UKH

You’ve got Tesla’s and robot surgery and space-x starlink, but everyone’s printer plays up, they’ve internally looked the same all my life. 
 

Boilers are just tanks that heat water and myself and my partners is regularly playing up. 

I’d like to hear of other examples and why you think they have never really been improved. 

Gas boiler efficiency has gone from 60 to 94% in the last 20 years.  

Maybe it's time for a new one, or at least a service?  

Kettles and teapots and jugs that pour properly. 

It was fitted in 2017, never quite worked right!

I bet you this is one of those things that’s been solved but those items live in those really weird niche posh kitchenware shops, and have never crossed over to mainstream use

My car regularly claims that it does not recognize the key, but it just let me open the door

I then curse Nissan and all their programmers... possibly an over reaction

Can openers. 

Indeed. Save it for their key workers.

Self scanners in the supermarket

Not true. About 10 years ago I bought one that cuts on the inside of the rim not the outside. Result the opened can is free from a sharp edge, just like those with a pull lid.

The only can I need it for is Ambrosia rice pudding.

I keep seeing people complaining about this and I don't understand. Am I the only one that never has any problem with them?

Yes. Yes, you are.

Me neither they seem to work fine.

Yes can openers, my gf has one called Magic Can and we don’t know the magic word so it doesn’t work. 

Doesn't that just depend what angle you use it at? I was baffled by my flatmate holding the opener such that it cut through the wall rather than the lid; it hadn't occurred to him that he could do it the other way

I’ve always used the can opener to cut through the lid, apart from a couple of weird ones that wouldn’t do it that way. Surely the majority are designed to cut through the lid, which is usually considerably thinner than the “wall”?! 

My thoughts exactly. I think the main issue with can openers is that cans have got progressively thinner over the years and theres insufficient metal on the rim for the can opener to engage. It's often easier to cut through the wall than the lid. That said my cheap Aldi can opener is great!

Why can't we make a toaster deep enough to fit a whole piece of bread in and wide enough not to burn bread buns. 

Can openers:

You need a "lantana 2 in 1 safety opener" and to read the instructions before use. Problem solved. Fab.

it's time coper wires were all replaced by fibre to the home so we can listen to oldfashioned radio spectrum again.  I have to carry my radio equipment a mile or two to get away from Openreach.pollute.ether.co.uk

I long ago  gave up trying to open a can with anything other than my Swiss Army Knife. Others seem to go backwards - as useless as using scissors left handed.

IT support, started shite, remains shite. Same for IT security, started clueless, remains clueless unfortunately gather the power to make stupid decisions and get someone to enforce them.

Printers are infinitely better than they used to be, if you're not convinced of this you're not old enough.  However, corporate shared printing systems work on the basis that if we could put up with that shit in the 1980s they can reintroduce it 40 years later and we'll all amazingly be pleased to take 10 times longer and be charged three time more to do the same job half as well in the name of progress. I guess the moral of the story is a single printer doesn't really do a great presentation to senior management but the "system" sellers do.

Not strictly necessary. It's not copper that's the issue per-se, rather unshielded copper twisted pair. You won't get such ridiculous leakage from coax (see: Virgin/NTL/Diamond Cable).

Every frigging component of a bike. How hard can it be?

Yes.

Dave

I often resort to those flat metal camping jobbies. Always work, bit slower.

I was about to post something similar. I went through a number of fairly cheap tin openers that would work for a year or so and then their blades would misalign and they'd be useless. Then, about 10 years ago I bought a quite nice tin opener for about a tenner in M&S or John Lewis and I'm convinced it'll outlive me.

My teapot and kettle are fine but my jugs are a different story! What is even the point of giving them a spout when they're impossible to actually pour from without pissing liquid all over your hand?

A robot vacuum cleaner that does stairs. As soon as dyson invent that, I’m all over it.

Fridges and Freezers that don’t frost up and clean themselves. Both of ours and constantly playing up and pissing water all over the floor.

Totally with you on the kettle. We bought a Brita filter kettle due to very hard water; but you have to wait 5 minutes for the water to filter through. Annoying when you are trying to do a roast and boil several pans of water!

Which component, sram, shimano, campagnolo, MTB or road, 6,7,8,9,10,11,12 or 13 speed as they are all different standards 😬

I second toasters - why the feck they aren't designed to fit they very thing they are supposed to cook i have no idea. And why are they so bloody slow?

Sounds like you need a change of person then!

A pair of jeans you can buy when you are twenty, with adjustable waistband, that you can be buried in, when you are ninety three. 

Microsoft word and Excel are doing nothing now that they weren't doing in 1995. I still spend longer fixing random formatting than typing on a lot of docs, especially if they have been written on another PC first

Apart from using orders of magnitude more storage and CPU, you mean ?

Fair point, well made.

Toilet rolls. Seriously. Why do some manufacturers put soooo much damn glue on to adhere the first sheet to the rest, that you lose a tenth of the roll just trying to get the thing started! 

but they do look prettier

Thanks - don't think you meant to, but you just gave me the best laugh of the day

The amazing thing is that I have never had an issue with coffee pots.

But the end result is exactly the same as it was 25 years ago. Usually me filling up the swear jar.

Dictation software would be good. I think I gave up around Dragon Naturally Speaking 13...

( Not having a mid-Atlantic accent probably makes this my own fault .  )

Non stick pans that work and last.

Hot & cold fill washing machines with controls rather than programmes.

Yeh they should read ‘Temporarily non stick’ really. 

All the suggestions aside, we can’t forget the old planned obsolescence to keep the economy moving. Where would we be if phone chargers and iPhone screens actually lasted as long as the phone. 

Sorry that I can't agree with you. When I first saw this thread I thought "computer printers". I've been using them for more decades than I can remember with no improvement. The last one we bought, not long ago, not a cheap or generic model, is RUBBISH - endless trouble - and I've seen little change over all those decades

OK rant over

These was my thoughts too, at least in terms of commercial printers (first used circa 1985).  Personal printers have definitely improved though in that time period.

I use a £250 a3+ one, it’s the top one recommended for its purpose in printing the positives to make screen printing screens before you go to large format. 
 

Every now and then it’ll say there’s no (pink) cartridge so you take it out and put it back in then it will say no (blue yellow pink) cartridge, remove, put it back, repeat, I call it the printer game, after about 5-10 minutes of playing you’ll win and all the lights will go out. 
 

As company director this issue alone has been a major reason in me struggling to comprehend the idea of taking time off and putting someone else in charge. 

M&S sell trousers with an "active waistband", which basically means there's some elastic material that allows it to expand (very discreetly) because you're too fat 😀. Doubt they do it in jeans though, and if you think M&S jeans are ok then you really shouldn't be wearing jeans.

I've got some of them but at the moment I've got my weight down to not needing them. Might be useful in the future if I have a significant reverse.

Dictaphone.

Even after years of development, I still have to use my finger.

My parents have a Russell Hobbs stainless steel coffee percolator that pours perfectly, and I mean PERFECTLY.

If you examine the spout you can see how it does this (from it's shape). No idea why it works, maybe you'd have to be a fluid dynamics expert.

But if something has it sorted, and it's out there in the wider world (it's probably 50 years old), why isn't everyone copying it?

I’m transcribing and editing several hundred pages.  I’ve switched from Word to a package called “WordGrinder”.  Mono font, mono space, monochrome, full screen text mode.  For writing manuscript content as opposed to fussing over formatting it’s transformed how effectively I work.  It’s very similar to using ProText on my Amstrad 32 years ago, but with faster load/save than a tape...

Not the best choice of name for a word processing package!

Tbh the text part word handles ok-ish, but when there are tables and pictures as well I seem to spend days getting things to line up or stay where I put them.

I did think that if ever I wrote a book, I'd write each chapter as a separate .txt file in notepad, it would just be easier!

Toasters. They don’t fit the bread and don’t have simple technology to stop it burning. 

Boilers weren't that bad in 2000, even my nan's ancient Baxi back boiler had a 74% claimed efficiency, and that was well over 20 years old.

What I will agree is that combi boilers must be getting more reliable as manufacturers are offering longer and longer warranties on them. Companies are offering 10 year warranties on boilers now whereas a 5 year warranty was seen as impressive leas than 10 years ago.

It was game-over as soon as it smelt fear. The only thing you can do now is take it out in the car park and put a bullet in it!

Used to think the exact same, never an issue since i first saw one in about 2006. Always just assumed that it was the customer that was the problem, too fast, trying to shove a trolley full of shopping through something designed for just a few items or just desperate for something to moan about.

Until Lidl got them. Now every time I go there all I see is red flashing lights with alarms going off and a beaten down staff member having to sort something for almost every customer.

I always use a table with gridlines hidden to position pictures and surrounding text. Also use for embedding tables you want displayed by using a hidden table to act as frame on which you build up your object and surrounding text.

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers

(o::

I wonder if there is a typo in there somewhere. I can't remember now where I saw those numbers.  Generally there have been improvements.  

I have a fantastic can opener that works perfectly and is still going strong after circa 20 years. Unfortunately you can only get it in Germany.

To be fair, when Word 2007 introduced the Ribbon interface, a lot of the focus shifted to free documents from manual formatting. It is not perfect in any way shape or form but it plays ball a lot better to use styles as intended and only make changes to styling by changing what the styles themselves are. I wrote a couple of theses with this in mind, mainly because I could not be bothered to do them in LaTeX, and everything actually worked as it should have. As soon as you try to impose a particular look for a particular element, trouble starts.

I'm using markdown now, or bookdown for longer documents. Combines code, maths and text without the pain of a full-on latex document.

I’ve used reStructuredText for similar in the past.  Although recently I’ve been drawn into a wonderful graphical LaTeX and tikz editor called “Mathcha” - free online version and I got the paid desktop version.  It’s great having figures containing latex typeset text that perfectly matches the main document and is fully selectable and searchable in pdfs.  I’ve started using it to build UI graphics now...

Possible new contender - spray bottles. 

Yes, they are, they're actually worse! Doing things like assuming you've written a date when you haven't then not allowing you to change that.  In '95 they did what you told them, now they think they know better than you do, and trying to undo their crazy ideas takes forever or is impossible. My colleagues that use it a lot have been tearing their hair out for the past 3 or so years with Excel, and they're not even doing lots with it.

Microsoft Word 5.1a for Macintosh was the highlight. I still have a copy running on OS9 on an old favourite computer at home. All downhill from there!

As for Excels date presumptions - the number format buttons on the toolbar soon become your very best friends!