Category: Technology

Posted on

The Computer Keyboard

All right– it’s just a little thing. It’s not like a war or the Olympics or Microsoft or GATT or the environment. But it bugs me a lot and it’s my web page, so I’m cutting lose. The subject of this week’s rant: the computer keyboard.

You see the orange circle? That’s where the left slash symbol is located. This is the symbol that any real computer geek knows is one of the most important keys on the keyboard. Why? Because when you really want to get things done on a system level at the keyboard, you go to the DOS prompt and start pecking away. And one of the things you type the most often is this simple little command:

cd \

Or any of a hundred variations.

Now you see the dark circle? That is pointing to the location where the dang “\” key SHOULD be. I even moved it there in the picture. That’s where it used to be on some IBM keyboards and, I believe, some early Northgate keyboards. But almost every keyboard made since then– even the legendary Northgate (much prized for it’s solid steel construction, it’s tactile response, and substantial weight)– puts the “\” key somewhere else, where you have to take your hand off the home row to reach it.

Now tell me, how often do you need the right slash (“/”) or a “[” or a “]” or a “{” or a “}”? Almost never, right? There’s already the perfectly useful “(” and “)” up there above the “i” and “o”, and those completely useless triangle brackets (“<>”) below the “k” and “l”. Why on earth do they put the most useful non-alphanumeric key in the most bizarre place?

Well, the same knucklehead who decided that directories could be named “program files” but only accessed with:

“cd\progra~1

Good heavens! Not only do you have to reach way beyond the right home row to hit “\” (and try to avoid accidentally hitting the return key) but now you have to leave the left home row as well to try to get the tilde (“~”) way up there beside the “1”. Curly, Larry, and Moe are in charge of “innovations” at Microsoft.

And while I’m at it… have you seen those new idiotic keyboards with the row of blue buttons along the top? These buttons are dedicated to Internet functions. Instead of actually having to move a mouse pointer to a icon on your desktop, now all you have to do is press a button, and there you are: MSN, NBC, CNN, whatever.

I have always said that the goal of AOL, Microsoft, Compaq et al is to turn the Internet into television, where your choices are limited to what the corporate hacks think you should have. The entire idea of these buttons is revolting. The personal computer was, at one time, a force for personal liberation precisely because it was flexible and non-proprietary and controlled by the user. Ever since then, Corporate America has been trying to take it back. This is the latest step, along with all those obscene programs you get with every laptop to try to get you to subscribe to Genie or MSN or AOL or some other apparatchik-infested on-line service. The goal is to force you to watch their propaganda and advertising. The goal is to, once again, reduce the computer user to a computer viewer: passive, docile, mindless. The ultimate consumer. Just enter your charge card number…. Their worst nightmare is that you might one day once again seize control of your computer and choose where you get your information from.

It will have to go down in history as one of life’s great mysteries, along with these:

Why did cruddy Microsoft Windows outsell every other operating system in the world?

Why did mass audiences ever learn to accept the hideous vulgarity of television sitcom laugh-tracks?

Why did VHS defeat Beta in the market place?

Why was the 2000 election in the U.S. ever even close enough for George Bush Jr. to steal? Quick, list Dubbya’s accomplishments prior to his elevation to this lofty status.

Why did anyone ever buy a Vega or a Pinto?

Why do shriveled old bureaucrats present trophies at celebrated sporting events?

Who buys “extended warranties”? Why do these people think that salesmen would hustle them so avidly if they were a good deal for the customer?

Posted on

Air Baggies

Do you feel safer knowing that your car has an air bag? Would it surprise you to know that, in reality, you would actually be safer without it? If you are a woman, according to a study done by Transport Canada, you are about 21% safer without an airbag. If you are child, you are even safer than that without the airbag.

In Canada, at least. You see most Canadians wear seat-belts. We’re a reasonable people. Once we were convinced, as most of us were, that being thrown from a car at 80 kph was quite dangerous, most of us decided to use our seatbelts. We don’t need airbags. In fact, when airbags go off during a minor accident, they frequently cause more injuries– and even death– than the accident itself.

Most Americans do not wear seatbelts. Insurance companies don’t like paying out for serious injuries, and American state and federal governments didn’t want to require seatbelts, so the insurance companies demanded the air bags, and the government complied, and the auto-makers, reluctantly, installed them.

Of course, just because the auto makers didn’t want to install air bags doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of them. If your air bag goes off, you will pay a princely sum to have it “recharged”.

And if you are a Canadian, mechanics will charge you up to $800 to disable this stupid device which, it is now clear, is a danger to your life and your children’s lives. Auto makers, who insisted that they didn’t want to install air bags when they were first demanded, now insist that the won’t remove them even though they do not provide any additional protection for people who wear seatbelts.

Of course, the same government classifies mini-vans as “trucks” so they are not subject to the same stringent safety regulations as passenger cars. Did I say “stringent”? Safety regulations for passenger cars are also slipping, and the 15 km impact resistant bumper is a thing of the past.

Vote for Ralph Nader.

Posted on

Napster

I have followed, with some amusement, the misadventures of the American legal system over the insidious, corrupting, devilish program Napster.

Napster allows users to “kidnapster” music files from other users on the Internet running the same application. You log on and type in a search string and the Napster finds MP3 files on other users’ computers and allows you to download them onto your computer and listen to them.

Well, right is right and wrong is wrong. Is it wrong to “steal” music over the internet? Yes. Is it wrong to rip off young artists? Yes– but that’s what the music industry does better than a million internet users. Is the current system of distribution of music unjust, unfair, and grossly inefficient? Yes. It will die of it’s own contradictions.

I watched the debate and the court proceedings with amusement because the judge that tried to shut down Napster made a ruling that is ridiculous and will only bring scorn and ridicule to the legal process.

Here’s why:

1. Though shutting down the Napster site will temporarily stop people from using Napster to download MP3 files, there are dozens of other programs that do the same thing. When the Napster site was temporarily shut down last month, the Gnutella site had so many hits that it too went down. Shutting down Napster will have almost no effect on the distribution of music over the internet.

2. Sony has announced that it will sell music over the internet for $2.98 per cut. This is a bad joke. This is obscene. It is more obscene than millions of users sharing their music over the internet without paying the artist. This amount is so ridiculously high that it will only serve to increase the scorn and hatred of the music industry out there among computer hackers. If the music industry is going to sell music over the internet, the price is going to have to be about ten cents a cut. At this price, the music industry will– believe me– still make piles of money, because they will sell 100 times as much music as they currently sell.

3. The other programs that do the same thing as Napster don’t do it in the same way. Napster still requires a “server” which a judge could order shut down. Other programs, however, function in a more decentralized way. It may be impossible to shut down these systems by shutting down a small number of servers. A zealous judge would have to shut down everybody– which means it won’t happen.

4. Even if Napster, and Gnutella, and all the other programs succeed and prevail, the music industry will survive, and it will continue to sell music through music stores. In the first place, MP3 is not really a very good music format. The new generation of DVD’s will provide better quality sound and there will always be a market for disks. In the second place, even though it has long been possible to record music off the radio and television programs off the TV, the markets for CD’s and video tapes continues to grow. A lot of people just want to get the disk or tape in their hands.

5. The music industry will cease to have a cooperative monopoly (something the banks and oil companies already have) over the sales and distribution of music. Anyone can get on the internet and distribute and promote his or her own work.

6. Video is next. The fact that we cannot, at the present time, watch television programs when we want to, rather than when they are scheduled is, when you think about it, absurd. If Monty Python is on at 2:00 a.m. and I want to watch it, and the television station showing it wants me to watch it, why shouldn’t I be able to move that program to a day and time when it would be convenient for me to watch it? Furthermore, why can’t I watch programs that aren’t scheduled whenever I want to? Want that Dick Van Dyke episode from 1964? The news footage of the Munich Olympics hostage crisis? The Beatles appearance on Ed Sullivan? Someone should have it on file somewhere. If the television industry was smart– and I don’t think they are– they would put up web sites right now and announce plans to make the entire back-catalog of television programs available as soon as it is practically possible to make them downloadable. They would publish the specs for creating the compression algorithms necessary, and make it freely available to all.

Yes, I know, we already have the means with which to “time shift” television programs: the VCR. However, even after twenty-five years of development, most people still don’t use it regularly to tape programs they would otherwise miss. What do they use it for? To watch pre-recorded tapes rented, at outlandish prices, from a video store.

That should teach us something. For one thing, it indicates that there will continue to be a market for CD’s and video tapes in spite of new medias. For another, it indicates that a large number of people will never learn to master some new technologies.

Posted on

Digital Vs. Analog

I have read with great interest some of the discussion about the differences between digital video and 35 mm film.

At this same time, I have been converting some of my old films to digital video for preservation and convenience. I am really dazzled by all the progress made by digital video over the past few years, but as I watch some of those cheesy “Super 8” era movies, I find myself more and more in love with the “look” of film.

In the same way, I still like vinyl for music. I am convinced that under ideal circumstances (a top notch turntable, for one thing) vinyl records DO sound better than MP3’s or even CD’s. Many people describe it as “warmth”, but we do know that digital recording IS inherently reductionistic. Every byte of sound is a precise mathematical expression, at a time when our data storage capacity is still relatively limited (even if a 75 GIG drive sounds impressive to you). Analog recordings “mimic” sound and video. They record a kind of mirror image of what they see and hear, rather than “process” it. But when a digital camera or recorder scans images or sounds, it translates it into a string of data bits that refer to parallel data structures that try to reconstruct the image or sound on your computer. We know that in order to fit this data onto a computer disk, the data has to be limited and restrained, because there is an immense amount of data in a picture or a sound.

Film and tape have limits too. These limits are defined by the maximum (or minimum, depending on how you look at it) granularity of the medium. Film has developed to the point where it’s granularity is quite good. It takes a big computer file to match the true resolution of a 35mm picture.

The key point is that if there is a really, really strange color out there, a computer may not be able to match it to its internal references. But a computer is clever. It won’t crash just because it can’t find an exact color match. It will simply adopt the nearest approximation.

Logically, digital media will likely eventually catch up to the best films or vinyl records, as they continue to expand storage capacity and accuracy of the scanners (the CCD or the microphone), but it may be many years before digital video really compares favorably to film for the subtlety of colours and shades, or vinyl for the subtlety of overtones and reverberations.

Interesting aside: didn’t Marilyn Monroe consider her mole (which apparently “moved” around on her face) a distinctive beauty mark? It may be the flaws that give something beautiful “character” and richness that people really want to experience.

Posted on

Lions and Tigers and Hackers– Oh My!

What is it with you people out there? A few years ago, it was Ouija Boards. Then it was Satanic Ritual Abuse. Then it was Backwards Masking. Then it was subliminal messages. Now it’s hackers.

I have a simple solution for the hacker problem. It is very, very simple. It is completely effective and feasible. My solution is this. If you are a big company who wants to do e-commerce over the internet and you are afraid of hackers—get off the internet! That’s it. Couldn’t be much simpler could it?  You’re welcome.

To understand my solution, you have to understand one thing about the internet. To Amazon and eBay and Yahoo and all the other so-called high-tech start-ups: who asked you here? Who invited you? Who wants you? Get out. Go back to television where you belong.

Posted on

Dumbing Down Computers

The dumbing down of Computers
You bring your garbage out to the road. You go back inside your house, take off your coat, your winter boots. You pick up a cup of coffee, sit down to read…. Suddenly, there is a knock at the door. It’s the garbage man. He’s standing there holding some lemon rinds and egg shells. “Are you sure you want to throw this out?” he says. You say, “yes, of course.” You go back to your table and your coffee and resume reading. There goes the doorbell again. It’s the garbage man again, and this time he’s holding a broken toaster. “Are you sure you want to throw this out?” You nod. A few minutes later, it’s an old magazine, a pair of leaky boots, a shriveled old sponge. Are you sure you want to throw them out?

Of course I am, you idiot. Why do you think I put them in the garbage?

Of course, in real life, the garbage man doesn’t do that. He doesn’t go through your garbage first to see if you might have made a mistake. Once his truck is in front of your house, your garbage is gone, and you’re never getting it back. Is this so unmanageable?

Obviously not. Yet, this is what Microsoft Windows does whenever you want to throw a file away. “Are you sure you want to throw that out?” Yes, yes, yes.

It tells you something about the world of computers nowadays that Microsoft, which is a very market-savvy company, keeps putting stuff like this in their operating system. Think about the “my documents” folder, and the fact that the dos prompt defaults to the Windows directory, the least useful place for a user to be. Think about Windows 98 and Windows 2000 which have added “my pictures” and “my music” as defaults, as if the user is so stupid, lazy, and trivial, that he will be keeping all of his precious files in these three locations, named, as if by a child, “my” stuff.

Think about the fact that when you go into Explorer and try to look at drive C:, Microsoft presents you with this nebulous thing called “desktop” and then “my computer”. What is “my computer”? I don’t know what Microsoft thinks it is. It wants you to think that your disk drive is attached to something that keeps everything together for you. What Microsoft has done is make the operating system king of your computer. If you want your data, you don’t go looking on Seagate’s 10 GIG hard drive anymore. You go looking in “my desktop” for “my computer” which has “internet explorer” on it as if it was something apart from the software provided by Microsoft, and “printers” as if they existed in the ether and could be invoked only by an application provided by—you guessed it—Microsoft. And there is your hard drive: a mere subsidiary of the true ruler of the universe: Windows! It looks like you could lose a hard drive or two and hardly miss it: you’ll still have “my desktop” and “my computer”—right?

In the old days of DOS, and the present day of Linux, you booted up to a hard drive, which had everything on it: your applications, operating system, software, and – most importantly—your data. You made a copy of your data because sometimes the hard drive—the thing that your data is actually, physically, on—could occasionally fail. But today, in Windows, your data is stored in some labyrinthine network of secret passages, hidden grottos, and camouflaged tunnels. Can you find it? Oh, you can probably find your letters to grandma in “my documents”. But if you think that is neat and you like Microsoft and think it’s great, let me ask you this: where is your e-mail? Do you know? Can you back it up? I thought so. When your hard drive fails, my friend, you will start over from scratch. But then again, a short memory seems to be a requisite of joining the on-line world nowadays.

When you use Windows Explorer to go look for your e-mail files, it doesn’t show the full names of the files, their size, or the dates they were last used. It shows you a stupid picture of what the file is supposed to be like. Windows no longer shows you the extensions of the files, because it supposed to be able to tell you what kind of file it is. In fact, if you rename a file’s extension, Windows doesn’t have a clue what it is.

Windows doesn’t show you “hidden” files: it wants you to leave them alone, and let Microsoft tell you what should or should not be on your computer. Double-click on a certain file, and suddenly Windows is trying to drag you onto the Internet. Haven’t signed up with an Internet Service Provider yet: Microsoft will take care of it. Just click here—or don’t click “no”—and you are hurtled onto MSN, but make sure you have your credit card ready.

With every new release of Windows, the nuts and bolts of your computer are becoming more and more invisible, and you are less and less able to control what is on your system and how it works. With every new release, your expensive hard drive is polluted with more and more hidden functions, routines, and settings designed to manipulate, cajole, and annoy you into doing something you didn’t think of yourself. With every new release, the idiotic short-comings of Windows become more and more embarrassing:

  • – it crashes frequently, even while running Microsoft games, like “Age of Empires” or applications like “Outlook”
  • – it can’t back up your data. It has no idea of where your data is. It has no means of backing up your documents, e-mails, bookmarks, or anything else, efficiently. As a result, most people don’t back up anything.
  • – It is SLOW, SLOW, SLOW, as molasses, as they say. Don’t believe me? Get out an old 486 computer running Windows 3.1 and play with it for a while. You’ll be astonished at how quick and responsive the computer is compared to Windows 98.
  • – It is getting more and more difficult to program for Windows—the operating system is becoming enmeshed with applications, making it extremely difficult to produce efficient, reliable applications.
  • – Microsoft deliberately creates file incompatibilities to drive everyone to upgrade. If one person in your office starts using Office 2000, before you know it, other users will be complaining because they can’t share files anymore. Access will not allow two different versions of the application to run on the same computer: the result is that applications have to be redeveloped for the new version.
  • – Windows is bloated beyond belief. Does Microsoft every throw anything away? I suspect that when the garbage man comes to Bill Gates’ door with a handful of rotting fruit, Gates says, “yes, actually, I did change my mind about throwing that out…”
  • – Windows is often just plain stupid. I installed a network card once, but Windows failed to find the correct drivers for it. Strike 1. No big deal. I installed the updated driver for the network card, but Windows wouldn’t install it because it couldn’t find the card. Strike 2. Annoying, perhaps. Then I decided to remove the card and try a different one. When I told Windows to delete it, it asked for a driver disk. After accepting the driver, it said, “do you wish to remove the card?” Yes, you moron.
  • – Does Microsoft think that people only use CD drives to install software? If I want to install software, I’ll tell it to install software. In the meantime, I’d like to be able to change disks without having the computer come grinding to a halt while it checks to see if something should install itself from drive d:.
  • – When you try to export a file from Outlook, it asks for the Office 2000 CD, but it checks drive a:. Does it think Office 2000 comes on a floppy disk now? When I tell it I want to browse to the files, it dumps me into “My documents”—good place to keep my copy of Office 2000, don’t you think?

In short, the computer is becoming like television. The Internet was a bold, amazing, astonishing innovation in communications technology that promised the world a new means of building networks of communities reflecting the rich diversity of cultures and intellects on this planet. Microsoft’s vision the internet: the “shop” button on your browser.

Now, you may have rightly observed that my opinion is not an isolated one and you may have asked yourself why, if Windows is so bad and so annoying, does everyone use it. The answer is really quite simple: like many other “power users”, I make a living trying to keep Windows systems running smoothly. People pay me, fairly good money, to solve the endless myriad of problems created by Microsoft’s sloppy programming, so I have to understand their products as well as I can. It is also true that there are some dazzling applications that run only on Windows—Adobe Premiere, Sound Forge, Audio Catalyst, Paint Shop Pro, etc. There is a growing number of good applications for Linux, but they can’t match some of these applications at the moment.

But power users are not like salesmen. To a salesman, millions of people buying defective products is nirvana. When the product breaks down, you simply sell them another one.

Computer technical support people see this as wasteful and stupid. They like things that work well, like hard drives, video cards, and RAM. They admire efficiency and durability. They hold reliability in high esteem. It’s part of their nature: that’s why they hack. To play with fascinating technologies that do cool things, like send music over the internet.

Why is Windows so popular if it’s so bad? I have explained that in detail in a previous rant, but, in a nutshell, to reiterate: Microsoft Windows was probably the worst graphical user interface ever developed, but it triumphed in the marketplace by leveraging it’s position when Microsoft’s version of DOS came pre-installed on every IBM computer. Only someone who has never read the news or any books on the history of the computer would really believe that Bill Gates is a technical genius. He is a marketing genius—I grant you that—though a lot of Microsoft’s success is also due to practices which, as the Department of Justice has observed, were blatantly illegal. The final factor in Microsoft’s success came as a result of the first two reasons: the network effect. Everyone wants compatible software. Everyone wants to be able to “borrow” their friends’ applications. IBM compatible computers were about 30% cheaper than the superior Apple McIntosh, and it was easy to copy software. That’s why Windows is on every desktop.

As wonderful and magical as computers are today, they could be twice as wonderful, three times as magical, and reliable to boot, if OS/2 or Geoworks, or the McIntosh, or the Amiga (a brilliant little machine way ahead of its time) or Linux had triumphed instead of Microsoft. The magic and wonder, my friend, comes from the hardware improvements, which have been astonishing. Sound cards, hard drives, video cards, monitors, CPU’s, RAM—all have improved at an astonishing rate. When you can record a ten-minute piece of music into a digital format onto a hard drive, edit it, and then compress it into an eight MB file—that’s impressive. And you know what—none of those functions related to this process were produced by Microsoft! Not one! The digital sound quality came from Turtle Beach (since adopted by Creative Labs). The compression codec came from a German company, Xing. The software came from Audio Forge and others (only dilettantes use the built-in Microsoft software for this). And the Internet, of course, came from the U.S. army.   And yes, Al Gore played a big role in creating it by promoting it to Congress because, yes, he was visionary and understood the potential of the idea.  The browser was invented by Tim Berners-Lee. Microsoft didn’t even see it coming until Netscape had 90% of the market.

When Microsoft does try to compete with real software companies, it generally does poorly. Of all the Microsoft products available that were developed in house, only Excel was superior to it’s competition (Lotus).

Posted on

When You’re Hot You’re Not: Drink Coke

Coke has just introduced a new concept in vending machines. The new Coke dispensers will adjust the price depending on the weather. If it is really, really hot, you will have to pay more for a Coca-Cola. If it cools down, thereby, presumably, reducing demand, the price also goes down.

The first question, of course, is does the price go lower than what you pay now? I doubt it. But I don’t think Coke really cares. Once the public has accepted these machines (I’m sure they’ll be asking for your vote any time now), the price can go where-ever Coke thinks it can go. Which is up, of course. Coke will tell you that “market conditions” should determine the price.

So, if it’s hot and dry outside, and you’ve been working up a real sweat, and you see this vending machine… you are going to have to pay more. Well, why not? If you go to the hospital and the doctor notices that you are really, really sick, why shouldn’t he charge you more for treatment? Rents go up when the Olympics come to town.

I could be in favor of this idea. Hmmm. Might be good. But, let’s say that it is a really hot, dry day, and the vending machine runs out of Coke. Well then, along comes Mr. Truck-driver with another big load of Coca-cola. And he knows that Coke is going to make a killing in this hot weather. So he says to Coke, “my hourly rate has just doubled. It’s hot. There’s people lined up to buy your product. I’m merely taking advantage of market conditions. Pay up.”

And it doesn’t end there. Car sales go up? Ford workers get an increase. Enrollment goes up? Up goes the salaries of the teachers. The computer network breaks down? Ahhhhh. Too bad. But the technician and systems support person now costs $500 an hour instead of $150.

Market conditions.

Posted on

Pushy Annoying Software Turning the Internet into Television

I just installed Music Match, an MP3 ripper and player. It’s a nice piece of software. I got it for free off the internet. No, I didn’t steal it: they’re giving it away. Of course, you can buy an upgrade for $29. But the version you get for nothing actually does pretty well everything I want it to do. Thank you.

However… after I installed it, it started harassing me about upgrading. But, okay, there is a little button I can click to tell it to stop harassing me. However, then it started bugging me about going onto the internet to download more information about the artist whose CD was in the player– Leonard Cohen. Go away. Then I ripped some MP3’s. It did not ask me where to put the files. Why not? If I ordered a pizza, do you think they would hang up before I gave the address? Right. And then they would deliver it to My House in My Neighborhood in My City. And I would have to go out hunting all over town until I found that house, so I could have my dinner.

No, I prefer to say: deliver right here, this place, this location– so I can find it. Put it in this drawer, so I can keep things organized. But Windows wants you to store your pictures in My Pictures because it thinks you are incredibly stupid and haven’t the slightest idea of how to organize anything.

Music Match crashed, by the way, on a Windows 2000 system. Windows 2000 crashes– don’t believe people who tell you that Microsoft has finally put out a reliable product. Microsoft products are full of bells and whistles. They make a lot of noise as they crash and burn. I have had Windows 2000 crash while running Windows Explorer, a Microsoft program. Nothing else.

When I did humor Music Match and told it to go ahead, find some information on the internet for me, what did it do? It called up Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. I don’t use Explorer. I use Netscape.

Music Match is by no means the only software out there pushing you around. Almost everything you install nowadays starts trying to sign you up for Internet access or spam or web portals or whatever. How convenient, right? How nice. It does it all automatically, even if you don’t want it to. Quicken has been harassing me for three years to use their investment services. Go to hell. Sorry– I got mad, after the 1,477th time.

Microsoft, by the way, doesn’t think “spam” is a word. It highlights it with a squiggly red line, as it does words like “honour” and “labour”– legitimate British English spellings.

Anyway, my point is this: we are getting inundated with rude software that knocks on your door offering a valuable service and then takes over your cyber-house. In the process, it uses up valuable resources on your computer, including drive space and CPU cycles, and wastes your time clicking on messages boxes you did not ask for. And if you do accept any of their offers, you are likely to get either spammed or ripped off.

This is all part of a concerted plan I identified years ago: the plan to turn the internet into television. Television invites you to be a passive moron, watching with a vacuous expression, buying whatever they sell you, blithely accepting vulgar interruptions of every program every few minutes to hawk some valueless piece of junk to you.

The internet used to be different. But the corporations have taken it over. They see it as a true wonder of the modern world: a new way to sell things. A new way to manipulate people. A new audience of suckers for these vampires to sink their teeth into.

Posted on

Time Magazine’s Big Lie

Time Magazine recently released an issue devoted to movers and shakers of the 20th century. I found an interesting little item on Bill Gates:

gates_txt.jpg (29609 bytes)

This is a lie.  It’s not a difference of opinion held by the editors of a popular news magazine: it is a lie, plain and simple.

Interesting, isn’t it? “..together they designed the breakthrough software to run the first microcomputers…”

A few points:

1. Gates was kicked out of Harvard for stealing computer time– he didn’t “drop out”.

2. Gary Kildall designed “DOS”, or CP/M as it was then known. Bill Gates and Paul Allen did NOT. When Kildall and IBM were unable to reach an agreement on the use of CP/M for the new IBM PC, IBM went to Bill Gates. Gates realized that a version of Kildall’s CP/M– called “QDOS” from Seattle Computer Products could do the trick, so Paul Allen licensed it and he and Gates turned around and licensed it to IBM. Kildall later discovered that QDOS was a virtual copy of CP/M, sued, and then settled out of court with IBM.

IBM does not settle out of court if they are right.  They settle out of court to mitigate their losses against the likelihood of losing in court.

History is so enamored of material success that it begins to re-write itself. Suddenly, not only is Gates greedily, madly, insanely rich– he must deserve it in some way!

2. The software they didn’t create– DOS– was as much of a “breakthrough” as the Edsel, especially as the years went by and it was solely in Microsoft’s hands.  It was a piece of dated, inadequate code that couldn’t even address memory above 640K for more than 10 years. The “breakthrough” was the Macintosh OS from Apple, which Gates shamelessly pillaged for Windows, and which itself stole from the Xerox lab at Palo Alto. Breakthrough? Geosworks was a breakthrough, and unlike Windows, it worked. Breakthrough? The 80386 chip was a breakthrough. But Windows still runs as if it’s on a 8088– it can’t multi-task or multi-thread. Breakthrough? On the same machine, Linux hums and 0S/2 throbs.

3. Microsoft software “humming”??? “Humming”???? “Humming”????? The person who wrote this little blurb was insane. Was Time soliciting new advertising from Microsoft at the time this little piece of shit was written?

Let us pray that “history” has more regard for the truth than Time Magazine or Bill Gates.

Posted on

Microsoft Word Still Sucks

Normally I sit down and collect details for this kind of rant, but I’m too enraged to do it right now.

The subject is Microsoft Office and Front Page 2000.

Microsoft has had a monopoly on office “suites” since they intentionally destroyed Word Perfect for Windows by finagling the settings on the links to the operating system so that Word Perfect crashed frequently. Word Perfect never recovered. (Does anyone still remember when Word Perfect had a huge margin on MS Word, in the DOS world?)

Office has a lot of nice functions, a fairly nice interface, and some intriguing capabilities. You can’t avoid using it because almost every office has standardized on it. Employees request it. And it does have some slick features.

But it has a number of very, very large annoyances, all of which serve to profit Microsoft at the users’ expense.

1. What kind of idiot wants to store all his documents in a directory called “my documents”? Well, an idiot. You get a computer. You don’t understand anything about directories or files. You create something in “Word”. Where is it? Where is my document? Oh! Eureka! It’s in “my documents”. How convenient. Convenient, of course, until you have about 200 documents and you need to sort them into logical directories.

And guess what– Microsoft is carrying this absurdity even further! I just noticed there are two new directories on my computer called “my photos” and “my web pages” and “my music”.

And, after reading Bill Gates’ personal web page, I now understand what the meaning is of “my” in those directory names: your files belong to Bill Gates.

2. I have a lot of documents. I store them in many directories. In order to find what I want quickly, I have a list of “favorites”, which narrows down the search considerably, and quickly. Then I installed Front Page 2000 and Internet Explorer. You know what these incomprehensibly stupid programs did? They added my internet bookmarks to my “favorites” list. Does Microsoft honestly think that I now want to keep all my files on web servers all over the globe? And just try to get rid of the extra “favorites” that refer to web sites like “Amazon” (just where I want to store my personal letters, of course). Does anyone know how to get rid of them?

3. I used to create a certain file in Excel and then save it and then import it into Front Page to convert it to a web page so I could adjust the décor, install some images, and fine tune it for my web page. Well, after installing Front Page 2000, whenever I open the file, it opens Excel! Look, you morons, I want to open it in Front Page, not Excel! You can’t even “import” it into Front Page. Are you people incredibly stupid or what?

4. We have an application in the office where I work that runs on Access 95. When we installed Access 97 (as part of Office 97) on our computers, the application could no longer run. So we tried to install Access 95, while leaving the rest of the Office suite alone. Access 95 killed off Access 97. For what reason, pray tell, can you not run both Access 95 and Access 97 on the same computer? Well, the obvious reason is Microsoft’s desire to bully you into upgrading everyone in your office to Office 97.

5. For that same application, we needed some kind of module from the Developer’s Tool Kit for Office 95, which cost about $1000. We bought it. We installed it. Then we found out the application will not work with Office 97. So we went looking for the Developer’s Toolkit for Office 97. Microsoft didn’t offer it anymore. Tell you what though– if you upgrade everyone in the office to Office 2000, you can buy some other combination of stupid modules for $2000 that might give you the same functionality. But then again, it might not. Nobody knows for sure. And just think: right at this very moment, Microsoft is probably hatching their next evil plan to make your life miserable until you buy some new, expensive Microsoft application, which only make your life even more miserable.

6. I invest a lot of work in templates. They save a lot of time, if you create web pages that essentially require similar formats and images. So where are the templates for Front Page? Where are they hiding? In a directory called “templates”? Damned if I know. Where are the Office 2000 templates now? Here’s a history of where templates used to go:

 

  • Word 6.0 c:\msoffice\msword\templates
  • Office 95 c:\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97a c:\program files\msoffice\templates
  • Office 97b c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates
  • Office 2000 c:\program files\Microsoft\office\templates\??????

When I tried to find my Front Page templates, I ended up in a directory called:

..\..\..\windows\application data\Microsoft\chromehorse\images\rotw.jpg

Now the “chromehorse” and “rotw.jpg” are mine. They belong in c:\chromehorse. What is this file doing here? Why is Microsoft continually hiding stuff all over the place on my humungous hard drive, so it is almost impossible to figure out what files belong where and what they do? Well, it’s not some weird sort of complex system of preserving your data. In fact, this ‘system’ is designed to embed defaults into Windows that make you wholly and utterly dependent on the operating system (Microsoft) to manage your data. And the aim of all of this is to make it less and less conceivable or possible for you to use any product that doesn’t understand these secrets intimately. In other words, any product other than those made by Microsoft.

7. Do you use the power save functions of Windows? Then your system has probably crashed. It probably went into power save mode and wouldn’t “wake up”. It went into a coma. And guess what? If you shut off the power switch on the back of your computer so you can reboot, you might very well lock the system into a permanent coma. You might have to pull the battery off the motherboard to get it to wake up again. If they can’t make the power save functions work properly, why do they even bother to put them in?

8. Wow. Even as I was writing this, I discovered a new incredibly irritating “feature”. In order to get around the other idiotic defaults of Office 2000, I decided to import my favorite Front Page template into Word and save it as a Word template. Then I can use it to write my rants in Word and save them in HTML for transfer to my web page. But guess what? When I try to import the template, Office opens Front Page instead of Word, even when I try to open the document in Word!

Whoa nelly! I just found out where Microsoft is really storing my Office templates! It’s in:

c:\windows\application data\Microsoft\templates

So we can add this to the list.

And you can think about how efficient it is to keep moving your files around like that. It’s as if every six months, your company moved their head office to a different building in a different town, and hid all the office supplies in various new locations, and changed all your user names and passwords, and won’t tell you where the parking garage is.

Wow.

As for my templates….

I’m not sure where my templates are actually. There are some bizarre file names at the tail end of that directory, none of which tell me where my laboriously designed and crafted templates are.

So, never forget that Microsoft’s goal is to put a computer into every trailer in every trailer park in America. Never forget that customers can be broken down into three categories.

10% all smart people

44% all educated people and smart people

90% people who live in trailer parks and smart people and educated people

And Microsoft probably understands that 90% very well.

“Honey, where the hell are my documents?”

“You don’t have any documents, dear. You are illiterate.”

“Oh yeah. I forgot.”

By the way, Microsoft isn’t the only evil empire out there. Netscape stores your precious e-mails and bookmarks in a directory called:

c:\program files\communicator\users\mail

And your e-mail files are huge. Why? I don’t know. What are they storing in there? One of my email files is about 80 megabytes and contains about 500 messages. What on earth are they storing in there? Every address of every web page on the face of the earth in every message? Details of the merger with Warner Brothers?

Folks, it’s like TV. When TV started, in the 1950’s, we had some first-rate plays and dramas sponsored by Hallmark and other corporations looking for prestige.

Within ten years, we had “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “Green Acres”, “Mr. Ed”, “Petticoat Junction”, and “Gomer Pyle”.