“Halloween brings thoughts of all kinds of scary things. Anyone who follows high tech knows that you don’t need to look far to make a list of the scary. Scary products, scary ideas, scary services…these are the some of the ones that haunt me,” Robin Raskin writes for Yahoo! Tech.
Raskin’s list includes:
• Windows Vista: I’m not sure what the scariest part of Windows Vista is. Is it: How hard it is to just figure out which version of it you need? How to move your XP life over to Vista? How to find a driver for your old peripherals? The monthly critical fixes? Pick your poison-it’s clear that the chief beneficiaries of Vista so far are XP and Apple’s OS. Scary.
• iPod Docking Station for Dogs: This one falls into the scary pet tricks category. Bad enough that pets are wearing jackets that are more expensive than mine. Now their jackets are doubling as iPod docking stations. Still in the conceptual phase, the jacket has speakers on each side and a space for the iPod in the middle. The remote control is in the dog leash. “Full metal jacket” takes on a new meaning.
More “scary tech” in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
The doggy docking station may be scary… but at least it probably works, unlike the sucky Vista.
Maybe I can get an iPod vest for my cleaning lady…
Salsa, merengue and the Miele vacuum…
Ay yi yi!
Vista is scary, but the dog jacket is just too much, sort of like the toilet paper holder/ipod dock
And the Zune docking station will cure your dog of constipation. Please be polite and pick up any squircles he drops.
Unless your dog is already deaf, I don’t recommend the DogPod Jacket. Sensitive ears and a constant dose of Celine Dion and Stompin’ Tom Connors would quickly result in a dog that appears to be ignoring the door bell, the sound of the fridge door opening, and even Santy Claus coming down the chimney.
“Sensitive ears and a constant dose of Celine Dion and Stompin’ Tom Connors would quickly result in a dog that appears to be ignoring the door bell, the sound of the fridge door opening, and even Santy Claus coming down the chimney.”
WHEW! Thanks!
Now I understand why my ex-wife was such a lazy pig.
Microsoft Vista is a iPod Docking Station for Dogs
My sympathies to those Mac users who are forced to use any Microsoft product.
If you think about it, your not really forced. You could get another job.
I’m missing Zune Thingie in the list of the most scariest products…
Now all we need is doggie noise-canceling ear gear, with a battery pack.
I spent the past few days setting up a new PC for one of our offices.
It was the first time I ever used Vista. I’m not an IT guy, but reasonably experienced with computers so I took on the task.
Buying the computer and deciding on all the confusing Vista/Office choices was bad enough, but actually using Vista was even worse.
I’ve used XP at work for years and I had trouble finding even simple things on Vista. Endles menu choices and a million pop ups asking me what I wanted to do. Then after all that I had trouble sharing files with the main office because we run XP there. It even locked up on me twice, and Ctrl, Alt, Del did not work. I had to manually shut it down.
Despite all the articles about how bad it was, I wanted to see for myself….well, it’s not bad….it’s horrible.
Scariest product of technology of all time?
Steve Ballmer.
I love the idea behind the iPod Docking Station for Dogs! Why be burdoned carrying all that hardware and taking your style down? You wanna look good on the street, right?
Except, I don’t have a dog.
Ooh, maybe the iPod Docking Station for Dogs will be big enough to fit todlers!
Paris Hilton wants to know the available colors for the iPod Docking Station for Dogs. She needs to know so she can decide to keep the one she has or get a new dog to match.
Although, you could dye the fur too.
“Paris Hilton wants to know the available colors for the iPod Docking Station for Dogs.”
Paris Hilton is a docking station for dogs. With dyed fur.
@Dextroamphetamine
Steve Ballmer came long before the era of technology. Hell I half expect to see him on a Geico caveman commercial one day.
By the way, wouldn’t we all like to see one of those iPod doggie docking stations on Ballmer? Now that would be scary.
I have to use Vista for work. What scares me the most about it is its ultra-painfully-slow file copy, move, and replace functions. It doesn’t matter whether you’re moving files from your USB drive to your local disk, or from your local disk to a network folder, or from one external to another, if it’s something that would take 10-20 seconds in XP, it takes 5-6 minutes in Vista. It’s a very well-known problem, one Microsoft has been unwilling or unable to fix in the 10 months Vista has been on sale.
Pitiful, and completely inexcusable.
Oh, one other extremely scary thing about Vista: That Microsoft’s idea of “securing” windows against malware of all types is to put yet another OK/Cancel dialog box in the user’s face. This has been their security model since the early days of IE, and it doesn’t fucking work! Get a clue MS! People are still just going to click “Allow” without reading the message (because Vista pops one up at you 10 times an hour) and end up hosing their systems. How does this help any?
And what’s with the weird answers Windows has always placed in their dialog boxes? If it’s a Yes/No question, why are my options “OK/Cancel” (in XP) or “Cancel/Allow” (in Vista)? If someone asks me, “Do you want to go see ‘Saw part 19’ this Halloween?”, I don’t say “Cancel”, I say “No.”
I just can’t believe how utterly unusable and ill-conceived Microsoft’s products are out of the box. You’d think they do absolutely no usability testing at all, and that there’s no quality control department in the whole company. If you thought XP was a cluttered mess, wait till you see Vista’s default look, with its round analog clock and other “gadgets” taking up 25% of the screen and crapware trial offers and vendor-installed utilities strewn all across the desktop like garbage. Now that’s some scary shit.
So where’s an iPod docking station for hamsters – they could recharge my iPod while they run the wheel…
MW: ‘seem’ as in, “It seems Barnum was right. There is one born every minute.”