Things to hate on Web sites

Recaptcha could b the most frustrating time waster because it is so unpredictable but there are other time waters that create disasters.

Recaptcha

Recaptcha must be one of the most annoying time wasting creations. It is only used on stupid sites where people are forced to log in for some compulsory service. Recapture uses your slave labour to decode text that will never be for your benefit. I am currently forced to use a site that requires 5, 10, or more attempts at decoding badly presented text images. If I have to go through the verification a few more times, I will stop using that site forever.

Command line

1950s teletype command line rubbish. If the DOS box, the ancient and much hated original DOS command line is reviled by most of the open source and Unix communities, why do they insist on subjecting us to exactly the same cr*p? They call it the command line. So what, it was the command line back in the 1980s when Microsoft sold DOS. it was the command line back in the 1970s when everybody except Microsoft sold an operating system they called DOS. It was the command line in the 1950s when America invented electronic computers. It was the command line in the 1940s when the British invented the first electronic computers. The British used vacuum tubes so it probably should be VTOS. Australians invented the first electronic computer using mercury delay lines. they probably used MDLOD.

One of my teachers, in his youth, invented a disk based on an LP record sprayed with iron oxide paint. He probably used used LPRSWIOOS.

The command line was history in the 1960s then the Unix world dragged it back because they could not think of anything useful. Hey, Apple made their first hundred billion dollars profit by pirating the Xerox Parc operating system user interface, the Zerox Parc mouse, and everything else XP. That stuff is out there. Surely 36 years later, Unix and Linux can switch off their DOS box.

Git

Why did I ever think git was an advance on anything else? Git is a version control system that invents version I did not create. I have used professional version control. Professional version control saves you time. Professional version control easily saves you more than it costs. Git wastes my time. Git always costs a lot of time to set up, always costs a lot of time to use, and almost always messes up your code. Based on my experience of using Git on several different projects, you cannot rely on git to do anything and have to backup all your code some other way.

CVS was very difficult to use but it worked when you found the right combination. You could save something in CVS then retrieve it reliably. Git often brings back a random combination of code. Git brings back some files as old versions, some files as new versions, and some files as a random assortment of lines that never existed anywhere on any computer.

The last time I used professional version control software, I could select a point in time, a change, anything I liked, and have the software restored to exactly that. Git is is restoring my software to points that never existed, points halfway between changes, and Git does the restore even when I do not request the change. Git has restored old versions of software when I requested the commit of an update. Git has restored old versions of software to my local computer when I requested the push of a new version to the server. A Git push sometimes puts the new version on the server and, sometimes, I can pull the new version to another computer.

If you were a professional photographer, you would immediately buy Photoshop because Gimp does not have 16 bit colour. Git is one of those products that makes professional software developers rush back to Microsoft and equivalents. The money saved by installing Git would not cover the time wasted trying to get something as simple as a branch working, let alone the disaster of trying to restore something to a known state.