Discussion on:

10 MORE technologies that are just plain broken

I use many PC's both at work and home, some old and newer, and I can tell you that I have an old Dell Dimension 4100 that has three (3) Western Digital hard drives in it and all run well. The oldest one is from 1996; the second from 1998, and the newest from 2000, when I bought it. One of my work PC's is running on Windows 2000 with hard drives installed in February 2003. The latest hard drive status shows only one "cautionary" section for both the hard drives: "spin up time." This is after 10 years of use. Of course, I have all my data backed up to external hard drives, and system images of all the critical PC data.

Secure Boot is a bad idea simply because it helps protect 99.9% of the Windows user base while making it more difficult for the remaining 0.1% to install another operating system.

really, only 0.1% dual boot? 99.9% of you gotta catch up to the times so the only problem you have is why can't I run OSX on my PC

So having to dual boot is catching up to the times? Yes, I have a laptop that dual boots Windows 7 and 8 but is that the direction for future computing? Making things more complicated for the average user? Please go back and continue trying to install OSX on your PC. Hint give Apple a call and see if they will help you (LOL)

Dual booting windows 7 and windows 8 to me is hardly a dual boot... let's be serious you can do anything you want with 7 as u can do with 8 and vice verca. I am talking about linux/windows dual boot so you can do things you can't do with both of them. As for installing OSX on a PC I have done it many times... is it legal? Ask apple hahaha ... Why not add XP and vista to your boot, while you're at it, Windows 95!

I though people used virtual machines instead.

as long as you don't need all your hardware focused on one OS... I can think of a few reasons dual booting is better then using VM's mostly depending on how much power you need to give the guest OS's. Sometimes I want all my power focused on one OS vm's do not allow that

Dual boot is better than Virtual machines- applications running in a virtual machine are noticably slower than when run on their native OS...

I develop s/w and keeping projects in separate VMs saves me soooo much trouble.

It also allows me to use hardware that won't play with W7, or windows generally, at the same time as using h/w that is windows only. And that's nuthin' compared with what I do with it at home...

you know how to implement them Chaz -

Coming from a helpdesky area, and sometimes supporting people who want their boxen to "just work", I would have thought that anything that protects 99.9% of users was a *brilliant* innovation and a complete success. The oddballs [me included] who like to fiddle can *always* find a way around anything. The extra work just makes it more fun.

to another operating system for any reason. especially when they buy it as a used system a few years down the track.

Though even then it might be possible to wipe everything and install BeOS or something even more amusing.
Though, as you suggest, even that might not be possible on some boxen. I'm sure for example I'd never get Win8 to run on my DVD recorder. Maybe it could be fun trying.

Almost everything mentioned in this article works when professional and educated people are operating them. If you start reducing to the lowest common denominator most people are not capable of walking across the room successfully. If these technologies are broken, I would submit the thing that is most broken is your training program. Hardware breaks, printers, hard drives? Seriously? A fact of life that EVERYTHING breaks, even LEDs burn out ... sometimes in a matter of minutes???
This is why you have techs and administrators. To make certain that when (not if) things break, normal operation can be restored efficiently.

Once again the "writers" of Tech Republic are put behind the 8-ball and force to release an article, it doesnt matter how bad it is or if it even makes sence. Just have an article to release. Also the more controversial the better. Also, let me just add that EVERYTHING breaks. Cars, computers, houses, plans, ideas. If your looking for something that never breaks, you need to live in Utopia.

Better luck next time buddy.

The problem with this post is that the vast majority of computer users are not tech savvy. The drive by the main providers (Microsoft and Apple and most others) are trying to make computing as simple to use as white goods and cannot achieve this. Hence all the problems with "broken software and systems". It is unrealistic to to blame training as there are essentially no training programmes for the general public whereas, in businesses, there should be some form of training programmes and often aren't.

And that subject line is a little ambiguous.
Apple stores run one-to-one training for new users. It costs but it's far cheaper than bricking a two-thousand dollar Mac. Some larger retail stores also have tutorials. And in UKland the Government has "computer literacy" schemes. I have no idea how good those are.
But your point about treating IT tech as a white good is very valid. We *should* be able to just buy kit, plug it into the mains and start surfing, printing and VOIPing. Macs get close to that, sometimes but Wintel boxen are often more problematic [which gave me a fairly good living for thirty-odd years]. So long as you do nothing innovative or weird Wintel boxen *can* "just work" and they are getting very much better at it but even W8 can take a bit of fiddling to get working perfectly.
What many people want is a box of tech as mature as a TV or telephone, what they often get is a quirky Model T with strange control interfaces.
Give it another forty years and computer tech will be as reliable, accessible and easy-to-use as motor cars. Maybe more so.
We're only three decades or so into mass IT use. We should be pleased with how far we've come.
And, yes, pushing for better.

tell it like it is, although a bit extreme, all very valid points.
You know when "they" get all technology perfectly working and synchronized, people like us IT folk won't be needed anymore either....

Kids with their gadgets and widgets these days. BAH! Are there no workhouses?

HA!

"Are there no workhouses?"
Not yet.
Give them time. The lackwits driving the "austerity measures" will eventually think about that one. They've so far tried almost every other dead, obsolete, proven not to work idiocy they remember from "The Good Old Days".
No, I'm not afraid of discussing the idea here. The chances of our esteemed leaders being able to find this forum are smaller than the smallest infinitesimal. We're not giving them ideas.
Look for "experimental" workhouse "pilot schemes" in about 2014.

Agreed - on the MS aspect - why is it after all these years the three main apps still are not consistent between each other; eg, handling comments, revisions, why can I not have the auto fields in PowerPoint like I have in Word, etc.

Also I would prefer to break up the monolithic apps - have a much more modular approach - like a table tool that can have the layout features of Word with the calcs, filtering from Excel and put it in a Slide in PowerPoint, etc. It would make things more consistent, smaller more flexible apps and even add in 3rd party replacement modules - remember the in-line spell checkers from years ago?

Word and Excel etc. are legacy junk, held back by lost source code and fragile code, however much Ribbon fart you dress them up in; I really can't be bothered with PowerPoint. Example MS Office fubars includes modal dialogs * which lock all open Word documents, and the pathetic inability to have two separate Excel spreadsheet windows open and visible at the same time; yes even in the Ribbon version of Office !

* Haven't these MS Office developer cretins heard of multi-threaded code and concurrency? Many other developers sure have and produce even small applications using it!

LibreOffice may have some bugs in it but the GUI does support concurrency and has some features which shame MS Office. I've had no choice but to use LibreOffice on occasion, because I really do need to work on more than one visible spreadsheet at a time!

Some people cannot afford them but because of an entitlement mentality feel they should be free.

I totally agree. Not wanting to pay and not being able to pay are two separate things. We find money to spend on so many other things, but software that we use to work productively should be free...

I rely on Office at work and at home. But at home I have felt no need to update past Office 97, which does everything I need it to do. Therefore I won't spend many hundreds of dollars merely to get the latest and greatest. (I hate what was done to Office since 2007 so i will never get anything more recent than 2003. I don't care what kind of bells and whistles they offer. I don't need bells and whistles, I need a spreadsheet, a word processor and a small DB. Anything else is a waste of space and money.)

I don't feel the need to constantly upgrade my home software, but then i don't have to justify my salary at home and impress the upper management that keeping me around is worthwhile.

try running MSO 97 or MSO 2003 on Win 7 - it don't work right.

Libre Office. Unlike Microsoft office, Libre Office will not be incompatible with the old file formats.

not long ago when I used to have to use Open Office to get anything to view; it was way easier than going to the MS site to download all those darned converters . Surprisingly after I got Vista x64, I've never had to go to the MS site to get a "converter" for office documents again. I just use the crapware Works that came with the PC myself. I do recommend Libre now, for many of my clients who are having difficulties. I can't remember if it runs on a Mac - maybe on the old RISC architecture?

Get your Monday morning bitch session out of the way? Just because a technology is inefficient, does not mean it is broken. Just because it looks different or behaves different, does not mean it is broken. Justbecause you do not like it, does not mean it is broken. I do not like Windows 8, but it is suprisingly solid. Every OS has exploits (fan boys go away, this discussion is not for you) it is just a matter of how much time people want to spend looking for them. MS is an easy target. Apple has been getting more exploit love lately, think it might have something to do with popularity? Printers have sucked since they first came out. Boo hoo, necessary evil. Think about it this way, if everything worked as it was supposed to, the first time, unemployment would be at 97.7% instead of 7.7%. Flame on. Not checking responses anyway.

I pretty much agree with everything although I do not use Exchange so I can't say anything for that. I also know that we wouldn't move forward if everyone stuck to one way of doing things so keep thinking you know better while developers keep trying to break the mold The future is beautiful!

My biggest complaint is with Outlook. Why do all my calendars have to be in the same time zone? I travel 80% of the time and my clients are not all in the same time zone. I need calendars that correspond my clients' time zones, not my home time zone.

This is a perfectly valid (if contencious) list of broken things. PC's and other devices should long ago have become like stereo systems, I do not need a degree in Engineering to work my stereo. Its input is standardised and works everywhere. It is long overdue that the software business was taken away from mega-corporations and based on a collective standards model, and when software does not comply it is banned.
In this environment Microsoft/Apple/Unix et al would all work together because they have to. Their revenues would still accrue from user taste (as with all electronics) and I wouldn't have to know 4 different desktop languages and write web sites with 4 different browsers scripts in them. It is long overdue that simple competition driven development was kicked into touch in the PC device world and the sooner the better. Until then everything will continue to suck at one level or another.

Regards

While I can certainly get on board with a number of these, I can honestly say that I can't remember the last time I had a serious printer problems ... and we're talking years, not months. I print virtually and physically on a range of different printers, and the only issues I ever seem to have are the inevitable running out of media. Curious.

Ha! I get a call from my mom once a week... "WHY DOESN'T MY PRINTER WORK"... Most of the time she just has to turn it off and on again

I had no problems with my desk jet 812, but the HP 1210 "All In One" was a major pain. Print jobs always hanging up. Whenever you needed a print job done quickly, then it would take 15 minutes to print each page. When you had all the time in the world then the whole print job would kick out in seconds.

However the new Kodak Office Hero has been mostly great except when for some reason the print cartridge holder died on a virtually new machine. Once that was replaced we've not had any problems. At work the HP Laser Jet 5 was a major pain until it was finally replaced with the HP laser jet 3015.

The only systems we've had to print from have been various editions of Windows so we've have not had issues with the new machines regarding cross-platform work. However, is it just me or has anyone else notice that ink/toner seems to go faster in the newer machines?

You might want to add Adobe Acrobat Reader, Adobe Flash And JAVA. They have an up date at least twice a week. Its a royal pain in the a**.

The aritcle title caught my attention. I thought it might be a list of technical issues that don't function the way they are supposed to, and the problem they cause users. This list sounds like a list of items that may or may not be broken, and seems to exists only to highlight the author's personal preferences/gripes.

I hate Windows 8's UI I installed win 8 spent 11 hours
Relearning How to get ware I wonted to go, I have bad eye Site
And Very dry Skin And Most Touch Devices Do not Respond
To my Dry Fingers very well The Apps Look good On cell phones Not on my desktop The start Menu Is a must And why After Spending A lot of money for a very fast desktop would i wont windows striped down for sell phone apps, I like The eye candy In win 7 in Win 8 to much has been striped away yes Win 8 has some new very smart tools that's about it but looks a kids toy.

if you use your phone as a phone (as I do tpp) and not as a computer (as I don't either), why did you purchase a W8 device? You can get a cheap flip phone from Wal-mart for less than $50.