Annoying Technologies

Here are a few contemporary technologies that should go the way of the dodo bird as soon as practicable:

• Nickel-cadmium rechargeable batteries. I've never had a set that got anywhere close to the advertised 800-1000 recharge cycles before they failed, usually due to dendrite growth, causing the cells to short out.
• Digital cell phones. They can make a local phone call sound as if the speaker is gargling with ball bearings. They drop out at the most inopportune moments. Some radio talk show hosts refuse to take calls from listeners using cell phones for these reasons.
• Laptop computers. Their Li-ion batteries cost a bloody fortune and seem to die every three years, or so, no matter how much I take care to keep them charged. (I'm typing this on a laptop computer whose battery croaked two years ago; I'm not going to spend $130 to replace it, when the whole machine only cost $499 originally.)
• Cordless telephones. Most of them are made in China these days and they sound tinny. The batteries in many of them barely last an hour, or so, between 14-hour charges. Talk show hosts frequently refuse calls from listeners using cordless telephones, for the same reasons they refuse cell phone calls.
• FAX machines. In high resolution mode they can produce copies comparable to poor-to-average Xerox copies, but most folks don't understand how to use the higher resolution modes, so why bother with the technology at all? It's better to scan documents and send them by email. Compared to FAX spam, it's easier to filter out email spam, and even though both cost me time, at least email spam doesn't cost me printing supplies as well. When someone I barely know asks for my FAX number, I usually lie and tell them I can only receive e-mail messages.
  
• Coal-fired power plants. They spew tons of mercury, uranium and thorium into the environment, along with a host of other noxious substances, and they waste coal, which would be better-used as a feedstock for our chemical industries and for making steel. Sulfur dioxide gas emitted from the stacks forms acid rain that lays forests to waste. Acid tailings from coal mining leaves areas looking like lunar landscapes. Ash and slag from coal burning requires huge areas for disposal. (Thank you, Al Gore, Sierra Club, and the rest of you enviro-whackos, for forcing us down this path.)
  
• Natural gas-fired power plants. They waste natural gas, which would be better used to heat our homes, propel vehicles, and as chemical feedstock. All natural gas and coal power plants in the U.S. should be replaced with clean, safe standard nuclear plants, like the French have done, using our very own U.S.-developed nuclear plant technology and spent fuel rod reprocessing technology.
  
• Recordable Compact Discs (CD-R). No one knows how long they'll last. Some guesses are as little as ten years. That's quite poor archival storage compared to the glass plate photographs taken by Mathew Brady in the mid-1800s. My lifetime success rate with burning CD-R discs with music and digital photo images is quite low, perhaps 50%. That's a lot of wasted time and wasted money on blank discs. Also, like yesteryear's floppy disks, will there be any equipment ten years from now that will be able to read an 800 MB Compact Disc? (I learned only recently that a Japanese company, Taiyo Yuden, is the place where the CD-R disc was invented, and the only company whose discs are reliable as an archival storage medium. Some brand-name discs are made by Taiyo Yuden, but many are cheap knock-offs made in China, using forged codes on them to make the CD writing software think it's burning a Taiyo Yuden disc. If I'd only known this ten years ago ...)
  
• Liquid crystal displays. Even though the technology is mature and there are places where it is an excellent choice, such as in wristwatches, it really sucks wind in automotive and aircraft display systems, as well as other places where the devices are subjected to temperature extremes, high shock and vibration, or the need to be readable in marginal lighting. Marginal lighting may include full sunlight: I practically need to use a photographer's changing bag to read the display on my Kyocera cell phone. Another misuse of the technology is in computer displays. The images have too much color saturation and brightness; when an image that has been prepared on an LCD screen is viewed on a properly adjusted cathode ray tube, it usually looks awful.
• Inkjet printers. The print cartridges cost waaaay too much and have waaaay too little ink in them, plus, the print heads are too susceptible to clogging and drooling. I'd buy into them if the manufacturers would switch to separate print heads and large, easily refillable ink bottles, with small tubes feeding the ink to the print head. They should also have a locally-selectable monochrome printing mode, with a button or switch on the printer control panel, for those times when one doesn't need color and/or the printer driver doesn't have support for black-and-white printing. Until that happens, I'll stick to black-and-white laser printing; if I need a color image, I'll send it to my local Walgreens, Longs Drugs or Costco photo department for printing.
• Microsoft software. Overpriced, bloated and buggy, with some serious bugs never fixed, even to the day that the software became obsolete and technical support ended. (I'm happily writing this blog in SeaMonkey running under Ubuntu Linux; I've never, ever had a more reliable browser/operating system combination.) I've never understood how Microsoft management has allowed their programmers to get away with including "easter eggs" in Microsoft Office, such as mazes and first-person shooter games, adding to the bloat and potentially reducing the reliability of the product.
  
• Adobe Acrobat. Instead of a way of archiving documents in a system-independent fashion, it's become a moving target, a memory hole. Yesterday's Acrobat Reader can't read today's PDF files, and chances are that within ten years there won't be any software available to ready any PDF file, from the day the first one was created to the present (2008). Useless. That's what we get for trusting yet another private, proprietary implementation. I think OpenDocument Format has a brighter future.
  
• Internal combustion engine cars. Dirty, noisy, leaky, messy. Gimme an electric car with decent power and torque, and a range of 1000 km (600 miles) between recharges and I'll dump my oil burner in a heartbeat. 'nuff said.