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".

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.

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: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.