products you hate

[TerraHertz]

Car systems management computers, and specifically the way the driver window control acts differently from the other windows.
This has been mentioned here before, I think, but I'm bringing it up again because of an ironic stroke of luck a couple of days ago.

Recently the driver window had been playing up. It would open OK, but when I tried to close it, it would start sliding up, then reverse and go all the way down. Repeatedly. Very frustrating. Eventually one time it closed, after which I left it closed due to not wanting to spend several minutes in that ridiculous loop again.

Then on Monday I was starting the car. Before the engine actually started, the car computer crashed, and remained completely locked up. Both dash dials (speed and revs) had their needles steady at 8-o'clock, nothing in the car working, all unresponsive. Even the gear shift lever (automatic) could not be moved since the release button was somehow locked. Fortunately the doors happened to be unlocked, so I could get out.

I thought I'd disconnect the battery, give it a cold reboot. On going to loosen the battery Plus terminal I found it was slightly loose. Ah ha! Cause of CPU crash now known - voltage drop/spikes due to starter motor. Pulled  the lead off anyway, counted to five, put it back, tightly. Then the car computer and controls were working again.

The next day I discovered... a miracle! The driver window control now works the same as all the others. It only goes up or down while you hold the button. Let go, it stops. Hallelujah! This is how I wish it always worked. No struggling with the damned thing, trying to get the window to halt just where I want it. Which is difficult, requiring close attention and timing, which distracts from driving and is also really annoying - which further lessens road awareness.

Now how long is it going to stay that way? Obviously some data got corrupted, so it isn't working the way it's 'supposed' to. There was also some software feature where the driver window button was operable for about 20 seconds after turning the engine off,. That is no longer functional either, but I don't care. Fingers crossed the damned 'driver window auto up/down mode' stays disabled forever, but I suppose that is too much to hope for.

And that in itself (complex unpredictable and mysterious behavior) is another reason why I hate computerized cars. For life-critical things like driving, give me purely mechanical, simple systems over software glitches any day.

[BradC]

Now how long is it going to stay that way? Obviously some data got corrupted, so it isn't working the way it's 'supposed' to. There was also some software feature where the driver window button was operable for about 20 seconds after turning the engine off,. That is no longer functional either, but I don't care. Fingers crossed the damned 'driver window auto up/down mode' stays disabled forever, but I suppose that is too much to hope for.

Probably somewhere in the order of about 5 up/down cycles while it re-calibrates itself, then the designed behaviour will return.

I must admit, it's stuff like this that makes me actually enjoy driving my 29 year old bomb. Enough EFI to be low maintenance and not enough to get into trouble. Contrast with the wifes Landrover with its 12 (ish) networked modules where a faulty brake light bulb can cause the suspension to drop to the bump stops and vehicle to have a panic attack.

If you want to go bush in Australia, take a Landrover. If you want to come home again you'll want a Toyota

[Zbig]

Car systems management computers, and specifically the way the driver window control acts differently from the other windows.
[..]
The next day I discovered... a miracle! The driver window control now works the same as all the others. It only goes up or down while you hold the button. Let go, it stops. Hallelujah! This is how I wish it always worked. No struggling with the damned thing, trying to get the window to halt just where I want it. Which is difficult, requiring close attention and timing, which distracts from driving and is also really annoying - which further lessens road awareness.

It's the default window control mode after (re)applying battery power in my Seat Ibiza 2003. But contrary to you, I don't like it and prefer the "nudge the switch to fully open/close" as I'm not finding myself wanting to open the window partially very often. I just open/close it to grab the mall parking lot ticket and drive with windows closed and AC running at all other times. The way to enable the other mode in my car is to take the physical key, insert it in the driver-side mechanical lock (pretty much the only situation I put the actual key there) and hold it in the "lock" position for a few seconds. I think it's a kind of a safety feature, perhaps legally mandated, even. They're basically seem to tell you: "if you want your window to go all the way up all by itself and risk having your kid/Chihuahua decapitated and you know how to do it: it's your call, but it wasn't like that when you got the car from us".

[TerraHertz]

I must admit, it's stuff like this that makes me actually enjoy driving my 29 year old bomb. Enough EFI to be low maintenance and not enough to get into trouble. Contrast with the wifes Landrover with its 12 (ish) networked modules where a faulty brake light bulb can cause the suspension to drop to the bump stops and vehicle to have a panic attack.

If you want to go bush in Australia, take a Landrover. If you want to come home again you'll want a Toyota

Totally agree. I normally drive an old pre-computer Subaru, but that is off road atm for some registration-required maintenance. Currently driving another car.

[Rerouter]

Terra, looks like your in luck, seems they poorly implemented the reset procedure, so as long as you dont follow it you should have partial windows again.

https://priuschat.com/threads/cannot-reset-auto-window-after-battery-disconnect.20117/

Auto windows always scare me, after having a finger get caught and a few muscles torn on that finger while the motor tourqued down trying to seal to the top.

I prefer the hand winders on my toyota,

When your highway driving, and want some fresh air with the aircon off, you only want a crack at the top. but nope, there it goes to the bottom, and any loose paper items in the cab start whirlpooling about.

[IanMacdonald]

Image sliders on websites are fast becoming anathema to me. Along with backgrounds that do weird things when you scroll down, and neverending pages.

I guess the owners never really stop to consider what it's like to try to read the text on these ghastly creations. OK I could put a hundred flashing lights on a page, maybe even add flippers and a multi-ball feature.. but wait, will it sell my product?  I suspect the answer is no, it won't.

[rdl]

The people who design web pages and sites are a strange bunch. They seem more interested in impressing each other with new fancy effects than making a usable site. My latest pet peeve is shopping sites where the images are delayed and have to "fade in" as you scroll down. For some reason I find that very annoying and usually just whip the slider top to bottom a couple of times so the images all load and display normally.

[Rolo]

I would like to add childprotection caps on plastic bottles with distilled water. Seriously, they do make them.

[Cubdriver]

I would like to add childprotection caps on plastic bottles with distilled water. Seriously, they do make them.

Well, drowning is a frequent cause of unintentional death among children....   

-Pat

[skarecrow]

The people who design web pages and sites are a strange bunch. They seem more interested in impressing each other with new fancy effects than making a usable site. My latest pet peeve is shopping sites where the images are delayed and have to "fade in" as you scroll down. For some reason I find that very annoying and usually just whip the slider top to bottom a couple of times so the images all load and display normally.

I don't disagree with you at all, but it's not always the designers at fault there. Back in '05 I worked for a guy that insisted his site have a splash page done completely in flash that you couldn't bypass. I fought him every step of the way and ended up quitting. I make it a rule that function comes before all else when I'm making a website. He didn't want to hear what I had to say, it was his way or his way. Yes, I said that right, there wasn't even a no way option.

Sent from my XT1565 using Tapatalk

[Gregg]

How about the annoying little Tapatalk signature at the bottom of forum posts. The one that states "Sent from some device or other using Tapatalk"  Who cares? 
It can be turned off; a quick search on the internet will show how.

[Cubdriver]

How about the annoying little Tapatalk signature at the bottom of forum posts. The one that states "Sent from some device or other using Tapatalk"  Who cares? 
It can be turned off; a quick search on the internet will show how.

Guys on another forum I'm on have had great fun with that one.  One who's a police officer sends his messages using 'copatalk', another from his stone tablet and someone else from 'two tin cans and a string'.  There are others too, but those are the ones that come to mind.

-Pat

[IanMacdonald]

I hate websites that have a picture of something for sale that you can click on for a closer look, but the following picture is just the same size or sometimes even smaller! 

That is definitely something that makes me want to scream in frustration.  "Click for expanded view" and you get the same tiny image, but now it's surrounded by an expanded plain border that entirely fills your screen.     Yeah, guys...  ..not exactly my idea of what an expanded view is. 
And as you said, sometimes it's SMALLER!     
-Pat

Even worse are the ones where your site navigation is messed-up by viewing an image. Wikipedia's is like that. Click an image, close it, then try to go back to the previous page and you have to cycle through all the images you've viewed first.

I'm amazed that a site like Wikipedia hasn't got the coding skills to fix this. Surely.. 

[Naguissa]

How about the annoying little Tapatalk signature at the bottom of forum posts. The one that states "Sent from some device or other using Tapatalk"  Who cares? 
It can be turned off; a quick search on the internet will show how.

It has a function: prevent others about the person sending the post using a mobile device, which is more prone to typos and too much briefs.

Tapatalk signature is easily recognized in any language, as my spanish one.

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

[Cubdriver]

Even worse are the ones where your site navigation is messed-up by viewing an image. Wikipedia's is like that. Click an image, close it, then try to go back to the previous page and you have to cycle through all the images you've viewed first.

I'm amazed that a site like Wikipedia hasn't got the coding skills to fix this. Surely.. 

That is annoying, too.  Most of the time on Wikipedia, I remember to just use the back button to get out of the image, rather than closing it the 'correct' way.  That seems to alleviate having to scroll through everything you opened when you back out.  Sometimes I forget, end get to enjoy a reverse slideshow when going back...

-Pat

[SeanB]

I normally spawn a new browser window doing that, it is often faster plus a background load so I can finish reading the article while it loads, and simply change tab to see it.

[Zbig]

Anything with non-latching low battery warning. I have a radio-controlled, motorized radiator thermostat system in my flat. The thermostats display low battery warnings on their LCDs, with the warning also showing on the wall control panel/thermostat, on the network-connected base station and also in the mobile application. The problem is, device power consuption from two AA cells varies wildly: it uses bursts of current for motor operation but it drops to almost nothing while dormant. So you get low battery warning shortly after the actuator runs or LCD backlight comes up which then disapperas after the battery voltage under no load recovers. Can't decide whether it's the laziness on the firmware developers' side or the utter lack of understanding of how the batteries work and poor-to-no communication between the hardware and the software teams. I mean, come on, you've registered the low battery warning so just keep it engaged until powerdown. What have they thought could have caused the batteries to magically recharge while in the device?

[RoGeorge]

Forum post that ends with

"Send from my (whatever) using Tapatalk"

Hate you, Tapatalk!
 

[cdev]

Some time ago in this thread (last winter) I described how my expensive "ecco" brand hiking boots had suddenly decided to catastrophically fail.

Well, yesterday, my (extremely comfortable) weatherproof ecco walking shoes also started showing a similar sudden failure mode.

It appears that they made a bad choice in rubbers. The rubber that they use inside the soles gives them their characteristic comfort but is also prone to this- crumbling.

They need to be clearer about this when they sell them to people.

They are selling what should be seen as essentially a disposable product at a non-disposable product price. The uppers last a very long time and are very well made so it is really a horrid waste of what could remain a functional shoe for decades longer when the soles just suddenly crumble away.

[cdev]

I think that's there as a way of warning people that semi-uncommon words in the original may quite possibly have been replaced at random with other words and the rushed sender may not have noticed..  (One of the most annoying things about those systems that try to make it "easier" to type on a tablet- for lots more on these issues see the other thread about how bad tablets are as compared to laptops for anything that involves writing text.)


Quote from: Gregg on 2017-08-19, 19:28:43

How about the annoying little Tapatalk signature at the bottom of forum posts. The one that states "Sent from some device or other using Tapatalk"  Who cares? 
It can be turned off; a quick search on the internet will show how.

[cdev]

Indeed.. this is often very true..

I could go on and on about the really horrible things that are done to usability and cross-browser compatibility in order to create some of these effects. (Luckily, this is not as big of a problem as it used to be due to some new javasript toolkits that address these problems - if used properly)

Many would-be "web developers" get their code from cut-and paste and have no idea of what it does or how to properly use it.

They are invariably unaware that these tricks also often make their sites less findable by search engines and also often make individual pages within them un-bookmarkable.

This "breaks the web" as far as their clients sites go.

An extreme example is provided by sites that simply embed Flash files or huge bitmaps only linked via (sometimes also vendor-platform-specific!) Javascript. 

Their target audience is usually people using one or two browsers - with default settings, and nothing else works.

If you browse those sites with Javascript and/or Flash turned off, you will often not see anything there at all!

Not even any "noscript" text.





Quote from: rdl on 2017-08-18, 08:14:59

The people who design web pages and sites are a strange bunch. They seem more interested in impressing each other with new fancy effects than making a usable site. My latest pet peeve is shopping sites where the images are delayed and have to "fade in" as you scroll down. For some reason I find that very annoying and usually just whip the slider top to bottom a couple of times so the images all load and display normally.

[Yansi]

Some time ago in this thread (last winter) I described how my expensive "ecco" brand hiking boots had suddenly decided to catastrophically fail.

Well, yesterday, my (extremely comfortable) weatherproof ecco walking shoes also started showing a similar sudden failure mode.

It appears that they made a bad choice in rubbers. The rubber that they use inside the soles gives them their characteristic comfort but is also prone to this- crumbling.

They need to be clearer about this when they sell them to people.

They are selling what should be seen as essentially a disposable product at a non-disposable product price. The uppers last a very long time and are very well made so it is really a horrid waste of what could remain a functional shoe for decades longer when the soles just suddenly crumble away.

You better stick with some reputable brands like Asics, Mizuno, even maybe Nike and Adidas, if you are willing to pay premium prices. The difference is that these will last.  Whatever "Ecco" doesn't feel like any reputable manufacturer of this kind of stuff. However be warned that there are lots of other known brands like Salomon or Reebok, that you should stay away of.

[IanMacdonald]

"Some time ago in this thread (last winter) I described how my expensive "ecco" brand hiking boots had suddenly decided to catastrophically fail. "

I'm not sure that Ecco rate as much more than a fashion house. For any serious outdoor work you need something you can trust, after all a complete boot failure ten miles into the hills in winter could be life threatening. That's not to say that you have to pay the earth though; I've had some very cheap boots that were comfortable and lasted years. An outdoor sports or work clothing shop is less likely to sell you something unfit for purpose, though.

'Many would-be "web developers" get their code from cut-and paste and have no idea of what it does or how to properly use it. '

Well, tried that route and most of the stuff you can get on Github or the like has serious bugs. Worse still with third party CMS plugins, which often have security holes that can lead to your site being hacked. Best answer is to code it yourself. At least then if there IS a bug, at least you understand how the code was written and can fix it.

The obsession with jQuery by young players is a case in point. Now, jQuery is reasonable quality code, but their reason for using it is basically because they think it will avoid them having to learn how to write proper Javascript. Which, is a wrong way to go about things. Understand the system first, then get to grips with its additional features.

I find that cross-browser compatibility is a lot less of a problem than it used to be. Even when using precise positioning of elements, the results are very near the same in all. Main problem in this respect is IE11 going into 'compatibility mode' in which it emulates IE7. Corporates sometimes have it set permanently like that for the sake of old software, and it trashes any modern site.

The one thing that is a huge PITA in HTML5 is the inability to properly center anything on the page. They deprecated the <center> tag which worked nicely, and replaced it with a hotchpotch of other css properties, most of which cannot be trusted to work reliably since they are influenced by other settings. Though the center tag still works, and I've even encountered online editing software that uses it. 

[SeanB]

Some time ago in this thread (last winter) I described how my expensive "ecco" brand hiking boots had suddenly decided to catastrophically fail.

Well, yesterday, my (extremely comfortable) weatherproof ecco walking shoes also started showing a similar sudden failure mode.

It appears that they made a bad choice in rubbers. The rubber that they use inside the soles gives them their characteristic comfort but is also prone to this- crumbling.

They need to be clearer about this when they sell them to people.

They are selling what should be seen as essentially a disposable product at a non-disposable product price. The uppers last a very long time and are very well made so it is really a horrid waste of what could remain a functional shoe for decades longer when the soles just suddenly crumble away.

Standard for polyurethane foams, which is what these are all ( including those ultra expensive brand name shoes) made from in the sole, to give a light weight easy to manufacture sole and designed to be a single piece integrated base for the shoe. The foam has a definite shelf life after manufacture, it will all crumble and fail after 5 years after catalysing, irrespective of the use it had, and will do this just from exposure to oxygen in the air causing a chemical reaction in the urethane foam. Same with all polyurethane pipe as well, it will get brittle with time, and will eventually crack when stressed.

I find this on air systems, where you just have to replace them all every 5 years or so, though often when it does fail you find as well the fittings have been stressed to the point that they are also going to fail as well, or that your tubing has swollen up where it was not constrained by the fitting to be nearly the next size up. Nylon tubing does not do this, though it has the drawbacks of being a lot stiffer and a lot less forgiving of bending, but has a very good thing in water use of not leaching into the water much.

[Yansi]

Shoe midsoles are not polyurethane foam. At least as far as I know regarding the "classic" material. There is a lot of material types they use, but the foam should by ethylen-vinyl acetate.   (Maybe? My unuducated guess is polyurethane is used in the Adidas boost technology, as the material feels similar to PU?)

//EDIT: yes, adidas boost is based on TPU.