And this is different from any other classical instrument how, exactly?
Let’s not go overboard with this “bad design” thing. If you can’t think of a way it could have been made better, than you really can’t call it bad design.
OP: um, will a link do? It’s quite meta, I think.
BigT: Just a heads up. Went from lurking to signed up to warn you that the link you posted is throwing infection warnings from Avast!. May be a false alarm, but decided it would be best to play it safe.
Why are the back panels of A/V devices all matte black? It makes hooking up the cables ten times harder than it needs to be because those black panels soak up most of the ambient light back there and makes it impossible to see what you’re doing. I always end up holding a flashlight in my mouth with a standing lamp lying on its side on the floor trying to get enough light to hook up my speakers. If they were white it would be a hell of a lot easier to see. So why are they black??
Oh boy, my GF´s phone has a blue LED on the top that flashes when charging the battery, many a night I have restlessly howled “Won’t you turn that bloody AMBULANCE over, PLEASE!”.
May the designer of the standard English style power plug, jump into the nearest available lava pit, please?, those things are fricking huge, what are they meant for? pluging in railguns to a nuclear reactor?. I bought a Sanyo battery charger that looked deceptively the same as another one I already had, the old one had a little, very practical swiveling plug in the back, but the new one, almost identical in all other aspects came with a small plug and an adapter cable of the aforementioned style. The stupid cable and plug take up as much space and weight in my travel bag as the bloody charger itself.
They’re meant to have fuses inside.
Yes, fuses.
Yes, like the ones in the wall of the house. You know, those cilinders with the two metal ends which melt if there is a big power surge, so that the machinery plugged to your house’s circuits won’t melt.
Why? To protect the appliance.
But why protect every freaking individual appliance? Well, you ever hear of when London burned down? Them Brits take fire seriously; electrical stuff blowing up can cause fires, ergo electrical stuff should be prevented from blowing up as much as possible.
So why put the fuses in the jacks? Because the other options would be putting them in the jills (which would mean requiring nuclear-rated fuses, as you wouldn’t know what would be getting plugged into any given jill) and putting them in the machine itself (which would be much more difficult for the manufacturers and also mean harder-to-replace fuses than by having them in the jack).
Bloody big tho, that’s for sure.
Actually, this is a useful feature given the slowness of my player’s interface. Press the eject button, then do some other related stuff like go find the Netflix envelope, and only then walk up to the machine. By this time the disc may actually have ejected.
That slowness is annoying but also is the fact that the player’s manufacturer wants you to perform periodic software updates. I’m not pleased that the appliance manufacturers are taking their cues from Microsoft or Apple. Appliances should just work, not require constant attention and tender loving care like a freaking pet.
As of this week I will have to say that the latch on my MacBook Pro is poorly designed. All of a sudden it just stopped working. I have googled this and discovered that it’s pretty common, and I’ve tried some of the solutions (blowing on the two little holes it’s supposed to click into, cleaning out those holes with a pin), and still nothing. So my computer really never closes.
Make sure it’s not bent.
Joking there.
Actual bad design: Coaxle cable plugs.
My space heater has a thermostat dial that goes down to “frost protection” but not all the way off. The little light proclaims “I’m plugged in” for no reason. My old heater simply dialed all the way to a click-stop Off and consumed NO power at that point. Those switches are about a dime in bulk parts catalogs.
YES!. They had easy and fast “RCA plugs” for half a century that do the same thing and never cause problems. Why do I now need to use a wrench in tight quarters to rearrange my components?
Visitors to the United States have to fill out an I-94W form. On the front of the form, you have to put your First name below your surname. On the back of the form, you have to put it to the right of your surname.
On the new version of the form, there’s also a place to put your email address. There’s only about 12 spaces, though.
Well, yes, but that form comes from the same guys who created forms to ask for Visas where the space for “countries visited in the last year” is about half an inch wide and about as high as the thickness of a Bic pen.
For motorcyclist that only ever use a front brake, please come visit. I live on a hilly gravel road… snerk
Placement of the windshield wiper controls…
This made no sense to me at all…
My Samsung Blackjack2 When the batteries get low, the phone chirps and lights up the display every 30 seconds.
Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to initiate a constant battery drain that cannot seem to be shut off as a warning that your battery is running low.
My computer has the headphone jack right next to the power button. Guess what I keep pressing by accident?
The headphone jack?
Remember computer reset buttons? I had a computer whose reset button was very sensitive and was mounted on the front panel right next to the turbo button. Remember turbo buttons?
My experience working in retail electronics was that Universal Remotes don’t work. None of them, except for one or two of the stupidly expensive Logitech remotes.
We used to get so many Universal Remotes returned it wasn’t funny. Initially we thought it was customers too stupid or lazy to read the manual, or just "doing it wrong, but we tested them on the TVs and DVDs in-store and sure enough, none of the brands we stocked worked. The Logitech remotes did work, but they were so expensive most people figured that it was cheaper to buy another DVD player than replace the remote they’d lost.
I was going to write about this (Kevbo’s post so well summed up why to use front only). Yes, I use my rear brake only on dirt. In the end, the idea is to slow the bike and not lose control. Using rear brake on a sloped dirt road causes the rear tire to lock up and slow the bike, while keeping the front tire able to maintain control.
So, yes, I do use the rear brake now and then ;).
re: button placement…
behold, the Power Macintosh 6100. This was back in the era when Macs had floppy disks. Notice the large button next to the floppy disk. That is NOT a floppy eject button. Macs never HAD floppy eject buttons. But imagine that you are a switcher from the Windows world. Anyway, yeah, it’s the power button, of the old fashioned variety where pushing it is akin to yanking the cord out of the wall.
