Any "helper" task: Background tasks designed to speed up the booting of any particular application. All they do is waste memory. What's the point of precaching if the task itself is going to get swapped out to VM? They seem harmless until everybody starts doing it, and you've suddenly got 30+ 3rd-party background tasks running.
Anti-virus software: Responsible for probably 80% of all BSOD and lost data, not to mention unbearably slow performance. The only time I ever used anti-virus software since Windows95 was a few months, shortly before I upgraded from Win2K to XP. In that short time, Norton destroyed my entire e-mail archive (luckily I had a recent backup). I uninstalled it immediately. After almost 12 years of not using any anti-virus software, I have still never gotten a virus or mal-ware.
HTML: A lot of people applaude the W3C -- I despise them. Who's idea was it to make a language based on SGML that couldn't be parsed as SGML because it was syntax incompatible, and then spend over a decade trying to "fix" a broken format? How the hell can something be a standard if its syntax continously changes? Isn't the point of a standard is so it doesn't change? No wonder the web is a huge mess of non-compliance! Hey, now I'm required to add blank "alt" tags to all my "img" tags just to signal that the tags are blank and not null. Oh, wait, these days I'm supposed to use "object" tags declared as image classes, not the "img" tag.
Java: Crap when it was introduced, and it's still crap. Almost every applet I've ever used will only work for a few years, and then when a new version of Java is released, everything breaks. I thought the whole point of a software platform is so you didn't have to worry about platform compatibility? Java is the new DLL hell. Software is nicer than hardware, because software can be updated at any time. That also ensures that software standards are updated and patched about 20x times as often. Funny how a Core2 Duo can run software two decades old, but Java barfs on applets written a few years ago.
Web 2.0 (and up): Not a technology, but a way of thinking. Yeah, instead of using a clean standard, I think I'll write 200K of bloated XML and JavaScript just to populate drop-down menus in realtime. Hey, who cares how complicated things are to code, so long as the technology is largely invisible to the end user? Oh yeah, and let's not forget that the reason for using XML and JS is so the application is accessible to everyone -- except those using browsers incompatible with the newest XML standards. Wouldn't it make more sense to make a new format if it takes years for browsers to start supporting the "new old" formats, and even then, they do it poorly? A clean format could be implemented in a few months, but instead we spend years trying to force HTML and XML to do things they were never designed to do? If something doesn't work in a 2-year-old web browser, what's the point in having it based on a "standard" DTS? I mean, other than for political reasons. We wouldn't want a consortium of commercial companies developing a standard to compete with those lovable martyrs at the W3C, would we?
