Discussion on:

10 MORE technologies that are just plain broken

My Monday morning gripe is my HP printer telling me my ink cartridge is passed its expiry date. Is it going to turn into a pumpkin? I just refilled it so shut up and use it. I'm not going to let HP rip me off by buying new cartridges.

As far using it goes I'm happy with the performance, It works very well.
Also every Linux flavor I used so far has no problem with this printer. ( So far) lol.

That's where all the unnecessary bloatware comes from.

Instead, connect the printer and turn it on. Let Windows see if it can find drivers on the web first. If that doesn't work and the system asks you for drivers, see if you can find a 'Drivers' folder on the printer CD / DVD. Only if you strike out there should you lower yourself to running the DVD's installaiton. Make sure you select a 'Custom' installation and disable as many 'features' as possible.

... usually find the best driver matches for most any device and, if they don't, a quick trip to the vendor's support web page will usually turn up the right driver for your OS. If no such driver exists, then it is time to by a new peripheral from a vendor who supports your OS.

...but i have *never* had the Windows driver wizard *ever* find a driver for *anything* on the web, EVER. Not Win7, not XP, not 98se... trying to install a printer in anything but Linux is a Massive PITA ... yes, i said Linux. Average install time in Mint for my hp colour laser 4650 is 4 seconds (time it takes to get the drivers from the repository). Windows *any* flavour (well, not 8 - not going there)? Without the disks... 22 minutes, much of which is trying to remember what the bloody printer was named so WinX can find it.... and IP address doesn't suffice.

For example, I connected a brand new HP P3015 to a W7 box just this morning. It happily scampered out to the web and dragged back the drivers in about three minutes. I had the CD just in case, but threw it out unused.

However, if you're referring to network printers, then no, I've never had an Windows server find the drivers for those either.

I said the exact same thing about Windows 8 being another Windows Me. Furthermore I bet computer sales go down this year because most people do not want Windows 8. I tired it and uninstalled it.

nuf said!

I love it, people cannot use something so they blame the product and say they hate it.
Maybe you're just not good with new technologies, thought about that?
If it took someone 30 minutes to understand how to restart win8, then get yourself a mac or a vtech.

I wholeheartedly agree with the list.
One additional thought on UI:
The game players have to much influence. One of the original provisions of a Common User Interface (CUI by IBM OS/2) was that a user needs to look at items and know their status and expect a certain action. If a button is dimmed, it means that function is not available at this time. Nowadays one has to hover with a mouse over the button to see if it lights up and is available. Confusing and time wasting, just because someone likes these stupid optical effects. This just one example of many that make operations less efficient and cause errors.

To whatever extent "Windows Security" still is an issue, it isn't only a Windows problem. The problem more stems from an approach that treats system attributes like security, performance and robustness as something you can retrofit to a deployed system. It just does not work like that. I think Bill Gates (no less) stated it best: "Secure in concept; secure by design; secure by construction; secure by default." If only the software world could run with that.

You are right on target! i encounter these events daily when servicing my customer computers. I admint many of the flaws generate revenue for me but I would prefer spending time on other tasks that are revenue genereating that fixing what was broken from the beginning. Another reason I prefer my Linux stations is no MS garbage!

Every time you write to an SSD, you damage it. It WILL eventually fail (though it might be quite some time after the computer has become obsolete). I have eight-year old hard drives in my old computer that are running fine.

My new machine has an SSD as its OS disk (and for those pieces of software that programs insist on installing on C:). I have, however, made sure that "everything else" -- including e-mail and browser temp files -- are on a hard drive. The hard drive comprises two 2TB disks arranged in a RAID 5 configuration. I will eventually start backing IT up, as well.

We definitely use CD/DVDs exclusively in the military because the DoD prohibits the use of flash drives. So I don't see them as going away anytime soon.

CSS was a great idea in theory, separate the content from the look, that is a great idea. But
the implementation is horrible. CSS is much more difficult to use than tables and cannot even do some of the things tables can do. What's worse is that due to the convoluted inheritance, it is very difficult to troubleshoot and debug all but the most basic CSS pages, and of course web designers seem to only write the most complicated CSS pages.

nt

know that the non cross-platform technology problems and issues with drivers is created solely by Microsoft for their profit and then Apple copied them on part of it. Back in the early 1990s the relevant International Standards body developed a set of International Standard Command Sets (ISCS) to allow total cross-platform operation of all hardware and software. For a very brief moment in time we had that, then Microsoft deliberately dumped the ISCS and walked away from it during the development of Windows 95 and NT 4. Apple saw this and did the same to a lesser extent. To make matters worse Microsoft pressured some hardware companies into making hardware with the Windows commands built in so they wouldn't need drivers to work with that version of Windows but need drivers for Unix or Linux or any other version of Windows not using that specific command set.

If all the hardware and software companies designed to the ISCS everything would just attach and work and there would be no need for different divers for different operating systems at all.

This fix above would also fix a lot of the issues with your complaint about Office packages.

Now I have to admit I've NOT used every odd little feature available in Word, Excel, or Access but have used them extensively over more than 20 years, starting with Word in DOS. I've also used other packages like Lotus etc too. I currently use Libre Office and switched from Microsoft Word back in 2003 when I found MSO 2003 would NOT properly open older MS Word documents while Open Office did. I write a lot of stories in a formatted layout like a 6 x 9 inch book and a number of styles. This means what I hit one button to create a print ready PDF when I finish. I do not, and never have had much use for Macros over the years and have not found a feature in MS Word that I regularly use now or have used much in the past that is NOT in Libre Office Writer or Calc, including the word art stuff. So I don't know what features you think are missing from Libre Office.

Gnome and the Windows 8 GUI are a clear case of the developers deciding they know better about what the users want than the users - ie very bigheads and egos.

Windows security in Win 7 etc are a clear case, common with Microsoft, of trying to bolt onto the system something that should have been built in at the start and doesn't bolt on well or work if only bolted on.

Secure Boot is another after the fact attempt , but this one is aimed at vendor lock-in to stop you using other people's software once it's on and working. It's not, and never was, really aimed at providing any user security, so why the surprise at its failure to do so?

Single point of entry, well we all saw how bad an idea this was with the way Microsoft keep embedding applications into the operating system kernel - the GUI and the browser etc. Since it seems to work for them, according to some people, why shouldn't it work for everything else? Except few saw it didn't really work for Microsoft.

Don't deal with Exchange at all, so I can't comment on that, and I suspect the moving parts items was just there to fill up numbers.

Who in the heck puts their Exchange logs on the C: drive ?

hmmm, I'm using firefox to post this.
IE is brokem as far as I'm concerned. I'm tired of my web page elements not displaying properly in IE when they look great in firefox and Chrome.

When its time to upgrade Acronis I will be looking for another backup solution.

I like the way it can purge older backups so the NAS account doesn't blow up when it hits the quota wall. However Acronis usually fails 7-15 days after a backup job was created and started. The error is some non-descript code that it not listed on their web site. In fact most of the errors it spews out cannot be found on the web site. Even their tech support can't find an explanation and keep asking users for logs only to never reply with a fix.

How is this code written? By multiple programmers from multiple countries that never talk to each other.

ACRONIS, YOUR PRODUCT FAILS TOO OFTEN AND WITH NO WAY OF FIXING AN ERROR LET ALONE FINDING OUT WHAT IT IS.

Office Suites
Well has been trying to do standards. Microsoft has no interest in open standards as that would remove most of the reason many people have to use MS software at all - ie it's in MSs interest that documents created in Word and Excel don't open 'properly' in anything else, hence people are more or less forced to keep buying MS software. Of course, the fact that they keep changing the formats in a non-backwards compatible way is merely development - it can't possibly be intended to make life awkward for people who run older versions (that's sarcasm for those who can't spot it).

Just how much MS fear open standards is evident from the effort they went to in buying votes on various national standards body to push through their own "open" standard. The BSI (British Standards Institute) comments on their proposal could be summarised as "croc of s**t", yes MS still bought enough votes for it to be passed.
All this to head off a proper open standard getting a good foothold and them being forced (by large customers) to support it.


Networks
Much the same thing. MS do not want open networks - they go to great lengths to lock everything down and make it as hard as possible to create interoperable devices. That was why they were found guilty by the EU Commission and forced to provide protocol documentation to third parties (notably the Samba team). Reading between the lines, that bit really hurt as it forced them to actually document stuff where it sounds like they didn't actually know themselves !

Apple are no better !

This extends to file systems as well. The only reason FAT is still alive is that there are only 2 filesystems (FAT and NTFS) supported by Windows. Apple only do NTFS read-only, and don't support anything else that's non Apple other than FAT. Hence all memory card, cameras etc come supporting FAT. Memory cards and disks can be reformatted, cameras etc are limited to what they support in firmware.


And printing.
Well there has in fact been a very successful system around for decades - it supports all sorts of printers with one unified driver, is supported by virtually all OSs (but not by many bits of software I've had the misfortune to deal with), and will work (with some limitations on using printer features) even if you don't have the right config file to hand. It's called Postscript and is at the heart of CUPS - but in my experience, MS are s**t at supporting it as again, it wasn't invented by them (well they actually had quite a spat with Adobe IIRC).
With just one generic driver, you can print to any Postscript printer - from an ink jet through to high end typesetters and multifunction copiers. All you need is one text file that describes the printer features, how to configure them, and what options to show the user.
Unfortunately, too many people want cheap rubbish, and they get what they deserve.

We will get rid of moving parts in computers when someone invents a way to move cooling air without a fan, and without having to ionize air (thereby making it conductive and attractive to dust particles) to make it move.

With a Zillion different distros? That looks quite broken to me if you say that different Office suites should work together...

I think this list is quite pointless anyway but along those lines pretty much everything is broken... but still works

the same sort of thing you're complaining about!! Hmm.

... versions of Windows Vista (Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate). The other variants were all either OEM or Enterprise editions and each step up was a 100% compatible superset of the next step down.

With Linux, all distros may be similar but none are 100% interchangeable.

Not counting the OEM variants, what was officially released by Microsoft in the Windows Vista editions range for business and individual consumers were:

Starter - 32 bit only
Home Basic - 32 bit edition and 62 bit edition
Home Premium - 32 bit edition and 62 bit edition
Business - 32 bit edition and 62 bit edition
Enterprise - 32 bit edition and 62 bit edition
Ultimate - 32 bit edition and 62 bit edition
Business for embedded systems -
Ultimate for embedded systems -
Home Basic N - 32 bit edition and 62 bit edition
Home Basic K - 32 bit edition and 62 bit edition
Home Basic KN - 32 bit edition and 62 bit edition

Then you have the various specialised OEM versions.

With most of the Windows Vista systems you have do a clean install over the others if you want to change them.

Most of the software designed for other versions of Windows are not compatible with Windows Vista, or the reverse.

...........

Most packages and applications for one version of Linux will work on another, and I've had a lot of success in the past in installing one version of Linux over another while still carrying across a lot of personalised settings and data due to having the 'Home' directory in a separate partition.

On cross platform I even get networking issues between XP and Vista or 7. Network connections deadlock for a while when an XP machine is introduced. Linux or Macs don't cause that.

Network attached pcl seems to be the best hope for a printing standard

Number 2 is a lot about human nature. Separate systems often means separate password. More passwords means lost passwords, or worse, passwords written on post-it notes. There will always be single points of failure therefore IT professionals must find better ways to mitigate the risk. Especially for mission-critical systems.

Number 3 is unavoidable. It is not about system design, it is about the size of the target. Windows is no more or less vulnerable than Linux or MacOS X. Nevertheless, With 90% of desktops, worldwide, running Windows, and with a very large number of those being operated by end-users, you are correct that end-user education is a problem. You are also correct that tools like UAC simply frustrate users. It does not help that social networks train end-users to expect unsolicited e-mail from entities they are not familiar with. Further, unscrupulous vendors trick users into believing that their computer is infected when it is not so they can sell them some completely worthless piece of software.

The most vulnerable component of any full-featured OS (other than the end-user him/her self) is the buffer overflow. Operating Systems designers must not only think about how the OS is supposed to be but also how it might be used improperly used and to remove that possibility. As with any human endeavor, for every human who can figure out how to mitigate a vulnerability, there is another human who can find away to get around the mitigation. With such a large number of human users of widely varying experience level and awareness, Windows is just too easy a target.

Number 4 is simple to understand. No printer vendor can afford to have their printer be generic. A generic printed becomes a commodity printer and the end user will never shop by brand name if all printers were the same.

Don't believe me? Over the last two years, we have watched all the "generic" Android tablet vendors chase each other down to the $199 price-point and none of them are making a lot of money on their products. Meanwhile, Apple has stayed above the fray, keeping themselves firmly in the $499+ price range for the mainstream line. Even the iPad mini is perceived by many as overpriced but Apple will remain profitable thanks to their attention to detail. It remains to be seen if the Microsoft Surface can compete at Apple price-points.

Number 5. Yes, as with #4, this is about competitive advantage. The only real "standards" are the "de facto" standards defined when the majority of end-users pick one vendor.

Oddly, your number 7 is the very thing Microsoft is trying to do to address your concerns in Number 3. Users crave change until it changes something they like, then they hate it.

Number 8, same problem as 4 & 5. Interoperability defeats competitive advantage. We simply do not (nor would we want to) live in George Orwell's novel "1984".

Number 9 is strictly a matter or personal preference. Don't like it? Don't use it. Microsoft will change whatever it needs to in order to keep its core customers engaged.

Number 10. Because HDD devices cost about $0.10 per GB at retail. SSD devices cost about $1 per GB and SDD devices are still limited to about 256GB while HDD drives go up to 2TB,. For $100 you can get a 128GB SSD or a 1TB HDD. When the typical HDD outlives the PC you just bought, why would you spend ten times as much for SSD storage?

Ultimately, this are not broken technologies. They are trade-offs that end-users and vendors alike must choose in order to sell their products to a maximum number of people at the lowest cost. Apple's choices are different than Microsoft's and user's choices keep both companies profitable. What more can we ask for as consumers other than clear choices from multiple vendors.

Microsoft has recently deciding on a name for their "Metro" interface on Windows 8/Windows Phone. The result being "Windows Design Language". I suggest you check out these videos to really appreciate the process that Microsoft took when designing their new UI.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Series/Windows-Phone-Design-Bootcamp

A few years ago, Jason Hiner started putting his name in the 'From' field of a bunch of emails I get for being a subscriber. I thought that was a little narcissitic and self-important, but hey, if he wants to stroke his ego, let it be, as long as the content continues. Since that time, I've found less and less to read that's of interest to me at all, and it seems like we get more and more garbage like this. Newsflash... You know what's broken? The attitude of someone who's supposed to write informative articles that turns out whiny criticism at the easiest of targets. Microsoft bashing has been done to friggin death for so long that it's only funny because someone still thinks it's original. Printer bashing? Really? That was funny in Office Space 14 years ago. Great, they still don't work. Guess what, they'll never get any better. Deal with it.
And then we get these smug pinheads who have to prove how much smarter they are than the rest of us by talking about how much they know about XYZ operating system that 4 other people on the planet know about (WTF is GNOME?!). No one cares. We all have perfectly good reasons for using the OS's we do, and very few of us have the time or the inclination to work through a multi-year learning curve just to figure out how to print documents or watch movies from Ubuntu or UNIX or GNOME or whichever OS is apparently better than mine. I thought these pinheads were just chat forum posters, but apparently Jason Hiner, in his infinite wisdom, has decided their rants warrant a larger platform and lets this kind of drivel pass for journalism.

I find the Windows Event log to be far superior to any Unix logging - which is basically a big text file.

As far as Exchange logging, I manage Oracle DBA's all day, and running out of space causes constant issues. This is 98% Linux/Unix based, by the way. It's no better than Exchange, and frankly I think is quite a bit worse. We routinely bill hours per month to maintain the logs properly. Exchange is much simpler.

== John ==

It seems as they become more entrenched in their way of doing things, with their favorite operating system, they tend to become very negative about change, or really anything that does not meet their standards, even when they obviously don't know what they are talking about.

I mean, broken in ways other than it requires a signed UEFI boot manager that must confirm trust, by a hash or certificate, before loading any UEFI and/or OS boot code. I agree that it was initially frustrating that only Microsoft could create a secure boot manager, but the most recent efforts to allow loading of other OSes from an independent secure-boot manager solves much of the problem.

When a signed independent boot manager UEFI app is installed onto a machine running in SecureBoot mode, it will be able to hash or validate certificates for any OS code to be booted. It requires human intervention to modify the hash or certificate of code they want to allow to boot securely, and I don't see an easy way for a virus writer to bypass this. (Yes, if a virus is embedded in code before it is hashed or signed, then it will be loaded along with the OS, but this is a vulnerability in any environment, not just SecureBoot.

PC-OEMs are just now releasing updates to their UEFI BIOS that are way less buggy than the initial stuff that came out on Win8-compatible hardware. I believe that we're also very close to having an independent boot manager signed by Microsoft that can then maintain a secure list of hash/certificates for OSes it will allow to boot. If the booted OS doesn't continue to make use of the TPM to measure all code before executing it, the resulting security failures are a result of that OS, not of the SecureBoot mechanism itself.

However, I do hear that Microsoft has been very arrogant in dealing with the attempts to get such an independent BootManger signed -- but that's a common problem when dealing with Microsoft to get anything from them that doesn't positively impact their bottom line. Come on Microsoft -- sign the damn bootmanager code and put an end to this bad publicity you have invited..

Printing is not an issue for me, because I generally don't print and I always request electronic versions of documents. Most of my work can be done on-line and with smartphones and tablets, I don't need to print. Of course there are some documents that need to printed out and some places now accept e-ink as a valid signature.

Why am I not surprised Jack would rant against Microsoft and their technologies. He thinks Windows security is flawed? I wonder if he bothered with any other OS or is just open sourced blind.

Secure boot is designed to reduce boot-time malware Jack. Have you seen any boot-time malware affecting a Windows 8 system yet? Share a link. Or are you just crying because you can't dual boot Windows 8 with Linux.

Outside of the crummy desktop which you can easily bypass, I don't see what the fuss is with Windows 7 Modern UI.

Exchange logging? You're kidding me. How many of us use Exchange? Have a problem with logs? Have you bothered to check "normal" ways of "fixing" the problem.

Technologies you [of course] forgot that already broken:
Chrome OS
Google+
Too many of these useless Linux distros out there.

I specifically take issue with the moving parts section of this article. I have replaced many drives in my professional life, with most of them being HDDs. That being said, most of the drives I have used are HDDs. I have seen USB thumb drives fail at a much higher rate than HDDs, but since flash memory is not moving, it should be so much better, right? Wrong. As HDDs continue to increase to sizes that SDDs can only dream for in another decade, they have gotten better and better, but I can't say that flash memory's rate of failure has gotten any better, so would I rather pay less money for more disk space instead of a bit faster performance? Usually I would. Even Apple's new hybrid hard drives use both, so why would spinning HDDs be dead?

Also, onto optical media. I still trust those things at rest more than magnetic tape, HDDs or even flash memory. I know that I'll be able to spin one up 15 years later with the correct equipment and be 100% confident that the data will still be there. Would you trust your HDDs, flash-based devices, or magnetic tapes? I'll bet your entire backup on it.

When Gnome 3 came out, people all complained about what was missing, and there were a lot of things. But, as the Gnome team pointed out, the whole reason for the change was to allow users to determine how things would work. extensions.gnome.org has tons of great extensions that add everything back you wanted and allow you wonderful customizations you wouldn't have had before. Stop spouting old stories and try it again. I find it much more usable than the Gnome 2 stuff I have been using for 15 years and am more efficient also.

Printers would be great if people didn't try to "cheap" their needs. A Laser printer is not a replacement for a Lithography Press. You can only print so many books before it trashes.

Dear Mr. Jack Wallen, I understand that you are a big fan of Linux. That's all well and dandy and commendable. But this is 90% a Microsoft-bashing post. That's really a shame. Also, please get your facts straight and try to be a bit more objective.