Computer science students are taught a lot of things, some of which should not exist. I have compiled (along with some peers) a list of computer-related things that need to go (be thrown in the garbage). Some of these are meant to be funny, while others would actually be really nice if they disappeared. I've separated the suggestions into hardware and software.

Software


1. JSON
   
2. XML
   
3. IE and Edge
   
4. IPv4
   
5. SQL
   
6. Prezi presentations
   
7. VI/VIM
   
8. RIPv2
   
9. RPG (the IBM language), COBOL, Pascal
   
10. Bootstrap colors
    

Hardware


1. Thinkpad nipples
   
2. m versions of nvidia cards
   
3. Acer and HP laptops
   
4. 2-in-1 laptops
   
5. Windows phones
   

It is important to note that I don't agree with everything on the list.
I wanted to know what other people wanted to throw out. Feel free to comment with as many suggestions as you want.

Some brief rationales (even if silly ones) on why they should be thrown away would be nice. I don't understand all of them.

To be honest, I'd much rather deal with JSON than XML. XML is a disgustingly redundant and inefficient syntax and is a PITA to read and write from a human standpoint. JSON is at least somewhat legible.

Also, the TrackPoint beats the pants off of touchpads and touchscreens, which have never once treated me well. The only minor irritation is that I sometimes tend to hit it by mistake when trying to hit one of the keys around it, but being able to move the pointer without moving my hands off the home row is awesome.

Also, we can't afford to get rid of IPv4 yet, at least not until I've had a chance to save money and upgrade my equipment to be IPv6 compatible.

As the user/ owner of a 2-in-1, I find that offensive Why though? They are useful (to a point)...

I didn't write all of these, but I can try to explain what the people who did were trying to say.
This is pretty much common knowledge, but the nub on a lot of laptops is generally considered to be inferior to a trackpad, although I've heard stories of people being able to improve efficiency with them. Hence why it is on the list, along with windows phones, which are pretty much that kid that everyone bullies in elementary school at this point
I agree that json and xml both have a place, but the context and way they were presented in class didn't help in making them seem useful. Remember, these are all students from my classes, and the way it was presented was as data that arrives from servers. Because of the way we used them in assignments, students would rather just have html sent in by servers that they can plop into their pages. For them, seeing json and xml just means that they have to write more javascript to parse it.
Of course the implications of trying to get rid of ipv4 all together are just beyond crazy, but ipv6 is objectively superior. (increased speed, security, and of course, enough addresses)


As my computing mathematics teacher put it: "they aren't good at being either thing"

Oh man, I'm going to turn this into a 2 in 1 argument, but here's my $.02.

I have a Surface Book, I love it. In tablet form, it rarely gives me issues, the screen is responsive and is very useful for note taking (especially with the pen). The screen looks fabulous and it's easy to wipe away fingerprints even 1.5 years later. The only issue I have with tablet form is the on screen keyboard isn't that great.
As a laptop, well it could be perfect. I unfortunately couldn't afford the model with a GPU so gaming and graphics stuff isn't that great. However, everyday and moderately intensive tasks are performed without issue. The keyboard occasionally glitches (as in every 4 months lately), but I just have to clean the contacts between the tablet and the keyboard and it works perfectly.

In summery, although yes, not every 2 in 1 is spectacular, to call all of them 'not good' would be incorrect in my opinion.

As for adding to this thread...
I think USB A/B, mini A/B, and micro should be kicked out and replaced with USB C.
Also, get rid of VGA and DVI. Who uses that anymore?
And get rid of the nub on the thinkpads, just use your thumb on the track pad to quickly move the mouse cursor.

USB A/B did make it clear which device is the host and which is the device. From what I have heard connecting two dual-role ports will randomly assign one the host role and one the device role. This could be annoying if you are trying to use one device's interface to move files off another, but the wrong device is assigned the host role.

Additionally, I am currently watching myself type this on a DVI and a VGA monitor. There's nothing wrong with those. Additionally, most infrastructure I know of uses VGA for things like projectors, so it's not totally unused yet.

I still don't quite see how a trackpad would be superior, unless people were using poorly made knock-off “nubs” or subpar drivers. I once had a Toshiba laptop years ago with one of those things, and I seem to recall it becoming quite intuitive after a while. On the other hand, the one on my UNICOMP keyboard now is rather crummy. It has too much physical give, making accurate movements difficult. The buttons are also useless (90% of the time a single click results in a double or even triple-click, and there is no middle button and no scroll buttons). So I don't really use it much anymore. But they can be made well.

On the other hand, my experience with every single trackpad I've ever used is the pointer moves either too fast or too slow, always wants to click when I don't want, won't click when I do want to, scrolls or loses my place when I'm trying to move the cursor around, jumps the cursor randomly all over the screen for no reason, and on and on. I'd rather throw things like that in the garbage. Touch screens (like on phones and tablets) aren't much better, though they have improved a bit. I still suffer a lot of crap where them being either too sensitive or apps expecting me to tap a .01-by.01 pixel tap target or insisting that I've made a one-trillionth-of-a-subpixel swipe operation when I just want a !@#$ tap. As if the human finger can reasonably be expected to deliver anything remotely close to that level of accuracy and precision.

Touch screens have their uses, but they shouldn't be a sole input device. Devices need more physical buttons, not less. Buttons and keys are about the only truly reliable input device left in the world.

<end rant>



I guess that's fair enough. You mentioned “in classes”, so I wasn't sure if that was supposed to be the context of what we should “throw away”, or if it could be in general.


That's true, and we're going to want to switch to it eventually. But many people still rely on IPv4 for now. Also one thing that was nice about v4 that v6 lacks is nice, short, simple addresses that you could even memorize if you wanted to. I don't really want to try to memorize a v6 address. Not that there's often a need, but still, v6 addresses have a really unwieldy and intimidating appearance to them IMO. v4 address are much easier for humans to read and compare.

***

As for VGA and DVI… I also don't see a big deal. The cables are bulky and unwieldy, but a big advantage is that they generally just work. Sometimes I don't mind analog connections, either. They tend to me much more robust than digital connections. HDMI is fairly convenient, but I've encountered lots of annoying bugs and weird compatibility problems, not to mention it takes forever for a display to connect and start displaying a picture. Remember the days when you had to wait for a CRT to warm up? It's even worse now: you have to wait for the stupid HDMI connection to “warm up” every single time you turn the display on, even if it was off for just a second. My TV takes about 15 seconds to do this; that's ridiculous. At least a CRT would already be warm and turn back on pretty much instantly if you happened to accidentally power it off.

My DisplayPort monitor comes up in a much more reasonable amount of time, but I'm not all that fond of DP yet because I also see what appear to be some weird bugs with it at times, though it could just be my video card or drivers being buggy and not the fault of the standard itself. I've read some pretty bad things about bugs and glitches people had with DP a while back, though.

***

Okay, so things I want to add to the list? I'll have to think about that a bit more. Most of the things I can think of are rather abstract:

* reliance on unreliable input devices (like touchpads/touchscreens)
* software with bad UI design (seriously, this is 2018. People should know how to design software with good usability by now. It's not like there isn't a wealth of resources and studies out there on how to do it)
* nagware (in particular, Google's software and web services seem to enjoy persistently bugging users about stupid, unimportant crap, without offering an option to turn it off)
* OSes that take control of the device and data from the device's own owner (read: pretty much every smartphone/tablet OS on the market right now)
* websites that require JS to work when JS is not necessary (my favorite is when they lock up the browser with 100% CPU usage and use gigabytes of RAM for, like, an hour just to display some text)
* infinite scroll and “lazy loading” web techniques
* websites that use JS only to do irritating crap (like hover-overs/lightboxes; why do these idiots think pop-up blockers had to be invented in the first place!)

Actually, I guess I could go on for a while just about web design trends I'd love to be thrown away forever. I'll stop now.

I don't see how Google nags you about "stupid crap", besides YouTube bugging about "YouTube Red" and Google Docs reminding you that "Google Docs Offline" exists.

For the first one, this is understandable. YouTube is a division inside of Google and it probably has to meet performance goals. To be fair, YouTube Red actually isn't half bad. I tried the free trial and I found it useful. You can replace "YouTube" in this paragraph with practically any one Google product that bugs you, and it still holds valid.

Google Docs Offline is actually incredibly useful when dealing with an unreliable network.

Are there any other examples of this?

Well, here are my examples:

* Using Google in Firefox always pops up a warning on top of stuff begging you to set Google as your default search engine, never mind that it already is set, and Google's official answer to click “no thanks” (which doesn't exist; you have to click the X) and it will go away is a flat-out lie, because it comes back every time. There is an enormous thread of complaints about this, which, in perfect upkeeping of a modern big company's reputation, has to date been completely and utterly ignored by Google.

* Every time I try to log in and it stops me with a full-screen thing telling me to “secure” my account with a cell phone number when I don't even have a cell phone (yet). Encouraging users to 2FA their account is one thing, but there should be other options. Plus, I've read that they continue to do this nag even if you do give them a number, so the argument that users need to be warned to secure their account is moot.

* On my tablet, I regularly get notifications nagging me about updating apps and Google offline maps, when I told it to automatically do it itself. It works automatically, so what's the point in bugging me to do stuff I don't need to do? For a while, I actually thought the automatic update option didn't work at all because the notifications were coming up.

* Also, Android gives a stupid “your eyes are going to bleed and the world is going to end if you run your screen at max brightness too long” nag every single time I need to turn it up on boot. Same with the headphone volume, though I hear this has to do with EU regulations (never mind the fact I don't even live under that jurisdiction). That would be understandable if the implementation of this warning weren't supremely stupid and popped up even when the audio I'm trying to listen to is too quiet for even somebody with superhuman hearing to make out at max volume.* Same with the brightness: warning comes up even when I'm either outside and that's the only setting the device is usable, or I have it in “auto brightness” mode and the “max” setting is incredibly dim. That's even more stupid. Unlike hearing, I'm pretty sure tablet or phone technology isn't for the foreseeable future going to be capable of producing enough light to literally damage the human eye.

(* Funny thing is, I regularly hit a driver bug on my tablet which causes really loud, full-blast popping and crackling regardless of the volume setting, so one could argue they're already running afoul of EU laws even with the stupid volume warning. )

So, should Google ever have a real warning that I need to pay attention to, I'm probably going to miss it because I'm too focused on ignoring all the false cries of “wolf”.

And of course, not one of these warnings has a “don't ask me again” checkbox. At least Microsoft had the courtesy to provide that in much of their old Windows software back in the day.

Another Google product that needs to go is: https://www.google.com/bookmarks/

It is so old and outdated. It doesn't even use Material Design!

That's because you're using the wrong one. You're supposed to use [url]chrome://bookmarks/[/url]. It's new.

I know, they should remove the old one

Keep Edge and SQL please lol

*edit*
Can I add to the list - non-ASCII bioses?

Religion.

Christ.

OS 5.3.1

Also - Windows phones need to be removed? Really? If I had to get a new phone the only options I would consider, really, would be, a Sony, or a Windows phone! pppssshh

Alright so as expected, this has turned into a general ranting thread, so I might as well include some less specific things that could also go.

planned obsolescence
buying apple products because they are "premium"
pre-checking boxes that are undesirable during software installations
The pause/break key and scroll lock
very small or flat computer mice (usually sold for use with portable devices)

Now since I am listing more things that I'd like to see disappear, I think I should also include things that I think should reappear

CPU clock frequency displays on system cases
Turbo buttons to overclock gaming systems (those might have already made a comeback on some higher end gaming laptops, I'm not sure)
OS 5.3.0

I'm not personally too keen on removing “legacy” keys like scroll lock, etc., because sooner or later I'll come across a program that uses them and expects it to be there, and then I'd be screwed if I don't have it on my keyboard. Also, I occasionally find useful functions I can bind to those keys. For instance, back when I used the Dvorak layout, I used Scroll Lock as a layout toggle back to QWERTY. Actually, I still have it set up, for some reason, even though I stopped using Dvorak some time ago. I guess just due to laziness.

At the very least, maybe software makers could be more creative and make better use of some of those less-useful keys, and perhaps they could eventually be renamed to better reflect their new purposes.

Speaking of keyboards, some things I wish would go:

* Recent keyboards that keep removing keys (especially ones which still have a use, like Insert) and keep screwing with the original IBM Enhanced key layout for no good reason

* The Fn key and requiring finger-bending gymnastics just to access what used to be simple key functions. Not only do we already have more than enough confusing modifier keys on modern PC keyboards as it is, the Fn key is invariably handled in the keyboard hardware, so you can't even remap it in software like everything else. Dumb design.

* The recent trend of obscuring the F1-F12 row and replacing it with a row of redundant functions that already have shortcut keys (and then making it so you have to use proprietary Windows software to make the F-key row behave normally, if that's even possible). Kind of goes along with the first two points.



Presumably, they would display an actual measured frequency today, as the early CPU clock indicators were just hard-coded via jumpers to read particular values in conjunction with a Turbo switch, I think. Those were honestly kind of pointless.

Don't some servers have some sort of multi-function displays and such you can install? I think I've heard of them, though I'm not familiar with that line of hardware.



Hehe