Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.

[Simon]

Let's see if there will be a Windows 13.  That's not too far away.

depends on if the want to make a shit version or a good one. It used to be that the odd numbers were the good ones but they skipped nine so now it's reversed.

[rdl]

Well, both 10 and 11 are not very good, so that theory has gone down the tubes.

[PlainName]

10 was supposed to be the last version going onwards.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-version-of-windows

[Simon]

Well, both 10 and 11 are not very good, so that theory has gone down the tubes.

well with 10 it depends on when you refer to. I would have stuck with 7. I suspect 10 is actually getting a lot of stuff that 11 is made of. All of a sudden 10 is now asking me to confirm what program to use for that file, just like 11. Up until the release of 11 10 was at least bearable.

[tooki]

In Germany recently, I noted the building lift went 1.0 2.0 3.0 4.0 ... 12.0 Point zero? Is this German's being super accurate? Nine. It's because europeans count half floors or Mezzanines - from latin mezzo for half. So that could be ...2.0 2.5 3.0... With a point zero, maybe the building had a secret half floor?  ...12.0 13.5 14.0...

More likely a typo by the Chinese that made the plate. IIRC in German language they put a dot behind a number to tell is it part of a sequence. 1st => 1.  2nd => 2.  5th => 5.

FYI, those are called “ordinal” numbers.

Regular numbers are the “cardinal” numbers.

[rdl]

A lot of the Windows 10 telemetry garbage was back-ported to Windows 7. It eventually got so bad that I just re-installed 7 and never updated it. Well, other than stuff that games required. Actually, if not for gaming Windows as a general purpose OS might have died years ago. All most people need these days is something that can run a web browser. And most people seem to have no problem selling their soul to Google.

[tooki]

   Actually, FENG SHUI is an established science, although I know only bits and pieces about it.  Some of it makes good sense, geometrically.  Like principals that say things like:
    'Keeping doorways clear of clutter, and leaving ample space, so door can open completely', (in my interpretation),  allows 'luck' and 'health' generally to flow and circulate.  Sounds comic book fiction, sure, but Feng Shui has some pleasingly APPROPRIATE fit, I've seen.
   My consultant used partial intuitive reading, and talked about a couple things (in my business office location) that were private / confidential, although she had no direct knowledge.  That's just a bit of mystery.

Utter nonsense.

Your "consultant" conned you.

No more so than your religious leaders conned you!

Jokes aside, you do need to accept that religion is something you cannot bring to a facts-based forum as if it were fact. You are free to believe what you believe, but many of us do not, and cannot and will not accept it as fact even if you make such declarations. I am an atheist and don’t believe in your religion (or anyone else’s), so arguments that DOG created everything and made us inherently superior to animals don’t, um, improve your standing in my eyes.

[Nominal Animal]

I've managed to get quite a few people very confused about me, by describing my own beliefs.

To me, it does not matter if there is a creator, god, godhood, or anything like that.  If one exists, it is so far beyond my ken that any worship or even acknowledgement by me is more likely to be offensive (or just ridiculous) than desirable.  Consider something like a bacteria worshiping one of my nostril hairs, for an analog: "I split from my parent-sibling, and was a long time in a deserted droplet, cooling down, slowing my life processes.  Then I was suddenly grasped by a heavenly appendage, the Protrusion of God, and put here! With lots of food, stable conditions, and this endless surface for me-us to explore.  I/we shall populate this world!"

I don't mind the idea of there being a final judgment; fine by me, I accept that.  Whether reality was created, is a simulation, or is a quantum mechanical relativistic machine, does not matter to me.  I can only behave according to my own judgment, based on what I can sense.  In my teenage years, I thought about it a lot, and finally decided that as a person, I wanted to behave like I'd like others to behave around me.  I've tried to do that ever since, and use that as the metric for my own behaviour.  Whatever judgment my behaviour gets, will be interesting, too.  As to pain or punishment, well, as a human, I can adapt to almost anything (possibly excepting an icicle in my butt, because that melts before you gets used to it).

And with this post, I wager I've managed to trigger the pet peeves of several members here.  Sowwy! 

[SiliconWizard]

10 was supposed to be the last version going onwards.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-version-of-windows

Many of us suspected this was just going to be a lie. And it was.
A "forever version" of something is not sustainable marketing-wise. (Sure it may be if the majority of us was less idiotic, but we are what we are.)

Releasing a new version of something creates anticipation, while a forever "Windows 10" ends ups just being transparent. No matter what it actually contains. That's marketing 101. Keeping the same version also makes it harder to make breaking changes, otherwise it creates too much fragmentation and major support headaches.

Their claim of the "last version" at the time was just to introduce rolling releases to the public, something which was just not a thing for MS products before.
Those rolling updates have created a lot of pain for users of Win 10 for several years. Then the cycle has settled to more or less twice a year, so things are getting a bit more stable.

[IDEngineer]

finally decided that as a person, I wanted to behave like I'd like others to behave around me.

That's a good philosophy. Mine's slightly different: I try to leave people and things better for my having interacted with them. I hope to leave a trail of improvement behind me. I figure that's objectively a good thing regardless of your belief system. And if there's some sort of "judgement" such a record would reflect well on me.

If we play out my philosophy, it might lead to and include yours!

[rsjsouza]

10 was supposed to be the last version going onwards.

https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/7/8568473/windows-10-last-version-of-windows

Many of us suspected this was just going to be a lie. And it was.
A "forever version" of something is not sustainable marketing-wise. (Sure it may be if the majority of us was less idiotic, but we are what we are.)

Releasing a new version of something creates anticipation, while a forever "Windows 10" ends ups just being transparent. No matter what it actually contains. That's marketing 101. Keeping the same version also makes it harder to make breaking changes, otherwise it creates too much fragmentation and major support headaches.

The "last version" statement was never an official Microsoft stance but it came from one of their employees - I believed that as well.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/394724/why-is-there-a-windows-11-if-windows-10-is-the-last-windows.html

Regarding versions, Apple and its marketing machine was able to successfully capitalize on releasing the same "major" version of their operating system for almost twenty years - OS "ten" (OS X).

You can sell anything if you market it wisely - something that Microsoft has trouble with in many occasions.

[james_s]

You can sell anything if you market it wisely - something that Microsoft has trouble with in many occasions.

Their marketing is almost universally terrible, I don't even know how they manage to make it so bad. Have you ever seen a commercial for one of their tablet things? I forget what they're even called.

[Nominal Animal]

This is more of a question that has bothered me forever, rather than a pet peeve, but anyway:

How do you help people who are asking for advice on how to complete a thing, when they are doing just about everything wrong?

A recent particular example I stumbled on was someone writing a "server" in C on Linux.  They use recv() on a socket to read a structure, but never even check how many bytes they actually received.  They then use strcmp() on structure members to check the username and password.  Their question is, how to add many users.

Everything in it is wrong, especially if they are using TCP sockets, since the number of bytes available depends on the network conditions, and does not necessarily reflect the number of bytes sent.  Assuming data is a string, terminated with a nul byte (as you do when you use str...() family of functions in C), is a clear buffer overrun risk.

Not to mention the overall architecture.  You want to use a database (a flat file will work fine) of usernames, salts, and salted hashes of the passwords to compare against.  To explain why, you need to understand the overall security model, and that alone is at least a dozen paragraphs.

My intuition is to point out a few of the errors in the existing code, and then throw it all away and start from scratch, using sensible engineering principles.  (This includes things like using the proper available POSIX interfaces like getaddrinfo() to obtain the socket given host name and service or port, nftw() to scan directory trees, scandir() to list the contents of a specific directory, regexes for matching (regcomp()/regexec()/regerror()/regfree(), all of the aforementioned being included in the standard C library; plus things like return value checking, proper error messages via %m (GNU extension) or strerror(errno) (pure C), robust data structures using known working approaches, and so on.)

In face-to-face, I can observe cues and adjust my approach so that the learner does not get frustrated, just more motivated/excited.  (I've used things like describing past projects by myself and other people; showing how the proper engineering approach is not only more powerful, but saves a lot of work in the long term; and how these things makes one quite a powerful developer.)

Online, say stackoverflow, possibly here also, the more likely response is "No, I didn't ask for that.  I asked for help with my code.  If you cannot help me with this, please do not post at all."

In a similar vein, here in physics threads, I've tried to describe things in a way that helps people intuitively grasp the phenomena better, but as such descriptions are not exactly what is discussed in text books, the response is similarly polarized to positive and utterly negative, with nearly nothing in between.  (Consider things like describing electron orbitals around an atom as electron clouds.  Each "cloud" is just one delocalized electron, with "density" corresponding to the squared modulus of the actual quantum wave function.  If you examine each term in isolation, you can find several faults in it.  But, if you examine the two sentences assuming that the terms used are descriptive, not definitive or exact, then you have to agree that it fits perfectly to our current quantum mechanical understanding of atom electron orbitals.)

The underlying question is, what is the approach that has the best chance of actually being useful?
And "useful" defined as something that helps there be less crappy software or misunderstanding of physics out there in the future.

This bugs me to no end.  I don't want to waste my efforts when it is not welcome or is considered not useful.  But seeing someone just take off with a little bit of help, I really really like that.

[unknownparticle]

Damn bonfire night, a strange UK custom for those in the rest of the world!!  People literally burning money just to see pretty lights in the sky   So those that don't indulge in such nonsense have to endure 6 hours of noise disturbance!! Yes, I am a grumpy b4stard!!

[PlainName]

At least they're getting wet tonight

[Zeyneb]

This is more of a question that has bothered me forever, rather than a pet peeve, but anyway:

How do you help people who are asking for advice on how to complete a thing, when they are doing just about everything wrong?

Well, if it is someone online like stackoverflow I don't think you should waste your time and effort and instead try to find a question from a poster that shows a style more like yours. That person is more likely to accept your suggestions.

If it is a coworker it's more problematic. Try to assess if the person is just naive but cares for quality or just being careless and wants instant results. In the first case provide some tests that break the code and show ways to prevent that. In the careless case I'm not sure, maybe avoid having that person on your team.

[Circlotron]

Damn bonfire night, a strange UK custom for those in the rest of the world!!  People literally burning money just to see pretty lights in the sky   So those that don't indulge in such nonsense have to endure 6 hours of noise disturbance!! Yes, I am a grumpy b4stard!!

Strange custom alright. Celebrating a political terrorist. Or at least his downfall.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_Night

[TimFox]

When I started my employment, there were many British subjects working at the American company.
They were prone to celebrate Guy Fawkes' (no relation) day.
Out of curiosity, I asked them which king had been the target of the Gunpowder Plot, and none of them knew.
(One said that his history class in school had stopped at 1066.)
I had to look it up on my own, before the internet:  James I of England (aka James VI of Scotland).

[PlainName]

I think we tend not to be big on history. I recall at school that history mainly consisted of knowing things like what Shakespeare had for breakfast on a Tuesday, which wasn't too riveting for a 14-year-old. Bonfire night we celebrate because... well, it's lots of bangs and flashes and who the hell knows why but it's fun.

[Nominal Animal]

How do you help people who are asking for advice on how to complete a thing, when they are doing just about everything wrong?

If it is a coworker it's more problematic.

Well, like I said, I find face-to-face rather easy in comparison.

Most of my coworkers have liked me, because I do admit when I'm wrong, and explicitly express my appreciation when I learn something new from them.
It's only the instant-gratification types who don't care about long-term results because they've gone by then with whatever they have managed to extract by then that aggravate me; I don't want to work with them at all, so one of us will walk out anyway.

Here at EEVblog, it's the physics discussions, things like "measuring the speed of DC current".  By exact definition, you can't do that, because DC implies a steady state where no changes actually propagate, because as a steady state, there are no changes.  If you use it as an approximation, it's like starting a psychology paper with "We define humans as roughly spherical toroids, with mouth at one end, and rectum at the other".  It just won't lead to a practical useful model at all, even though you can derive many details that match with real world measurements.  Yet, a majority of the participants on the discussion reject using transmission line or electromagnetic field models –– which would be appropriate, down to the quantum mechanical level, really! –– because it gets too far from the approximations they are familiar with and have experience in applying in typical situations.

How the hell is a nobody like me, using a pseudonym, going to help anyone realize they're using the wrong model to solve the problem?

It's exactly the same as the discussion here in Finland about the origin on Finns.  A relatively recent bog-body DNA samples from 5000 years ago clearly shows that they were genetically closest to modern Finns.  Yet, just a few days ago, yet another docent held a talk at Helsinki University (youtube) "describing" how Finns came from "somewhere between the rivers Olga, Kama, and Oka, getting to Estonia about three thousand years ago".  Yet, Finns genetic forebears have been in Central Sweden, much further West, over the Gulf of Bothnia, at least two thousand years before that.
Whenever I send that link to anyone, they just respond: "No, I trust the Finnish linguists and historians like this docent more."
Basically saying "I trust their theories more than what the archaeological DNA findings say, because it is important to my ideological narrative about Finns' origins," so please don't bother me with such links, you racist fennomaniac.  (My closest friends and colleagues at UH only leave the "racist" bit out.)
I'm not interested in making history political, but when people like the prime minister of Finland says they don't know what being a Finn means, and they don't really think of themselves as Finnish, it is time to show them where their roots are, using physical facts and research done by non-Finns.  Finns are not better or more original than anyone, but just like everyone else, we do have a history that is much more interesting than the ideological "Turanic idiots from the Volga river" these story-tellers are peddling for ideological reasons.

Similarly, online, I want to help people find solutions that are used to create better (robust, resilient, efficient, effective, utile/useful) "stuff", especially programming.  Not pointing out when people are going about arse-end first is just letting crap slide downwards towards future; stopping them early, and diverting them on even just slightly better path, reduces the total amount of crap out there in the future, and possibly increases the total amount of good stuff.

Is it even ethical to stay quiet and ignore them?   

[themadhippy]

At least the uks fireworks are let off to celebrate  a historical event,not  in memory of some spreader of fairy tales  as happens in many other countries

[TimFox]

In the US, the main fireworks displays celebrate our independence from Britain.

[rsjsouza]

This is more of a question that has bothered me forever, rather than a pet peeve, but anyway:

How do you help people who are asking for advice on how to complete a thing, when they are doing just about everything wrong?

Nominal, just slowly make your hands walk away from the keyboard... Then put one one the mouse... Move the cursor to the "X" near the tab... Click! And go make a tea or a coffee.

I suffer from the same "help at all costs" inkling as you and it took me years to get a sense to find the best balance of my time with the interest and engagement of the original poster. There is a discussion somewhere around here when both I and Mr Modemhead talked about it in yet another thread where the OP vanished after all the good will efforts of many around here.

[Muttley Snickers]

This is my current pet peeve and it fucking stinks.     

Scumbag companies who scam loyal customers by shrinking their product sizes but increase the prices. This is one of the dirtiest tricks in the book and made worse when they retain the same size packaging but reduce the contents for nothing more than profit.   

The regular can I buy on the left is 150gm and normally costs $3.15 on special, the new can on the right is only 130gm and cost me $3.75 also on special.   

[rsjsouza]

That's inflation 1:1. Lived through that and much worse in the 1980's and their 2000%+ a year. The lost decade for us.