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The Most Annoying Software Out There
superglaze writes "ZDNet UK has a very entertaining round-up of the most annoying software out there, and everything from RealPlayer and Adobe Reader to Java and Norton Antivirus gets a kicking. 'The internet has brought us many joys. It's rewritten the rules of business and pleasure. And pain. For it allows what may have seemed like bright ideas at the time ('let's use it to make sure our customers have the latest software', for example) to turn into a stinking pit of misery — usually, but by no means always, after marketing gets its fangs in.'"
And I agree with most of these, particularly Apple. I recently spent several hours trying to remove Quicktime from my system and replace it with Quicktime alternative. I had to go in and hand edit the registry. The damn program was incidious about wriggling it's way back into my system tray and running processes if every single reference to it wasn't removed from the registry. That will be the last piece of Apple software I ever install on my system.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
The worst has to be the Norton XXXX products. I installed Norton 360 v2 on my laptop as an "upgrade" to Norton AntiVirus 2007, and I think that intentionally installing a few viruses and malware would have resulted in better overall system performance.
Symantec tech support was, of course, useless:
"Sir, you have a virus or malware."
"Yes, I know: the malware is called Norton 360 since my problems didn't appear until I installed your product. What I want to know is how to stop Norton 360 from using 100% of both cores and incessently accessing the DVD drive for no apparent reason."
"Sir, you need to run a scan for virus and malware."
At least I got the damn thing uninstalled and got a refund. Never again...
I've noticed recently it's wanted to update itself about once every two weeks, which would be fine if it was a FireFox type update - nice and clean, restart app & done, but instead the update mechanism is something like the following:
Click on "omg! Update me!" big window.
Browse through newly openeded browser window.
No, just the free one, no shitty MP3's thanks.
Download. Click install.
No ffs, don't take control over all my media types.
No, keep your shitty ad-ware.
Die Winamp agent; if you're not the default for everything it's for a reason.
Yeah, same settings as last time (it's an update ffs).
Oh right, you changed a bunch of setting anyway, thanks.
There's just a tonne of questions that are so unnecessary for a minor update, which seem to come thick & fast these days. Thanks a bunch AOL; you've created the least smooth updating process i've seen in a while.
throw new NoSignatureException();
I think they could have just said VISTA... Done! Though seriously this app misses, a few apps. Mainly... GOOGLE BAR? Dear god, does every application on the planet now try to install google bar? Completely removing it requires a virgin, 2 brillo pads, a priest, plus 6 gallons of goats blood.
I'm almost to the point where I want to remove Quicktime from all of my machines, because I'm so tired of being asked to "upgrade" to Safari and iTunes.
We have one of those all-in-one HP printers at my office, where we're all on Macs. When we first got the printer I installed the disk with the Mac drivers. It also installed a bunch of utilities. Playing around with these utilities I found a tedious maze of buttons and windows. I couldn't even find the most obvious features, like where to see a scanned document.
But I also noticed my computer was running slower, even when no HP utilities were being used. So I looked at the Activity Monitor and found the HP background applications were permanently taking up 10% CPU, even if nothing was ever printed or scanned. So I removed all of the HP utilities and drivers and found a driver built into OS X which was for almost the same model number. I have no problems at all printing and my CPU is back to normal utilization.
Not only do these HP utilities suck, but they're annoying when you're not even using them.
Developers: We can use your help.
Update apps are a pain in the backside, but they are a symptom of the way windows and osx are designed...
There's no question that your system should be aware of what software is installed, and what the latest version is, and make the user aware too and give them the option to install the updates.
On linux you rarely, if ever, get problems like this because the updates are handled centrally.
The problem with windows and osx, is that there is no central way for third party apps to register to the automatic update mechanism, the supplied update functions are only for the original vendor's apps, not third parties, meaning every third party has their own update service wasting memory and informing/annoying you in different ways.
The linux approach is orders of magnitude better, centralised package repositories, a centralised method of informing the user, you can choose how to be informed of updates, and you won't be hassle any other way. To further help matters, the package manager knows of packages you don't have installed too, giving you single click access to the latest versions of a whole host of additional applications.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
The most annoying thing for me? The stupid little bubble that pops up to inform me that wireless networks are in range, even when I am running through a wired connection. The only way I've found to really get rid of this is to disable the connection, a hassle for whenever I try and go anywhere. Of course, this particular annoyance only really hits me nowadays when I need to boot into my small windows partition. Ubuntu FTW.
09-F9-11-02-9D-74-E3-5B-D8-41-56-C5-63-56-88-C0
Welcome elrous0, to the 'what were they thinking? anti-software fan club'
Here we will help you commiserate as you belch out the pains brought to you by software that is premised on the thought that ALL users would surely want this software until the day they die.
With the mentality (and social skills) of clippy, these coders work double time to ensure that your experience with their software will be never ending. What could possibly be worse than malware you might ask. How about software that has an uninstall feature but won't do so?
I'm wagging my finger at you AOL, Apple, MS... you, antivirus guy in the back snickering, you can STFU too.
We're glad to have you as a member, and look forward to your votes in the awards ceremonies next year. Note that Internet infamy is your for the taking if your right up for nominees is both exacting and excoriating.
I'm still investigating, but the OOo quickstart on XP may get a nomination. HP printer driver division has a place on my list too.
Anyway, mill around, meet the other members, enjoy....
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I've appreciated that Adobe has provided Reader for Linux for quite some time now. Until I tried their latest a number of months ago (version 8? or 9?).
It insisted upon putting a bunch of worthless crap in my ~/.kde and ~/.local directories, overriding my MIME types and replacing KDE's PDF icons (which looked consistent with all the other KDE icons) with its own icons, which clearly were out of place.
Of course, it also decided to set itself as the preferred reader for PDFs, contrary to my preference. It would have been annoying, but bearable, had it asked me about this before it made invasive changes, but simply running the program was enough to wreak havoc.
So fuck you Adobe, I'll continue to use kpdf, which doesn't feel the need to take over my desktop. As an added bonus, kpdf doesn't have a million worthless plugins that slow down application startup, either.
"Stop using Windows" isn't a bugfix.
I get all the benefits of no flash, but can still watch youtube and all the rest if I change my mind with no hassle.
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
Look at the top of your window:
"The Most Annoying Software Out There - Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 5"
I didn't say it - the browser did!
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
Unfortunately, I'm the IT Manager for the ad agency of one of the most annoying programs mentioned in that article (I won't mention which one). So I'm in the unhappy position of having to install our client's software on all of our computers. Would I use that software if the company weren't our client? NO FUCKING WAY! If there is a hell for IT support people, I'm in it. I not only have to support this crapware, but I have to pretend that it's the greatest thing since oral sex.
On Windows, use Foxit PDF Reader. It's not open-source, but they do have a free version for non-commerical purposes. It's fast, it's small, and they have it available in a ZIP so you don't have to run an installer.
Usually I disagree with these rather non-technical whiners, but I found this to be right on the money this time. Besides, there's some wonderful British humor there:
Acrobat Reader"a reputation for being as welcome as a flatulent camel in the kitchen"
Windows Update
We've been kind and not talked about Vista.
RealPlayer
"If this software turned up at your door, you'd call the police."
"... we were given software to install. 'Disable your firewall', it commanded. 'Drop dead', we replied."
Java
"Programming languages are like sewage plants: if the average user becomes aware of them, something's gone wrong."
Yahoo
"And yes, when I ask to exit the software, that's because I really want to, not because I'm having a crisis of doubt."
Flash
"There's nothing wrong with Flash, provided you don't use it to construct web sites where people want to find information..."
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I like this quote from the article, about Apple QuickTime: "... what is this, Make Microsoft Look Good day?"
You haven't seen some of the alternatives, then.
;)
Some years ago, for example, sick and tired of Norton, I went and bought McAffee's anti-virus. In fact, I figured I'd go for the full monte, including firewall, "privacy" stuff, you name it. I can't be arsed to dig up the CD and find out which year it was, and I wouldn't know if it got any better in the meantime. (Though I would be surprised.)
The first funny impression was when trying to update it. As is the craze in the last decade, it couldn't just have either a URL to their download page, or a neat little downloader program. It just had to launch an ActiveX control in a browser to do the actual download and install. It launched whatever browser you had configured as default. E.g., for me it was Mozilla. It only actually worked in IE.
But wait, the patcher was more stupid than that.
I didn't have too much space left on C:, but I had vast amounts of space on my slower D: drive. So I refuse to install it to the default location, and install it to D:.
Then I run the updater. It installs the updates to the default location on C:. Literally, it was too fucking stupid to either ask, or figure out where its own installer had put those programs.
It gets funnier. Presumably because it couldn't figure out where they were, it didn't uninstall or at least disable the origina, unpatched version on D:. It just let it run too.
If you think one anti-virus is a resource and CPU hog, now picture twice that. It felt like I had downgraded back to my trusty old 486.
Now I don't know how good their virus protection was, I didn't actually have a virus. Their privacy stuff, though, now that made most sites that required a login, no longer work. And it made some schizophrenic: they thought I was simultaneously logged in _and_ not logged in. It was giving me some insight into what Schroedinger's cat must have felt
To cut a long story short, and skip over a few more faults, after a few days I uninstalled it.
The uninstaller, though, only got rid of the new patched copy from C:. It left the one on D: as it was, and loading itself in memory anyway. Trying the uninstaller from D: didn't seem to work either. I had to manually mess with the registry to get rid of it.
On the whole, it left me the impression that it makes malware look good by comparison. Ok, so you have to mess with the registry in safe mode too, to get rid of it, so it's a tie there. Most viruses don't use as many resources or interfere with your daily use of the computer half as much, though.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
For example: Quickbooks. Why does it have to have (IIRC) three services running EVEN IF QUICKBOOKS ITSELF IS NOT RUNNING!? One of them is for updates. The other two I have no idea, but all three sure bogged my system down. I uninstalled Quickbooks and it took Registry Mechanic to get rid of everything. I tell you with this and other problems I've had with Intuit, if I see that company's name on something , I refuse to buy it.
Back in my day, when we had to program in the snow, uphill both ways, we would check for updates upon startup AND allow the user to turn it off.
Folks, just because there is a feature for programs or cool way of doing something, does not mean it's a good design.
Now about Windows registry and the fact that it only grows.....Never mind. I need a drink.
...it's many.