daily life: like my dreams

You may recall that the old Laboratoire had to be abandoned due to a biological incident and that work on the newer, better, faster, stronger, slicker, cheesier Laboratoire started in earnest.
As you can likely imagine The Laboratoire has to store lots of potentially dangerous fluids and the most efficient way to prevent a repeat of 'the incident' is to store these in a supercooled environment. This means that large swathes of The Laboratoire are dedicated to the freezing of liquids ranging from milky to creamy, and that requires a large number of freezing units.

While rebuilding The Laboratoire I ordered specially designed freezing units manufactured by Hotpoint, specified to handle the particularly toxic substances that are commonplace at The Laboratoire. Unfortunately these were not manufactured to the standards that we at The Laboratoire pride ourselves to uphold, and a few days ago an unfortunate, and previously very promising, member of staff was opening one of the storage drawers in an RZ freezing unit when it failed. As safety is of utmost importance at The Laboratoire she was wearing a state of the art hermetically sealed suit designed by The Laboratoire Skunkworks, yet as she pulled open the drawer it shattered and shards flew in all direction piercing a hole in her suit (the Skunkworks is now working tireless to create a more robust suit), and another piercing a containment unit enabling some very dangerous specimens to escape.
The biological containment procedures automatically triggered sealing off sector 19B of the Refrigeration and Freezing Facility and a controlled burn of the area was initiated, including the unfortunately infected employee.

Upon hearing the news that an employee of The Laboratoire had met such an untimely end I immediately contacted Hotpoint to complain that after a mere 5 months there had been a critical failure on one of their freezing units due to the poor quality materials used in it's manufacture.
Hotpoint boast of a 5 year parts warranty on all products, yet the company representative stated that this is a 'limited warranty' and does not cover any non-mechanical or plastic parts. I was completely outraged by this, they essentially stated that the product can be poorly made and break as long as it isn't the motor/compressor, the door can fall off, the shelves can snap, the drawers can explode, but as long as the compressor still runs they take no responsibility for this, even if the unit is only 2 weeks old, and even if the failure was covered (as unlikely as that would ever seem to be) there is a £100 labour charge levied against the replacement of any failed parts.

I'm not allowed to endorse or condemn an organisations or products on this site, I certainly can't tell you to never by a Hotpoint product because they are poorly manufactured and that the company unethical promotes a generous rectification programme with the aim of luring customers into purchasing products that are not fit for purpose. Though I can setup a new division at The Laboratoire dedicated to manufacturing freezing and refrigeration equipment that doesn't break after 5 months!

mini-moan: locking the stable door

The internet is a dangerous place. Everybody is trying to steal your bases so they belong to them and although sometimes people don't lose their bases due to stupidity, most of the time it is down to the world being populated with morons.

As a result of this websites handling information that could be used to steal bases often overreact to this threat and implement absolutely ludicrous security measures such at the UK National Lottery website.

To buy tickets online for the UK lottery you have to fund your account with a minimum of £10, this is often via a debit card payment. These details are then stored on their servers so it's quick and easy for you to top-up the bases so Camelot can make millions make things more convenient for users.
You are able to get your bases back at any time, so long as there are at least 10 in the account, but these have to be transferred to the debit card used to fund the account.
So what happens when you want to your bases back but since you funded the account you were issued a new debit card because the old one expired, broke, was lost or was stolen? Well obviously you update the debit card details stored in your account, there is a handy link on the website.

But this is where the security kicks in, for your 'protection' if your account has any bases you can't update your debit card details, this prevents somebody hacking your lottery account, updating the debit card details and putting your hard earned bases into their account. So when you update your debit card details the site automatically transfers any bases to the previously registered card and then adds the new card.
Can you see the problem here? If you have an intellect great than that of a mentally retarded dung beetle, which granted is many times greater than the developers of the National Lottery website, you will have realised all your bases have been transferred to a debit card that no longer exists!

All your bases are belong to some random person now!!!

daily life: against the rocks

Like an incredibly dashed thing against the rockiest rock on the dashiest day of the year.

You know how some online retailers enable you to configure stock alerts? The intention is that you will be immediately informed that an item is in stock so you can rush to their website and purchase it without a seconds thought, so overcome with excitement that an item, which may have been unavailable for months is suddenly just a few mouse clicks away.

Well, Tesco are one such retailer, and a few weeks ago I had duly configured a stock alert for a product, I'll leave it to your imagination as to the identity of the item.

Yesterday, while checking my emails I spied an email from Tesco titled 'Stock alert for xxx', where 'xxx' will be the stand for the item in question. So I navigate to Tesco's website like a man possessed by the urge to by some 'xxx', never has a man been so determined to get some 'xxx' action. Yet, I was bemused to discover that Tesco didn't have any 'xxx' in stock, the 'xxx' cupboard was bare. My first thought is 'xxx' must be bloody popular, it's flying off the shelves, people obviously want to get hold of some 'xxx', but just to be sure I doubled checked my emails and reading past the subject line it all became clear.


Sorry, the following product isn't back in stock:

The thing is, I'd assumed that the whole point of a Stock Alert is that until told otherwise, the customer will assume that the item isn't in stock, I knew it wasn't in stock, and explicitly asked to be informed when I could get my hands on some 'xxx', which means I'll assume there isn't any 'xxx' available until I am informed otherwise.

To make matters worse, out of interest I decided to check up on Tesco's 'xxx' levels today, and it appears 'xxx' is now abundant, though I have not actually be informed by Tesco that a hot batch of 'xxx' has come.

So it seems that Tesco haven't quite understood the concept of a Stock Alert, instead of informing customers when 'xxx' is available they instead inform customer that they there 'xxx' needs cannot presently be met.

And in case you are wondering, I had seconds thoughts on acquiring 'xxx' over the internet and am considering how best to fulfill my current 'xxx' needs.

technology: (English)Foreign

Yes, it is StyleCop compliant.

I may be English through and through, but I have nothing against those foreign people that come over here and steal our Software Engineer 3 jobs. But what does annoy me is Facebook's relatively new 'See translation' feature that aims to convert all those silly foreign words (and their 4 letter Y's) into good, honest, strong English words. This should be perfect, instead of having to open an external translation engine I can see the words magically transformed before my eyes. Sadly the translations are provided by 'Bing', and we all know how useless they are. As much as I hate to admit it Google just works so much better when it comes to translations.

So I conducted an incredibly scientific test overseen by a team of fully qualified linguists fluent in many types of 'Foreign' which involved translating the following English phrase into a randomly chosen 'Foreign' language and back into English.

I absolutely love blue cheeses, the perfect blend of creaminess and tart.

Google

English -> I absolutely love blue cheeses, the perfect blend of creaminess and tart

Randomly chosen Foreign -> Man labai patinka mėlynųjų sūrių, idealus derinys creaminess ir tortų.

English -> I love blue cheese, a perfect blend of creaminess and tart.

Bing

English -> I absolutely love blue cheeses, the perfect blend of creaminess and tart.

Randomly chosen Foreign -> Durke Durke Durk Durkah Durke

English -> Where am I? How did I get here? Please, no, don't do that!

As you can see Google only lost some of the subtlety, if it was a blue cheese it would be an under-ripe Stilton. Bing failed utterly, there is no way I'm going to spread that on my crackers.

mini-moan: buffer-underflow

There is a new trend lately when it comes to watching videos on the internet. I've already moaned about the various annoyances associated with consuming media via the internet. But the one that has really annoyed me the last few days are video players that only buffer while playing.
For some reason my super fast fibre optic broadband suffers slowdowns on occasion so watching videos online is like trying to watch your neighbour changing through a slat in the blind eating soup with chopsticks.
But that shouldn't matter, I'll just pause the video and wait for it to buffer then I'll be able to watch the whole video without interruption. Hmm, it doesn't seem to be buffering, my connection must be really slow now, I wonder what happens when I hit play. WHAT? Now it starts buffering. WTF!!!!!! (this time three just doesn't cut it).

Has anybody realised that this defeats the only point of buffering? In my mind buffering means to store data before it is required so it would seem obvious that you buffer while the video is paused instead of making me suffer 30seconds of video, then some buffering, then 5 seconds, then buffer and on it goes. Why can't I just pause the video for a minute and let the buffer fill to bursting?

Perhaps I am just too wise for this world, if you need me I'll be lying on the train tracks.

mini-moan: sync failed.

One of the most annoying parts of modern communication is that it is often asynchronous and this can cause problems because you have no idea if the other party has received a message let alone read it. Text messages are one of the biggest causes of confusion in communication as unlike a phone call which guarantees your communication will arrive they have a tendency to vanish into the electronic ether.

How many times have you sent a text that has disappeared? Perhaps the message you sent  decided to go on a little trip to Narnia and returns 20 years later without ageing a day.
This has certainly happened to me, I've known text messages arrive 3 days after they were sent so sending messages containing relative time information is useless and even worse confusing.

Let's use the real world scenario that prompted this post.
Somebody sends you a message that reads 'can come around 11' which then arrives at 11:24. What am I meant to do with that? Assume the message's flight was cancelled and it had to catch a later connection? Or maybe it was meant to read 11pm/23:00? Or the least likely scenario is they mean 11 tomorrow? Of course nobody would assume the last option was the intended message would they ;)

You know who you are!

technology: curse you

I'm pretty traditional in my daily life, 99% of my media consumption comes from the good old fashioned satellite dish the type of satellite dish your grandparents would have had, none of this new fangled internet that all the kids are using these days.
But there are some web only shows that I enjoy to watch and I often visit The Escapist for shows such as LoadingReadyRun, The Big Picture with MovieBob and of course Zero Punctuation. As much as I enjoy much of the content on The Escapist something has always bugged me about using the site and that is because when you view a video in full-screen the mouse cursor doesn't hide, it just sits there glaring at you like a petulant child. So you sit there delicately trying to position the mouse cursor at the far right side of the screen so it doesn't distract you, but you can always see a little white line peering out from the edge of the screen as to say "I'm always watching, you can't get get rid of me that easily". I've never seen the reasoning behind keeping the cursor on the screen, nearly every other site has learned that after 5 seconds you should hide the mouse cursor because it just annoys the :censored: out of people watching the video.

And now Youtube are at it, many of the new HTML5 videos suffer from 'cursor incursion', along with a stupid dialog that asks 'Do you want to allow watching this video in fullscreen'. Of course I fecking well do, that's why I hit the Fullscreen button. Why would I want to watch it in a 5" box and not the entire 46" screen I have available. It's not like I can do something else while watching the video such as filling in my tax return or writing a blog post about how annoying watching online videos can be.
Then Youtube really starts to pee me off when it has forgotten to show an advert, it's amazing how many adverts you now get on Youtube, so it then gets stuck and forces you to refresh the page so you then see the advert it previously forgot to show you.

This was originally going to be a mini-moan, but by the time I got to the end of the first paragraph I had released so much bile, so brace yourself a full moan is coming - Hoooowwwwlllll.

And those bloody expandables you get on websites such as The Escapist. Things that fly out of the video player and fill the entirety of your screen like that creepy little girl in the ring who lunges out of the TV. They scare the bejeebus out of me.

And everytime you watch a Youtube video you have to close a damned banner advert, and then often another one shows up, and another, so you miss the first minute of the video just closing banners. And Blip.tv is worse, they show up in random parts of the screen and just wont die no matter how many you close, and just when you think you've won, 3 minutes later another will pop-up. It's like playing an endless game of whack-a-mole.

And videos that have advert breaks in the middle piss me right off, you can always tell because the timer bar at the bottom of the video has little lines so as to say 'Hah, you know what's going to happen when you reach this point, I'm going to try and sell you crap'. And often they put an advert about 1 minute before the video ends knowing that by that point you aren't going to leave.

It seems like a backwards step, with HD PVRs and massive screen TVs or projectors we evolved our media consumption to a point where we could see our favourite shows in glorious quality without the interruption of adverts, and now I'm watching a pixelated mess with unskippable adverts that annoy me with stupid dialogs and banners. Progress, it's not what it's cracked up to be.

technology: safety not critical.

I prefer 'Coming of the Epoch-alypse'

Yesterday I had a discussion about the poor build quality on modern cars, in particular the terrible build on my Renault. But today while driving down half the UK motorway network I began to note all the faults with my 4 month old car. Just imagine what it would be like at 4 years.

Firstly the Carminat (what a stupid name that is, it's a SatNav built into the car why not just call it the Built-in SatNav, I guess somebody was paid a fortune to come up with the name), has a bug that means it reports the speed camera alerts in Kmph and not Mph, so go through a camera with a speed limit on 30Mph and it reports that as 18Mph because it thinks it is actually 30Kmph. It has no problem with speed limits for roads, just bloody cameras. So it flashes at you wildly when you are actually obeying the speed limit and is terribly distracting.

Secondly, the Multi-Function TunePoint (again what's up with the stupid name, it's the cd/radio/mp3 player why does it have to be a TunePoint with Multiple Functions) has started crashing after 35 minutes. Plus, despite understanding ID3Tags it will only play tracks in alphabetical order WTF?

Thirdly, the OneTouch on the drivers window doesn't work so when you try to close the window it starts closing and then re-opens. So I have to open the passenger window instead because it's more convenient and safer than hoping the drivers window shuts rather than just re-opening over and over again.

Fourthly, the cruise control is just bug-tastic. When you press the button to increase or decrease the speed it just chooses an arbitrary number. Most of the time you can go from 68mph to 69mph and then instead of 70mph it jumps to 71mph. And you can go 54Mph and 56Mph but not 55Mph. The most annoying bit of this is that speed limits for roads are 30, 40, 50, 60 and 70, but you can only choose 29, 39, 49, 59 and 69 or 31, 41, 51, 61 or 71. But then sometimes it will let you choose 70 and wont let you choose 69, it will jump from 68 to 70. Why? How? What?

Come on, these are the computer systems for a car, surely these sort of bugs should not be allowed to ship, just imagine what other bugs are lurking in my cars computer system. I could be just one IndexOutOfBoundsException away from a firey death. It's not on, any computer in a car should be a Safety Critical System no matter it's function because a buggy SatNav or stereo is as likely to cause an accident due to distracting the driver as the brakes suddenly failing.

By the way, I haven't spell checked this post because I didn't regard that as 'Safety Critical', so it could be buggy.

technology: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

For the last few weeks when trying to post to Facebook I regularly have to fill in some Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. I don't know if this is because I am posting links to my blog or because I am using my phone to post on a regular basis but it is really starting to bug me.

In the past this wouldn't have been a problem because CAPTCHAs where easy to read if you were human (and even for computers, old CAPTCHAs were pretty pathetic) but now they are impossible to complete. The other day after failing 5 and rejecting 6 others because I had absolutely no clue what most of the characters were I resulted to using the audio CAPTCHA which still took me two attempts. Honestly, I was there for 5 minutes just trying to post an update to my Facebook. How is this progress? If we have to make CAPTCHAs this difficult just to foil the computers we might as well give up and let SKYNET win because we don't stand a chance.

Below are some examples of the ludicrous CAPTCHAs that are currently prevalent on the internet. 

I call this 'What's up with my monitor?'

This one is 'My Head Hurts'

And finally 'I don't think I'll bother'

And just for giggles

technology: taking the easy route.

Shortcuts, in computing a shortcut is a key combination that is designed to make performing a common task quicker and easier. We all know the common ones such as Ctrl+F to bring up the search/find dialog, it makes perfect sense because I want to find something and find starts with an F.

Then you have the less obvious shortcuts Ctrl+X to cut and Ctrl+V for paste. Now Ctrl+X/V are chosen for logical reasons, most of the time you want to copy and not cut so Ctrl+C is copy (copy starts with a C you know), now after copying you want to paste and V is right next to C on a keyboard so just move your finger and everything is jazzy. Now Ctrl-X, well that's because X is the other side of C, so it's just convenient.

Anyway, I'm not here to compliment well chosen shortcuts, oh no, I am here to shame the stupidly chosen shortcuts.

Let's start with Google Chrome because according to the statistics for my blog that is the second most popular browser and also my browser of choice, if you are reading this post in Google Chrome you can sleep safe in the knowledge you have a tgwmcm approved browser and if any companies out there would like to join the 'Approved by tgwmcm' programme please send me a cheque for £1000 and I will officially endorse your product on my blog. But have you ever wondered what the shortcut to open the download history page is, logic would dictate that Ctrl+D would show downloads (download starts with a D obviously). Give it a try, I'll wait. Hah, got you , you just bookmarked my blog because Ctrl+D in Chrome bookmarks the currently opened tab. In what language does the word for bookmark start with a D because in English it doesn't even contain a D? So now you are asking what shortcut does open the download history, maybe their isn't a shortcut for it and they ran out of letters by the time they got to Bookmarks and had to use D. There is actually a shortcut for downloads, Ctrl+J. Ctrl+fecking+J, downloads certainly doesn't contain a J so where'd they get that one from?

So now you ask if Ctrl+J is downloads because Ctrl+D is bookmarks what did they map Ctrl+B to because obviously Ctrl+B was in use so they used Ctrl+D for bookmark instead of downloads. Well Ctrl+B isn't a bloody shortcut in Google Chrome and it just boggles the mind that this ever made it through usability testing.

And it gets worse, if you ever used the Perforce source control client, or more specifically P4Diff the shortcuts are even more bizarre. Atleast Chrome stuck with Ctrl+<letter>, P4Diff decided to eschew (that means to deliberately avoid using for my Lithuanian readers) letters in favour of numbers. If you want to go forward you use Ctrl+2 and backwards is Ctrl+1. WHAT? Why not Ctrl+N(ext) and Ctrl+B(ack), even Ctrl+<Left><Right><Up><Down> would have made more sense although it would have seemed like you were playing Dance Dance Revolution when performing a particularly complex diffing operation.

In summary it's counter intuative to add any shortcut that is harder to remember or use than completing the Kobayashi Maru.

technology: live for the likes.

I have a confession to make - I have become addicted to 'the likes'.
Something snapped in me one day and now I am completely dependent on the little notification that pops up on Facebook to indicate somebody likes my post, picture or link.
In fact I sit their staring at my computer screen waiting for the notification to reassure me that I am indeed valued by some individual that I really don't know that well. It has reached the point where I will post any random crap in the vein hope that somebody will hit that little thumb icon, most likely out of pity, just to brighten up my sad and pathetic life.

I really need help, for years I was able to let the whole social networking craze pass me by, dismissing it as something stupid people do. But now I am actively participating, but worse than that I don't even have any friends to socialise or network with and that just makes it even more pointless.

I wonder what happens when you like your own post?

technology: landline is king. long live the landline.

Like many of you today I woke up and was unable to make a phone call from my mobile. At first I thought the phone was broken as it has been crashing a bit lately, but after resorting to a landline and then surfing the internet via a landline based ADSL connection I discovered that O2s network for most of the South East of England is down due to an 'equipment theft'.

This is just another reason why being completely reliant on a mobile phone is always going to result in tragedy, and no matter how hard the industry argues, landlines cannot be fully replaced with a 'cellular' network.

So take today as a warning, mobile networks fail, and they fail bad. The landline phone is still king.

technology: a series of tubes.

It seems that everybody is watching TV on the internet. It is being sold as a convenient way to watch anything at any time. This is of course a lie, it's actually a fantastic way for broadcasters to mitigate PVRs and cut costs.
I record practically everything I watch, much of it in HD. Broadcasters hate this because HD is expensive to produce, edit and then distribute. Secondly, they hate that I can fast forward all the adverts. Broadcasters aren't making these shows as a charity, they are getting money from advertisers which has been dwindling because TV advertising is less effective than ever.

But enter the internet, this provides a cheap way to send sub-standard resolution video to you and it also prevents you fast forwarding the adverts. You try skipping the adverts on 4oD, you can't. So the broadcasters can prove how many people are watching their adverts and therefore charge more to the advertisers, and because the quality of streamed video is often far below broadcast they save a fortune.

So next time you think that the broadcasters are doing you a favour by letting you stream their shows, just remember that you are doing exactly what they want you to do.

technology: the sincerest form of flattery

I wasn't actually planning to do this post. I haven't actually used Open Office in years since it corrupted a lot of my documents. But after an avid reader pointed out the Open Office developers blatant attempt to rip-off MS I just had to critique.

I was one of the few that liked the Office 2007 Ribbon, and with MS incorporating it in Windows 7 even those that didn't are stuck with it.
Realising that the Ribbon is actually pretty good, Sun/Oracle decided to shoehorn it into Open Office. If any of you have written Java (which Open Office is written in), you will know that, to put it politely, it sucks in the UI department, so it was never going to look pretty. But not even Lucifer himself could have created such an abomination, a sight so abhorrent that to look upon it is to peer into the darkest abyss of humanity.

It is actually so awful that I have had to overlay it on Office 2010, because to look upon it's entirety will drive the sanity from you. Just look what it did to my beloved dog, I hear she is now ruler of a middle-east nation.

So ignoring the fact that Open Office is not very good, using it will turn you into a drooling lunatic, destined to live the rest of your existence with the knowledge you have seen the worst man can produce, no longer able to see all the beauty in the world.

technology: playing with fire

I have mentioned the irrational hatred that exists for Microsoft in the past, and never is this more prevalent than with Internet Browsers. Yes, IE6 was pretty pants, but IE7 and IE8 weren't bad.
Many years ago I switched to Firefox, and at the time it was much better than Microsofts offerings. But I started to get annoyed by how damned slow Firefox was , it made IE8 seem snappy and caused the only BSODs I have had on Vista and Windows 7. I soon jumped over to Google's Chrome and I have been loving it ever since. I've also had a brief play with IE 9 and it's pretty good to, and I see no real reason why you wouldn't use IE9 to read my musing.

But recently I've been doing some web development and I've been forced to use Firefox, and I've hated every moment of it. It's just so clunky and regularly hangs, it's like using IE6, but atleast with IE6 I was on a 56k dial-up connection so the browser was the least of my problems.
Yet, there are thousands out there who feel they have earned their geek-cred with statements like

IE is junk, Firefox FTW! 

And we all know the EU's opinions on IE, yet they haven't yet explained how you are meant to download their beloved Firefox if Windows didn't ship with IE.

Any unbiased individual will have noticed that Firefox has turned into the buggy, crash prone and incredibly bloated software that the community rightly accused IE of being.
But where Microsoft have learned from the communities concerns, and from Google's barebones Chrome, Mozilla has become complacent while legions of loyal 'fans' spread misinformation as they attempt to make millions join the cult of Firefox. I doubt few of the Firefox users have even used the browsers they claim Firefox is superior to.

So if you are reading this with Firefox, I advise you to quickly download one of the alternatives in the 30 seconds you have before your browser hangs for the 134th time this hour.



Next time, Open Office and why is sucks and GIMP really pisses me off too.

technology: welcome to the world of yesterday.

Technology sure does move fast, and as William Shatner will tell you we can only imagine the miracles that are to come.
Shatner's Toupee would have flown off his head if somebody had told him that in the year 2011 I would be typing this message, and in mere milliseconds somebody anywhere in the world would be able to read it. Not that anybody is actually reading this nonsense.

I sure would like to know what magic those 2 buttons on that phone will be used for. One can only imagine, but I bet if you press them somebody will commission a decent Star Trek TV Series that doesn't get cancelled after 4 years.

technology: development by divination.

Web development is a lucrative business and as web technologies have tried to meet the needs of users old approaches have been deprecated in the name of usability.

One example of this is Tables, back in the 90s every website was built around tables, if you need to position something on a page you used a table. It was messy and more than a little unreliable, but then came the DIV, a neat little box that you can position anywhere on a page, and automatically manoeuvre based on the screen size and resolution.
But with great flexibility comes great annoyance, and web development has been reduced to a hair pulling procedure of messing with CSS, floating here, clearing there. After 20 minutes of trying to float a div at the bottom of the screen you'll be curled up in the corner of the room, rocking back and forth in a puddle of your own drool.

There is only one think that can bring you back from the edge in such scenarios

technology: echo "Hello World"

This post has been sparked by two things.
Firstly, a brilliantly funny video from LoadingReadyRun.
Secondly, the most pointless device I have ever seen.

It is vogue to despise Microsoft because they are an evil corporation that is destroying competition, as a result more and more companies are turning to 'Open Source' solutions as a way to save licensing and attract the 'trendy' market who want to lord it over their Windows using friends because they run 'teh linux'.
But as netbooks sales are falling manufacturers need more  devices to run linux. That sentence just went on forever.

Enter Linux phones, and I am not talking about Android. Motorola have hailed in a new device that can run a full linux distribution. But how can you run Linux on a 2" screen with no buttons or mouse, you can't it just isn't possible, so to get around this Motorola will sell you a laptop which you plug your Linux powered phone into.

When you have to do this to make your device run Linux it's time to give up on the idea, when your phone looks like this you might as well just carry around a laptop. It's the complete opposite of convergence.

technology: a fool and their money.

With so much jargon bandied about these days it is easy for organisations with purely financial interests to extort money from the clueless. The technology market is probably the best case of such activity, with companies and magazines preying on the ignorant with massive financial rewards.
What Hi-Fi are notorious for ridiculous reviews with the sole purpose of keeping advertisers happy, and the infamous Denon Link  which is nothing more than a $500 Cat 5 cable is a prime example.
I thought I had seen everything, but whilst reading this thread (which I suggest you check out) I came across some hilarious products of which I will detail just a few.

Firstly, the Russ Andrews 'Audio Desk', that claims to improve the quality of your CD audio and DVD video by cutting a massive grove in the disc. The last thing any sane person would do is cut a massive chunk out of a DVD spinning at hundreds of RPM.
Another Russ Andrews product is a CD cleaner that can magically make your favourite artist sing better. Through the power of magic this cleaner can modify the data encoded on your CD to make listening to Björk even better.


There is so much of this crud that I can't mention it all, in future I'll try to collect together a more definitive list. But before I leave you I'll just give you a link to an investigation the Advertising Standard Agency are conducting into Russ Andrews, they must be waiting for a new delivery of Chappie.

technology: Should have gone to Specsavers.

Keeping up with technology can be difficult for even the most technologically minded individual, new buzz words are thought up by marketing to make 10 year old technology seem new and exciting, just look at how the Apple Newton iPhone that has revolutionised the way you don't make phone calls.

I'm sure everybody and their dog has heard the 3D buzzword, how 3D can turn even the most pathetic plot into the 'Greatest Movie Experience Evar' it's all about 'Perspective' you know.

Perhaps this is true, but like many of you out there I wear corrective lenses and trying to wear active shutters is like balancing a hippo on top of the Eiffel Tower.

In truthiness 3D was reintroduced a few years back to try and curb the haemorrhaging numbers attending the cinema (which has so far failed miserably). The TV manufacturers jumped on it as an easy way to beat the spiralling costs incurred in pursuit of improving LCD technology by simply updating the picture engines in their existing models and killing off the dynamic 3LED back-lights that were costing them a fortune.