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Ask Slashdot: What Software (Or Hardware) Glitch Makes You Angry?
This question was inspired when Slashdot reader TheRealHocusLocus found their laptop "in the throes of a Windows 10 Update," where "progress has rolled past 100% several times and started over."
I pushed the re-schedule dialogue to the rear and left it waiting. But my application did not count as activity and I left for a few moments, so Windows decided to answer its own question and restart (breaking a persistent Internet connection)... I've had it. Upon due consideration I now conclude I have been personally f*ck'd with. Driver availability, my apps and WINE permitting, this machine is getting Linux or pre-Windows-8...
That's mine, now let's hear about the things that are pushing you over the edge this very minute. Phones, software, power windows, anything.
There's a longer version of this story in the original submission -- but what's bugging you today? Leave your best answers in the comments. What software (or hardware glitch) makes you angry?
That's mine, now let's hear about the things that are pushing you over the edge this very minute. Phones, software, power windows, anything.
There's a longer version of this story in the original submission -- but what's bugging you today? Leave your best answers in the comments. What software (or hardware glitch) makes you angry?
No unicode on Slashdot. All I ask for is a Thorn!
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Switched to Linux several years ago for the final time. Although some GUI-bugs here and there, I get around them, and not looking back. Keeping W7 in a VM and only for the 2-3 Windows applications I still use now and then. Forget Wine, find and support alternatives.
Forced W10 at work and lose productivity and motivation to work due to that and cloud solutions being rammed from above.
The thing that pissed me off in a major way was the flexlm "protection" software that was changed so that a perpetual license expired in the year 2000. It took a few weeks for that to be resolved before the stupidly expensive software that was "protected" could be used.
For added laughs their USB dongle updater used MSDOS stuff and would not work in a 64 bit operating system. How that happened I have no idea since they must have had to add USB support to MSDOS to get that problem to happen in the first place.
"You have to restart your computer in order for the changes from this patch to apply" [Ok] [Cancel]
"The software have been succesfully applied" [Ok]
Pressing OK restarts the computer.
When I'm typing on my keyboard and some application thinks it's important enough not just to pop up in front of all the other windows but also move the cursor to its windows.
Especially funny when you're entering an internal password with a customer looking over your shoulder.
I also very much hate it when I enter a domain and the browser goes "Oh, I know tha tone! Let me autocomplete that for you, even though you hit enter after the ".com""
I want the computer to sopt trying to think for me until it's actually smarter than me. But at that point, I want to be able to copy a url, a username and a password and just hit ctrl+v three times and the system pastes the correct value in each field.
When my computer's OS lies by stating a username/password combination is wrong, when actually the account has been (temporary) disabled.
That's standard security practise, and it's actually for good reason.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Drivers NEVER have to be re-compiled.
False. You just make yourself dependent on the good will of vendors to perform the builds for you, since they won't let you have the sources.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
The security practice is about not telling whether you got username or password wrong, to avoid revealing existing account names to possible attackers. However if username/password combo is correct then there is no security reason for the system to hide the fact that account was disabled. Telling the real reason of login failure would save the now known authentic user possible futile attempts to reenter password thinking that he made a typo.
Photoshop and Lightroom. I'm more or less forced to use these tools because all competing products dropped off the face of the Earth, so there is no viable alternative to the work that I do (yes, I know there are some RAW processors out there, but they don't have the feature set that I need for my job) - but PS and LR are so god awful fucking buggy pieces of shit. Over four years ago, LR5 Beta introduced a UI bug. It made it into production. It continued to exist in LRCC/6. It continues to this day. Yes, over four years for a stupid UI bug. Photoshop is so notorious for crashing, they implemented a crash recovery system that never works! Oddly enough, today PS "recovered" a photo from a crash from six weeks ago, despite the fact I've been using PS nearly daily since then until now. DRM is both also routinely fail at LEAST once a week, even though they are supposed to go 30+ days without a phone home connection. LR-CC had a very nice DRM bug in which it 100% failed for everyone at launch! Luckily THAT was patched quicky.
I get furious when a paid-for piece of software thinks I'm not allowed to use it. So I consider that broken bij design.
Auto update that closes open applications with unsaved work in progress, How hard would it be to send save commands before closing a file and appending a WIP designator to the file name so nothing is over written. That should be a standard required windows feature. Webpages that jump during load have popover, popunder or autoscroll. The fricking browser should be designed to not even allow these things to happen. The commands that even allow those things to happen should be banned and the people who thought them up drawn and quartered. It would make for a much much friendlier web experience to make the web flat again. But the most annoying thing that forces me to keep the volume muted on my computer is the autoplay curse. Web pages that somehow play video or audio when they open. I want my computer to do as its told speak when its told show video when told and stop when told. Any programmer that does not create software that enforces that basic human machine interface rule is a curse to mankind.
I see bugs, non-ideal behaviours, wrong approaches, easily-improvable bits, etc. almost every day in virtually any piece of software. The software which I develop might also include bugs. Everyone makes errors. How could I feel angry about any of this? I would be constantly angry! What kind of life would be that? I find most of bugs funny or irrelevant. Some of them might be somehow annoying, but I would plainly ignore them or even stop using that software.
A different story is gross incompetence, careless/abusive attitudes (sometimes, even intentionally!) or dishonest reactions. I wouldn't feel angry in these cases either, but might stop taking that company seriously or have a more aggressive reaction.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
If you have Office 365 you can download it again free at office.com. Just use your login ID for your account information. One of the good things to using it as a service is you do not have to fiddle with license keys. If you use the home edition go to outlook.com to log into your tenant and download office.
Also there is the Microsoft office uninstaller at Microsoft's website and a vbscript version too that Microsoft uses if you google for it to do a full scrub and clean.
Last if this is in an office then your system administrator is not doing a good job. AutoKMS on A.D. needs to be enabled so that message never pops up.
http://saveie6.com/
Car manufacturers are the worst for software updates. Some worse than others. There's a couple of stupid little bugs in the audio system of my 3 year old car, that make it too painful to use, that could be fixed easily enough with a software update but probably will never get one.
The dealer and manufacturer are aware of the problems. The dealer just gives me a blank look when I ask when a fix is coming.
It's that lack of appreciation of software's importance that sank the likes of Nokia et al in the mobile phone market.
I fully expect the same to happen to the traditional big car manufacturers, they deserve it.
A few years ago, I bought a 64-bit laptop that came with 32-bit Windows. I put 64-bit Windows on it only to discover that the wifi card had no 64-bit Windows driver. Period. I found that there was a Linux driver for the same card for which source was available. So I put 64-bit Linux on the machine, got the source for the driver and one make && make install later I had a 64-bit machine running a 64-bit OS with all hardware supported, including wifi. Something that was not possible using Windows, in spite of the fact that the machine came with Windows on it, for neither love nor money.
You like letting your vendors make your decisions for you, fine. But don't try to pretend that isn't what it is.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
This is to you, Mozilla, Google, Firefox...
STOP deliberately breaking things. I don't care that my 5 year old IOT thing uses HTTPs with old encryption. I don't care that it uses self-signed certificates. It's still better than unencrypted, and I can't update it. You just deliberately broke things so now I'm forced to use unencrypted communications - what idiot decided that's better than even weak encryption? Put up a warning, fine, but don't break it. Idiots.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There is no excuse for professionally written code to suffer memory leaks.
Over time, the Chrome browser (on OS X) leaks more and more memory until it eventually loses screen synch and flickers on scrolling refresh. Eventually, it just locks up and crashes. This has been the case for at least 10 years.
I don't care what the excuse, professionally written programs should never crash due to memory leaks. Ever. Period.
I'm sure Bing has similar issues on Windows, but Google should do better w/ Chrome on OS X & Linux. They should be ashamed.
Error: NSE - No Signature Error
In the days before on-screen spellcheck there was a lady at our printshop who was voracious and speedy reader, but she was also a perfect final proofreader. Try as we might all we could do is plod along but she was fast and caught everything, every misspelling, word choice error, even inconsistent spaces. I asked her how one day. She made two passes over every paragraph, the first eyeballing the words in reverse order while noting only spelling and spacing. Then (in double-time she said) moving forward sounding the language normally for meaning, style and grammar.
While she was reverse reading she said, there was NO mental distraction from the actual message, to her it was like being presented a series of word puzzles/problems in a sort of "game" mode. Perhaps you could adapt yourself to examine troublesome code meticulously in reverse sequence this way while not perceiving the task. You seemingly work in some type of overlay mode where as you lay it down you are reproducing a (fuzzy) mental image.
If everything compiles perfectly in your brain, just use that and to blazes with the computer. Best of luck.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Programs which hide (delete) menu entries based on state.
I once spent two days trying to figure out how to recover a low quality software raid disk because the recover menu entry had been deleted and the documentation was useless. The menu entry to start the recovery wasn't visible until the spare disk had been precisely configured as the software wanted. Of course with no feedback of that being the case I was left searching through the interface and floundering around until I managed to luck into the solution.
Generally, I resent becoming a beta tester for literally everything. It seems like some time in the mid 90s, companies started doing away with in-house validation and decided that consumers would be the new quality control auditors, because almost every electronic/computer/software product I've bought since then has been utter shit, with a constant stream of patches, bug fixes, and other problems that should have been flushed out before the products were ever released.
Almost everything sold to day is chock full-o-glitches, gaping security holes, fatal errata, and other things that should never be shipped to consumers.
This. I recently switched jobs and went from a Mac to Windows10. Why is that if I fat-finger my password on Win10 it takes 15 seconds for it to let me re-type it? (I know the reasons, but they are...questionable.)
In general, what irks me most typically aren't glitches, but annoying design decisions. These are the main ones for me:
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
- Same hole used for eating, drinking, and breathing
- Same hole used for liquid excretory function and pleasure release
- Same hole used for solid excretory function and object input
- Self copy feature confused with pleasure feature
- No updates, ever
- The only fixes are user-created workarounds and patches from expensive industry
Actually in a work environment the computer belongs to the company, so it's their final call and the employee has to put up with it (or quit) even if the company made stupid decisions.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Locking individual accounts is also a bad idea, it allows someone to intentionally lock out other's accounts causing a very easy denial of service.
Also attackers won't usually try thousands of passwords against 1 account as thats not very effective, they are more likely to try the 10 most common password against thousands of accounts.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Oracle here. The reason is that if you say "That account is locked out" then the attacker can enumerate the valid usernames. If bobama is valid user but gwbush is not, then you can try gwbush with random passwords six times and it will still say "Username password combination is incorrect." Whereas with bobama it would say "bobama account is locked out," confirming the existence of the account for further targeting. So, loonycyborg's problem is the error message should be correct, which would be "You could not be logged on with those credentials. Try again or contact your system administrator."
**** those idiots.
Also, *** websites that scroll into a different article after reaching the end of the current one.
So you're saying successful login is bad because it indicates credentials are correct?
Long signatures suck.
Yes there is.
(1) If an account is disabled, we have to believe it's possible that it is currently under a brute-force password attack. The attacker may be trying to learn the password or he may be trying to generate a list of valid usernames. Our goal is to prevent him for doing either.
(2) If an attacker is brute-forcing the password, we should make sure that correct and incorrect passwords give the same result so the attacker doesn't learn the correct one. In your example, the attacker would know when he got the password right because the response would switch from "Invalid Password" to "Account Disabled".
(3) Even if the system requires the user to change the password to something different, letting the attacker learn the password in his attack is dangerous because many users use the same or similar passwords (!!!) on various accounts.
An alternative approach, by the way, that might satisfy your requirement is to allow nonexistent usernames to be "disabled" with the same incorrect attempt policy as real accounts. So then you can safely return "Account Disabled" for every single login attempt after the 5th and you aren't an oracle for either the username or password correctness.
"Working on it ..." and a green progress bar. I have just a few (maybe 60) entries. The damn thing cant open a folder with a few files without making me wait. WTF MS???
Many happy little committees have met over the years to help you. All of their ideas were Good Ideas. Every idea only "increased loading by 0.x percent!" but the combined percentages have added to 20,000% thus far. And some of the ideas were APIs for Microsoft Partners and Script Kiddie Partners to sink their pus-filled meat hooks into your bloated registry to affect basic computer operation. Every time you open a folder...
All 32x32 icons on the system are upsampled to 1024x1024 and scaled down again; Microsoft Security Essentials loads completely, realizes you turned it off a year ago, then unloads; Windows checks for updates; Internet explorer checks to see if it is the default browser (it isn't); two dozen corrupted registry branches left by incomplete installs are accessed and the system looks for 50 programs that aren't there; the ILOOKATEVERYTHING utility is run because it installed a registry to look at everything though you have never used it; Windows converts extensions to MIMETYPES and back again just for shits and giggles; media handlers load in multiple threads; folder display flags are inexplicably set to the dumbest view possible; everything is alphabetized; Windows re-sorts by 'group'; a blank window is shown; media apps are struggling to produce thumbnails; (W10 only) inactivity! Time to reboot NOW for updates; Cortana thought she heard you grunt, she transmits a voice-snippet over HTTPS; SSL certificate services loads causing everything else to swap out; certificates are checked for revocation because Paranoid Nerd Is Paranoid; media hooks still trying to make thumbnails; problems with media length detection on improperly encoded files causes long delay, then length is discarded anyway because "..." no one asked for it or there's no room on the display; now media metatag information is being accessed for NO DAMNED REASON; cute (but empty) film borders are painted, what the hell are film sprockets?? Where are those thumbnails??; file names finally appear, mostly hidden after "..."; virus checkers are invoked, both the one you use and the other OEM checker that Windows doesn't know is still operational; twenty smartphone-specific pieces of bullshit code briefly run and then exit (every second); a media codec triggers an Internet lookup for mysterious reasons; DNS delays stall 10 threads and an indeterminate amount of resources; DESKTOP.INI is accessed for Windows 95 compatibility; mouse pointer turns into a pointer for a moment just to torture you then flips to 'busy' again; Windows has synchronously finished counting files, GOLLY GEE, now you have an (unclickable) scroll bar; thumbnails finally starting to come in; dipshit 'subdirectory logic' is triggered for subfolders, all this shit starts to happen for them too; subfolder shit completes and the calculated result is discarded because it wasn't to be displayed anyway; OH HOLY SHIT, ANIMATE/THROB is on, we need more power Scotty because we need moving thumbnails; 3rd party media apps run to see if they are needed now (they're not); you clicked the right mouse button on an item to attempt to regain control which actually starts a whole new CONTEXT MENU WORLD OF SHIT completely separate from this shit; hold on, CrystalFonts has to smooth the edges before you can get control; timeouts for stalled threads finally trigger (cleanup routines delaying you again); a whole second goes by where everything is finished or stalled; inactivity triggers fire making you think the waking nightmare is still going on; finally THE FOLDER HAS BEEN DISPLAYED.
Queued mouse and keyboard desperation events have been detected! Launch stuff you clicked on, push that button that wasn't even there when you clicked, display a context menu and a balloon tool tip containing useless junk and wasn't that easy.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Uh Oh.
We've summoned the Old Ones.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What more common and just as annoying is when you're typing and a dialog box pops up and steals focus, and you inadvertently select some option because you're still typing and you have no idea what you just did.
Also, when you go to click on something on a webpage that's still loading, and the browser decides to redraw the page at that very instant, and you click on something else because the thing now is to make the entire webpage a clickable element for some stupid reason.
Ambient Authority in all of our operating systems is the cause of most of our grief, and the fact that most technical people don't even realize it's happening makes it even worse.
It's going to be about 5 more years until everyone wakes the fsck up, and another 10 years to finally fix things.
Saying things like that discredits you. There has been a LOT of differentiation between Windows versions. Microsoft has done things that were vast improvements, and they've rolled things back to Windows being a horror show. The quality back and forth is typical of any large organization's product.
No, I'm saying is there's an account lock out due to too many login attempts, the last thing you want the OS reporting is "I can't let you because the account is locked out, but way to go entering the right credentials!"
I can go on any of my outward-facing routers and watch the brute force login attacks, at least a couple a minute, even with mechanisms in place to shut down obvious hacking connections. Further, we have a RD server sitting on an open port, and it too faces these sorts of attacks, so no, I don't want confirmation of correct credentials after an account is locked out.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.