Internet shit that never works.

OK, I’m placing RealAudio on the list of “internet shit that never works”. Does anybody ever notice how often you see what promises to be an interesting audio link, and it turns out to be a Real Audio file that just doesn’t fucking work? Is the technology a piece of shit or is it somehow titanically difficult to keep it running? Inquiring minds want to know.

Oh, and while I’m ranting about internet shit that doesn’t work, the next person that posts a link and says “Hey, look at this”, and demands that I register with the site before I look at it, will get a big hearty “eat shit” from yours truly. No fooling. At least copy and paste a teaser if you’re going to do that shit, I’m not signing up for your favorite navel-gazing hippie fishwrap unless I know there’s something worth reading on it.

That is all.

I refuse to have RealAudio on my computer. There’s nothing I want to hear so badly that I’ll install it now. As for the other end, the radio stations where I work have three RA streams. The streaming software (RealProducer) crashes on average, every two days. That doesn’t recommend it too well, if you ask me.

More related internet shit that doesn’t work - Live365. I entertained the notion of doing my own stream a couple of years ago. I could not get any version of their software to run but one, and while it said it was running, no audio went out, and then it would crash the whole computer. I don’t know how other people managed to make it work. I clicked on Install, read the manual, did as many steps as it would let me, until it crashed. Beats the hell outta me.

I DJ on a station that uses Live365.

Never had any problems with it, and it rarely goes down.

Let me give an “aaaa-men” on the RealAudio thing. Nowadays when I see a .ram file, I simply skip over it, even if it’s a personal audio directive from God. It’s just not worth it.

I don’t know how it is now, but a while back, not only was RealAudio a buggy piece of shit, but it installed all sorts of bloaty spyware garbage when you installed it. I refuse to have anything to do with it now.

Internet shit that never works, eh? For my entry, I’m going to have to go with in-browser media player frames. The only one that has ever, ever, EVER worked for me – in Firefox, IE, Netscape, Opera, whatever – has been QuickTime, and that’s a 50-50 proposition at best. If, while loading a site, I see a Windows Media Player frame on the page, I have to hit the Back button as quickly as possible, because if I don’t, I’ll get Illegal Operation’d as soon as the video loads and every single one of my browser windows will crash. A RealMedia frame will quite reliably just sit there and do nothing, but at least it leaves my browser intact.

For the love of fuck, people, either give me a functioning link to a stream so that I can copy and paste it into Media Player Classic, which, miracle of miracles, actually fucking works, or else just (SHOCK!!! HORROR!!!) give me the goddamned video file. Yes, I can do what I currently do, which is to fire up URLSnooper, aim it at my browser’s activity, rapid-fire click Refresh->Stop, look at URLSnooper, find the address of the video file my browser was trying its blessed little heart out to load, copy that into MPC, and have that load the video in question, but in all honesty, the odds do not favor me being quite that eager to watch your fucking video.

GIVE ME A FUCKING FILE or at minimum a functioning link or address. Do not use buggy-ass worthless pointless entirely disadvantageous browser-crashing media player frames. That is all.

Not to defend this, given that I hate it too, but it must be noted that sometimes one forgets which sites one has had to register for in the past. Let’s say there’s an online article from, oh, the Washington Post, which requires a free registration the first time you visit the site, but places a cookie in your temp files so that you don’t have to login thereafter. If it’s been a year or so since someone first registered there, that person might link to the article without remembering that the link will require registration for newcomers. Again, not necessarily a defense…just something to keep in mind that might help mitigate your unbridled rage. :wink:

Right on, Roland!

I’m actually surprised these days that some sites which insist on streaming realaudio deliver content which MPC with RealAlternative can handle – which wasn’t always the case. I don’t know who deserves the praise in these situations. I’m assuming everyone knows about “Real Enterprise” – I’m not ashamed to say I have this software installed on my computers, and it handles everything, just in case.

I usually am annoyed when people quote an entire post, but there ain’t a thing I could bear to cut from this.

Oddly enough, my complaint is the opposite of Rolands - It’s QuickTime that’s the buggy POS and Windows Media Player the one that works all the time. Of course, I’m a MS whore, with XP, Office, VS, IE, etc.

PDF files. My GOD, do I loathe thee. I have Adobe on my computer, it doesn’t matter-they always fuck it up six ways to Sunday.

It really is a pile of junk. I heard it used to come with even more mandatory near-spyware level software until someone made the execs at Real install the software themselves rather than have support tweak a special install, and they realized how crap it was.

Have some links:
[ul]
[li]Real Alternative[/li][li]Bugmenot[/li][li]Bugmenot extension.[/li][/ul]

In addition to Nanoda’s links, there’s the “PDF Download” extension for Firefox that will convert a PDF to HTML and open it in a new tab. It’s the only alternative to Adobe’s crapware that I’ve found so far (Well, beside’s Google’s “view as HTML”, but that’s usually a hassle, and doesn’t always work.).

One thing that really bugs me is when clicking something triggers a program I’ve run out of trial days for, which sits at the bottom of my stack of windows, causing slowness. Like, I’ll double-click a picture in Windows Explorer, and it won’t come up, but I’ll forget about it and move on. 30 minutes later, wondering my my computer is going so damn slow, I find behind all of my windows this damn mini-window thing saying, “Sorry, your Paint Shop Photo Album trial period is over”. WELL THANKS FOR TELLING ME.

Java applets invariably cause my computer to lock up for about thirty seconds whilst the JVM loads in the background. I don’t know why anyone uses them.

Yeah, that’s another one. No matter how many Adobe patches I’ve done in the past week, there’s always one more that needs installing. And a google toolbar. And it needs to shut down my computer. That @#!#!% piece of !#@#!@~! (a simple “fuck” wouldn’t cut it, you need a cartoon image of a guy brandishing a broken bottle).

I got to agree with this one. It’s one of the most useless pieces of shit out there. It’s slow, takes forever to download, and usually prompts me for updates. Really annoying if your having hardware problems and the online manual is a 75 page book, most of which is sections that are in other languages. May as well walk away for fifteen minutes while the thing downloads.

And Real Player does suck. Ogre basically summed up my thoughts on it.

I heartily endorse all of these.

Real Alternative and Quicktime Alternative are essential downloads for headache-free multimedia browsing.

PDFs can also be a nuisance but at least you can drastically cut down Adobe Reader’s interminable startup time by using PDF Speedup. This lets you strip out a large variety of extensions and plugins that AR loads by default that you may not necessarily need. The result is a faster and less buggy piece of software.

Ditto. I finally figured out that Adobe 5.0, which is like three versions ago, is the safest one to get. The worst hassle is getting asked constantly if you want to upgrade. But at least 5.0 doesn’t cause Firefox to crash (for me, at least).

I didn’t know there was an open-source alternative to Quicktime; thanks. The constant suggestion when running Quicktime to upgrade to the paid version is really annoying.

I gotta chime in with the PDF files…I’m so tired of people claiming they’re wonderful. No, they’re not. They suck eggs…and I also agree with the constant updates.