10/23/07

I have been hell of busy today so not much of a rant. Besides, I don’t have anything new to add. Oh, I guess I could ‘splain the post script yesterday. It took me half an hour to get that e-mail to Spiderman. I had to reboot the computer three times and still things kept locking up. I almost shat myself later in the evening when I saw a commercial for this AT&T air card thing claiming broadband speed anywhere. BULLSHIT! “Near dialup speed” would be a believable claim in my experience. Notice I didn’t say “Dialup speed” but put the qualifier “near” on it. Yes, I still hold that this AT&T air card is SLOWER than dialup. That is so important I'm going to say it again. An AT&T air card is slower than dialup. Oh, and don’t get me started on Tiny and Flaccid, AKA Microsoft. What do they do, sit around in meetings thinking of ways to make their programs incompatible with each other and buggy? It sure looks that way from the outside. I have a theory about computers. I just can’t seem to get the words right to explain it. I've tried and deleted it several times now. It involves keyboard based programming versus mouse based programming and how some tipping point will be reached when all the “keyboard” programmers are replaced with “mouse” programmers and all the programs become so bloated and complex that they won’t work anymore. Let me see if I can ‘splain it. Assume there is a computer system in place that works because it is an older style, non GUI controlled program. This system is important because it, oh I don’t know, controls the dispatching and routing of trains or something. If this system crashes, so do a bunch of trains, or whatever, and that would be bad. But the system doesn’t crash because you have to be specially trained to use it. It isn’t “user friendly” and it doesn’t have a lot of superfluous programming behind the scenes. Now, let’s say that the people who are specially trained to use this system are beginning to retire and are being replaced. Who is coming in? Young people who have never seen a computer that doesn’t use a mouse! What is the first question these punks ask? Yep, “Where’s the mouse?” Now, the smart thing to do, in my opinion, would be to continue to train the folks on using the system that works. However I foresee that companies won’t do that but will replace these vital systems with buggy, bloated, crash prone, complex, GUI controlled, “user friendly” systems and will begin to have more and more problems with them. Oh sure, it will be great for the companies writing the programs and farming out tech support to India, but it is going to be ugly for many other people. Keep watching the skies people, a storm’s a brewin’. Ok, so I did have a rant in me after all.