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A Mythbuster's Biggest Tech Headaches (and Solutions)
Posted by
Zonk
on Wed Jan 30, 2008 01:38 PM
from the watch-for-flying-HDD-magnets dept.
from the watch-for-flying-HDD-magnets dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Mythbusters' Jamie Hyneman shares his top tech annoyances. Hyneman runs down the little things that bug him about everything from tools (exotic chargers) to cars (useless features). He also notes that there's a lot of room for improvement on PC desktops: 'In addition to being buggy ... extra features tend to bog down your system by demanding more processing power and memory. Computer-makers: Don't load up operating systems with features and then make us sweat to figure out how to get rid of the fat ... There's another solution available to consumers: Switch to a Linux-based OS such as Ubuntu. Since most Linux OSs are free, there's no business reason to bloat up the system with feature frills.'"
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Submission: Jamie Hyneman's 7 Tech Headaches by Anonymous Coward
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No offence, (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:No offence, (Score:5, Insightful)
I love Jamie and Adam, but he needs to realize that engineering!=profits, hence all these annoyances.
Parent
Re:No offence, (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, it's kind of nice to get support for this kind of view from a celebrity. It's like "no, you're not crazy. Jamie Hyneman Agrees!!".
I am in total agreement with his stance on Vista for example. (I find it almost hilarious that MS now includes a movie editor, MSN, media this and media that, but still doesn't provide a decent text editor.)
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You've missed the point (Score:5, Insightful)
...because we're on Slashdot. We all know what Jamie is saying is true.
But he's near-famous. He has a show that millions of people watch. And he's saying that Vista blows, and why it blows, and that Ubuntu kicks its ass.
And he's saying it in Popular Mechanics. You see those everywhere. My barber has a rack of them by his waiting bench. So does my doctor. You see PM magazines all over a doctor's waiting area.
It's called getting the word out.
A lot of us here on /. complain about how Joe Sixpack has no clue about computer issues. Well - now Joe Sixpack has an opportunity to be sitting in a dentist's office, and see a PM magazine with Jamie on the cover and think "Hey cool - think I'll read that. That's the show where they blow stuff up. It'll be interesting to hear what he has to say."
And suddenly he's exposed to the problems with Vista, and the joys of Ubuntu by a person he respects and likes. Maybe he'll call up his geeky cousin later on in the day on Jamie's recommendation and ask him what this Ubuntu thingy is.
This is how mindshare happens. A war is a million little battles, and we just won one.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Screw *ALL* OS's! (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:You've missed the point (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, if you had spent any time AT ALL on the Ubuntu forums, you would know that. The only people who generally don't get help are those that go in with a snotty, arrogant attitude. Although even they are OFFERED help, but their own attitude usually gets in the way of them being able to absorb it. I have myself been a Linux newbie, and have even recently, well out of my newbie stage, gotten stuck on an oddball issue now and again, and have always been able to find friendly and useful help on the Ubuntu forums.
Honestly, that is what drew me to Ubuntu. While it is a very useful distro, I found the greatest draw was the near complete LACK of the classic Linux community snobbery that so often pervades web forums and IRC channels. Ubuntu users, particularly the more experienced ones, seem to be just generally nicer people.
Of course, I have seen their moderators in action, and have seen flame posts vanish within moments of being posted. So I'm sure that a crack moderator staff has at least something to do with that. However, even THAT redounds well to Ubuntu. It shows that the community and Canonical understand that good PR is very often a key to success. And that the web forums are the Ubuntu community's public face. So they work hard to keep it looking good and working smoothly by stamping out any trolls and "cult of personality" types.
Ok, I'll get off the fanboy soapbox for now. I guess I'm just saying that your point really has no merit, as it doesn't jibe with the reality of the Ubuntu forums that I have experienced on a regular basis.
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Re:No offence, (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:No offence, (Score:5, Funny)
Layne
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Re:No offence, (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Ditto on the charger for the Nintendo DS whose plug is a very slight variation from a standard mini USB jack.
Re:No offence, (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, there is. Getting L+R audio and video can't be done via USB and plug it into a stereo and/or TV with minimal electronics. Plus, there are ways to remote control the iPod via the connector, although I suspect that could be done via USB pretty easily.
I don't think they even had micro USB when the iPod came out, either.
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Re:No offence, (Score:4, Interesting)
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Shame he didn't... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shame he didn't... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Shame he didn't... (Score:5, Informative)
No, he "posted" it to Popular Mechanics, a magazine frequently read by people who will understand the issue, but may not have encountered Vista or Linux before.
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Bloat? (Score:5, Funny)
But Mandriva have never let a little thing like that stand in their way.
Re:Bloat? (Score:5, Funny)
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Adam (Score:5, Funny)
And another thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
So if Jamie represents Linux... (Score:5, Funny)
My guess is Buster.
Re:So if Jamie represents Linux... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Corrected for him... (Score:4, Funny)
Things will be getting simpler, and are already. (Score:5, Interesting)
In my car I tossed the 12V "cigarette lighter" from the dash to the truck. I also increased its power from a small 5A fuse to a 10A fuse, so I can run a reasonably sized 120V inverter (also in the trunk) to power a few devices on-the-go.
In the place of the dash 12V adapter, I installed a nice custom panel with 3 USB ports. They're high power ports, so I can charge a phone, a GPS receiver, and a plethora of other devices that use USB to charge. In the future I'd like to connect one port to a radio so I can play music on-the-go without my iPod.
In the past, I've had relatively complicated small PCs to run my music system, but I'm seeing more and more options for in-vehicle PCs running Linux. Eventually I think we'll see a system that works well and is cheap. Since we only buy used cars, tossing the radio is one of the first things we do, and it's at most a loss of maybe $25 worth of electronics.
There are many things I wish were modernized, standardized, and more open. First, vehicle information is very proprietary. Why is it that cars can't report status information via a simple USB connection? All the information is either there, or could be generated VERY cheaply. I ran out of wiper fluid two days ago (lots of snow in Chicago lately), and I sat there thinking how lame it is that the wiper fluid reservoir doesn't have a simple sensor to detect low fluid (it's a 2001 vehicle, not THAT old). Even that could be transported across a USB chain with regular updates. Heck, a $2 sensor could even sense fluid at 3 levels. Simple enough.
At home, we have a DC run throughout the house wherever we upgraded our power, and I'm seriously thinking of changing it to USB charging. AC in the home is useful, but so many devices use DC (and the dreaded overheating wall-warts!) that I'm shocked that more devices aren't standardizing on DC. 18V, 5A+, not a big deal -- but so many devices could use it (charging tools, video games, cell phones, even some computer monitors). Simple, without needed ANOTHER heat-generating and wasting transformer. My laptop is DC, too, yet I need the darned transformer throughout the house.
But I still see more and more devices standardizing in many ways. Over time, manufacturers are seeing that power is a commodity, not a profit maker. I tell my friends and family to stop buying products that use proprietary charging hardware. With tools, the battery situation is frustrating, but I think we'll see some changes there. I like the idea of having a standard 6V pack, and just adding more if you need 12V or 18V. Even better would be a "serial/parallel" switch so you could go from 6V 1A to 6V 2A or 12V 1A with the flip of a switch. Ahh, to dream.
a small 5A fuse to a 10A fuse (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Things will be getting simpler, and are already (Score:5, Informative)
Drawing twice the power than the wire was fused for is a good way to need another car soon. Unless you also upgraded the wire, I wouldn't recommend changing the fuse size.
I have a reasonably sized inverter in my trunk also, next to the battery. 1KW will power most anything except hair dryers you care to bring along.
At home, we have a DC run throughout the house wherever we upgraded our power,
This is not a good idea. Volts X Amps = Watts in DC circuits. To run a 100 watt laptop cross the house on 12 volts with less than 10% voltage drop requires a huge wire. Do the math.
http://www.otherpower.com/cgi-bin/webbbs/webbbs_config.pl?noframes;read=6346 [otherpower.com]
Don't forget a 50 foot cord is a 100 foot DC path.
To cut your loss in the wire by 100 as in a 10$ loss is now a 0.1% loss, go from 12 volts to 120 volts. That is the simple reason for the big inverter in the trunk. I can run a 100 foot 14 AWG extension cord and have less than 1% voltage drop in the cord to a 100 Watt laptop.
From the page "14AWG =
Now using the same cord and laptop but now using 120 volts. Instead of needing 8.3333 amps for the 100 watts, we now need 1/10 of that or 0.8333 amps. Our voltage loss is now 1/10th what it was or 0.49499 volts at 1/10th the current. We now lose 1/100th the power in the wire we were before while still delivering 100 watts to the laptop. Now the wire has a loss of 0.41 Watts. I don't need to boost anything to make up for it.
I'm shocked that more devices aren't standardizing on DC. 18V, 5A+, not a big deal -- but so many devices could use it (charging tools, video games, cell phones, even some computer monitors). Simple, without needed ANOTHER heat-generating and wasting transformer. My laptop is DC, too, yet I need the darned transformer throughout the house.
Do the math and you won't be shocked at all. I would rather lose 5 watts in a laptop power supply than 40 watts in the 50 foot wire from the battery fuse box to the laptop.
I've standardized on 120 VAC for almost everything. As a bonus, I don't have to buy special 12 volt CF bulbs at $15 each. I can use the buck a bulb ones instead. It's all about saving money. A 1 KW inverter is chaep and can be located very close to the battery to keep loss minimum in the low voltage wire.
http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11234952&search=inverter&Mo=13&cm_re=1_en-_-Top_Left_Nav-_-Top_search&lang=en-US&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&Sp=S&N=5000043&whse=BC&Dx=mode+matchallpartial&Ntk=Text_Search&Dr=P_CatalogNam [costco.com]
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Re:Things will be getting simpler, and are already (Score:4, Insightful)
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This should annoy him (Score:5, Funny)
There is a business reason for crap software!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember when the promise of cable TV was that you wouldn't have to watch commercials because you were already paying for TV? That didn't last long... the promise was broken and now you pay for TV service *AND* you have to watch commercials.
You pay for magazines and news papers and with the exception of consumer reports (at least that was the case in the past) you get commercial ads in there too!
It seems no business can resist the temptation to sell their customer's eyes to advertisers and other parties. It's a very bad business practice and one that eats at the trust that customers have with their vendors and service providers. But it's so common place these days that to do otherwise would be an exception rather than the rule. It's not an excuse for bad behavior, it's just a fact.
Dell does a lot less of that than others and you can certainly request that anything be loaded or not loaded as well. But the average consumer doesn't know this and so they are victimized by having their computers compromised right out of the box.
But there is a business reason for the extra crap-ware to be installed... they get money when they do it.
non standard screws (Score:5, Insightful)
What really drives me nuts is non standard screws intended to prevent you from opening your device.
(Unless of course you have the special magic screw driver.)
I really hate these. I love opening things, to fix them or just for the fun of seeing how they're made.
I bought it, it belongs to me, don't prevent me from trying to have a look inside if I want to.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Just recently I came home to find a cockroach in the LCD panel of my microwave. A true "That's disgusting, but how the hell did he get in there!??!!" moment. Well of course my first thought is to grab can of raid, a screwdriver and open the microwave up. As I get to screw number 3, I realize that this is not your typical screw. In fact, there is no way for my multi-headed screw driver to unscrew it! So now I have no way of being able to look inside my microwave and see if it's just one
Car locks (Score:3, Interesting)
Tool Batteries (Score:3, Interesting)
Half the time, I don't even need the power of the 18V drill, I just need a bit of Juice to turn a bunch of screws. Wouldn't it be slick to pop in 3 6v Batteries, and be able to toggle a switch to choose between connecting them in serial or parallel? IE, more power, or longer lasting battery?
Deliberate (Score:5, Informative)
Most of these annoyances are very deliberate. HDMI is intended to be non-interoperable and failure-prone. OEM Windows preloads contain extra bloatware because bloatware makers paid to have their crap installed. Tools use nonstandard battery packs, in order to sell proprietary replacement packs.
These aren't engineering failures. They are just examples of products that are made to serve interests other than the user's.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The obvoius counterpoint (Score:3, Insightful)
Since most Linux OSs are free, there's no business reason to bloat up the system with feature frills.'"
Since most Linux OSes are free, there's no business reason for them to deliver features people want (and hence are prepared to pay for).
Standards and poor design choices (Score:5, Informative)
1. Cordless tools and equipment--all with different kinds of battery packs and chargers.
2. Flashlights and other small electrical devices that run on exotic batteries.
3. Cellphones that all come with different chargers and power-supply units.
4. AV equipment that has different types of hookups and remote-control protocols.
And his other three points are all about bloat and poor design choices:
5. Computer operating systems loaded with stuff I don't want and will never use.
6. Automobiles with obnoxious electronics.
7. Cars designed to make it tough to do maintenance.
Overall he makes some pretty good points.
In response to his first three complaints, I don't think companies will ever give up their non-standard battery packs... they make too much money on replacement batteries.
As for complaint #4, I thought AV equipment was pretty well standardized already. All of my TV and AV equipment accept the same types of audio cables. I'd agree with his point about remotes though. I've never owned a "universal remote" that "just worked".
In complaint #5, Jamie is mainly complaining about the bloat in Windows (more specifically Vista). I think the problem is that Operating Systems like Windows have to be designed with a wide user base in mind, so they have to have features that only 10% of the users would use. It would be nice if Microsoft actually made a modular OS where I could uninstall everything that I don't use (Outlook and IE for example). I have to give Jamie props for advocating Linux in the article.
Here's a quote from complaint #5 which I totally agree with:
His main complaint in #6 is that he doesn't like cars that beep at him to buckle his seatbelt and he doesn't like cars that auto-lock the doors. Personally, I don't mind these features, but I can understand why someone might find them annoying. As for all the other electronics going in cars nowadays, I don't mind them. If you've ever driven in a BMW, you'd probably fall in love with all of the electronics. Whenever I drive in my toyota, I'm constantly adjusting the temperature as it's always fluctuating between too hot or too cold (I can never seem to find that comfort zone). But in a Beamer, I can set the temperature to 22C and forget about it. Some electronics I can live without, like those onboard navigation screens, but others I tend to enjoy.
And finally, complaint #7 is all about poor design choices (in cars). Here's his example of a bad design: "One late-model sedan I worked on required the removal of a front wheel, plus a bunch of other stuff, just to replace the battery". I'm not a mechanic, and I have little to no experience under the hood, but are a lot of cars really designed this poorly? I can't think of any car where I actually had to remove a tire just to change the battery (Does anyone know what car Jamie was talking about?).
Re:Standards and poor design choices (Score:5, Insightful)
Sort of.
It's more that Windows is designed with a wider base of user *experience* in mind -- they hand you everything and you use it. A la carte, the *nix way, is great if the user knows enough to go decide what's needed. My linux system can load drivers for stuff Windows has never heard of: Amiga file system management, USB-to-serial IC's. But 90% of the people who use computers will never need any of that, so the Windows system of one-package-to-rule-them-all, one-package-to-bind-them works great. But just try to get support or drivers working on Windows for any hardware that's not sold at Best Buy. (I bought a Philips webcam a while back. It works with Windows98. There is no other version of Windows that can work with it. But a tiny bit of tweaking and my linux systems, one from 9 years ago and one brand-new, could both handle it.)
>I'm not a mechanic, and I have little to no experience under the hood, but are a lot of cars really designed this poorly?
Other people have already talked about the specific case of the battery behind the wheel. Things I've seen on cars I've worked on: having to remove the wheel to change the oil filter, on a Saturn; having to remove part of the power steering booster to change the rearmost spark plug, on an Oldsmobile; and having to wrap the CV boots with plastic bags before removing the oil filter so it doesn't drip on them and dissolve the rubber seals, on a Subaru. I've been told that on some rear-engine Porsches you had to remove the engine to change the spark plugs, and on some '85-90 Corvettes you had to remove part of the intake manifold to change the spark plugs. On my dad's '64 Ford, there were no hydraulic lifters, so every 3000 miles or thereabouts, I had to relash the valves -- manually adjust for the wear in the valve train. I had to do that on my '84 Nissan, actually, but then all the clearances were quoted cold, so that wasn't too bad. On my '71 Datsun, they were quoted hot, so you'd run the engine, then quickly pull off the valve cover and start measuring clearances between really hot pieces of metal, trying to adjust them accurately. But the '64 Ford was the king of annoyance, because the adjustment was specified WHILE THE ENGINE WAS RUNNING. You want a bad time: try adjusting a nice hot threaded bolt with a locknut, while it's jerking through about 15 degrees of movement 400 times a minute, while hot oil is spraying out of the valve train lubrication lines, and you have to feed a feeler gauge between the bottom of the bolt and the top of the pushrod during the brief moment they're not in contact. Oh, and the cam was sufficiently aggressive that at idle the car was continuously backfiring through the carburetor so there were occasional blasts of flame from right in front of you.
Compared to that, what's a little hassle like removing a wheel to replace the battery? I was so glad to see that car go, even if it did have the hottest engine Detroit ever made.
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Going to make some guesses here without RTFA (Score:5, Funny)
1. Electric mustache trimmers far more newfangled than the reliable steam-powered models.
2. Local beret dealer insists on selling them in outlandish, inefficient colors such as "blue" and "red" instead of the more streamlined "black" model.
3. Technological advances in promulgating human rights laws make it no longer possible to keep hyperactive co-host safely chained to a radiator in the basement between tapings.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Of course, when he does get hurt, it looks more painful than Adam's frequent miscues. That shot he gave himself when cutting the line to his handheld grappling hook winch was rough...it almost ranks up there with Adam putting his lips in the vacuum motor.
Re:Geekgasm (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, going from the choice of the not computer literate to talking about Linux as a desktop OS, in a non-computer tech magazine...that's a sign of progress. Is that another crack I hear forming in MS's empire?
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently Jamie got some time between the last season and now to test out that Ubuntu thingy and he really likes it. I'm a Linux/Mac-sysadmin, I don't necessarily like Ubuntu for myself (too dumbed down) but my parents currently run it on their desk- and laptop
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Granted, she's not Catherine Deneuve, but hot body+cute face+understanding of physics and engineering is not average, not by a long shot. Either you spend too much time in your basement or you're banging Playboy models on a regular basis.
I'll leave it up to the reader to decide which is the most likely scenario
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Flamebait??? Give me a break. (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, if they ever get low on cash... (Score:5, Funny)
I can only imagine what that'd bring on eBay.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Ubuntu no better (Score:4, Interesting)
ATi, however, crapped out drivers that don't work for years. Unfortunately, the answer is that you're SOL. I battled with a 9800 all in wonder pro for close to a month under gentoo then ubuntu before I just dropped back and made that machine into a server. So yes, the answer if you would like to use your machine with Ubuntu is to get a better video card. Sorry you had it put to you so rudely before, but that's what open development on one side and closed on the other gets you: winners and losers. If only they were all open.
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