products you hate

[eugenenine]

That was my biggest issue with XP.  I'd copy/build virtual servers on my 2000 workstation then copy to the other developers workstations.  With 2000 I would run 3-4 virtual guests without issue.  XP would swap just to open the first.  Trying to set the swapiness reg key (Can't recall what it was called then) didn't affect it, even disabling the swap didn't affect it as I could run one of the sysinternals disk monitoring tools and see the swap get re-activated and used.  Opened a case with MS who confirmed the OS didn't use the reg key anymore and it could re-enable swap if "necessary".  I ended up buying a couple more hdd's so i could dedicate one to swap and one to the virtual guest disks to speed it up but it was never the same as w2000.  I eventually made the switch to Linux where the OS actually did what I told it to. Glad XP is gone now.

Funny, did the same with an old machine, as I had the Adaptec SCSI card installed ( so I could plug in the Zip drives as needed) and a few SCSI Deathstars around that still ran, all 1g each of them. Used the one as swap, and the other was a simple scratch drive for temporary storage. Used just to speed up slow drive access with limited RAM on the desktop, and worked well enough till the one Deathstar died, and I just used the other for swap. Took me a while to notice the one drive had not started at boot, as I rarely used that drive. Eventually the other one did the click of death, and I really did not want to put in the replacement full height 5.25in drive I had as spare, as it would not fit any of the drive bays and also allow the DVD drive to be there.

But while it lasted it was a good improvement, though a RAM upgrade ( thank you for capacitor plague killing motherboards) was a lot faster eventually, and the plague finally caught up and killed it, even with having 3 extra fans for cooling there.

The problem though with XP is it never used all the RAM.  I had plenty but as soon as I started to open the first virtual guest it would start swapping.  2000 I could open 3 or 4 guests in the same amount of ram without touching swap with the swapiness reg key set.

[ayal]

All tobacco things. Yes, the bad air makes me feel chest tightness and nausea, especially in the festive days.

[AlxDroidDev]

I am adding my Fluke 17B+ to the list of products I hate.  14 months since I bought it and it is already out of calibration. Even my Mastech MS8260, that survived a trip from China and being handled by the Brazilian postal service, 4 years ago, is still a lot more precise than the Fluke 17B+.

[Artlav]

Hardware gets cheaper, programmers' time gets more expensive.

Huh? I thought the current overabundance of programmers makes that time near-free?
You can always find someone who would code the thing cheaper, thanks to all the frameworks and online courses, so the only time you pay any noticeable price for programmers time is when you NEED high performance or high reliability code.

[CraigHB]

You see sub-standard programming all the time in cheap products.  So definitely they get what they pay for and there's plenty of crap programmers out there working professionally.

[SpaceCow]

I hate that in 2016 there are still low resolution images being uploaded and used all over the Internet.

[Yansi]

But it's  2017, bro 

[R005T3r]

Hardware gets cheaper, programmers' time gets more expensive.

Huh? I thought the current overabundance of programmers makes that time near-free?
You can always find someone who would code the thing cheaper, thanks to all the frameworks and online courses, so the only time you pay any noticeable price for programmers time is when you NEED high performance or high reliability code.

For simple tasks, programmers are quite cheap I can imagine, but it is still nowhere as cheap as computer time. A program can be 10000x slower than a nearly optimal C-version, but if it still works within 5 seconds, it's fine to the user (and so, to the programmer as well).

However, if too many software engineers work this way, you get a slow, lagging system.

It's an unfortunate truth. I guess the laziest approach will be "copy it from the web", you get the job done with minimal effort...
Anyway, C and C++, java are not as user friendly as Python and so, you make more mistakes...

[Kilrah]

Huh? I thought the current overabundance of programmers makes that time near-free?
You can always find someone who would code the thing cheaper, thanks to all the frameworks and online courses, so the only time you pay any noticeable price for programmers time is when you NEED high performance or high reliability code.

There's an overabundance of average/poor programmers, you can hire them for cheap but on a large project if you don't also get a sufficient number of good and expensive ones to direct them (easy mistake to make) you'll quickly end up with code that becomes unmaintainable or broken beyond repair... at which time you have to hire the top level ones to fix it or start from scratch at great expense while you lose sales opportunity, which will likely cost you more than you ever saved by going with the cheap guys.

Proper software development always ends up being expensive regardless of how you get there, so plan for it and start right.

[Circlotron]

I hate that in 2016 there are still low resolution images being uploaded and used all over the Internet.

But it's  2017, bro 

Probably only has a low resolution calendar.

[avrishuvorlaz]

I'll be back in 5 years, just off to buy a big enough pad to write them all down on 

[technix]

Get an SSD, disk access is a bottleneck for a long time...
Even a Core2Duo in a laptop will fly with an SSD, anything newer than Sandy Bridge is overpowered for anything that is not gaming over FHD with high end GPU's or rendering image/video..
Just get an SSD and enjoy the new world of computing.

Better yet, screw the SSD and get an Ultra m.2 plugged directly onto the mother board. Speeds up to 3.5gb/s for read and 2.1gb/s for write speed. Regular SSD drives only do like 450mb/s read/write.

You need the latest hardware to boot from NVMe SSD. SATA ones are much wider accepted.

[mmagin]

I hate the solderless breadboards where the bus bar contacts don't line up with the middle rows.  Top is a 3M breadboard, bottom is one of those noname breadboards:

[R005T3r]

Yeah, right. It's terrible.

breadboards also have the problem that you can't go over 30V... And in some projects you have to use other solutions like veriboards or printed circuit boards.

[onesixright]

• Windows fits the bill. The ultimate crap: 140 EUR for Windows 10? 
• WIFI signals that disappears within a 5m radius.
• eBay with their idiotic import/shipping rates (and email alerts)
• UPC that just give me ½ the speed (from a 240mbit optical connection)
• Not truly a product, but doing something that suposed to be 5 minutes, ending up to be hours
• Customers with their "it doesn't work" support request (ok not a product, but hell how annoying!)

Is their also a "products that you love" thread? (i know negative is more appealing, but something positive for a change  ?)

[ZeTeX]

I hate the solderless breadboards where the bus bar contacts don't line up with the middle rows.  Top is a 3M breadboard, bottom is one of those noname breadboards:

Yep I can agree, in fact I owned 1 breadboard that I got from school that was your average breadboard but I wanted something bigger, without knowing that you can get breadboards with the contacts not lining up I ordered one from aliexpress and then when I received it I realized that there is even quality for something so simple like a breadboard.

[rdl]

I ordered some stuff from a Chinese seller on ebay. They sent me the wrong stuff. As usual, they fixed the problem by sending the right stuff and telling me to just keep the wrong stuff. The wrong stuff included a cheap plastic breadboard. One day I actually tried using the breadboard. It was the standard type with 2 upper and 2 lower strips of holes, which I normally use as power rails, and a center section with 700 or so holes. I bridged the upper and lower rails across the middle, because on that size there is often split in the middle. My circuit, though very simple, failed to work. After 30 minutes or so of trying to figure out why, I discovered the upper and lower rails were not split in half but in thirds!

[GreyWoolfe]

mmagin, you made me look at mine.  2 of the 3 line up.

[Circlotron]

Not exactly a product but I hate roads that have a long dedicated turn lane, maybe even two cars wide, which means they are expecting lots of turning traffic, and then during peak time have a very short green arrow time so only two or three cars get through.

[james_s]

Yeah, right. It's terrible.

breadboards also have the problem that you can't go over 30V... And in some projects you have to use other solutions like veriboards or printed circuit boards.

I built most of a ~600W SMPS for a Kodak xray head on a solderless breadboard once, including the mosfet half bridge fed by a ~330V rail. It's not really advisable, but just because it's rated for 30V doesn't mean you can't go higher if you feel like living dangerously.

[Landrew2390]

Any product with feature creep.  I don't need a car that can check my email and I don't want a phone that alerts me every time someone posts on social media.  What ever happened to products that did one or two things well instead of trying to do a thousand things poorly?

Also, cloud based services.  If I wanted an off-site solution, I'd locate a server off-site.  This cloud based subscription model is getting out of hand.

[CraigHB]

For sure that one.  It seems the trend is to make products with as many useless features as possible.  Do I really need a refrigerator with a big screen and internet accesss, umm no.  I already have something (my desktop computer) that can do that way better than some household appliance ever could.

[Circlotron]

^^ Like the UNIX philosophy regarding system files - do only one thing and do it properly.

[Landrew2390]

As a recent GNU/Linux convert, I have to agree.  My laptop died and I was faced with the choice of Windows 10 or adopting some form of Unix.  That was five weeks ago and I'm never going back.  Unix is complex, but it does use the KISS principle on almost everything.

Windows has come up with some really good ideas over the decades, but they've reached the point where you can't use the features you want for the steaming pile on top of them.

[Ducttape]

As I'm trying to carefully align mating parts, why oh why do these 'helping' hands require both of mine to tighten an elbow?? One for the wingnut and one for the back of the stud.     Tack weld, or otherwise attach the stud to the plate Fercrissake!