Your most hated piece of software

[rogerzilla]

Adobe Reader.  What a piece of crap.  It keeps requiring kernel-level updates for security issues, it takes up the same disk space as a whole Windows 98 installation and all it does is display pre-formatted documents.

I use FoxIt now, or the Linux PDF reader that comes with Mint.

[Woofage]

A secretary at one of my previous employers had turned her screen round 90^o so she had it look like an A4 sheet of paper.

I think my monitor can do that, but I've never tried it. I think it's a good idea for people who work a lot documents.

Alternatively:

I actually like the widescreen though as I can have two documents open side by side which is really really useful sometimes.

[Dez]

IE 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11. Microsoft preventing you from running the current version of their browser unless you run the current crazy incarnation of Windows is evil. IE 10 generally displays things the way other browsers do and would otherwise not make the list, but the fact that I have to use Win8 to use it puts it back on the list.

Currently, SMF because building the search index is going to take over a week and requires me to supply the admin password every 40 minutes. I could probably rip the PHP code out to do this and have it running separately as a background process, but I think the chances of getting it wrong and ending up with a useless index are high. Incidentally, it looks like we're in the top 20 SMF forums in the world based on post numbers.

Anything my dad is using because he refuses to remember what he did last time or even read the text and buttons on the screen in front of him and regularly expects me to stop whatever I'm doing to help him.

[Ham]

..... with some substantially larger ones available http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/

Same SMF version  ... wonder what they are running it on?

[Feanor]

IE 10 generally displays things the way other browsers do and would otherwise not make the list, but the fact that I have to use Win8 to use it puts it back on the list.

Are you sure? I'm using IE10 on win7.

[Dez]

IE 10 generally displays things the way other browsers do and would otherwise not make the list, but the fact that I have to use Win8 to use it puts it back on the list.

Are you sure? I'm using IE10 on win7.

Ah yeah, that's the other thing - not being able to buy Win7 any more, even if I wanted to.

[Biggsy]

You can still buy W7 from independent traders, but I feel sorry for everyone getting a new computer as they'll just accept W8 (apart from a few savvy peeps).

[aidan.f]

W7 must  be  around  for  a  while longer, my MediumCo.  is just  going  from XP to 7
or for  personal use  should  I lay  in a small stock of  £40-00 copies whilst the price  is  low?

[Ham]

As far as I've seen, W8 has zero takeup in the corporate sector. On the Dell site, all you need to do to get W7 is to select from the Business section. Probably the same all over.

[Dez]

I was buying online for a Parallels VM. Fortunately, Parallels gives you the option to add a proper Start menu so I can live with it.

[Feanor]

Wait, what? You could *buy* windows 7?

Anyways, on my recent Alienware lapdog purchase from dell's website, Win7 was available as a zero-cost upgrade from Win8.

[perpetual dan]

Framemaker.
Seriously, anyone who thinks Word is bad should try to use this piece of shite. It has such wonderous 'features' as a search dialog that is in a fixed position on the screen - even when that is obscuring a found item. I know someone who resigned when they were told they would have to use it.
Word, well, I can make it sit up and beg. Most of the problems are caused by people failing to use styles and trying to bodge things.

It has been a good 10 years, but Framemaker was great. Did what you told it, reliably. Mind you these days latex and a text editor are what I write in by choice.
iTunes was OK but (like several recent apple things) has got worse recently. I'm quite fond of Adobe Lightroom.


Back to the hating...
Windows 8 (came with the new laptop for the family) is counter intuitive to me and I've no motivation to learn.
MS Office annoys me by wanting to restart firefox when it updates. I only use it because people will send me office files. I tend to get sweary if I have to do anything beyond the most trivial tasks with Word or Powerpoint.
However "Agresso" is my current least favourite bit of software.

[Pingu]

There's a lot of cursing at work when people attempt to use Agresso.

[David Martin]

Word. Excrescence solidified.

Word on a Mac. Square that.

[David Martin]

OK, my hate list.

Excel. Any program that rather than display data in an arbitrary format rewrites it irreversibly is a work of evil and death is too good for the PHB who thought that was a good idea.

Word. In places nice, and some good ideas that might work, but the underlying structure is so broken it does not take much to get it to misbehave. Even Latex is starting to look acceptable instead.

SITS - Student information tracking system. Inconsistent, awkward and slow. Really is magic chicken territory.

We took the plunge this year and ditched Excel in teaching for anything other than basic data entry. All analysis and presentation is now taught in R (with R-studio)

[drossall]

Access. It does lots of good things and I value it. However, I'm not a programmer. The point at which you have to get into serious programming is all wrong. There are simple things that should be possible with point and click, but need a programmer.

To some extent that's also true with Word. I used to record and hack macros to do various things, but all that stopped after Word 6, when you started to need more advanced skills just to edit a macro meaningfully.

[David Martin]

Access. It does lots of good things and I value it. However, I'm not a programmer. The point at which you have to get into serious programming is all wrong. There are simple things that should be possible with point and click, but need a programmer.

Access is a nice (FGVO) front end that is far better spliced to a proper RDBMS rather than the JET engine. JET databases are nice toys, but putting an access/jet database on a shared drive does not an enterprise solution make.

[drossall]

We wouldn't use Access for enterprise uses under any circumstances. We've got people who understand SQL Server for that. However, from time to time I find myself playing with data ad hoc, often using Excel sheets as data sources, and building Access queries and so on as the easiest way of manipulating information. Sometimes I end up with queries on queries on queries.

If anyone else was going to be let at the result, I'd get the business information team to do it.

[Oaky]

Today, I am mostly hating Citrix CloudPortal Business Manager.

Fantastic:  expose an underlying standard CloudStack API, but filter it through your own your own end point, adding a layer of billing/management stuff in the translation... so far so good (or at least not so bad) ... then add in a spew of error messages about entities you define in that layer (bundles) BUT don't provide any additional API calls to query, manipulate or specify said entities.

 

[Jaded]

Access. It does lots of good things and I value it. However, I'm not a programmer. The point at which you have to get into serious programming is all wrong. There are simple things that should be possible with point and click, but need a programmer.

Access is a nice (FGVO) front end that is far better spliced to a proper RDBMS rather than the JET engine. JET databases are nice toys, but putting an access/jet database on a shared drive does not an enterprise solution make.

Access was written as a front end. That is why it has that name. Also why it is painful as a database.

[drossall]

Yes but it stops being a front end in the wrong places.

And it's not a database. Northwind Traders is a database.

[andrew_s]

Can I nominate the Windows "Search" function, which was never very good, but now fails to find even more things that definitely do exist much faster than before.
I've been reduced on occasion to copying several gigabytes to a unix server, just so that I can do a search that gives a reliable answer, and doesn't tell me something isn't there when it is.

[Afasoas]

cygwin is your friend!

But failing that, where users have lost files I've found myself searching linux backups rather than the wintel boxes the files were originally stored on to find what they are looking for.

[Dibdib]

A secretary at one of my previous employers had turned her screen round 90^o so she had it look like an A4 sheet of paper.

Yes I've seen that before.  I actually like the widescreen though as I can have two documents open side by side which is really really useful sometimes.

The holy grail, for me at least, is two side-by-side 4:3 monitors with fairly narrow bezels. On my desk in the office is a pair of 19" 1280x1024 displays. A higher resolution would be nice, but it's a pretty comfortable setup as it is.

[simonp]

1920x1080 or 1920x1200 work well enough with a single display.

2560x1440 is even better.