Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> - Network installers.
> 
> At least MS usually gives you a full-download link if you look around 
> for it.

Yes, MS at least actually understand that people might want to do this. 
Usually you need to look for "network administrator install" or "IT 
professional install" or similar terms.

> Most other software too.

Sure, for suitable definition of "most". :-P

> The network install is when you don't 
> want to install the whole package, so it automatically picks out the 
> bits that work for you. (E.g., it doesn't download the firefox add-ins 
> if you don't have firefox installed.)

If you're an end-user trying to install a service pack, for example, 
there might be huge wedges of stuff that isn't applicable and there's no 
reason to download it all. But as an administrator trying to update 20 
machines to the latest service pack, I do *not* want to download several 
hundred MB multiple times! o_O

>> TRYING to annoy me to the point of leaving your site?
> 
> Actually, yes. Once you get the advertisement, it's actually negative 
> value to have you look at the content you wanted to see.

Heh, cold economics, eh? Fortunately the TV channels haven't started to 
think like that yet...

>> won a car!" (...do I *look* stupid?)
> 
> Turn off your webcam. You might get fewer of these.

I don't own a webcam?

>> - Stuff which is "free", yet you still have to "register" to actually 
>> get it. 
> 
> That's what a free junk email address is for.

Except some of them actually check for this. And you still need to go to 
all the bother of setting up that email address in the first place. And 
often when you "register" you must also provide a real street address, 
telephone number, inside leg measurement and a few other items. Even if 
you lie, it's a lot of work to make up enough data to trick the system 
into thinking it's real.

>> - 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??
> 
> Welcome to open source!  :-)   [Or any free software, for that matter.]

It's worse with open-source, since it usually starts out as a one-person 
hobby project. Ther person who wrote it knows what it does and why 
that's useful, but they forget to explain this part on their website!

>> - Broken links that pretend not to be broken links.
> 
> Or a broken link handler that redirects you to a page saying you're 
> screwed, making it impossible to simply fix the URL instead of typing it 
> in again.

Heh. Certain versions of Darcs can't fetch from the repositories on my 
web server because of these "soft-404" errors. (Darcs tries to determine 
whether the repo is Darcs or Git by requesting a Git file and seeing if 
it errors out. But my web host helpfully tries to auto-correct it...) Of 
course, since I have no power over the Apache configuration...

Post a reply to this message