1. Why can’t anyone build a portable media player that is both easy to use, elegant, and not crippled by DRM or tied to crappy software in some way?  I have a tiny Samsung flash based player that is smaller than the ipod shuffle, has an lcd, lets me listen to the radio, lets me record the radio if I want, and allows me to load mp3s on it without using itunes or anything else.  I love it.  It is ridiculously complicated for what it does though.
2. Ipods are cool for being severely limited in what apple allows you to do with them; however, you have to have itunes in order to use them (unless you want to hack it and make it more complicated).  Itunes would be cool if it didn’t require me to do a 70MB download every time I open it.  Oh yea, and itunes is packaged with Quicktime and now Safari.  If you want one of the three and not the others then you have to jump through hoops.  That’s retarded.  I have actually made a conscious effort to not use apple products anymore because of this seemingly minor complaint.  I can’t tell you how calming it has been.  I actually payed $20 for winamp and every time I open it and it doesn’t comsume all of my computers resources and tell me it needs to update I smile.
3. Another piece of software that loves to update is Adobe Acrobat.  This one is unforgivable.  There is no reason that this ridiculously enormous program should borg my computer immediately on boot up and require as much interaction as it does.  Every time I need to open a pdf file I have to close or acknowledge 3 or 4 dialog boxes worth of crap.  I uninstalled it and am running a program called Foxit Reader.  It is everything Acrobat should be.
4. Where is the software for Blackberries that can stream internet radio and Pandora?  I know you can show me examples of it but it won’t be easy to get running on a blackberry.  Thus far I have found nothing that actually works.  Why is everything hard to do on cel phones for that matter?  What a sea change it would be if cel phone companies got the networking in place to compete with cable companies for streaming media and providing internet.  Oh that is right, Cel phone companies want complete control over what I do with my phone that I pay for and the software and services that I pay for and are willing to cripple their product to protect that.  I pay for it jackoffs, let me do what I want with it and let developers build cool software that will do what I want to do.  That brings me to Comcast.
5. Comcast throttles my internet that I pay $50 a month for on top of the other $150 I pay for other services.  I get 300kbps uploads for about a minute before it throttles back to 45kbps.  I hate Comcast for this.  It makes it very hard to do my job which often requires uploading of very large files.  I am leaving these bastards the instant I have another option (cel phones should be able to stream video and do internet by now and it should be easy… cables companies should be scrambling to keep customers and I look forward to the day when they have to be nice to me because their competition is putting them out of business).
6. Logitech Squeezebox is a cool idea.  It is completely overpriced and starts chopping audio and becoming unresponsive after a few hours.  My wife’s salon had what should have been the perfect device.  Logitech support blamed the router.  It’s an internet device guys, you better have the router thing sorted out, especially when all you’re doing is streaming audio.
7. Digidesign’s 002 is a wonderful piece of hardware if you use ProTools.  If you want to use any other ASIO software on it though you’re in for frustration.  I tried using Ableton Live 7 through it and couldn’t get the clock to stay constant.  It jumped around constantly while recording and the latency had to be up really high to even get it to behave a little bit.  I tried it with 2 different other ASIO firewire devices and could set the latency to 128 samples without so much as a hickup.  Why do companies insist of crippling their product in some way if you use it with another vendor’s product?  I will be weaning myself from ProTools over the next year.
8. All virus software is worse than the viruses they try to stop.  They don’t actually do anything and they slow down people’s computers to where they are nearly unusable.  I run windows XP.  I have been running it on at least 3 computers in my house for almost 7 years.  I’ve never had a virus.  I’ve had some spyware but the security holes in browsers that caused that have been fixed.  People should quit buying this crap learn how to identify shady sofware and not install it.

That is all I can think of off the top of my head that has annoyed me lately.  As I think of more I will post them.  Maybe I’ll post a list of software and gadgets that kick ass too.  Feel free to post about products that don’t do what they should.