A Mythbuster's Biggest Tech Headaches (and Solutions)

An anonymous reader writes "The Mythbusters' Jamie Hyneman shares his top tech annoyances. Hyneman runs down the little things that bug him about everything from tools (exotic chargers) to cars (useless features). He also notes that there's a lot of room for improvement on PC desktops: 'In addition to being buggy ... extra features tend to bog down your system by demanding more processing power and memory. Computer-makers: Don't load up operating systems with features and then make us sweat to figure out how to get rid of the fat ... There's another solution available to consumers: Switch to a Linux-based OS such as Ubuntu. Since most Linux OSs are free, there's no business reason to bloat up the system with feature frills.'"

Comments

No offence,

[pwnies]

But it seems like this is just a fairly famous person telling us what we already know. Nothing new or insightful here IMHO.

Re:No offence,

[Captain Splendid]

Not to mention the article's free of any "fixes" promised in the first paragraph. The best we get is "it should be like this!" Uh, yeah, it should, but got anything more practical?

I love Jamie and Adam, but he needs to realize that engineering!=profits, hence all these annoyances.

Re:No offence,

[king-manic]

Personally, I think that's one of the iPhone's "sleeper" features that hasn't really been touted. There are by now tens of millions of iPod docking ports, docking cables, adapters, etc., around. IMHO, all phones should just pay Apple some minimal sum and standardize on the iPod port for their recharge/data cables. In the meantime, the iPhone is the only phone you can take virtually anywhere on the planet and borrow a cable from someone to recharge it. (of course, it would be nice if it could get service anywhere on the planet for reasonable money, but that's another story.) I think my mini-USB on my motorola Q does that job just fine. Charging, docking, syncing etc... Why not standardize that (most smart phones use that anyway). I think it's less a sleeper feature and more "Apple going it's own way" or "monolithic megalomaniac corporation attempting to force new standards down our throats a la Sony".

Shame he didn't...

[Anonymous Coward]

..share it on his TV show, where it might have mattered. Posting it here is just preaching to the choir, so to speak.

Re:Shame he didn't...

[sjaguar]

What we need to do is to get a whole bunch of people to write in to see some PC myths.

And another thing.

[ColdWetDog]

How about web articles that have more words than ads. Come on. This paragraph-at-a-time stuff is more annoying than even Vista.

There is a business reason for crap software!!

[erroneus]

The reason is that they get paid to install crap software on your computer!

Remember when the promise of cable TV was that you wouldn't have to watch commercials because you were already paying for TV? That didn't last long... the promise was broken and now you pay for TV service *AND* you have to watch commercials.

You pay for magazines and news papers and with the exception of consumer reports (at least that was the case in the past) you get commercial ads in there too!

It seems no business can resist the temptation to sell their customer's eyes to advertisers and other parties. It's a very bad business practice and one that eats at the trust that customers have with their vendors and service providers. But it's so common place these days that to do otherwise would be an exception rather than the rule. It's not an excuse for bad behavior, it's just a fact.

Dell does a lot less of that than others and you can certainly request that anything be loaded or not loaded as well. But the average consumer doesn't know this and so they are victimized by having their computers compromised right out of the box.

But there is a business reason for the extra crap-ware to be installed... they get money when they do it.

non standard screws

[artdwpmt]

Not specifically a tech issue, but affects numerous tech products as well.

What really drives me nuts is non standard screws intended to prevent you from opening your device.
(Unless of course you have the special magic screw driver.)

I really hate these. I love opening things, to fix them or just for the fun of seeing how they're made.
I bought it, it belongs to me, don't prevent me from trying to have a look inside if I want to.

You've missed the point

[Weaselmancer]

...because we're on Slashdot. We all know what Jamie is saying is true.

But he's near-famous. He has a show that millions of people watch. And he's saying that Vista blows, and why it blows, and that Ubuntu kicks its ass.

And he's saying it in Popular Mechanics. You see those everywhere. My barber has a rack of them by his waiting bench. So does my doctor. You see PM magazines all over a doctor's waiting area.

It's called getting the word out.

A lot of us here on /. complain about how Joe Sixpack has no clue about computer issues. Well - now Joe Sixpack has an opportunity to be sitting in a dentist's office, and see a PM magazine with Jamie on the cover and think "Hey cool - think I'll read that. That's the show where they blow stuff up. It'll be interesting to hear what he has to say."

And suddenly he's exposed to the problems with Vista, and the joys of Ubuntu by a person he respects and likes. Maybe he'll call up his geeky cousin later on in the day on Jamie's recommendation and ask him what this Ubuntu thingy is.

This is how mindshare happens. A war is a million little battles, and we just won one.

Re:You've missed the point

[d3ac0n]

Except that this is Ubuntu we are talking about. The Ubuntu forums are VERY newbie friendly, and very tightly moderated to eliminate forum trolls.

Of course, if you had spent any time AT ALL on the Ubuntu forums, you would know that. The only people who generally don't get help are those that go in with a snotty, arrogant attitude. Although even they are OFFERED help, but their own attitude usually gets in the way of them being able to absorb it. I have myself been a Linux newbie, and have even recently, well out of my newbie stage, gotten stuck on an oddball issue now and again, and have always been able to find friendly and useful help on the Ubuntu forums.

Honestly, that is what drew me to Ubuntu. While it is a very useful distro, I found the greatest draw was the near complete LACK of the classic Linux community snobbery that so often pervades web forums and IRC channels. Ubuntu users, particularly the more experienced ones, seem to be just generally nicer people.

Of course, I have seen their moderators in action, and have seen flame posts vanish within moments of being posted. So I'm sure that a crack moderator staff has at least something to do with that. However, even THAT redounds well to Ubuntu. It shows that the community and Canonical understand that good PR is very often a key to success. And that the web forums are the Ubuntu community's public face. So they work hard to keep it looking good and working smoothly by stamping out any trolls and "cult of personality" types.

Ok, I'll get off the fanboy soapbox for now. I guess I'm just saying that your point really has no merit, as it doesn't jibe with the reality of the Ubuntu forums that I have experienced on a regular basis.

a small 5A fuse to a 10A fuse

[wiredog]

I hope you upgraded the wiring. I have scars (well, one) from a wire that was undersized for the load. It started to melt. Across the fuel line...

Re:Things will be getting simpler, and are already

[TheThiefMaster]

All my phones in recent years use a USB port to charge. My new iMate Ultimate 6150 does, my previous HTC Trinity did, my wife's Motorola phones do. I won't buy a phone without a USB port to charge with. Do you mean that the phones have a standard usb/mini-usb socket on them so you can use a standard usb cable, or that the cable has a usb plug on one end and a proprietary phone plug on the other?

Re:Standards and poor design choices

[smellsofbikes]

>I think the problem is that Operating Systems like Windows have to be designed with a wide user base in mind, so they have to have features that only 10% of the users would use.

Sort of.
It's more that Windows is designed with a wider base of user *experience* in mind -- they hand you everything and you use it. A la carte, the *nix way, is great if the user knows enough to go decide what's needed. My linux system can load drivers for stuff Windows has never heard of: Amiga file system management, USB-to-serial IC's. But 90% of the people who use computers will never need any of that, so the Windows system of one-package-to-rule-them-all, one-package-to-bind-them works great. But just try to get support or drivers working on Windows for any hardware that's not sold at Best Buy. (I bought a Philips webcam a while back. It works with Windows98. There is no other version of Windows that can work with it. But a tiny bit of tweaking and my linux systems, one from 9 years ago and one brand-new, could both handle it.)

>I'm not a mechanic, and I have little to no experience under the hood, but are a lot of cars really designed this poorly?

Other people have already talked about the specific case of the battery behind the wheel. Things I've seen on cars I've worked on: having to remove the wheel to change the oil filter, on a Saturn; having to remove part of the power steering booster to change the rearmost spark plug, on an Oldsmobile; and having to wrap the CV boots with plastic bags before removing the oil filter so it doesn't drip on them and dissolve the rubber seals, on a Subaru. I've been told that on some rear-engine Porsches you had to remove the engine to change the spark plugs, and on some '85-90 Corvettes you had to remove part of the intake manifold to change the spark plugs. On my dad's '64 Ford, there were no hydraulic lifters, so every 3000 miles or thereabouts, I had to relash the valves -- manually adjust for the wear in the valve train. I had to do that on my '84 Nissan, actually, but then all the clearances were quoted cold, so that wasn't too bad. On my '71 Datsun, they were quoted hot, so you'd run the engine, then quickly pull off the valve cover and start measuring clearances between really hot pieces of metal, trying to adjust them accurately. But the '64 Ford was the king of annoyance, because the adjustment was specified WHILE THE ENGINE WAS RUNNING. You want a bad time: try adjusting a nice hot threaded bolt with a locknut, while it's jerking through about 15 degrees of movement 400 times a minute, while hot oil is spraying out of the valve train lubrication lines, and you have to feed a feeler gauge between the bottom of the bolt and the top of the pushrod during the brief moment they're not in contact. Oh, and the cam was sufficiently aggressive that at idle the car was continuously backfiring through the carburetor so there were occasional blasts of flame from right in front of you.
Compared to that, what's a little hassle like removing a wheel to replace the battery? I was so glad to see that car go, even if it did have the hottest engine Detroit ever made.

Re:Obligatory...

[misleb]

Drop some weight?? What? Did she gain a lot of weight lately and I just haven't seen recent episodes? Because I don't think I've ever seen her and thought "wow, if only she'd lose a few pounds." Or are you one of those guys that has to be able to count the ribs on a girl before she's considered hot? Ick.