Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.

[IDEngineer]

I want to agree with you, but after seeing some of the automotive design decisions over the decades.... Some things are so mind-numbingly suboptimized it boggles the mind. Many times I've seen things that made things MORE difficult and yet cost MORE money. Yes, I'm familiar with the concept that perhaps parts are shared between vehicles and rather than design something new they just cram-fit an existing part into the latest model. That might explain a few. But sometimes you just stand there scratching your head asking yourself WHY, when it would have been easier/faster/cheaper/lighter/etc. to do something better.

EDIT: Here's a perfect example. This is a Toyota engine. There needs to be a connection from the block fitting to the silver cooling rail above it. On some versions of this engine they have an intercooler so they have hoses coming down to the bottom of the engine for that connection. In this application, they don't use that intercooler - so the "solution" was a U-shaped aluminum hardline connecting the two dangling hoses! You can see the U-shaped tube at the bottom of the first photo. The second photo shows the 100% functional optimum solution: A short piece of rubber hose. This saves cost, space, weight, and improves reliability because there are half the number of connections that can become leaks later.

[tooki]

That is the problem with the regular smoke detectors : they come with a wet-paper-bag variety of a 9 volt battery. it holds as much charge as that bag can hold water.

All off-the-shelf products come with cheap carbon-zinc "starter" batteries.

Many smoke detectors now ship with lithium batteries that last for ages. Some are even dispensing with removable batteries, since the lithium battery will last more than a decade, which is when an ionizing smoke detector is supposed to be replaced anyway.

True for TV remote controls, etc. Always the cheapest batteries with manufacturer names I've never seen elsewhere.

In a remote control, this makes sense. Carbon zinc batteries still provide years of life in an IR remote, and they aren’t anywhere near as likely to leak as alkaline batteries.

[rsjsouza]

I'm familiar with the concept that perhaps parts are shared between vehicles and rather than design something new they just cram-fit an existing part into the latest model.

Indeed. BOM consolidation across a product line is enforced in many industries - unfortunately it sometimes can lead to ridiculous decisions such as the one you showed.

[AndyBeez]

Me, I use a laptop that is thicker than the "thinnest" but has every physical port type you can get in a single box. That way I'm prepared when I walk into some lab or shop and need to connect to whatever. I don't have to carry a dozen dongles or adapters,

Sometimes a man needs a static addressed Ethernet port. Especially when the system manger is being a complete a*s over the wifi. And smug is the man who can still connect a DV camcorder to a Firewire port. Even PCMCIA ain't dead yet - in the world of business modems.

That has been my thought all along. It sacrifices too much in order to be thinner than it needs to be. It's so thin that it's uncomfortable to hold on edge in my hand, there is no reason for it to be that thin, with an extra 5mm it could probably fit a large enough battery to last a whole work day and maybe a better keyboard.
...

My tablet is a real pain to hold outside of it's cover. So too, my iPhone needs it's sillyprice-silicone case just to make it ergonomic.

Welcome to the omnipresent reality of unserviceable product design...

Two more reasons I believe the Apple keyboard is a piece of style over substance junk.
The PCB is a pair of paper thin plastic sheets with super thin traces. Like all membrane keyboards, it cannot be serviced. In fact, taking an Apple keyboard to the repair shop results in the keyboard's certain destruction. The traces are so fragile, a gust of wind will blow them off the substrate. Sometimes literally when the tracks have been exposed to a corrosive liquid like Diet Coke - or even a sea breeze.
And why do Apple keyboards have edges that feel they are straight off a milling machine? You can use an Apple keyboard as a varnish scraper, the edges are that acute. I've burnished (polished) the edges which makes the keyboard feel like a $99 maccessory. If Apple made apples, they would be square, make your gums bleed and have no allergy information.

I simply don't understand the importance placed on having little or no bezel, to the absurd extreme of having notches or holes cut out of the display. It makes no sense at all to me, I would much prefer to have a bezel around a solid, uninterrupted display than to cut out part of the display, especially when it's for a feature I don't even want...

I agree. "Why is it zooming!?!?!?! Oh yeh, I'm touching the very edge with my fingernail." If you think notched out screens are dumb, check out Samsung's new  folding phone. A technological masterpiece but for the consumer, why make a phone go twice as thick in the pocket?

[tooki]

The eraser head is a terrible solution that is better than the alternative touchpad.

I like trackpads — but only because I’m a Mac user: Apple’s trackpad mechanics are so far ahead of anyone else’s it’s not even funny. I don’t know what their secret sauce is, but it’s all in the drivers, since even the Apple drivers for Windows (provided for Boot Camp dual booting) completely change the trackpad behavior.* They’ve managed to get the sensitivity, palm rejection, and acceleration dynamics just right.

Though the ones that follow the “Windows Precision Touchpad” standard are infinitely better than non-precision touchpads under Windows, they still aren’t great. I find that Windows touchpads somehow manage to be simultaneously too sensitive and not sensitive enough. I don’t know how Apple solved this, but they did.

*Caveat: I’ve never used Apple’s Boot Camp drivers for the Magic Trackpad 2. Maybe they’re better than the ones for the original Magic Trackpad, what I have at home.

[ccktek]

“Hanning window”.  There was a Julius von Hann and a Richard Hamming (as in Hamming window) but no one named Hanning.  If we’re going to corrupt von Hann’s name, shouldn’t we at least not capitalize it?  (I know – picky, picky.  But credit where credit is due.)

[GreyWoolfe]

I am a field service tech working on custom digital image and biometric solutions( will not go into greater details due to IP and NDA's).  These are custom and expensive solutions.  the engineers who design all of this equipment have had the word serviceability removed from their brains and vocabulary.  There is 20 pounds of stuff crammed into a 5 pound enclosure and I am the one stuck trying to figure out how to repair it without adequate documentation.  These same engineers also may understand how to design but not understand how what they design works.  A few years back there was an issue of an OTC strobe flash in a camera tower catching fire-2 instances in several hundred pieces deployed and unfortunately in both cases, this happened over the weekend when no one was in the building.  No damage other than to the tower.  This created a full on crapshow involving the engineers and the top brass for the client and the company.  We had a conference call about it as it was in our program.  Stoopit little tech me said, no big deal, shut the tower off at end of day and turn on in the morning. For more background, these towers are plugged into surge protectors under the desks of the users with other pieces of our equipment.  After a couple of weeks of whatever went on in the hallowed halls, the lead engineer sent out a memo for the end users to reach under the desk to turn off the surge protector at end of day.  Mind you, the towers have their own on and off switch.   Of course, no on ever did that.  After another couple of weeks, another memo came out that the end user could turn off the tower switch.   3 years later, the cameras still stay on 24\7 and there have been no repeats.  I know this can't be unique to my company.  Right or wrong, I will always be of the opinion that the engineers should be made to service their designs under field conditions.  For mass produced items built to a price point, I am not naive enough to expect this, but in those markets where full on custom/expensive solutions are the norm, this should be mandatory.

[Nominal Animal]

I will always be of the opinion that the engineers should be made to service their designs under field conditions.

Me too.

I've designed and implemented custom software for different kinds of needs, mostly to support the work my own team or organization does.  Think of customized tools.  Every time, instead of asking them what they wanted, I talked and observed them when they went through a real-world workflow.  I'm pretty good at it, too: I can usually tell how to make the process more robust (reduce the likelihood of errors), and save time and effort also.

Having done that successfully, making everyone really happy and productive, and then seeing how the Big Boys do the same, makes me and want to cry.

It's like the bad telephone game: someone rants a bit about what they want (without actually knowing or having any skill in deciding what they want), writing a report about it to their boss.  The boss goes on a few paid wet lunches, to see which companies could "fix" the issue.  Some dedicated people at those companies create some offers –– note that these people are not part of the actual development process, they're dedicated to writing tempting offers, and specialized in weasel-words.  The boss, or someone the boss picks, selects one of the offers, based on metrics defined on a spreadsheet somewhere, completely unrelated to the thing at hand but designed by some analyst or bureaucrat somewhere.  Then starts the design rounds, where the picked company selects a set of people to write up a description of the result.  None of these people have ever used this kind of software, but they're very good at writing nice descriptions; that's what they get paid for.  After a few rounds, the description is agreed upon, and a different set of people start developing software, using their own understanding of the description.  None of them have any experience in using that kind of software, of course.  The end result?  Has nothing to do with what was needed to solve the original problem.  Nobody takes responsibility, because everyone did their jobs perfectly, even if millions were spent and the end result is not usable nor would it solve the problem even if it was.  Some designer/architect/developer might get blamed and fired if some accountant or bureau generates noise about the wastage, but all the management types will get bonuses and happily move on to the next, even better paid job.

(In Finland, only about a third of large IT projects succeed, producing an usable result.  The failures never seem to impact the leaders of such projects.  A roughly similar project in Estonia that cost 20 M€ and was a success, cost an estimated 774 M€ (our population is about 5.5M, compared to Estonia's 1.3M) and is a complete unusable turd; see here.)

Making unserviceable, unusable stuff should be a shame that impacts your career.  Instead, it somehow seems to be something to be proud of. WTF?

[coppice]

… rather similar to people in the UK calling a moving van a "Pantechnicon".

As a Brit, and having lived in several regions of the UK, I have never once heard a moving van to be called a pantechnicon.  Not once. I’ve heard “the movers” if it’s a third party doing the moving, “a lorry”, or the 99% case “a moving van”.

I fear you may have been misled, perchance in pursuit of a jape, but unless you happened to be conversing with the right honourable Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, I fear the only citizenry sufficiently lexiphanic to use such a term would also refer to the common double-decker red vehicular conveyance as an omnibus, a spade as an earth-inverting horticultural instrument,  or a child’s carriage as a perambulator. These people are not commonplace…

Whatever!
Last time I visited the UK was 1974----a lifetime ago.
I definitely remember references to "Pantechs" in the local "rag" in Southampton, & in the "Yellow Pages" of the Phone book.

Strangely enough, the word doesn't come up in casual conversation, any more than "campus" does if talking to an American.
"Lorries" instead of "Trucks", "Artics" for "Semitrailers", did come up, as did "Motor" for "Car".

Pantechnicon is a term I heard a few times as a child in 1950s and 60s London, but I'm not sure I've heard it even once in adult life.

[SiliconWizard]

Making unserviceable, unusable stuff should be a shame that impacts your career.  Instead, it somehow seems to be something to be proud of. WTF?

Dunno, it probably depends on which side of the fence you're on.

For companies selling services rather than products (in the general sense), it probably pays off to make stuff that requires constant upgrades. Until clients get bored.
Happens even with the big ones. IBM has failed many software projects, some having burnt hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's like people just whine for a bit and move on, and IBM is still there.
Great business model.

[Terry Bites]

Well thats just people using mass and weight interchangeably. Not that much of a contradiction.

[Circlotron]

Women who wrongly accuse men of "mansplaining" while at the same time being unable to define what a man is.

[Vincent]

Cutting the ground prong.


#%*&$#!!   

[andy3055]

If in the US, Liberty Mutual TV ads!

[james_s]

Cutting the ground prong.


#%*&$#!!   

I don't think that happens much anymore. I have had the ground prongs break off several times though, they tend to stick much more firmly in the receptacle than the other prongs and being larger and round they exert a lot of force on the attachment point if somebody trips over the cord or whatever.

[IDEngineer]

While we're on the topic of plugs and outlets... If you're in the USA, who shares my hatred of those relatively new (and NEC required) "childproof" wall sockets with the internal doors over the prongs? Theoretically the doors are supposed to retract when the ground prong goes in first, but my experience is that you push and shove and try various angles until the doors just crack out of the way. Unfortunately, they don't seem to actually break off so you get to enjoy this little song and dance every time.

[jeffjmr]

Too many to pick a favorite, but these are on the list:

Fixing what ain’t broke.
Ads that say “Up to X% off, or more!”
Any sequence of traffic lights that are NOT synced.
Any vitamin or mineral or “health” supplement ad with the word “supports”.

And finally, the unfortunate reality that if a bacterium were to be discovered on Mars, the newspapers would have six-inch headlines, and TV networks would interrupt their regularly scheduled programs for this special news bulletin,

“LIFE FOUND ON MARS”

but we are supposed to believe that a human fetus with a heartbeat, is not life.

[james_s]

While we're on the topic of plugs and outlets... If you're in the USA, who shares my hatred of those relatively new (and NEC required) "childproof" wall sockets with the internal doors over the prongs? Theoretically the doors are supposed to retract when the ground prong goes in first, but my experience is that you push and shove and try various angles until the doors just crack out of the way. Unfortunately, they don't seem to actually break off so you get to enjoy this little song and dance every time.

Oh those things are awful, "Tamper Resistant" they call them, and since they're only required in residential construction you can only get them in the cheap builder grade junk which of course costs as much as good spec grade commercial receptacles. I refuse to use them except as needed to get through inspection. Thankfully due to only being required for residential the spec grade stuff is still readily available.

[james_s]

“LIFE FOUND ON MARS”

but we are supposed to believe that a human fetus with a heartbeat, is not life.

IMHO until it can survive independently of another organism it is not a life form, it is a parasite. Sperms are alive, we don't worry about those.

[Circlotron]

“LIFE FOUND ON MARS”

but we are supposed to believe that a human fetus with a heartbeat, is not life.

IMHO until it can survive independently of another organism it is not a life form, it is a parasite. Sperms are alive, we don't worry about those.

By that reasoning then, a hospital patient on life support would be considered a parasite. So why do we go to such great lengths to keep them alive? Besides there being lots of money to be made, in contrast to preventing a child coming into the world

[Ed.Kloonk]

“LIFE FOUND ON MARS”

but we are supposed to believe that a human fetus with a heartbeat, is not life.

IMHO until it can survive independently of another organism it is not a life form, it is a parasite. Sperms are alive, we don't worry about those.

By that reasoning then, a hospital patient on life support would be considered a parasite. So why do we go to such great lengths to keep them alive? Besides there being lots of money to be made, in contrast to preventing a child coming into the world

Babies are born helpless.

[james_s]

By that reasoning then, a hospital patient on life support would be considered a parasite. So why do we go to such great lengths to keep them alive? Besides there being lots of money to be made, in contrast to preventing a child coming into the world

That's a good question, I often think FAR too much effort is expended keeping bodies alive on life support, especially those that will never recover. I can see some reasoning though, society has already invested a tremendous amount of effort raising a person into a functional adult, if there is a chance that a person can be saved to the extent that they can recover and be able to live (as opposed to simply being alive) then it is worth some effort. A fetus on the other hand has had zero investment and it is trivial to make another. It is not even a person until it has been born, it has no memories, no relationships with others, nothing. Sperm are alive, the body naturally jettisons an egg every month, nobody gets upset about that. I personally don't see what makes it so special once these two elements have combined, it's not magic, it's just biology.

[Ed.Kloonk]

the body naturally jettisons an egg every month, nobody gets upset about that.

Oh yeah? Try co-cohabitating with a host of said egg.

 

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

[pcprogrammer]

Neither can I

Wait until the egg factory dries up, and live with it then

[Circlotron]

[A fetus] is not even a person until it has been born,

That is where we differ, but I respect your right to have your point of view. No flame war intended.