POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Internet frustrations : Internet frustrations Server Time
4 Sep 2024 07:20:09 EDT (-0400)
  Internet frustrations  
From: Invisible
Date: 15 Apr 2010 09:19:43
Message: <4bc7126f@news.povray.org>
There are several things that frustrate me about the Internet.

- Downloads with no size information. Seriously, is this thing 12KB or 
1.2GB? It kind of matters!

- Links that won't open in a new tab. So you've got a screenful of 
search results, but you *cannot* open each result in a seperate tab. 
Sometimes a new tab opens, but the original tab navigates to the new 
location as well. Sometimes you get a new blank tab. Sometimes you get 
no tab at all. Either way, I've got a huge number of links to 
investigate, and I have to do it by manually using the back button to 
get back to the search results. WTF?

- Network installers. You know, you download the "installation package", 
but it's just a 5KB executable that downloads the *real* installation 
files. And redownloads them every single time you want to install the 
application. Thank you, genius, the entire reason I manually downloaded 
rather than clicking "install now" is that I don't have much bandwidth 
and I've got 20 PCs to install this thing on!

- Advertising. You know the sort of thing. Excessive Flash animations. 
Windows that pop up every time your mouse pointer happens to brush past 
something. Every third paragraph being a bannar ad. Pages that open with 
"First, a word from our sponsors. (Click below to skip this.)" Are you 
TRYING to annoy me to the point of leaving your site?

- In a similar vein, "Would you like to chat to a customer advisor?" (If 
I WANTED to talk to the pushy salesman, I would have clicked the "talk 
to pushy salesman" button! :-P ) "Would you like to take part in this 
survey?" (How about AFTER I've been using the site for more than 12 
seconds?) "CONGRATULATIONS! You are visitor number 1,000,000. You just 
won a car!" (...do I *look* stupid?)

- Stuff which is "free", yet you still have to "register" to actually 
get it. Sometimes they won't let you download it until you give them 
your life history. Sometimes you have to give them an email address so 
they can email you the download link (and a bunch of spam for the rest 
of your life). Sometimes the software is "free for anyone to use", but 
each time you install it you have to enter a machine-specific "license 
key" to "activate" the program. (I.e., you can't just install it on any 
machine you want.)

- Products which utterly fail to explain what they are. "It has feature 
X! It has feature Y! New in v0.0.0.2.4 is features Z!" Yes, but WHAT 
DOES IT DO??

- Websites where every link takes approximately fourteen millennia to load.

- Broken links that pretend not to be broken links. I.e., you request a 
page that doesn't exist, and the server attempts to "guess" what you 
mean and provide that, rather than actually telling you "sorry, that 
page doesn't exist". Obviously, being a machine, it always guesses 
wrong. And so you end up with a random unrelated page and no idea why it 
happened.


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