5 Most Annoying Computing Things!

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers a few years ago i made a video called the top five annoying computing things which people continue to watch and to comment on to list their own pet hates in the world of computing and so in this video i thought i'd wade back into the discussion with five more of my own annoying computing things and i'm going to list these in the hope but at some point they might actually be fixed guess what at number five on my list we have thin scroll bars the scroll bars in modern operating systems and applications which keep getting thinner and thinner and thinner and hence more difficult to use and i'm sure some people will say chris just use the mouse scroll wheel well i'd say two things to that one not all rodents have a scroll wheel and secondly even when they do using a scroll wheel is nowhere near as accurate as clicking on and dragging the scroll bar now some operating systems linux mint being a good example you can go in these days and find a setting and make the scroll bar a decent width but that's by no means common in all situations where a thin scroll bar exists so please please please if you are designing a user interface make sure either you use a thicker scroll bar or have an option available so for those of us who want to actually use the scroll bar rather than just look at it as a nice visual accessory make sure those of us who want to use a thicker scroll bar have an option for selecting the same right next on my list we oh sorry we've been interrupted we just need to click ok here there we are we can continue as i was saying next on my list we have cookie consent messages which drive me mad those requesters that appear on websites so frequently these days to basically say this website uses a basic web technology are you okay with that now cookies are small bits of data which is stored on a user's machine by a website to enable personalization session management for things like e-commerce websites and also to track people with online advertising and i understand that because of the latter in particular some people really don't like cookies i get that that's not what i'm complaining about because if you don't like cookies you can simply go into your browser settings and turn all cookies off and given that is an option i find it intensely frustrating but the rest of us have to go on clicking on this cookies do you mind cookies yes i don't mind cookies click on it every time we visit websites there are billions of visits to websites every day probably where people are clicking on a cookie consent message that is an enormous amount of human time being wasted when the people who really don't like cookies have probably turn them off anyway and everyone else doesn't really care or they don't read it you know i i automatically just click yes regardless these days because i just if i want to go to a website i want to go to the website i'm going to use it so please please please can all those regulators have decided they want to navi us into being careful with cookies on every single site rather than turning them off universally in our browser please can those regulators change those laws can we go back to a situation where we can all use websites stop wasting our time and be a little bit calmer in our use of the web staying with things online at number three on my list i've got bloated web content or in other words websites and web pages that seem to be written without any consideration of the bandwidth and computing resources available to the average user now here i'm not complaining about sites like say youtube or netflix or disney plus where you go to watch hd video and if you click on an hd video you know you're going to use a lot of bandwidth that's fine you know what you're going to get when you use the site rather my complaint is with websites and web pages which are basically text documents maybe a few images around as well but when you load in the page they bring in massive image files far bigger than the images they need to display on the page and they load in loads and loads of code javascript something like that often not terribly well written and sometimes these days increasingly these days web pages start to play video files either as discreet videos or part of their background so there's masses of data using computing resources tied up with that web page and at best it makes the page slow to load and at worst it makes the page unusable on an older piece of hardware so this is bad for the user experience it's bad for the person writing the site i remember when we started to have the web building up what 20 years ago now and one of the great things about the early web is it forced programmers to write efficient code they got used to writing highly inefficient code to run locally on our computers because we got so much ram and so high level of computing resources that they could just write sloppy code here there and everywhere microsoft and everybody download doing that but the web was so where you had to think about what did you really need to transfer to the user's machine because internet speeds were slow and therefore the web was the place you found efficient coding efficient programming but these days that is no longer the case to the great detriment of the usability of of the web experience so please if you are writing web content web pages think about optimizing your images optimizing your code your javascript etc and please please do not start video content playing unless the user has specifically requested it next here i've got two leads and these leads have got various things in common they're both fairly new they've both got on one end a full size hdmi connector a plug or a socket and they both on the other end got wait for it a micro hdmi connector and the final thing both of these leads have in common is that neither of them work reliably even though they're quite new leads why well i've already told you it's because both of these leads have got a micro hdmi connector at one end and to put it nicely micro hdmi connectors are rubbish they simply are too small for the function that's asked of them now in saying this i should point out i am quite unusual in many respects but particularly in this context are unusual because i plug in and take apart hdmi connections all the time when i'm making videos plugging together cameras computers mixers splitters recorders that type of stuff so i can be making scores of hdmi connectors and pulling them apart every day that's not how most people use an hdmi connector but even so in use i find that full size hdmi connectors handled carefully will last for years and years whereas micro hdmi will last if you're lucky for months which is really not good and this affects lots of different things for start it affects single board computers these days the raspberry pi 4 and some other singapore computers now use a micro hdmi connector but also my laptop like most laptops these days has a micro hdmi connector and this is the laptop that i take out to make presentations with my clients who i used to before the world changed and i've had lots of problems plugging in to micro hdmi but the laptop i used before that which was slower and bulkier and heavier but it had a full size hdmi connector and a vga connector and neither of those connectors ever gave me any trouble at all so i'm one of those people who'd much rather have a slightly thicker device if it could have a reliable display connector maybe we could use mini hdmi connectors which are still quite small but massively better as connectors than the micro hdmi do you get the feeling i really don't like micro hdmi well i don't and so i hope micro hdmi connectors are something i'll see a lot less of in the future right we've now reached the top of my list and to celebrate i thought we'd bring in mr scissors and stand in the knife and also a rather large drill very exciting i always like using a a drill and why am i showing you these well it's because these are tools i use a lot and when i use these tools when i put them away after i've used them and i come back to them a few hours later or days later or weeks later they function in exactly the same way as they did when i put them away why do i mention this well it's because if you use say the windows 10 operating system and you leave it and come back to it it sometimes doesn't function in the same way it did when you you last left it because of automatic feature updates and so number one on my list of the top five more annoying computing things is automatic feature updates when a piece of software an operating system or an application goes online updates itself without asking you and then has different features to what it had when you last use it and of course often in the case particularly windows what really happens is you turn on your machine go to do a piece of work have to wait for a considerable amount of time whilst windows messes itself up you have to sort it out again get on with the work and it still doesn't function exactly as it did when you last used it i i find this intensely annoying partially it's linked to the fact that of course windows 10 is not an operating system it's a number of operating systems that changes twice a year to be a different operating system and microsoft takes things out and adds things in gives us new features apparently which many of us didn't want in the first place it's extraordinary i can't think of any other area of product or services where you buy something and you use it and its features change without any consultation with the user often for the worse we know that recently updates to windows 10 have been breaking things more and more and more why can't they leave things alone i accept we need updates and potentially automatic updates a lot of the time for things like security patches that is completely different to changing the functionality of an operating system or a piece of software and this isn't just windows 10 even some linux distros have a habit of doing things a bit like this now and you look at software like for example adobe's creative cloud suite where you're not allowed to use a fixed version of the software you have to keep updating regularly because it's part of the agreement and this worries me going forward because at the moment this just affects operating systems and applications don't waste a lot of our time but have we got used to a world where we think it's okay constantly for software products to be updated because if that is the case what will happen when we start to use more and more ai when we start to use robots in the home and in the workplace more when we have autonomous vehicles we think it's okay for them to be feature updated without the user asking i very much hope not and so please please please anybody selling or renting i guess these days a piece of software can we turn off can we make optional automatic feature updates and so there we are five more entries on my list of annoying computing things but what aggravates you when you're using computers please let us all know down in the comments section but now that's it for another video if you've enjoyed what you've seen here please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and i hope to talk to you again very soon you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 87,052

Rating: 4.9280858 out of 5

Keywords: Micro HDMI, cookie messages, cookie consent messages, thin scrollbars, thin scroll bars, bloated web content, automatic feature updates, windows feature updates, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, Barnatt rant, Christopher Barnatt rant, explainingcomputers rant

Id: HuF4NfU0k3Q

Length: 13min 16sec (796 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 20 2021