Very Important Update and rather than wait for me to say 'reboot', it apparently decided that it's okay to proceed on its own.
It's not like anyone ever walks away from their system without saving everything first.
(Okay, maybe people don't in the Windows world. But I've used Linux exclusively for many years and have only had the WinXP system for a few months. Yet this has already happened at least three times.)
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
The damn calendar skips a month when you hit the next month arrow. Come on, this is the default clock/calendar. I just want to know what day June 14th is. Being May, I hit the next month arrow and it quickly displays June, then goes to July. I have to resort to a paper calendar sitting next my desk. I know I could probably update it, but this is pretty stupid bug to let slip through.
1541 anyone?
[Error 407: No signature found]
It's hard to get headshots in Battlefield, when a blue light from my speakers illuminate the room and invade my eyespace. Useless extra lights suck.
The PTT button on the SonyEricsson Z525a is raised almost a 1/4 of an inch off of the side of the phone and is very sensitive. You brush your hand against it and your screen displays "PTT feature is disabled! blah blah blah" There's no way to disable it other than tearing the button off the side.
Horribly annoying.
what kind of an idiot designs an optical disk with exposed data surfaces, they should be like the mini-disk in a protective jacket at all times
I've got three things that annoy me every time I get in my car. First is the Jensen stereo I installed because it had a Bluetooth receiver. It's got a big, round, silver knob on the left side. It controls the volume. Great! Turn a knob instead of pushing a button! I love that! But... It doesn't turn. It's actually a four-way rocker: up-down for volume and left-right for station or track select. But it gets worse. The thing is cheap and flimsy, so it's infuriatingly easy to click the wrong direction and get a different song just when you had one you wanted to turn up. It also has an alarming tendency to stick when you click up, sending your volume skyrocketing to max after a second or two delay.
Speaking of alarming, the previous owners had an alarm installed, and it's got a bug or two. It's one of those nice ones that cuts power to the ignition until the alarm is disarmed. Fine, but unfortunately it also cuts power to the ignition if the alarm is never armed in the first place, every time the car is turned off! If I just get out to pump some gas, I still have to "disarm" the alarm to start the car.
Finally, I'm not sure who to blame for this one. It's either Jensen or palmOne. Every time I turn the car on, the Bluetooth receiver in the stereo pairs with my Treo. It almost always does this silently and without a problem, and that's great. What's not great is that the process of pairing somehow activates the Treo's screen and disables the keyguard. I tend to wear the thing on my hip, but I've had to get in the constant habit of taking it off every time I get in the car because it sits right where the seatbelt is almost guaranteed to push some button eventually, usually the redial.
The VX8300 is one of the most common phones because it is so damn good. It gets service everywhere and has a pretty good battery life. It even has VCast capability for Verizon and can take SD cards and stuff.
One problem - if you ever load any music onto it, beware if it in your pocket. When the flip is down, there are "easily accessible" VCast control buttons on the front, and if you hold down the play button the music will start playing. I have had the music go off during class like 2 or 3 times before i just took off all the music. It even will turn on when you are in manner mode (which is supposed to turn everything to silent). The only way to disable it is to lock your phone.
Cell phones with flip covers -- the keyguard feature worked great for me on non-flip Nokias which were damn near indestructible. Every flip phone I've ever owned eventually met its demise due to wear and tear from the flip feature.
My Sanyo Katana flip phone that likes to dial the last called number from my pocket on speaker-phone, because even when it's flipped closed, the right combination of button presses on the side of the phone can still manage to dial.
Cisco IOS -- Maintenance software releases are for replacing old bugs with new bugs, Technology releases are for introducing new features with new bugs.
Windows Vista -- no explanation required.
You know the single molecular layer stuff with infinite strength that is used to encapsulate CDs, or the thicker and even stronger stuff that small electronic devices like CF drives come in. I once broke a pair of scissors trying to cut one of those open. I am surprised some smart lawyer doesn't do a class action lawsuit against the manufacturers of that sort of packaging - there must be lost of people who have injured themselves trying open these packages.
Try running Microsoft Update on XP behind a linux/dansguardian proxy on a computer with Office 2003 and tell me how snappy it is. (Your CPU usage will go to 100% within a minute of bootup) Interestingly, Windows Update runs fine btw.
Yeah, my cell phone features are awful. When the batteries are running low, it beeps and wastes battery power literally every 5 minutes. On top of that, I keep my cell phone on vibrate, and to silence the call if I don't want to have it ring or vibrate there's a button on the side. The problem is the button is exposed so whenever the phone is in my pocket, the phone never rings or vibrates because the button is pressed in. Perhaps if it took 2 seconds or so of the button being pressed to silence it, I wouldn't miss as many calls, but as it is the smallest press will silence it.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
I just called that number to complain about the vending machine being out of taco pellets. They were very helpful and understanding. They also have a website
Man, you really need that seminar!
The right side control on the steering column in my Subaru has 5 different functions on it all marked with the same windshield wiper icon: rear wiper, rear wash, front wiper, intermittent rate, and front wash.
Who decided that pressing the remote unlock should only do the driver door unless I hit it twice? Now I always hit the button 3 or 4 times to make sure the tailgate is unlocked.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
You are experiencing a bug with Microsoft Update, not WGA. It's been driving us crazy here at work for months now.
Thankfully, Microsoft finally released a hotfix for it.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
"Your door is ajar. Your door is ajar. Your door is ajar." It's not a jar! It's a door! It always was and it always will be.
And I remember when a local store installed their new laser scanning checkout stations. Those had voice systems that read your purchases for all to hear. "Eggs, ninety nine cents." You can imagine how well that worked out. "Preparation-H, three dollars ninety nine cents. Extra-absorbent tampons, four dollars ninety nine cents." (I have no idea what those items cost either now or back in the 80s.)
All versions of Windows. Even DOS sucked less than Windows, since at the time we expected less of it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I mean, you don't have to "click" on a piece of paper (window) before you can write on it. You just do.
On my 2006 Mustang, the air conditioning controls are all digital. One of the buttons controls whether the AC air flow should recirculate the interior air, or pull the air from outside the car. The problem is, this button defaults to external air, and it doesn't save the previous value when you remove the key from the ignition. So, every time I start my car and want to use the AC, I always have to toggle the air intake button. I live in Arizona, where car AC is essential, and is used 6 months out of the year. I've probably pushed that damn air intake button over 500 times in the past year. I smell a class-action lawsuit for unnecessary finger strain. =P
When you're using the AC, whether for heating or cooling, that should imply you want the air temperature inside the car to be different than the air temperature outside the car, so pulling air from outside the car is a dumb default.
My other gripe involves Windows Update. I have it enabled to patch the multitude of security flaws in XP. It automatically downloads and installs security updates. OK, I can live with that. But then, when it's done installing, it displays a pop-up that says the computer will automatically restart in 5 minutes. If you press cancel, it will wait 10 minutes or so, and display the message again. I was in the middle of working on a major software project when I got this stupid message. I didn't want to waste the 15 minutes required to close out all my 20+ xterm windows, restart the system, reconnect to work, and open all my xterms again. So I spent the next 3 hours clicking the "cancel reboot" button every 10 minutes, until I finally got sick of it, and let the damn thing reboot. Great feature.
A simple "Don't remind me again" checkbox would have prevented this frustration.
Another nice side-effect of this feature is that if you step away from your computer for more than 10 minutes and a security update happens to come in while you're gone, you'll come back to a rebooted computer with no explanation.
Take off every Sig. For great justice.
Why the hell would I want to mix folders and files, all ordered alphabetically??
Not to mention the hockey puck mouse.
Oh and hardware locked DVD drives.
The entire user interface for Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not the free reader) is a nightmare. I have used thousands of GUI programs and never found anything that comes close to sucking so much. How a company that has produced so many other great interfaces managed to push that turd out confounds me every time I have to use that awful program.
I don't think anyone else has mentioned this so I will - why on earth put a print button on the camera? While this may make sense for some cameras and some users (cheap point and shooters especially), they're now popping up on more advanced DSLRs like the Canon 30D. Who buys a $1,000 DSLR and prints directly from the camera with no post processing and not even a look at the images? Worst of all, the button can't be remapped - you're stuck with a useless button. Why, why, why?
Most cell phones I've ever dealt with (read verizon) have a poorly implemented vibrate feature which is louder than the actual ringer in most cases.
The point of the vibrate function is to provide inaudible tactile feedback so the phone can discreetly get your attention, and my old Nokia got it right by pulsing the vibrations.
Most of the models associated with verizon have an unnecessarily loud buzzer audible throughout lecture halls of several hundred people. And it seems like they are proud of it, having incorporated the distinctive buzzing into their television commercials with that chubby redhead kid who was instant messaging at work on the can.
Also, my old Nokia phone was smart enough to realize that if it was plugged in and charging then it was probabaly not in my pocket so there was no reason for it to vibrate. Not so with my newer LG POS.
Thank you! I'd given up on this and I doubt if I'd have ever noticed this fix!!
I hate that fucking thing constantly telling me to "Place Item in the Bag". Over and over again, "Place Item in the Bag." I started screaming back at it: "It's in the bag!"..."It's in the bag!". Recently I've even seen other people at my supermarket talking back to the machine as well.
Says it all.
But if you're a DVD exec, I want the buttons on my DVD player ('fast forward,' 'top menu') to work as they *should* without playing "Mother-may-I?" with the embedded OS. The menu should NEVER be restricted. That doesn't even make sense! What harm could my having instant access to your product's menu do to your bottom line?
Also, on my DVD player I can't even turn the darned thing off reliably. Is it too much to ask that a power switch be an actual -power switch- and not a "send power down signal to the OS" switch? It's not like there's a hard drive in these things. There's no need for the absurd length of time it takes for most DVD players to go from a power off *command* to a power off *state*.
Same goes for the tray eject button. Kill the motor and eject the disc already! I don't need "pretty" or "graceful," I need my disc back in less than five seconds.
Worst "feature"... Ever.
--
Toro
It's a pretty big tank. One US gallon. Seems like a good idea, since I'm in the US, and windshield washer fluid is sold by the gallon. Just buy a gallon, fill the tank, done.
Except that's not how it works. I've got a "washer fluid low" sensor and light on the dash. It comes on when there's about 1/10th of a gallon left. Plenty of time to put more in before running out.
So I go to the store, buy a gallon, pour in (by now) 15/16ths of the bottle, and now the tank is full. And I'm left with a 1 gallon jug with 1 cup of fluid in it. So the almost empty jug has to sit in the garage or the trunk until I use a little fluid.
Sure would have been nice to have a 1.1 gallon tank.
I am not a crackpot.
i really hate the automatic locking on ford vans. you shift into drive, all the doors lock and the rear power sliding doors disable themselves. the motors actively resist the doors being opened! and there is no way to disable the latter behaviour!
probably lawyer-proofing so some idiot doesn't jump out of a van on the freeway and sue, but it makes it severely annoying when you need to get out quickly (stopped at a stoplight and dropping off someone), as it does this even when the vehicle is at a complete stop. it won't let you out unless the damn thing is in park.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Why the heck can't it show me the size of directories in detail view? When I need to find out which program has suddenly eaten the remaining 12GB of hard disk it's tiresome to recurse through every directory, right clicking and checking the size.
In the world of user design foolishness, the worst by far are programs that interrupt you while typing with error windows, pop-ups or windows suddenly gaining focus. Internet Explorer, I am talking to you here, as well as every other program that pops up a brain-dead window demanding me to hit cancel or OK while I'm busy with more important things. It's like stopping the State of the Union address to change a lightbulb.
In addition, any web page that doesn't follow sensible usability guidelines becomes a real pain in the neck. I read Jakob Nielsen to avoid most of these pitfalls when I code or design.
technical writing / development
XML for everything except higlevel communication between systems (read webservices)
Especially config files
Horrible files I had to edit...
I few 'doh' moments using VMWare.
Why does it let Ctrl-Alt-Del through to the hosted machine? It pops up a box telling you that you probably didn't want to do that, since both the server and the host see the keypress; but it sends it anyway. Result: lock your windows PC and reboot your virtual Linux box. Well, fine, I can get around that. (Just stop Ctrl-Alt-Del from rebooting the Linux box).
But why have Ctrl-R reboot the hosted machine? Ctrl-R which is used all the time when interacting with a shell. It's not exactly difficult to accidentally press Ctrl-R when the VM window has focus but the hosted machine itself does not. Gah.
Sigh.
While the keyboard is Lighting up is OK. But it can also adjust the brightness of the screen. Which is a real pain because the sensors are in the speakers right where I can put my hand as well changes on the screen cause the screen to flicker.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
After installing XP:
The wizard could not find the software on your computer for...
? Ethernet Controller
It is recommended that you connect to the internet so that the wizard can search online and look for the appropriate software!
(sigh)
1. Universal remotes. Great idea in theory, but they're often hard as hell to program, especially after you lose the programming guide. Even when they're programmed correctly, they still can't perform some important function that the original remote can, so you end up having to keep both of them around, which defeats the purpose of the universal remote.
2. The meaningless icons on many electronic devices. Yeah, I know, they use them so they don't have to label the buttons in different languages for each country they sell the products in, but all these things seem to do is equally confuse everyone around the world as to what they mean.
3. Convoluted shower controls. I swear, every time I take a shower in a hotel, I have to spend several minutes figuring out how the damn controls work. How about faucet manufacturers stop trying to be cute and just give me one knob for cold, one knob for hot, and a control to switch from bath to shower. I can take it from there.
4. Wall warts. I know they serve a purpose, but do they really need to be on the end of the cord, where they take up three spots on the power strip? How about placing them in the middle of the cord, so I can use more than three plugs on my six-outlet strip.
5. Windows XP's habit of constantly reminding you that the computer needs to be restarted after an update. Memo to XP: I told you five minutes ago that I didn't want to restart, and I haven't changed my mind. How about you shut the fuck up, and when I'm ready to restart, I'll get back to you.
6. So-called water-saving toilets. Sure, they use less water, but they don't work worth a shit (pun intended). So, do you really save any water when you have to flush them twice because the first time wasn't entirely successful?
My new stainless steel microwave has a very nice, modern looking, lcd display, except that if you place it onto a counter you cannot read the display because of viewing angle problems; I mean not at all, until you back away several feet, stoop down, or stand on your toes. You then struggle to once again to touch the appropriate keys to start it.
I wanted to turn it onto its side and keep it that way but my wife said No!
Just plain dumb.
This is my biggest pet peeve. Writing is a creative process. I often choose, for one reason or another, to express something in a way that might not be considered 'standard' English. Technical writing is packed with such choices. So is emailing a good friend who you've spent years developing a secret language with. Then I've got the blasted Word Processor putting ugly red and green squiggles under half of my words. I try to play along at first, thinking maybe the computer knows something that I don't. I try teaching it my style. But as soon as I type a new word or phrase in, there it goes with the accusatory squiggles again. Like it's telling _me_, that _I'm_ the one that's wrong. This is some stupid machine algorithm trying to over-ride my conscious intentions and turn my ideas into pure machine pablum. This will be the real reasons humans and robots will some day wage war. The robots simply have no understanding of human creativity, instead, the loathe anyone or anything that violates their sense of rigid conformity. I say 'bring em on'. I say pull the plug now on your spelling/grammar checkers, and start typing and talking like a real live autonomous human being.
I'm getting fed up with loud, persistent beeping on every step of the data entry process on gas pumps. Mobil is especially bad. The beeps seem to hit just the right frequency as the nails on a chalkboard kind, and you just want to push it through as fast as you can. What purpose does it serve? There's already a perfectly good feature that tells you that you're not ready to pump gas - NO GAS coming out of pump, AND the LCD screen. Can you name one other piece of technology that beeps loudly at you EVERY SINGLE STEP of the way through its functions?
The things is its not that much complicated to have a brightness control that'll decide how much power is spent on lighting the screen (you don't need full lights, unless you're using it to actually light your environment).
Most of the device have it, and some (like the future iPhone) are even advertised to adapt brightness to needs automatically.
It's not that complicated either, once the battery is detected to be low, to force a limit on brightness to save batters (like no matter what the user settings or photo-detector tell - when battery is low, brightness never exceeds 25%). My few-years old Palm Tungsten does it.
The poster is complaining of gadgets that have backlights you could almost tan with. That are always stuck at full power. And in this case alerts are just a form of useless battery suicide : whenever the screens turns on to alert user, whatever was left in the battery is almost immediately drained by the 2000 lumen flashlightscreen. Alerts would be a good idea, if the phone still managed to keep some power to display them long enough for the user to notice.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Some Casablanca ceiling fans have built-in, dimmable room lights. The remote control uses one button to control the light's intensity. One press turns the light on to its last set brightness (fine). Press and hold causes the light to cycle back and forth between lowest and brightest setting; there's no "full brightness" press, you have to stop pressing when you think it's at full brightness (if you missed it, you have to go around the cyle again).
But the worst part is this, no matter what the current intensity setting is (even lowest, I just got the kids to sleep setting), the double-press that is used to turn off the light FIRST BRINGS THE LIGHT TO FULL BRIGHTNESS, and THEN turns off.
If I hadn't of bought two of them, I'd have assumed it was a defect. I wrote to the company and was told they don't accept user comments!
Cars that bing at me are my pet annoyance.
Let me explain. I have a Toyota Camry, 1993 vintage. No Bings. When you leave your lights on, the car _turns them off for you_ when you open the drivers door! Nice stuff, works very cleanly, and I only turn my headlights switch off occasionally.
My parent's car (Ford Falcon) does bing. "Well turn the stupid things off yourself, then!" is my standard response.
One day, progress will move forward. But I am not holding my breath.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I know that SysRq originally had a reason for existence, but its functionality was never used, and that was many years ago. If it hasn't been used by now, it won't be, so how about reassigning that key to do something useful. Just pick a use, since just about anything is better than its current use, which is absolutely nothing.
My Motorola phone automatically switches to a silent ring when I charge it. I usually charge it when I am at work. The funny thing is that the voicemail notification is still audible. In effect, what happens is that I don't realize I have a call until I hear the voicemail alert.
Why would it switch to silent while it is being charged? Makes no sense to me. I can switch it out of silent mode, but it still seems stupid.
Might as well add the entire itunes program.
.. HMM THE LAST SHORTCUT POINTS TO Y: DOESNT IT NOW??? (detecting where a program has been previously installed.. a simple feature I had taken for granted in every single windows app ever made...)
After plugging it in on one of its DAILY charges (does holding down the pause button not mean off??), my position on the playlist is reset. Thanks asshole!
in the menus, going back is UP!@ but going forward, is ENTER. HOW IS THAT CONSISTANT (this is not configurable)
it tries to reset your install drive to C on the itunes upgrade. me: Thats funny, I dont usually install programs to C:
hovering over the... whatever the "eye" "nbc" icon means, brings up the alt text BELOW the system tray/taskbar. Thanks.
I must click "CANCEL" on downloading album artwork EVERY TIME I start itunes. Look itunes, you dont seem to be capturing the message here. I DONT WANT FUCKING ALBUM ART. THAT IS WHY I CLICK CANCEL AND CLOSE EVERYTIME.
Impossible to tell CURRENT ipod version from itunes.
Installing desktop items and installing QUICK LAUNCH items are two VERY seperate things.
When dragging tracks to a playlist it auto adds them to the end, instead of the exact place you place them with the mouse. I mean if im taking the time to drag it to a certain place, why not honour my request? Do mac users lack mouse precision skills or something?
If you have a bad headphone jack (or bad set of phones, or car amp,etc), the ipod will pause playing, as it detects the jack removal and reinsertion and ADJUSTS itself accordingly. There is no way to disable this "feature". thanks apple but id actually rather it not pause itself when the jack is removed. Oh! no one has gone against the groupthink before? so you never even considered making it configurable?? AN ESSENTIAL THING THAT EVERYONE DOES LIKE TAKE THE HEADPHONES OUT OF THEIR IPOD??????
Connected with above, you cannot actually move around the songs in a randomized playlist. What if I want some tracks un randomized and just want to start with a random seed of tracks from a playlist. OK APPLE? I really dont want to micromanage shit, BUT IF I ADD SOMEHTING NEW i want to move it aorund to WHER I WANT. Just to be clear, what I mean is that you drag a bunch of songs to a playlist. Randomize it, then go to add more songs / move the newly added songs around. It prevents you from doing this. So essentialy, there is no such thing to apple as a semi ordered random. Its either randomized the way IT chooses, or micromanaged to death by me. There is no middle ground. This is not configurable.
Cannot delete items off the ipod without a computer.
Must click "copy to play order" usually twice, in order to get your playlists to actually update on the ipod. This is not configurable.
I have no idea why everyone loves itunes/ipod so much. Its so annoying in many basic ways.
Keyboards with weird layouts. I want my backslash over my enter key. I want my home/end/ins/del/pg up/pg down keys in the classic 3 x 2 cluster I've used for years. I want my function keys in groups of four. I want a numeric keypad. I want two alts, two ctrls, two windows, and one context menu key. Don't mix multimedia keys in with standard keys. Both cheapo and expensive keyboards seem to have slight to drastic variations.
Is all over my campus. Every single door has a built-in electromotor that, with the press of a button on the wall next to it, slowly opens the door for you. It is obviously meant to make the campus much more handicapped-accessible, and I agree with the premise. If you have ever seen someone in a wheelchair going through the motions of opening a heavy glass door, you would too. There is one thing that makes this "feature" an absolute pain in the ass, though. The electromotor, for some fucking reason, makes the door about three times as hard to open for those of us who don't need to do it automatically. It's like the hinges have been bathed in molasses and honey, and rusted over for a century or two. You would imagine that, with this in mind, everyone should just press the damn button on the side of the wall, but I don't like that at all. It just feels wrong. It's redundant as fuck for the people who don't need it, and it makes me feel like a fat, lazy-ass convenience-trumps-everything type of person. Besides the moral quandry, though, there is also the fact that, when the button is pressed, the door opens just about as fast as it would if you sat there and pulled on the thing anyway, maybe even slower. I've been going over this situation in my mind, and there has got to be something wrong with the setup. It just doesn't make any sense that all doors equipped such as these are would have this same, aneurysm-inducing effect. If anyone knows whether this little "feature" is unique to my campus or not, it'd be nice to have some sort of explanation for it.
"We may face a scorched and lifeless earth, but they're accountable to their shareholders first."
Someone should get together a data standard for a universal frozen food barcode. Each item has a special barcode on it that says some stuff like density, weight, specific heat, and then you scan it WITH THE MICROWAVE and it automatically calculates the best profile to heat the food. You could also have a few modes, "Quality" which might take longer (as it heats the food more slowly) or "Sport" which heats the food on maximum power but may result in a rubbery texture. Since all microwaves are different, this would go a long ways towards making the science of frozen food better without having to have 20 sets of written instructions.
This could also be of GREAT use in a commercial setting.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
There is a reason those messages are so laborious with unnecesary pauses and bad order of menu options etc...
... another 10-20c... so one excahnge = 4 minutes of talk time. 4 minutes on the phone could accomplish a lot more... and uses way more bandwidth, but once again the tel-co's have it setup so that the more laborious the process, the more it costs you.
The time you spend with your answering machine is money to the Tel-Co. If you have Pay-As-You-Go it DEFINTLY counts as 10c/minute. Considering that they bill you for two minutes even if you hang up at 61 seconds, its a very easy way for them to make millions.
No joke, the more time you spend on the phone going through the various menu's the more time gets racked up, even if your on a plan your still burning minutes just trying to leave a message on someone elses phone.
Text messaging is almost worse in its cost vs value, a singel text message is generally 10-20c (sending party and recieving party), and generally requires at least one reply
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
Some Audis have a security "feature", where if you leave your keys in the ignition without the engine on for more than 30 seconds, the doors automatically lock and the alarm arms. Of course, like all German engineering, this is perfectly logical, you don't want your car being stolen because you were forgetful.
It's actually "Paper Cassette".
Because I know you care. <3
The United States of America: We do what we must because we can.
that have baterries and a base where you charge them. The funny thing is that when there is a power failure you can't make phone calls because the base needs power!! Really handy in an emergency, uh?
Forget THAT. If setting the time wasn't enough of a pain, try programming a circa-1985 VCR to record something while you're on a week's vacation. No OSD, just a couple buttons and a teeny blue LED display. "Press and hold SET until PROGRAM appears and the time blinks..."
But text messaging on a cellphone is even worse than that.
This is perfect timing. A co-worker of mine came back from a meeting to this gem on his desktop.
I can't believe no one has said Digital Rights Management (and not been modded to at least +4).
What better example is there of a bug being shilled as a feature?
Rotovator/Cultivator hired recently.
Amazingly stupid design, has a clutch which is disengaged when you pull up to the lever, but a dead mans handle you have to squeeze to keep it running.
So when running it backwards, you have to let go of the clutch lever (which is cleverly just too far away to reach reliably) and if you let go of everything it carries on going straight over the top of you.
If the clutch lever had simply been reversed (squeeze to go) you wouldn't need the dead man's handle, and it would stop immediately if you fell over with the thing going backwards at you.
-- You ain't seen me, right?
The one major complaint I have about my iPod is that there is no volume control unless you are actually playing music or video content. I have on more than one occasion blasted the shit out of my ears. This mainly happens after watching video content played from my iPod on my TV. To hear anything through the TV you have to turn the volume all the way up on the iPod. After the video content finishes and playback stops, the volume remains all the way up, so when you start to listen to music, its still all the way up. There is no way to check the volume before you start to play something, and there is no way to change the volume before you start to play. Its the most fucking annoying "feature" I have experienced on something that is claimed to have the best interface for this class of device. I feel like filing a class action lawsuit for hearing damage.
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
I once saw an Operating System that would actually connect to the company that made it, and would imply that user was a thief if it found something it didn't like. And they had the nerve to call this "feature" an Advantage! I'm sure by now they've stopped doing it, and it was probably some overzealous junior programmer who snuck that in, but I swear I'm not making this up.
"What other examples of designer stupidity have you seen?"
I use them everyday and they waste more of my time and money than (seemingly) everything else. Where are the 'smart intersections' with all the software and sensing devices we make nowadays?
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Splashscreens: Please, no more splash screens. Just load the stupid application.
Desktop and Program Icons: Applications that feel a need to always put their icons on the desktop (and 10 other places).
Tool bars: There seems to be a "tool bar" for every service/web page these days.
And one last one (that may not quite fit in the category but anyway):
Mapping websites/tools that give you a single line text box to type your address. You listening Google/MS/Yahoo/Mapquest/etc? Give me a text-area control and you parse the stupid newlines! Whoever thought (and continues to think) that single line address inputs are great needs to be shot.
I had a marine radio with me when I canoed the Mississippi. I mainly used it to listen to NWS weather reports, but occasionally to talk to lockmasters. When the battery got low, it would interrupt the audio stream to beep loudly three times, as well as displaying that the batteries were low on the screen. The problem was, it repeated this about every 15 seconds. This went on for at least a half an hour, meaning there was plenty of battery to use the thing for that time, but it was completely unusable due to the beeping. It would have been far more useful if it gave NO warning and just shut off when it was dead.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
With picture of a stupid smiling biatch on ever screen, the last going much like "Please take your card, your money and your receipt IF YOU REQUESTED IT."
My reaction, every time I see this, is an internal rage attack going like. "No goddammit ARGGGGH FFS I just said NO RECEIPT - You are a f*n computer program, FFS! ARRRRRRRRGH........ may your programmers rot in &@&%^T"
If someone at Westpac or their ATM suppliers is reading this, please read the following and contact me for my contracting fees (I'll let you have it for a mere $10k, you'll more than make up for it in customer retention).
IF (bReceiptRequested) {
print "Please take your card and your money";
}
else {
print "Please take your card, your money AND your receipt";
}
ISO certified == THX certified
1. My 99 Saturn has an alarm system. Press the key fob once to lock, press twice to arm. Except it ALWAYS went off if you did not use the remote to unlock it. If you used the key it would sound the alarm evIen if you didn't explicitly arm it. I eventually disabled it using a hack online involving jumping pins on the computer connector (it said the dealer could do it, but they insisted it would screw up my entire remote entry system - it didnt).
2. My dad's Samsung cell phone had a button on the outside. It adjusted the ringer volume when the phone was open. When it was closed, it automatically triggered silent mode. It was very easy to hit.
3. Is it really necessary to require me to push a button or tap the screen for the stupid "warning" about seizures on my DS? Display it with the logo and be done.
...and that's all there is to it.
Power steering is the worst feature ever. It makes cars heavier, more expensive, and adds more components that leak and break. And in this era of rampant obesity it would be just as well to spend a little energy turning your steering wheel.
Um... Duh. A "feature" designed to prevent you from using a device you've paid good money for in the way you expect to be able to. Deliberate sabotage on the part of the manufacturer.
TomTom don't just make all in one units, you can buy a bluetooth GPS unit and software to pair with your phone/pda but its terrible.
...
first of all it has 2 leds and a button that is all.
1 led is red when discharged amber when charging and off when fully charged.
the other led lights up solid green when it has a fix and flashes green when successfully paired.
problem turn the unit on or off with the push button, you don't know is it on is it off. well you may find out if it gets a lock on some satellites 45 seconds or longer much longer if it is off. Is it broken well if its fully charged you may never know it might be fully discharged too.
The only way you can find out if its on is if it shows up in a bluetooth scan but it will not pair if it doesn't have a satellite lock and to top it off leave it stationary it turns its self off after 10 minutes.
plus point when it is paired and locked it works well. Its getting it too that state might take an hour or more
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
After reading the "Worst Feature ..." article title, when I saw the vacuum cleaner icon, I thought it was most appropriate, if inadvertent.
The Blackberry OS has a lovely feature that tells you when the battery is too low to attempt to make a phone call-- but yet, it can power the backlight, let me read email I've already received, etc. for hours beyond that point.
I discovered this "feature" at 3 AM, on the side of I-55 in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi, sitting in a rental car with a flat tire.
Hey guys, when I buy a phone, I want it to be to expend its last bit of battery power WHILE MAKING A PHONE CALL.
I think Beryl has a feature that lets you motion blur your terminal. I doubt it gets much worse than that. Thou I admit it was fun to have xpenguins motion blurred at the corner of the cube with semi-transparency. Some of the xfce users almost cried at the sight...
is sperm... I mean, why did our overlords invented it?
At least we are inventing some pretty awesome things to prevent that feature :D
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
Lotus Notes (and still use it daily.... ugh)
My motorola v325 is an extremely QUIET phone. turning any ringer up to full volume, while having the thing in your pocket (with the speaker facing your leg), you can barely hear it in an environment with little noise. its battery doesnt last very long unfortunately, but when the battery is almost dead, the phone becomes EXTREMELY LOUD, beeping louder than any ringer, mp3, sound, etc. that i can put on my phone. I just wonder why the phone cant be that loud to begin with!
Whoever modded the parent redundant is wrong. Nobody has made a comment similar to this in this discussion. Probably a moderation abuse, as "-1, Redundant" often escapes metamoderation because metamoderators don't have time to check the entire discussion to see is a post is really redundant.
Anyway, this reminds me of the messages you get from most programs when you try to exit. Some programs even come up with an extra "Are you really sure?".
Lynx has a funny twist on this: If you reply "no" to the prompt, you get a message saying "Excellent!".
Either that or if they got smart with those, they would add a battery to the clock for when the power goes out...
Vista...
It is absolutely pointless to be able to eject a DVD from across the room. You still have to get up and walk over to the device. Unless you are strong with the Force. Then you wouldn't need the remote for anything.
My wife and I just got new Blackberry Pearls. Unless you use a holster that has a magnet in the right spot to put the phone to sleep, you have to depend on the keypad lock feature to prevent accidental misdials. Reasonable, but here's the kicker:
If you lock the keypad, but then bump the trackball (which protrudes the furthest out the front of the phone) a couple times, you get a menu to unlock, make an emergency call, or cancel. If you nudge the ball slightly and push bump it again, you have just dialed 911.
While it may sound implauseable to do accidently, it is actually quite easy for a 2-year-old to do, twice in 5 minutes our case. When my wife pulled out the phone to show the office how it happened (even though it was "locked") he just said "not another one of those Blackberries, we've been getting swamped by them."
I called our carrier's tech support to see if there was a way to disable this "feature" or at least change the emergency number to something besides 911. Of course, they had "never heard of this" and could not provide a solution. The best they could suggest is to passcode-protect the phone, which works for everything EXCEPT the emergency calling feature.
I checked the different Blackberry user forums, and it is a widespread problem. One user even detailed the difficulty in explaining to a police office how her pants pocket made a 911 call all on its own.
Thanks to this little feature, my wife now has to keep her phone in a holster and on top of the refridgerator when she's not talking on it.
Actually... Goretex is a breathable fabric. If water gets in it can get out. Thats the whole point of it. Otherwise you might as well wear rubber shoes.
Microsoft Windows.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
It's likely that your model shares some code with a more expensive one that uses the date function.
I don't do a lot of standby. I miss the days when I could hit the power button on a computer and the damn thing turned off. I also miss good cases that could double as a jack stand for my car. I gave one that went from being a 386 all the way to being a 450Mhz AMD K62 to a metal recycling guy a couple of months ago. The immediate power off was great for hang ups. Not to mention I had a situation where a cord got stuck in the CPU fan, I immediately turned it off, unplugged the power from the main board, then turned the power supply back on to spin the now unstuck CPU fan. You can't do that sort of thing now.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
My boss has a Mercedes SUV that will not start the engine if the engine computer detects that any of the three brake light bulbs have burned out. Now, there's a good idea -- when you burn out a brake light, you can't even drive to the store to buy a replacement.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Fuse: a $3 part protecting a $0.01 piece of electronics.
...enough said.
Uh, considering the target audience for minivans, families with young children, I'd imagine that the problem you cited is fairly rare. Plus have you considered letting the person you need to drop off ride in the front passenger seat?
Here are a few I can remember:
- Cordless phone with backlit display. When you press a button, the display lights for several seconds. So, when press end to hang up, the display lights for several seconds, making you think the phone is still on. My dad always got confused by this, and rightly so. The display even lights when you press an ignored button while the phone is off. "Hey, lighted display even though I'm off!"
- Electronic version of the De Longhi portable oil-filled space heater. Terrible user-interface with hard-to-press buttons and a button layout that seems more guided by aesthetics than logical arrangement. Lost power to the thing, even for just a second? No heat for you until you re-program it. Give me an electro-mechanical thermostat and power switch any day over this electronic crap.
- DVD player often refusing to respond to my commands. Oh, wait, that's intentional.
- Just to contrast, once I got a small programmable electronic outlet timer at a garage sale and had the thing figured out in just a few minutes without a manual. Somehow they managed to pack in something like 14 independent program slots, each able to turn on and off at set times either daily, weekdays only, weekends only, particular day only (separate days for on and off). It only had around 7 buttons (no numeric keypad), yet was logical.
You know, the default brown of Ubuntu. Is that a technical feature?
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
The first feature that makes me want to slap Steve Ballmer silly is the new Sleep mode. It's neither quick nor a power saver. I have 2 laptops, and they both behave exactly the same way. You close the lid, the hard drive grinds for 5 minutes, and eventually it clicks off. Later, you open it up, it grinds again for a few more minutes, and you find out that all the grinding just chewed up 10% of your power. Not to mention it made you wait. I went back to good ol' standby.
At least on sprint you can disable all the voicemail crap for people calling you. When someone calls me all they get is "Hey, leave a message *beep*". Just call up the voice mail and walk through a bunch of the preferences, it's not too hard to find.
Definitely my digital bathroom scale. When you stand on it, the LED lights up with the word "OFF" telling you to get off. Then it goes to zero, and you stand on it a SECOND time to get weighed.
:-)
Uhhh... why not a scale that you stand on once... and it WEIGHS you?!? Too mind-boggling a user interface, I guess.
And no, I'm not so heavy that the scale WANTS me off.
It's a little obscure, but back when I was in flight school, I flew a jet that had an audio control header that controlled 6 or 8 audio sources that were piped into my headset and mic. Like a lot of gadgets today, this relied on just a few buttons and ONE knob to control everything...meaning that you had to cycle through some button pushing before the knob would be latched to the particular source whose volume you wanted to change. Let me tell you, a radio that starts blaring suddenly can be far past your eardrums and well into your brain before you can make it through the menu tree and turn it down.
A related annoyance is my current HP laptop, which has volume buttons that are apparently controlled by Windows. Which means that when I boot up, I can't do a damn thing with the volume until Windows is good and ready to let me. That's just wrong.
Evil is the money of root.
I live in a dusty climate. I've burnt out four DVD players in the last three years. After the last one, I did some research, and discovered that they all share a common feature.
The motor and lens send back telemetry data to the controller. When they say they're too dirty to read at 100%, the ENTIRE MOTOR ASSEMBLY SHUTS DOWN, rendering the entire DVD player useless.
If I could find the first marketing slob who thought of this (and then forced the implementation onto an engineer), I would slowly dismember them. Assholes.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
It's a bug!
now if someone were to integrate Clippy with UAC, I can see a perfect storm of annoyingness.
I don't like brands, i prefer to build clones myself, even for servers.
For some crappy services, like a small router, or some backup DNS/Mailserver you just pick some cheap motherboard, and most tend to NOT have an option to just boot even when no keyboard is plugged.
Now it doesn't happend that often, but I used to fix this by using a crafted keyboard DIN or mini-DIN conector with no actual cable or keyboard attached to it.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
Does anybody know where I can buy a clock radio that doesn't bathe the room in light? I find it hard to sleep even when the display is "dimmed". It's amazingly difficult to find a clock radio these days which doesn't produce some source of light.
In Windows, you have the option to "Automatically move pointer to the default button in a dialog box." With this wonderful option enabled, your pointer will instantly warp from your control to a dialog box as soon as one appears. Why not move the dialog box to the pointer? Locating dialog boxes on multi-monitor systems is bad enough. Don't yank my pointer away and thow it into a sea of 18,432,000 pixels. Don't bring the dock to the dinghy, bring the dinghy to the dock.
A while back, I went to work at a new place, and they gave me a Samsung cell phone. I carried it around in my pocket. One day it rang. I answered, and the person on the other end wanted to know if everything was OK. I was confused and asked them who they were. Turns out they were the 911 (emergency services) operator, and they claimed I'd called them and hung up. I told them I certainly didn't do it on purpose, that I was OK, and that I was sorry for disturbing them.
Then the same thing happened a few more times, and there were other occasions on which I took the phone out of my pocket and saw a display asking me to confirm whether I wanted to dial 911.
After several calls to the carrier, I talked to someone who tracked down the problem. Seems that Samsung had put in a feature where if you hold down the "9" button for several seconds, it dials 911. And in their infinite wisdom, they were concerned about what might happen if you had an emergency while key lock was on. So they made it so holding down "9" dials 911 even while key lock is on.
Thanks, Samsung. I love "features" that might get me fined or imprisoned when someone concludes I'm making repeated prank calls to 911.
In my old nokia, selecting the silent option was met with a resounding confirmation beep.
My car has wireless tire pressure monitors. They worked fine for the first year+.
/Ed
Now they keep firing - only the message says "check tire pressure system". NOT
a specific TIRE. The tire pressures are fine, in fact, I know a spot of highway
I can drive by which causes the light to go off.
When there's a faulty sensor the on board computer does not store any failure code.
The error has to be happening for them to capture it.
The dealer has been worse than clueless and has replaced the computer and all of the
tire pressure sensors (some multiple times). The manufacturer is getting involved now.
Was supposed to be on a conference call with them yesterday but they never rang.
PS: Weeks before the first instance I had rented a car and I unknowingly had run over a
nail. The tire pressure sensor in that car worked and the console said "check left rear
tire" and voila, a nail!
WHY is the eject/close button below the tray on pretty well every CD/DVD drive out there? I suppose this is convenient for those who keep their machines overhead. But there's this tiny group of us who keep computers on our desks (or on the floor beside the desk). We find it hard to locate the button once the tray is open. So we resort to shoving the flimsy little tray closed rather than groping around blindly to find the button.
This one speaks for itself. you would think that Bios manufacturer's would include that file.
My microwave oven, and many like it, needs to be informed that it is a microwave oven before it will allow me to cook something. If you just walk up to it like some arrogant bastard and start pressing numbers it's like "wtf do you want me to do?" Then I remember that I have to tell it that it is an oven and that it's job is to cook thngs. After that it stops computing Fermat's last theorem or whatever the frak it is that microwaves do when they don't think they are microwaves and allows me to cook my food. That's not completely fair, my current microwave interprets buttons 1-5 as 1-5 minutes but still makes you press "start," while 6-9 and 0 do nothing. The work microwave ignores all numbers until you remind it of it's sole purpose for existing. The one next to it allows you to type in the time and hit start. My previous microwave, which I bought solely for it's interface, interpreted the numbers as minutes and started instantly. Insert meal, press 5, wait, eat. I miss that microwave.
My spell check just corrected my botched attempt at "interprets" into "interpenetrates."
My sprint phone had a "hands free" ear piece that had no mic, so you had to hold the phone up to your mouth while using the "hands free" feature. Often I put it in the charger and sat it on my desk in front of my mouth. Convenient. Not so much for car use.
My Treo 650 blinked all the time to let me know I wasn't roaming. Gotta love that indicator: "Look at me! Look at me! I have nothing to indicate! All is well! Look at meeeeeee!!!"
If I put a miss-burned CD in my car player it says "error 06" or something and wont let me eject it. I have to turn off and on the car and press eject before it reads the CD.
I bet I could list 50 things if I thought about it, and give myself an ulcer in the process.
I'd like to hear from the moron who thought it would would be beneficial to push a "volume+" button twenty times rather than simply turn a volume knob. Most gadgets have had this "feature" since about 1983.
"Ohh Lance it's SOOOOOO Digital! Duran Duran sounds WAY better now!"
I had a Microsoft mouse at work that was just covered in buttons. Besides the ordinary two + scroll wheel on the top, it had two on one side and three on the other and the track wheel could be pushed in or pushed to either side horizontally. These extraneous buttons had nearly no resistance to them, so I would push them accidently all the time. Microsoft programmed them to do the most awful things, too. Each movement of my hand would typically send me back a web page, or hide all applications, or turn on some sort of universal access mode for retarded people.
Also, I am increasingly frustrated with the "Information Bar" in IE that pops up from time to time with a loud "bloop!" to inform you that it blocked a popup or wants to install an ActiveX control or something like that. In the help system, there's a FAQ question called "Can I turn off the information bar?" Never mind the deferential tone that they expect their users to take; their answer is "yes, but you have to turn it off individually for each function. To turn it off when a popup is blocked..." Then they send you through eight layers of preferences for each individual feature. In other words, they recognized a user desire to kill the damn thing but CONSCIOUSLY CHOSE not to let you do it conveniently. And the very worst part? To turn of the ActiveX control function, you have to endure a DIALOG BOX instead, every time. The dialog box has as its default option to allow the ActiveX installation. There is no option for "rip ActiveX out of my machine by its roots and never let it come back," which is ideally what I'd choose.
In fact, ActiveX is a topic for another three-page rant all by itself, but I'll leave it for another day. I'll also leave the topic of MS Word, except to say that I can't for the life of me understand why when you highlight and delete a paragraph, it applies the style from that paragraph to the one before. I find myself trying to delete the paragraph in such a way that Word won't notice. Microsoft, why do you make me play these games?
Of course this meant that as the phone bounced around in your pocket or purse, it would hit random buttons. All of these would be blocked until a 9 was pressed. It would bounce around some more until a 1 was pressed. And so on for the final 1 and 'talk'. So basically the keyguard assured that pressing random keys would always result in a 911 call.
Some of you probably remember these cube-shaped clock radios from the 80s. In fairly typical fashion, there's a slide switch on the back to turn the radio and alarm on/off, and a sizeable snooze button up top for easy access in the dark. This is all fine. In an inconceivably stupid move, though, there's another push button called "alarm reset". What this does is turn the alarm off, permanently, until you set it again using the slide switch in the back. And yes, you guessed it, it's right there on top an inch or two from the snooze button where it's almost impossible *not* to hit accidentally from time to time. They might as well have called it the "miss work and get fired" button. Brilliant.
I have a cheapass prepaid cell phone plan, which is fine bause my phone travels with me about twice a year and sits on a shelf otherwise. A few months back AT&T made me trade in my perfectly fine Nokia with the grayscale LCD for a Mororola with a backlit display. To give you a hint about what an absolute piece of shit the Motorola's design is, when you're texting you have to indicate whether something is upper or lower case *after* you type the character. Blurgh. But the worst part is that when the backlit screen (wooo color!) goes off you can't see a damned thing. Stupid.
The only thing worse that that was a "special" installer an unnamed university gave me to set up my computer with all of the modem settings all configured about 10 years ago. The problem was, the install assumed that you didn't already have Netyscape installed and overwrote your bookmarks. Fucking idiots.
This is one of life's great mysteries, I guess. Why on earth are the 1-9 keys on my numeric keypad be completely the flip of the keypad on my telephone?
The weird part is, I don't know about others, but it has become second nature when using either keypad, without looking, I still know where the digits are.
(yet another one of life's great mysteries)
HEX offender mugshot ID: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I hate these new VCRs that require you to use the arrow buttons to navigate the menus. Ten years ago every VCR I had used the 'press x number for y submenu' approach, and it was a hell of a lot faster to type in the time and channel number when programming the VCR than it is to up/down through a long list of times/channels. I think it is all a scam to inconvenience people into getting DVD recorders/DVRs.
I still, still, _still_ don't understand why cordless phones have had beepers so that you can find them, but appliances such as TVs and DVD players do not! You should be able to go to your TV, press a button and the remote beeps... I just cant fathom why this ISNT standard... 2nd peeve was my old samsung phones predictive text, if you didnt reselect the word straight after you typed it you couldn't reselect it later... I'm never, ever getting another samsung... to many painful memories of a very poor interface...
We have a DVD player at home that we cant use because of no remote... the play button doesnt function as a menu button so the DVD just stalls at the menu... sigh... interface people, interface!
I've seen vacuum cleaners with 4 PCBs worth of electronics inside, which happily burn out if you don't 'shut down' the lux correctly, say by pulling the plug out of the wall. Yes this is on a vacuum cleaner.
Oh, but it gets better: The only way to switch it on and off correctly is with a small control panel at the top of the hose, which is apparently where customers wanted it. But rather than run a wire back to the controller boards, no, they decided it would be tidier to go wireless. That's right, a battery-powered remote control to turn on and off your vacuum cleaner.
And I thought BMW were guilty of over-engineering.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Just hold the light button the first time, stop pressing repeatedly.
cat
I was running the calculation for the required upstream diameters required for laminar flow of 98% oxygen at -230 degrees and 50 psig - this using the Annubar flowmeter vendors' own software - and I decided against straightening vanes because of the cost and trouble associated with fillet welding Monel inside small bore Sch. 10s SS316 (the impingement issue and likely HC trap points). Anyway, I decided to complete the calculation just to evaluate the results, and, as everyone knows, this involves at least 5 minutes of careful data field input. So what happens in the end? The program tells me that the proper spec for this actually calls for 304SS, not 316, and a rounded-edge orifice plate with a beta ration of .659 would be a better choice (assuming sweep-flow, top-insert purges were installed up and downstream). Why the hell couldn't the software have mentioned that in the first place?
Wait, isn't this the thread for piping designers?
All these are under Windoz, but other OS's have some
similar stuff too:
1) There's a power-off key on some Windows keyboards.
Hit it by accident and it shuts off the machine,
no confirmation or anything - just powers down!
Who the HELL thought THAT was a good idea?
Who turns their computer on/off so frequently that
they can't bear to go through a menu to shutdown?!!
I pried off that keycap and taped a shield over the stalk.
2) On the work laptop (Dell), there's a key combination, I don't
know what it is, which makes the laptop prepare to undock,
by powering down - again, no confirmation, just does it.
Same comments as above - why does this require a shortcut?!
3) Too many keyboard shortcuts in general - they're getting to
be like those parked domain web pages with ads on them -
you can't mistakenly hit any key combination these days
without it doing _something_, which you then have to figure
out how to undo. I'm a clumsy typist, this annoys me no end.
One or two apps' hotkeys are one thing, but when Windows and
every app all have dozens of them, it gets ridiculous.
I want a keyboard which filters out all ALT/SHIFT/CTRL key
combo codes except those I specifically allow, and can show
me, via USB/SW query, a history of my keystrokes so I can see
what I typed to cause my machine to go down or whatever.
Funny how people don't like command lines, but are willing
to memorize obscure key combinations to speed up use of apps...
one day somebody will figure out that commands are easier to
remember than this, and replace all those damned hotkeys
with "F1-command" - hit F1, cursor goes to a little editbox
on the bottom of your screen, and type what
you want to do, at least for seldom-used things. And make
it so I can search the commands too, and show history so I
can repeat what I did before (and SEE what I did before so
I can look it up and figure out how to undo it, if it was
a mistake).
4) Sleep mode / hibernate / whatever - I've NEVER seen this
work right, even on the laptop. Either I can't get it to
un-hibernate, so I have to just power cycle anyway, or
it goes to "sleep" but still runs hot (laptop)
and burns down the battery. Nice idea, worthless reality.
Here's my most annoying Slashdot bug: you know how when you view a single post it has "Reply to This" and "Parent" links at the bottom? That's fine and good. But when you actually do reply to the post, it removes the "Parent" link (which actually would have been useful if you wanted to review stuff farther up the thread) but keeps the "Reply to This" link which is entirely useless because you're already replying to the post! How brain-dead is that?!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
When replacing files in a folder in Windows, or doing any other number of things, you're presented with some message like "Are you sure you want to do X with this file?" And the options are: Yes, Yes to all, No, Cancel. When I want to say "No to all", without cancelling my action for whatever reason, the option doesn't exist. I find myself speed-pressing "No" over and over again.
I cannot speak about other providers, but:
With my Verizon phone, pressing 6 during any of the preambles will skip to the next step.
Since discovering this, my voice mail listening sessions have been shortened to:
1. Press VM hotkey.
2. Wait for for the welcoming speech to begin.
3. Interrupt welcome speech by immediately entering passcode.
4. Interrupt speech detailing my mailbox contents by mashing 6.
5. Interrupt pedantic lecture detailing the header information for the upcoming voicemail by pressing 6.
6. Listen to voice mail message.
7. Press 7 to delete it.
8. Close flip.
Takes only about 30 seconds, now. It used to be much worse.
Kid-proof tablet..
Automatic Seat Belts. These have largely gone the way of the Dodo bird by now, thank goodness, but I still have a Mazda that has them except that they both quit working so now you have to sling the seatbelt over you as you get in the car. When they were working, they'd often hit you as they were going by. Bad idea.
It is being used by another person or program.
Close any programs that might be using the file and try again.
The strict limits imposed ostensibly to prevent abuse also prohibit significant positive anonymous contributions.
CD/DVD trays for bootable media which can only be opened when the system power is on are one of the worst misfeatures I've ever seen.
There you are with your powered-off server which you've just taken a backup of, or your image-ready Windows workstation you've just run SYSPREP on. You have to boot to removable media to do a maintenance function. The system is now in a delicate, fragile state: if you should accidentally boot off the hard drive, the OS will boot up and start auto-configuring itself or setting a security ID or trying to talk to the network or something equally dumb that will break the system state.
So you go to insert your boot CD and darn, you can't physically at the drive because it's powered! You can only insert the CD once you've turned the system on! For your comfort and convenience!
So you hit power, hit the CD tray eject button as the BIOS self-test runs, and now you're in a race against time as the CD takes its time to self-test before allowing you to eject, and the BIOS does its self-test, and you hope like heck that you can hit the magic BIOS interrupt key (whichever it is on this model) *at precisely the magic moment* to stop the boot cycle before it kicks into Windows and corrupts the hard drive - because if you have any keys, including the magic BIOS interrupt function key, held down as the self-test runs and not during that magic half-second of grace you'll get the 'Keyboard error press F1...' and then *maybe* you'll be allowed to get into the BIOS and pause the boot cycle...
And then for some reason the CD tray doesn't respond to your eject, so you press it again, but now you find out it's actually read your tray button push but queued it for after the self-test, so now it's registered two button pushes, so it ejects then immediately retracts, wasting critical seconds as the BIOS counts down to doomsday...
Meanwhile, on the ancient 1993 box next to it, that's still got a floppy, you just turn it off, slot your boot floppy in with the power off, turn the power on, and you've got a guaranteed secure non-hard-drive boot.
And let's not forget all those times you've turned off a machine, pulled out all the plugs, tucked it under your arm to take away then realised you left the CD in the drive and now you've got to go plug it in again to eject the media, and either futz around with the keyboard and video cable for five minutes or just plug the power in and take your chances booting blind without a keyboard to enter the magic BIOS override key and just do the race-against-time with the CD tray eject vs BIOS self-test thing. Or let it half-boot and then go down cold during startup and let the filesystem corrupt.
It's like a mini Russian Roulette, every day! Just to make your life more interesting.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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Reminds me of trying to uninstall "legitimate" spyware like Zango. They would have a series of 5 or so prompts asking "Are you really sure?", followed by redirecting to a webpage where you pressed Ok, followed by more prompts, then several "Surveys", then you would be sent back to another webpage, where you clicked the last uninstall button, and there would be a mysterious error.
You're right, and most people don't like them, but the reason ist not stupid design as many may believe, but cost: Today, ICs are cheaper than analog circuits - themselves, and their integration into the product. Also, digital buttons can be made flat, whereas protruding analog knobs require more sophisticated handling and packaging. Finally, digital buttons and their attached IC are trivially adaptable to new functions in an advancing series of a product; panels with analog knobs would have to be redesigned in many cases.
These are all peanuts obviously, but they sum up to a few bucks, and companies today selling millions of units of the same product are very focused on maximizing their profit. In fact, these companies employ dozens of engineers who do nothing else than trying to squeeze the last cent in terms of design and production cost.
As a sidenote, the bad user experience with digital controls is most probably worse than it would have to be, because "classic" UI designers think "analog" and "physical". Maybe software UI designers would make a better job there?
It is more of a pet peeve than a technology nightmare, but it is the one tech thing that pisses me off the most often. It is obviously not necessary for a remote control to force you to press 007 to change to channel 7. How hard would it be for the code to wait for a couple seconds and if less than three digits were pressed to assume that was the user's intention? It should have been done right in the cable box or TV changer code, but if it wasn't, there is no reason that the remote control couldn't have been programmed to compensate for the stupidity or laziness of the TV or cable box programmer and add the leading zeros. Maybe it is because I know that there was no excuse for the bad design or sloppy code that it irritates me so much.
Not that it has this feature, but when not cooking something I turn mine off at the wall to reduce the (Aussie coal powered) electricity usage. Having a Linux server and router+switch powered 24/7 one has to make certain sacrifices.
ISO certified == THX certified
Piece. Of. Shit.
... uh... did it take?... hit it ag..oh, shit... I just hung up the call and dialed my mother. End end end end... well... whadaya know... I just turned off the modem.
Dung.
Feces.
Excrement.
My Palm IIIxe was FAR more responsive w/8MB and a crummy little CPU than this stupid thing is w/32MB (or whatever it has).
Look! In my hand! It's a PDA! It's a phone! It's a hot, loose, steaming dog turd.
The only time the ringer is loud enough to hear is when I should have put it on "silent" mode but forgot.
The only time I seem to get calls is when I put it in "silent" mode and forgot to switch it back.
It has no "reminder" tones... like the phone rang while you were in the can, and your phone was at your desk... no one else was around (or like you enough to tell you your phone rang)... unless you think to check your phone, you'll never know you missed a call.
If the phone DOES ring, and I can sense that it's ringing (usually through telepathy), and try to answer it.. I hit the "Send" button... and
Bluetooth? Oh, yes. It has bluetooth.. uh... you want it to remember all your bluetooth setting after the battery dies?... yeah... not so much...
I really think the "Camera Phone" idea is essentially foolish. If you want a picture of something, you want a picture of something that is not permanently obscured by pocket lint and finger grease... momentarily disregarding that.... Something is happening. I want to take a picture. I press the "End" button to turn it on (?!), wait a second then the middle-cursor button to disengage the key-lock... then a second later, I can press the "windows" key... and it takes a second to render the stupid Start menu... down down down down down... pictures. That takes a solid 45 seconds to come up and respond. Push the soft button marked "Camera". Wait another 25 seconds for the damned "viewfinder" image to come up... press the center cursor button again. About 2 seconds later, the Treo figures out that I wanted to take a picture, and captures the CCD. Now if you're hoping to catch baby's first steps, this is not the way to go. George Lucas could write, finance, cast, storyboard, shoot, edit, post-produce, score, merchandise, advertise, distribute and make a half-trillion dollars off an epic trilogy of films about your baby's "learning to crawl before learning to walk" adventure, working in cute, plucky comic-relief characters, mind-puree-ing space-battle sequences, inane dialog, ancient mysticism and strict adherence to Campbell Monomyth before the Treo will be ready to take a damned picture.
The one thing I actually WANTED the Treo for was so I could get PuTTY or something similar on there and do emergency Linux SysAdminny things from out there in the world, if I had to... problem is that the keyboard on the Treo lacks an easy way to input characters like \,|, and so on... oh, and there's no CTRL key... and no ALT key... So, uh... OH, and... nevermind...
Bottom Line: The Palm Treo is a lousy phone, an awful PDA, a dismal handheld computer, and a positively shitty camera.
Y'know what it's really good at, though? Sinking in salt water.
.
The default Linux behavior of locking the CD tray and refusing to eject when I press a button. On some devices, the lock stays in place even after a soft reboot, forcing a power cycle.
I don't give a damn if the FS driver will throw a hissy fit or the system will panic. It's read-only media, you'll eject it when I press the button or I'll eject it for you with a paperclip and get the sudden urge to crash some developers' skulls.
I honestly can't name a single design decision in a modern Linux system that is worse than that misfeature.
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I'm on annother computer temporarily (training), no FF. The tab handelling is crap, ads everywhere, no select -> right click -> search Google for ..., no re-open recently closed tabs, no spell check and it randomly flakes out and stops working properly; grr! >:(
Me lost me cookie at the disco.
Whoever modded the parent redundant is wrong. Nobody has made a comment similar to this in this discussion.
You mean, except for phalse phace saying "Cancel or Allow" at 4:27, Leroy Brown saying Vista itself at 4:50, flyingfsck saying all versions of Windows at 5:19? (For the record, the post in question was at 5:31, which means that a post saying specifically Windows Vista was posted over 40 minutes before.)
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
OT:
I have a 4+ too, and found a use for three sticks of 16MB of EDO memory from the K6-2 I was keeping.
The printer now has 52MB memory, and prints pretty much anything I've tried without skipping a beat, even with duplexing turned on - it used to stall on complex graphics when it only had 4MB...
It's pretty picky on which memory it will use, though - several 4 and 8MB cards were ignored or gave a console error on power-up.
I told you it was OT.
*Still* negative function...
I have a Pioneer Head Unit that plays MP3s off CD-Rs that has six buttons - not in a row, though, plus a four way rocker button.
All the buttons are modal, and also can be held for a 2-second-ish duration to get a different function.
The rocker button behaves differently depending on which button mode you are in.
There are a *lot* of settings to play with on this device, but the UI means they are not optimal 99% of the time.
Why they didn't just go with simple point-and-shoot menus using not much more than the rocker button, I cannot understand.
The manual is probably 100 pages long, and the unit is useless without it, and not much use with it. Grrrr.
*Still* negative function...
How 'bout this... I'm here reading about all these 'features', and another page I was on spawned a pop-up, which due to the settings I have opened in a new tab. The pop-up resizes my Firefox window, and disabled every function of the browser except creating and closing empty tabs, and scrolling (but only by the little knob thing on the scrollbar, the up-down buttons didn't work, nor the keyboard shortcuts). Apparently Firefox thought it had died long before this, because when I restored my session all the tabs I had closed when playing around with the paralysed browser (trying to revive it) were opened again. Thankfully this didn't include the pop-up, though.
In summary the most annoying feature of any product is Microsoft Office's insistence that no matter what I say, I should spell my words the American way; without the colour, flavour, honour, and organisation of Australian English. I could very much do without all the extra labour required by constantly being the saviour of other people's spelling when they don't check the lies the Microsoft spell checker is telling them. Especially since the new version of Word takes forever to load the language box, and at best setting the default will only buy one or two correct new documents before it changes the default back again. Why, Microsoft? Why? Apart from taking every available opportunity to insult you and actively trying to move people to Linux, what have I ever done to you? --- Beware of the seductive semicolon; it only means your sentences harm.
Two men claimed to have walked into a bar. Only one had the bruises to prove it.
The Macintosh Quadra/Centris 610 power button is located on the front of the unit below the floppy disk drive, where a non-Mac user would expect to find the eject button. To add insult to injury, it was a hard power button, which shut down the computer abruptly when pressed.
Picture of Quadra 610
Blu-Ray cases. Smaller than a DVD case... Bigger than a CD case... With a stupid see-through bit at the top demonstrating that the space is indeed wasted... Why aren't they the same size and shape as DVD cases, or CD cases? Agh!
Let's see...
I had a (land line) phone once that would only let you dial 11 numbers.
Great for making general phone calls. Less great for calling someone with an extension, someone in another country or navigating a voice mail system or phone tree.
My current mobile phone opens in a regular flip phone mode, and a landscape mode with a full keyboard.
But you can't use the web browser in landscape mode (entering urls or forms is murder). Nor can you enter address book information that way. Switching between modes cancels whatever you were doing.
Oh, and if you have the phone open in landscape mode and are receiving a call you can do one of three things:
1) Hit the answer button and talk on speaker phone.
2) Switch to portrait mode which hangs up on the call.
3) Let it go to voice mail.
If you close the phone while it is doing one of its "I'm doing something" animations, it will pause the animiation until you open the phone again. Because man I need to see that flying envelope. Which isn't really that awful, except it also keeps the backlight on. On the screen that's inside the flip. draining your battery for no real reason.
You also can't set it to ring silently without scrolling through all of the available ring volumes. So there's no way to mute the phone without being incredibly annoying. No I keep it on vibrate at all times and keep it in a rocks glass when I want to hear it ring.
Completely aside, I wish American phones had "Manner Mode" buttons that are on virtually all Japanese phone. It's an external dedicated button that switches your phone between two ring profiles. (usually ring and vibe). Though it's likely that no one would use the button here.
Porsche's got some great technical ideas. For "the greatest engineers on earth," they've sure done some doozy's. Here's a short list:
Oil Lines on the outside of the body, down where you would ordinarily feel free to position a jack. I know that this has a lot to do with the original 2-liter engine cooling itself adequately with a fan, but of all the places they could have decided to put the most important artery of the car, this seems to have been the worst possible choice. Similarly, an oil cooler under the bumper, right out in front, is also a little peculiar, given the tendency of all nations on the planet to bound their roads with raised, concrete curbs.
No apparent jack stand points -- if you manage to get the car raised up without pinching a $500 piece of pipe, it's often anybody's guess where it's best to place the stands that are going to hold the thing up there. Considering that these cars were made to be worked on by their driver/owners (at least in the early days), you'd think a clearly indicated hoisting point would be in order.
Poor line of sight for speedometer, etc. Sure, I love the big, easy-to-read tach. But what other mass production car requires you to twist the gauges to crazy angles in order to see when you're driving anywhere in the neighborhood of the speed limit?
One idiot light does double duty as the parking brake indicator and oil pressure failure warning. I don't know how many models this is the case in, but jeez... The difference between one of these situations and the other is pretty significant.
Webasto gasoline-fueled heater, right next to the fuel tank. Okay, where do we put the (potential) molotov cocktail we've designed as a supplementary heater? How about next to 15 gallons of explosive fuel, which is up front, at bumper level, where head-on collisions are most likely to happen? I don't know of any problems resulting from this, ever, but it was a gutsy idea for the Weissach engineers to even think up.
Counter-intuitive climate control sliders. No other way to describe them. Top one is for fresh air blown in from under the windshield. Next one is, er... sometimes I can remember, and get it to work. Usually not. But three levers on the dash, and two more down between the seats? That was the plan? Turning on the defrost requires sliding at least four of them.
The 915 transaxle. Nuff said, right? I mean it's not exactly durable, and it's not exactly smooth. Sure, it's an old design, but I've had early-seventies Japanese cars that shifted a lot like late nineties Japanese cars. Transmissions have been around as long as there have been cars. What is so hard to figure out?
A heating system that can kill you if your exhaust is leaking, or can choke you if your engine leaks oil. It's another one of those moves necessitated by the lack of water cooling, I guess. And it almost makes you think changing coolant isn't such a bad idea. It's an idea that mixes the one clearly toxic byproduct of the car with the one part that sends stuff right into our lungs. It works fine, as a rule -- but again, who came up with the initial idea?
Thermal reactors heating up an air-cooled magnesium engine case. I know, it had to be done if they were going to sell cars in the U.S. But the longstanding reputation of the car for reliability and durability was undone by three model years of cars with engines that would cook themselves to death.
Torsion bars - a radical idea, in its day. But not the best idea, ever, or even the best idea for the 911.
A dipstick that easily falls into the oil tank. Happens a lot. Some cars had a screen to prevent it. But when you combine the fact that every component of the oil-checking process is counter-intuitive and at odds with virtually every other car ever manufactured and a dash-based oil level gauge that is hardly ever useful when you're sitting in front of the dash, since you've got to stop, on a level surface, once the car has warmed up to 190 degrees, in order to use it. And even then the rule of thum
I'm not sure about vista, but this is true up to XP.
When i install windowsXp on a pc, it gives me the option of changing my location. Since i live in South Africa, i choose that. it then automatically sets my date layout, currency, sets my measures to metric etc.
But why oh why do my printers still default to Letter when i install them?
Surely they could default to A4? Letter paper is not even sold in this country. EVERYONE uses A4 here as their paper size for general purpose printing. Can this not be set automatically?
I had a little electric razor from Japan, and after cutting the plastic off of it (out of habit), I noticed the easy to open snaps. The US makes cool stuff, and the Japanese make it better.
(I might have wanted to move there, if it wasn't for the language barrier and their water-spray toilets. Who came up with that one?)
This is not a signature.
My gf has sworn off of Motorola phones for this same reason. She's had two now and both were exactly the same as you describe. Every 5 minutes they'd go off on one like the electronic equivalent of jumping up and down frantically waving your arms and shouting at the top of your voice "I'm running out of energy!! I'm running out of energy!!"
My Sony Ericsson tells you once, tells you again an hour later and then dies.
It seems there should also be some attention paid to the time of day. No point beeping away and flashing in the middle of the night for most people (user defined settings if you want to change it I suppose). Perhaps it should even only bother to tell you next time you try to interact with the device.
It iPhone probably has something like that.
A lot of cars out there these days have daytime running lights or even full-on headlights that come on when you start the car. The problem with this is that none of the other lights come on; just the headlights. When I drive at night, I generally see 1-2 drivers with their headlights--and no other lights--on.
That is easily among the worst features invented. I mean, really, how hard is it to make all of the lights come on? I bet it actually costs MORE to wire up just the headlights to come on automatically, than it would cost to make all of them come on automatically.
Before anyone complains about lights robbing power from the powertrain, indicator lamps are usually 3-5 watts, brake lights maybe 10 watts, headlamps 50-100 watts each. So with four side indicators, two front indicators, two rear indicators, two brake lights, and two headlamps, you're looking at a power draw of 160-260 watts, or a little over 1/3 horsepower tops. The alternator is producing more than that much energy as a surplus already...
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
And reset the time again, whilst I was out, making it un-obvious what the hell happened.
Sure, a CPU can have a faulty cache/FPU/whatever and still make it to the BIOS screen but the message says "CPU not found"!
No sig today...
This week, I bought an USB key. The thing was packaged in an easy to tear plastic/paper casing, put in a hard plastic security box by the shop that happens to have two relatively small holes, but since the key was even smaller, I could have easily popped it out in a couple of seconds with my bare fingers, but being honest, I let the clerk struggle to open the box the regular way, in 30s with a lot of pain and curse words.
Last I checked, if you password-protect a folder in Picasa, images from that folder are never displayed in search results, even if the folder is open/unlocked. This defeats the purpose of using Picasa in the first place.
Also, IIRC if you leave a passworded folder open when exiting, it'll still be open the next time you launch the program, no password asked.
This phone never really closes; the display with the mail,imode,offhook and joystick key grouping are always facing outwards though the rest of the kepad swivels out.
Well, it calls people from my pocket apparently and sometimes that is the last person I called, but now late at night which causes angry phone calls back to me. For some reason that person doesn't hang up, saying "I heard everything" whatever it was they heard. Once I was at a part and the guy next to me slammed into it and my coworker thought I was having a raucous time. And if they don't hang up ("I just heard walking all the time") then I wonder how much money that is costing me. Finally, the button that is used like a mouse button to select things seems to have halfway broken due to the stress.. it only works when you swivel the phone OPEN now, as if there was a difference with this stupid phone! (Oh yeah and the CCD died). Only neat thing is the hologram logo and sparkly pearl paint like a girl's fingernails. Time to move on.. but it's only a year or two old!
bad designs
But my personal ones are:
**TODO** Steal someone elses sig.
You click on spellcheck and it pops up over the word you are trying to spellcheck. You have to move the box to see the word. You have to do this every time.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Does anyone really *want* a system beep anymore these days?? It's a real hassle to disable it.
I bought a Panasonic camcorder back in the day when I had a Windows PC, and installed the video editing software that came with it. It had all the usual crap - non-standard buttons, "cool" non-rectangular windows, menus that weren't where they were supposed to be, etc.
But the worst bit was that the video time bar was under the video window and was consequently about 300 pixels long. The most common thing to do was to snarf in a whole tape of video (1 hour) and then chop it up. But at 300 pixels, a 1 pixel change is 30 seconds of video. And the only other controls were play/stop/pause and single frame forward/back.
Yes, that's right. To change your cut point you had two choices: forward/back by 30 seconds, or forward/back by 1/25 second. God forbid your kid ever did anything interesting starting at 15 or 45 seconds past the minute...
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
My award for 'What *were* you thinking?!' goes to the HTC Wizard. For the uninitiated, the HTC Wizard is a smartphone with a whacking great big screen and backlight, and with smartphones being what they are the battery drains in a day or two, maybe less, with heavy use.
HTC's stroke of genius concerned how to charge the phone: to charge the battery, the phone must be switched on. Spot the design flaw? Yep, let your battery level get too low and you can never switch the unit on to charge it again! Result: one trip to the shops to buy a new battery..
So a few years ago, I bought a BMW 530. My wife took it to the mall for the first time with my daughter who was about 6 months old. Upon returning to the car, she put my daughter in her car seat, and in doing so tossed the keys into the driver seat. She closed the door, walked around, and lo and behold, the BMW had locked itself up before she got to the drivers door.
The AAA locksmith shows up some time later, my daughter stuck inside a VERY hot automobile. They have no idea how to get in. So they used one of those airbag things to split open the driver door to stick a coat hanger or something inside the car to get it unlocked.
I have to call the dealership and ask where the unlock button is.
After I find out where it is and relay that to my now very panicked wife who fills in the locksmith, we come to find out that the car has detected a break-in and disabled the unlock button.
All the while we are yelling at them to just take a hammer to the window to break in. Apparently the damn car has some sort of unbreakable glass.
I finally get through to BMW's version of on-star and guess what - they can't unlock the car via satelite. As it turns out, the only thing BMW on-star is good for is asking for driving directions (there's a GPS in the car) and reserving movie tickets.
In the end, after consulting with the dealer again, I have to tell the now on-scene fire department that they CAN break the glass on the short split section of the passenger side rear window - apparently a feature designed just for these situations. Of course, that's exactly where my daughter is sitting, but thank goodness we had window shades that were drawn up.
So my wife brings my 1 day old car home that I haven't driven yet and it takes 6 weeks to get a new window. Of course, when the 6 weeks comes up and I discover they haven't ordered the window yet, they are all of a sudden in abundance and it only takes 24 hours.
So... pointless/counter-productive/bizarre features?
1) auto-locking doors
2) overly extravagent security
3) satellite communications link for directions in a car with a GPS
4) a window designed to be broken
Of course I haven't even mentioned
5) voice command (more distracting than buttons)
6) GPS Volume button is the radio button. You have to adjust the volume WHILE the GPS lady is giving you directions.
7) A radio that mysteriously reboots.
8) An integrated car management system that disables radio, air conditioning, and navigation when it doesn't boot properly.
9) A flat tire sensor that has presented at least a dozen false alarms and has never actually detected a flat tire.
the Ferguson CR150D. It's meant to be a bedroom alarm but has a bright blue display light that cannot be dimmed and is bright to enough read by in the dark. In fact it's probably bright enough to be seen from space. The alarm is also spectacularily unfriendly: the volume can be set to quiet at night but in the morning it comes on and then automatically gets louder and LOUDER to a point just above comfortable. This too cannot be turned off. It got replaced by a £30 DAB/FM alarm that does what it's told. I just couldn't believe that a piece of electronics that is designed to do a specific job was so badly designed.
If I'm called while I'm playing with my phone(6230i), trying to set something in the menu, writing sms, anything really, it will immediately pick up or reject the phone call if I happen to press the wrong button. It has happened to me several times that I accidentally reject a phone call like this, really annoying.. the obvious fix would be to have a delay of 1/2 second before you can reject or pick up a call.
The RealPlayer application for Windows, ca 2000-2001. But that is not my personal opinion - it is an indisputable fact. Personally I would have to say some early version of Windows or Gnome.
I had a yepp mp3 player (some years back) that would drain the batteries whether it was on or off, about 8 hrs life coudl be expected in the off position - solution, take out one of the batteries when not using.
A simple smiwtch woudl haev been easier and probably seen me using it more than I did - anyone want to buy it? Oh yes, updating its music took ages too!
Seriously, I hate touchpads. The touchpad era in notebooks started many years ago, but I still remember what an excellent pointing device trackball was. I tried many notebooks, IBMs, Dells, Asus and Apple among them and find that none of them has touchpad useful enough for me. It is because touchpads start to react on (surprise, surprise) touch. It wouldn't be that bad, but they also react on pull-off. Why don't I set touch pad sensitivity to small number? Because I don't like it this way either.
Trackballs react only on move, you can touch and off the ball as much as you want and the pointer will stand still. Until you roll.
I'd really love to see Powerbook 140-like trackball in new Dells.
The worst feature I've seen is the Power, Sleep and Wake Up keys sitting comfortably in the corner of many keyboards (though they thankfully seem to be out of fashion now). When do you ever need to shut down your computer in such a hurry that a single keystroke is necessary over a simple sequence to shut down or sleep?
Having the entire computer turn itself off (or go to sleep, which can be just as bad depending on your applications) with no confirmation is a really bad idea. I'll never forget the time I was doing a live performance involving a projected computer image, and someone accidentally hit the Power key...
I like the LED on my UPS that tells me the power in my home is off.
You don't say!
On my phone, if I miss a call then my answer service calls me back immediately to tell me I have a missed call. Does it expect me to answer this one, when I missed the last call ????
The new HSBC cheque paying in machines - and that is their sole purpose - have an interstitial screen towards the end of the process asking the question - "Do you want to pay these cheques in?".
Retarded.
Using a mac with two screens is an exercise in frustration.
iPod's crummy interface?
I agree with the OP about the 6230. I now have a 6233, and if you set your alarm, turn out the lights, etc. 2 minutes later the room lights up as the screensaver kicks in. Even if it is a blank screen.
Sending an sms on a series 60 phone must rank up there in terms of overcomplicating something.
My parents used to have a Philips mobile phone that had the worst interface I have ever seen on anything.
I once had to use a Motorola tri-band phone when I went to the US on a trip.
When you turned the phone on, it would do about a second of vibrate to let you know it had turned on. Apparently the screen display wasn't sufficient.
This is MIND-NUMBINGLY stupid, because if you're running low on battery and you turn off the phone to conserve power until you need to make a call, the vibrate drains the battery when you turn it on.
In fact, I have one of those wind-up chargers that give you about 5 minutes of phone time in emergencies. I tried it on the Motorola phone - the phone turned on, vibrated (thus killing the battery) and then said "No Battery" and turned itself off. Fantastic.
And let's not forget that I couldn't even work out how to set the time on the phone when I arrived in the US. I had to consult a colleague who owned a Motorola phone and 'knew the trick' (it's on a hidden or 'extended' menu or something).
The absolute answer must be the open/close button on CDRom drives in PCs. Which idiot thought to put the button UNDERNEATH the tray, so that when it's open I can't find it. More so when the CDRom is located near the bottom of the PC on the floor, so I have to crawl on the floor to open/close it!
Hey dumbo, ever hear of usability? You work for Microsoft????
That bugs me....
My Audiovox SMT5600, running Windows, would constantly call 911. I could never figure out how, but at least 3 times a month it would call 911 while it was in my pocket. I finally figured out that the phone was set to use "08" as an emergency number (which seems to be in use in Saudi Arabia and New Zealand). Since the two buttons are next to each other, they were constantly being pushed. I ended up using a registry editor to remove the number from the list of valid emergency numbers.
Where to begin? Right off the bat they misspelled razor. Now for the serious ones. First of all when the battery is low, the phone beeps/vibrates like crazy, screaming for help, and killing itself in the process.
Next, if you want to silence the phone quickly with it still closed, you have to push and hold the volume down button on the outside for like 3 seconds. That will take you into volume style mode, then you press a second button to cycle through the modes. Finally to lock in your choice you press the volume down button again. Also I should note plugging the phone into the charger nullifies all the hard work you've just done and puts the phone in the loudest possible mode. A lot more of a pain in the ass than my old LG phone where I could reach in my pocket, hold the volume down button for a few seconds and it would give a short vibrate to let you know its in vibrate mode.
Also there seems to be a mystery button on the right outside of the phone that doesn't really do anything besides beep when you press it.
Finally, god forbid you miss a call, the phone beeps and vibrates relentlessly until you go in like 3 menu layers deep and 'dismiss' the call.
Incidentally none of these behaviors are customizeable at all.
Check out the cave on the east side of lake Hylia. Strange and wonderful things live in it.
We were at a bus stop. Someone across the road came out of a blcok of flats, and tried putting a key into a car. The alarm went off, ewven though the key had unlocked the door. The person opened the bonnet, and pulled, and hit, and eventually blessed silence returned. He then managed to drive off. He could have been stealing the car. We did not think so, but he might have been. If you see a car alarm going off, do you rush to the defence of someone else's property? Naah. Even policemen who stopped when they saw me struggling with a car door and an alarm in a car park moved on when I gave them a wave and a I-can't-help-it shrug.
I have a Jeep Cherokee (right hand drive). This had an alarm which went off even though the door could be opened, which means the bonnet could be opened, and the alarm could be disconnected. If the side window is left a crack open, the alarm can go off when a gust of wind hits it just so. It then stays on until it is smashed by infuriated neighbours (this is what did for it eventually) or the battery is flat, whereupon the doors all unlock. The car is dead, so I ring home for a jump start. We connect up the batteries, whereupon the doors lock again, locking the keys inside, and the alarm sounds until the battery is flat again, or I rip the wires off. Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!
I believe BMW have an even finer version of the phone battery alarm trick. If you leave the car in the garage, the alarm system is still on. After about two weeks the battery voltage may dip beneath 11v. The alarm system reckons that someone may be trying to run down the battery, so it flashes the lights, sounds the horn, and uses up the rest of the battery in in the garage. Then it unlocks all the doors. Hooray.
I DON'T KNOW ANYBODY WHO USES THE CAPSLOCK KEY! EXCEPT PEOPLE IN SLASHDOT POSTING STUPID STUFF!
Why do modern keyboards have the capslock key? It's totally useless, totally oversized and in a real stupid position compared to the usage. Good thing you can remap it, but anyway. Do you know anybody who uses the caps lock? Much easier to use shift to type capital letters.
I guess all the COBOL programmers still need it.
GeoKone.NET
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
modern society
The RAZRs Low Battery & Voice Message Beeping has cost me at least a dozen nights sleep this year alone. IT SUCKS. I'll thunk twice before buying a Motorola phone again.
I also have an alarm clock that beeps every time you press a button to change the time. Really annoying. Wan't to get another 30 mins sleep? Forget it, after hearing this thing bee 30 times you won't be able to get back to sleep.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
I'm also annoyed with the RAZR stupid noisy shut-down music. Crap, if I'm shutting down the phone I don't want noise. And when you turn it on you get no positive response that it's turning on so I have to hit the power button a bunch of times to get it to turn on. I hope the software designer rots in hell.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Then I switched to the cell phone company that was previously promoted by hot actress lady (I believe that was after being promoted by less good looking actress lady). Now I don't use minutes to check my voicemail or my usage, and I get more minutes for the dollar to boot.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
How about glancing at your battery level once in a while, combined with a general awareness of when you last charged the phone and how much you have been using it? Any time my phone runs out of juice I will have been expecting it, and not because of some dorky flahing and beeping. Motorola Razrs are the worst. Piercing beeping and nothing you can do about it. Ugh!
pi = 2*|arg(God)|
No one will probably read this, but it cannot go undiscussed...
Why in the hell did MS decide you needed to have a RAID driver on a floppy disk?!?!?!? There is no reason a modern operating system can't support getting the driver from a CD/USB/anything but a floppy. When I had to install XP x64 on my RAID, I had to search the whole fucking house to find an old floppy drive and thank god almighty my motherboard still had floppy disk support.
On an semi related note. Don't try to install Windows with a USB hard disk plugged in. It will assume your USB disk the primary device, and even if you specify your internal disk as the install target, it will write your MBR to the USB disk, making your system unbootable if it is removed. Another ARRRGGGHHH STUPID MS!!! moment.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
My job involves being on call and servers sending me text messages to alert me of problems, but my company having migrated (years ago) from 128-character pagers, still has a 128-character limit on the text messages being send out of the central messaging server. So when I get paged the damn thing splits longer messages into two so it's like "message from blah blah error shows database is down on server a" and the next message concludes the error "bcdef at 2007-05-27 08:10am problem ticket 1728374" As if anybody still carries a freakin' 128-character pager! And it's an enterprise-wide messaging service, so they can not change it until every single person has upgraded their pager. And of course we have some curmudgeon writing mainframe cobol in a basement somewhere who won't give up his 1980 style pager. Not to mention the company spending 2x $ because nearly every alert is split into two messages.
And then comes the cheap ass cell phones that they get (have to choose the "Free" model for most people).. It had a default screen-saver (god only knows why a LCD screen needs to be saved) but the timeout on it was 10 seconds. That timeout could not be changed, nor could the screensaver be disabled. So I ended up having to type the problem ticket number into my PC with one hand and hitting a button on the cell phone every few seconds with my other hand (laptop, no 10-key). I accidentally dropped this POS in the toilet.. It's disturbing how much the technology impedes my ability to do my job well or react quickly.
We have a 2001 Volvo convertible. It's roof breaks on us about once a year. Every time it breaks it will beep every 3 seconds whenever you get above 5km/h. It doesn't matter that the roof is closed, it will still beep.
The best part is the fuse for the roof is the same fuse that handles the ABS Brakes. Disable the beeping and you disable safety features. Woo hoo!
That 3 hour drive was HELL.
Beep beep, I'm a Volvo.
beep beep beep beep beep beep beep
I just paid 29 bucks for a Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles DVD and now I cannot FAST FORWARD through advertisements for other DVD's in the front of a DVD I just purchased. (The movie is excellent though).
Why can't tax already be included in the price of an item at a retail store, or Food Chain?
Cannot turn off the stupid BLUE Circle on my HD Plasma TV so its bright in a room where people sleep. It also drains electricity. It ALSO looks like the darn TV is ON when its NOT.
Security features that log you out on a website WHILE you are writing a reply to a message.
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
Braille on Drive-through banking machines....
I once had a solar-powered calculator that shut itself off (to save sunlight?) after a minute.
MyYahoo has a feature that updates the "most popular" news items every 5 minutes. I often scroll down the list, picking articles to read in a new window, then going back to the main window. I am often a few articles from the end when the page updates, reordering everything and making me scan from the top. I actually tried to point this out to them, and they got all hung up on what browser I was running, my OS, exactly what did I click, etc. I couldn't get them to understand that this was just an ANNOYING FEATURE OF THEIR SOFTWARE and either fix it or at least acknowledge that they thought it was better that way.
"Debugging" by Dave Agans - the perfect gift for your favorite imperfect engineer.
I got a CD equipped clock radio for Christmas, along with a Wake Up compilation of tunes. Cool enough. Except that when the alarm triggers, the first thing I hear is the loud spinning of the CD. Then a few seconds after I'm awake, the music comes on.
But that's not the stupid part. If I hit the snooze button, the music stops, but the CD keeps spinning, noisily enough to keep me awake. And if I look over to see how much more snooze time I have, the time display reads "Track 01". No time.
I returned it.
"Debugging" by Dave Agans - the perfect gift for your favorite imperfect engineer.
Digital Rights Management
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
Several years ago, I was using the Kyocera Palm "Smartphone" 6035 or something. You know that massive beast of a PDA. The phone featured a s/w keyguard to prevent accidential presses of the front flip pad. However, on top of the device is a big button which toggles OS suspend. There was NO s/w guard for this button. Many times, I would pull out the phone, and there blazes the LCD.
Another example are the older Motorola phones for (at the time) Nextel. When the battery is low, the device would do two annoying things. First, it beeps periodically (Mots still do this) until charged. ANNOYING! Second, the clock display is replaced by "Low Battery". Minor, yet still annoying.
My last example is more modern. Camera phones, IMHO, are nearly useless. Poor quality pictures, easily scratched lens. And, if you have a Verizon phone, you can't get your pictures off the camera with messaging at obsurd cost. Just another "feature" to market phones and extra services.
Dave
...through which much of my recorded music has passed. Only among the 'worst' features if you've a vested interest in DRM, but then anything can and will be used for purposes not intended.
Re your sig: wouldn't Solaris be the Sun?
But if you're a DVD exec, I want the buttons on my DVD player ('fast forward,' 'top menu') to work as they *should* without playing "Mother-may-I?" with the embedded OS. The menu should NEVER be restricted. That doesn't even make sense! What harm could my having instant access to your product's menu do to your bottom line?
Two ways.
#1: It enables bypassing the copyright/FBI warning. This was the reason the "no fast forward, no menu" toggle was put into the DVD spec. It was thought the constant reminder would help limit piracy, and thus preserve the legal sales market.
#2: It enables bypassing the commercials; if you aren't forced to watch the trailers and commercials, you might not be brainwashed into buying their other crap. This is the use that was realized shortly after deployment of the standard.
Both can impact their bottom line if you can avoid them. Of course, #2 is massively annoying (more people can stand the five second annoyance of the FBI warning than eight minutes of mandatory commercials), and thus causes people to go out and find ways to get around it, which leads directly to bypassing the point of #1... and the region coding to boot in the process of doing so.
In short, the marketing divisions of major entertainment companies are probably the inspiration for Douglas Adams characterizing that of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as "a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the Wall when the Revolution comes". Here's hoping....
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I had a Logitech C-Series mouse. Windows 95 and later do not support this type of mouse. The first time my new mouse failed, I attempted to use the Start-->Help-->Mouse Trouble Shooter. Seems like a good idea, until you try to use it without a mouse. Can't be done, ever on WinXP.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Every program needs to have a non-mouse tester for usability.
On our 2000 Honda CR-V the driver has four switches to control the four power windows in the car. There is also a master lock switch, which is handy if the kids are playing with the windows.
So say the kids are making the windows go up and down, you tell'em to stop, and they don't. No problem: you flip the master lock switch and their buttons are unresponsive.
The problem is, the switch also makes the driver's switches unresponsive. So if you need to close their windows then you need to unlock the master switch, which then lets your (alert) kiddies start playing with their buttons again too.
Too bad they didn't make the lock just lock the passenger window switches.
I'm sick and tired of these hip, "ironic" sigs. This is an actual, honest-to-goodness no-nonsense sig!
I can think of a few right now:
Samsung: the previous/skip button is also the RW/FF button if you hold it down for 3 seconds. 2.99 seconds or
less and you've skipped/rewound w/o meaning to. Bravo, now I can't use a real DVD player because I've got
such a fucked up control scheme in my head. It does, however, provide some amusement/aggrivation for my son.
Pioneer: second hand, but my boss has an all pioneer sound system that he found out after adding a 5 disk DVD
changer, the volume for the sound is the same code to skip/ff for the DVD system.
Windows XP's Batter backup monitor: a big hearty PHUBBBBB to this POS when I came home several times to disover
that my machine is powered off. Checked settings and at 15% battery = warn at 5% = shutdown, so that meant
I was losing power for several minutes a day, but wall clocks were not that far off...hummm.
Went round-the-round with the power co, to no avail. I just happened to come home early and turn the monitor
on and the UPS went click-beep and the machine went off 3 seconds later. W..T..F?
Tuned out that with or w/o APC's s/w, that XP's service/applet/USB/something would got apeshit, ignore settings
and power down no matter what. Temp solution: move USB cable until it fucks up again. Perm: remove cable from
machine.
XP, redux: Dell laptop, and a battery monitor that doesn't. Only seems to be able to display 100, 90, 50, and 5%. So you never know even a *rough* calculation.
XP redux, part deux: See above and add the BRAINDEAD dialogue box while shutting down "your batter is criticl, recharge or replace battery"...THAT HALTS THE SHUTDOWN PROCESS! Maybe it is D*ll's fault, but damn, someone
needs a smack.
Windows default settings: hiding extensions, executing scripts/html in folders + browser integration that makes
it possible, hiding menu options that are rarely used.
MS office defaults: hiding menu options, period. Nothing like walking someone thru a common office task (or
even uncommon) only to get "I don't see that option". Conversation of that feature went something like:
User: I don't see it.
Me: do you see two chevrons/arrows pointing down?
User: yeah.
Me: click it.
User: ah! now I see the menu option. What a stupid feature.
Me: "That's the power of Microsoft software!". Aren't you impressed?
Sears garage door opener: Safety feature turned stupid feature, where if you have something blocking the travel
downward, it raises the door. Ok, cool. Neat idea, saves crushing kids and animals.
Also works going up, and when it gets cold it gets harder to open the door and closes the door again. Uh-huh.
So, during the winter I wind up playing "when will the door stop mash-the-remote-button-fast-enough to continue
its travel upward until it happens again mid travel (phew). No wonder batteries don't last long in the
winter. Grease, wd-40, increasing the torque only go so far. Somtimes all it takes is the extra lift from
my index finger. Not kidding. Would be amusing if it weren't so silly.
Motorola: Got one of those 800 series phones for emergencies. I hope nothing life threatening ever happens, because that 10 to 20 second fucking intro animation that can't be turned off might be a bit of a problem,
ya think? (technically it can, but involves several alpha/beta programs and file system hacking with void-
your-warrantee-fire-flood-death-by-lawyers type disclaimers. (SIGH) ).
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
MS Windows XP SP2 Security improvements
The worst product design I have ever used. The alarm temperature started at 0degF and increased ONE (1) degree per press of the increase button. Or, rather, it beeped on press and incremented on release. There was no method of increasing more than one degree at a time. Holding any button for longer than 10 seconds shutoff the device. The alarm temperature is not stored when the power is off. Cording buttons does either nothing or reset the device.
Therefore, if you want to set the alarm for 250degF, you must press (and release) the button TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY times. I got to about 130 before I took a hammer to it. All other frustrations have seemed petty in the face of pressing (and releasing) that stupid button over and over.
-
95->98->2000->XP->Vista
The primary reason you are upgrading is to get more stability and features. Very likely the secondary reason you are upgrading is to leave some problems with the existing OS behind.
When you upgrade you only partially reach these objectives. Yes, you have new features, but likely you brought your legacy applications with you and they may or may not be able to take advantage of the new OS features or may not run at all. If you had problems (stability, memory leak, drivers) and you perform an upgrade, you're bringing your problems with you.
Almost every Windows upgrade I've attempted in the past has ended the same way: back up the data, reformat and load the new OS from scratch, restore data.
NOW you have a new system as opposed to a patchwork quilt with numerous inherent issues.
Vista was by far the smoothest upgrade (too bad it wasn't worth keeping). I'm beginning to think MS is learning the fallacy of an upgrade and simply performing a backup/load/restore underneath the GUI shell.
I had an atomic alarm clock that would automatically reset the alarm every day for the next day when you hit the off button. The problem with this feature is you had to use it or turn it completely off. (defeating the purpose of it automatically setting the alarm) It did have a button to make it not go off the following morning. I had this clock in college imagine what it did when I was gone for the weekend or a few days... My roommates hated this clock. It must have been a massive failure, I have seen these clocks on clearance and at outlets many times since.
I have a motorolla DVR from Comcast. It does some of the stupidest things.
If you're watching a show, and it finishes recording a show on another channel, it displays a huge message on the screen that it just FINISHED recording a show. Why would I care? I only care that it started recording the show. What's more annoying is that it's hard to get rid of the message; it'll just sit there and obscure the show that I'm watching for 30 seconds!
The DVR is 2-tuner. Let's say I'm watching channel 2, and it's about to record shows on channel 2 and 3. It'll change the channel that I'm watching to 3, and start recording 2 in the background.
The DVR will also lock up when it gets transmissions from the network. When it does that, it queues up button presses. It's real annoying, because it'll fast-forward through half of a show and then start to skip around.
Whenever a show ends, it puts up a dialog where the default selection is to DELETE the show. If you're navigating a menu, and the dialog shows up right before you hit a button, you can accidentally delete the show.
No, I will not work for your startup
Maybe it's just mine, or the fact that I bought them from The Great Evil (aka Best Buy), but instead of doing the logical "my light flashes on when I'm reading/writing," it does the opposite. The light is automatically on, unless it's reading/writing, then it goes off. It blinks so quickly, I stare at the light and wonder "is it still doing r/w? Can I take it out?" It's like they want to force you to use the OS drive-eject function.
my personal favorite, at the ISP where i worked, they would buy lots of nic's for instilation in new customers computers (because some of the people around here have oooold comps with no nic, and we have bad electrical storms, so peoples nics seem to fry a lot) anyways, the ones they got came in a nice box, with a slip of paper inside that says "before installing this nic, visit www.netgear.com and download and install the driver" or something along those lines. and invariably, the floppy drive in the computer had half a jelly sandwich in it, or the usb drivers where corupt, or the thumb drive was borrowed/lost/broken. real pain in the butt.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
The worst in my household is the clothes dryer that buzzes after a complete cycle (and again a few minutes later) with an ear drum busting alarm that you cannot turn down. Tomorrow I am going to locate the buzzer and amputate.
Didn't the wireless providers / phone manufacturers / other evil conspirators ever notice that people don't use all their stupid "features?"
For example: I didn't pay for Internet access on my phone. So I don't want 3 of my main menu options devoted to it. And if they're going to put their stupid shopping pages on top of all the browser lists or even on the main menu, at least have something worth buying!
And then stuff like synchronizing my address book simply doesn't work. I don't think I have ever, from as early as Palm III to my latest smartphone, gotten the synchronizing software to move changes from the phone to the computer and vice versa without fucking it up.
Spare me the pretty interface and get the basics to work. *Then* you can worry about ringtones and wallpapers that show off everyone's bad taste in music and poor choice of sexual partners.
A set of professional grade shears does the job nicely. Maybe the design allows for hand clearance, (think rosebush) but they do seem to keep the mitts out of harms way. I've done the bloody knuckle thing with kitchen shears and gyp-knives (known as box-cutters since 9/11), but no more. As an amateur gardener, I have a few pair by the back door so they are easy to access any time I am compelled to deal with that style of consumer-resistant-packaging. As a well-known-misanthropist I find this one of the stimuli that induces my medication reflex, and as a rule I endeavor to boycott the purveyors of this blight, but it don't come easy.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
I'm not sure how it relates to setting the date, but /. voices in my head are assuring me it's to properly enforce a DRM lock on all your food. No heating stolen pizza for you!
General Electric, General Motors, and General Mills are all in this together. I can feel it.
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