 |
A project to make businesses more aware of their customer experience, and how to fix it. By Mark Hurst. |
| About Mark Hurst | Mark's Gel Conference | New York Times Story on This Is Broken | Newsletter: Subscribe | RSS Feed |
Search this site:
Categories:
- Advertising
- Current Affairs
- Customer Service
- Fixed
- Food and Drink
- Just for Fun
- Misc
- Not broken
- Place
- Product Design
- Signs
- Travel
- Web/Tech
Previous: Parking garage ticket dispenser | Main | Next: Walmart website search engine
November 22, 2005 03:22 PM
Broken: Bad gadgets
Link: Ten to Avoid--the Worst Products of 2005 - Yahoo! News.
Including the "worst product of the year":
Samsung Digimax V700: ...We hope this terrible digital camera is an aberration, not a sign of things to come. With slow performance, lousy auto-exposure, and some shutter lag, this 7.1-megapixel camera never should have been released. Compact cameras from Canon, Sony and Nikon are far better—even if they do cost a bit more.
There's a better camera recommendation in the Uncle Mark 2006 Gift Guide.
(Thanks, 'Burgh Pete!)
Their #9 is kind of silly. I don't think the authors have a lot of experience with boutique computers; very few ship peripherals like mice, speakers, or monitors as part of the package, as retailers like Dell might. That is common in the high-end world. Also, their sole other complaint is that it is loud, which I think is an issue that is hardly unique to that PC.
I agree Maurs. So the computer is loud when it boots up, is that the worst part of it? If the highl-priced components resulted in sub-par performance, then yeah I'd say to put it on the list.
It doesn't even look like they did any benchmarks, they just said "No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor, high price, and THAT NOISE...must be a crappy product!" It's designed for elitists who care about the horsepower in their PC, and personally I'd rather not pay for a crappy keyboard and mouse if I have my own high-end devices (wireless, optical, or kb/mouse with extra buttons and features) that I plan to use.
Aside from that, the article did a good job of steering us away from lousy products.
Now THIS is a proper review of the computer:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1849362,00.asp
Extreme heat so that it shouldn't be placed near anything flammable, poor performance when compared to other cheaper, less fire-hazardous computers, compact design makes adding internal devices impossible, exterior shows fingerprints and smudges easily...NOW it sounds like a bad product.
What's broken is the .asp extension. I havn't found a decent browser that supports it's coding. Whenever I have to check my grades on the school's website, I have to use IE to log in because ASP dosn't work right in Mozilla and Opera.
Works fine with Firefox.
P.S. The "remember personal info" isn't working for me. Cookies are enabled.
.asp should just be regular html when it reaches your computer. All that it means is that the server is supposed to make some modifications to the file before it sends it, so that shouldn't cause any problem for your web browser.
ASP has been in existence for about 9 years, and for awhile it was an industry standard for displaying non-static content (along with CGI). If your browser can't handle it, I'd say its the fault of your browser, or it's a network firewall setting that's screwing with something. And like Roger said, the concept of ASP is that all internal code is run on the server side, so when the client gets it you only see plain HTML.
I agree with Manni on this one.
Check the code of the site you are looking at. You should see HTML if you view the source. The .asp extension tells the server you are requesting the file from that you want it to do something to the file before it spits it back at you (in HTML).
I can't speak for Mozilla/FF, but if it's a publicly accessible site (or can easily create an account) and you have problems in Opera, then post the URL on the forums (my.opera.com) and you'll probably get a reason why you are problems.
The Remember button is BROKEN for me too. I had to change my google autofiller to type in Bob as my name... but when i have to fill out a real form i'm out of luck...
Pittsburgh Pete? Pittsburgh Pete's is a Primanti's type-deal down on Bryan Dairy.
...for those from Pittsburgh and Largo.
Wow. I thought simply saying "first" was off topic... but the off-topic-ness of the following posts is staggering.
Not that that's a bad thing. After all, we already had a complete analysis of why the Samsung Digimax was broken, so nothing left on topic to discuss.
This "work" is getting tiresome. Is it time to go home yet?
Roger, Manni and Eddie are right that ASP (Active Server Pages, if you were wondering) are server side, but that's about it.
ASP == Microsoft. Contrary to popular belief, just because Microsoft makes it does not an "industry standard" make. ASP is an extension to Microsoft's Internet Information Systems (IIS) server software that allows the server to run Microsoft's VBScript to dynamically generate web pages.
Typical of anything Microsoft, it generates some gawdawful HTML that is anything but standards compliant. This is why it works in IE but any other browser that actually follows industry standard might have problems with it. Other standards based solutions that do the exact same thing, such as PHP, are both more powerful, more universally deployable, and use fewer system resources than ASP, but alas, they are not Microsoft products so there are some braindead sysadmins who think an MCSE certification means they know everything who won't even consider using them.
That said, I'm not having any problems with this ASP link (or most others) using Firefox on a Mac.
Comments on this entry are closed
Previous: Parking garage ticket dispenser | Main | Next: Walmart website search engine
first.
Posted by: first at November 22, 2005 04:12 PM