Hello my beauties!!!!
Today I have some steam to get off my chest (ummm . . well anyways) and it comes in the form of a massive rant about software and software giants who think the world stops and starts at their convenience and that they provide us with our every need! Other topics include lazxines, germaphobia, and techological vanity in the form of "hands free" operations in every public place the developed world over! Now drop yer linen and start yer grinnin! Her wego!
First off, I had the pleasure to meet a fellow geek (not the fake hip type of geek, but the original, really dorky geek of yesteryear [in otherwords, not the poser]) at my school the other week. Realizing this guy was a real piece of work, I promptly snapped up his AOL Instant Messenger handle so we could chat about all things CULTURED.
Here, a disclaimer: I do NOT subscribe to AOL. AOL, althouigh seemingly falling from public favor, is an example of the type of pan-corporatism that I hate. Only people 45 and above in this current day seem to be dumb enough to let these plankton attach themselves to their aged yuppie asses to rip them off for services provided (for now) for free the World Wide Web over. I have NEVER subsribed to their lame services, and haven't had an account since I was a wee teenager and took advantage of my parent's account to add a user name and e-mail address. AOL can bite my ass!
That said, I do suckle at the proverbial teat of AIM (a "free" service offered by AOL at the measlwey cost of having to deal with tiny ads on the "buddy list" window and an annoying (and occasionally glitchy [good job guys]) pop up at start up giving us the "News." By "news," I mean the fake news (almost of the SNL Norm Macdonald/Chevy Chase/Jimmy Fallon variety, save that these stories aren't made up. They just might as well be. Call it "News." Call it "pop news lite." I call it concentrated, distilled SHIT oozing from the backside of the American MEDIAoricty served up for our frivolous delight. It's not news, guys. It's decorated feces to keep us distracted and willfully ignorant of the real stories. It is, in a very real sense, less important than the at least mildly intelligent sarcasm offered up by the like of SNL.
Back from my trip off Tangent Ave., IMing on AOL isn't so bad. I've been doing it since I was 17 or so, and it's free. I click their platter of shit they serve me upon signing on off my screen once and IM for hours and hours for free. If only I had someone to talk to . . . .
That reminds me, I met this geeky dude at school, not in the new chic nerd way (read: gay guys with horrifying fashion sense or straight guys trying to get back all the girls us straighties have lost to the gay and the wannabee gay "Scene" kids out there) and . . . wait I've already gone here, haven't I? So, yeah. I like REAL nerds. They are my people and always will be. We generally have higher IQs and are more cultured than your average Abercrombie magnates these days. We know who William Gibson, E.E. Cummings, Dr. Demento, Phillip K. Dick, Fritz Lang, and Wierd Al are, and we're proud of it. This guy seems a little off-kilter though . . . . a little naive. You'll find out in a bit.
I get home, and promptly lose his screen name. Nice. Upon getting it back, I find it to be an odd one: following a distinctly un-AOL format of firstname.lastname@me.com. What in the fuck is this?! He assures me I'll be able to contact him with it somehow, and apologizes if it isn't the right screen name for IM. He's a young guy, all right. In disbeleif and suspicion, I add him to my buddy list and, of course, get an immediate error message. The screen name is not in the correct format for IM. I e-mail him back and get a respopnse that it's from his Apple Mobil Me account but should be compatible. After another quick back and fourth or two, he says it must be my error: I must have something in AOL IM turned on to prevent people I don't know from contacting me and that when he tried to IM me, he gets a message saying I'm offline. Riiiight. I check my settings, and have no such protections turned on. We never did get in touch by IM.
Here's my point: Apple is TAKING OVER THE WORLD. Sure, by "Personal Computer" standards, they still have a small but goriwng market share, but in every other sphere of entertainment, they are fucking EVERYHERE.
Let me get one point out in the open right now: I grew up on Macs. They were my first accessible computer as a teenager, the first I ever used regularly, and I went to school as a graphic designer learning on one the whole way through. Let's get this straight: I HATE MACs.
I'll toss one bone their way: Steve Jobs is right when he says PCs are vulnerable. Coming down off a virtually 99 percentile market share, they damn well might be. That will change as Apple computers (sorry to the noobs out there . . . .I meant Macs) gain more and more market share. Guaranteeeeed! He's also right when he says the PC market (windows) took his ideas and wrapped them up in an unnatractive box (modern desktop pcs ARE ugly). I don't care that they are unwiedly, large, and often look like decrepit large inner city buildings (or, to dress it up a bit, like the Ghostbuster's Fire House, and that's being nice). Point is: I don't care. This goes back to my universal mantra: Content over form. I've had far more problems using Macs (and more experience using them) than I have with Windows. Windows 98 and XP are far more user-friendly, for my tastes, than is any Mac OS I've ever used. Windows also seems more customizeable. His assertion that the operating sydtem itself has no taste and is also ugly falls on deaf ears, on ym part. It's all based on personal p[reference. I'd rather use an OS that appeals to my personal tastes, not Job's idea of what is pretty to him. that aside: You can customize window's OS much easier in my experience.
Here's the deal: Do you have to homogenize the world with your offwhite OSes, you i-this and i-that? The i-pad looks like a shitty system with virtually no expansion capabitilities that is so crippled, shallow and self-contained that it will go obsolete faster than you can say "i-me" (the product they will liekly bring out to replace it). The i-robot-clones will form armies of death and march all over the world soon afterwards. The rapture will soon follow.
Nice show, Apple. Waitta find a successful IP and run it in to the ground. There's striking while the iron's hot, and then there's shoving an IP down consumer's nearly unsatiable throats until even they get sick of it (Starbucks, I'm lookiong in your direction). Lessons will soon be leanred, God willing.
Why homogenize the marketplace? Especially when the marketplace is currently so divided that this just isn't possible. You're essentially homogenizing only the already-converted Mac fascists, causing their naive asses to not be able to contact their PC-owning buddies (who still, bythe way, are the norm as the market stands now). "CAn't we all just get along?!" Insteand of bringing the Mac and PC communities together, Mac continues to stubbornly preach pan-Macism to their i-pod and i-phone toting user base (the majority of whom seem confused and often naive of the fact that there's another world of Linux, Amiga, and, yes, MSX out there. Mac and Windows (but mostly Mac) have erected a wall analogous to the Berlin wall between their respective user bases.
It all came to a head in my . . . .er . . . head . . . when I realize this nerd who I thought was nerdier in a real way than he really turned out to be (his ignorance showed him to be truly nerdy, but not worldly enough to understand what was going on here: that I wasn't in his Mac-aligned universe) was unable to chat with me about whatever it was we were to discuss. Apple Mobile Me? Are you kidding me?! We are not cows, so don't homogenize our milk.
As it turns out Apple Mobile Me was problematic from the start. Out of the box it had major glitches and ifficulties of the sort we both experienced last night: users unable to contact non-Mac or non "MobileMe" users. A revamp began, along with an all new set of directions of what MobileMe users now needed to now in order to make sure they could contact other people who didn't inhabit i-land.
On to other things, this seems to be a trend that is essentially encroaching upon all of new technology, especially in the software/hardware department. You go to install Nero CD burner software and what do you get? "Would you like to install the Nero toolbar for Internet Explorer?" What the . . . ?? Who the . . . ?? Fuck off!!! Later on, after clicking options to avoid any corporate toolbars, ugly and cluttering desktop shortcuts, startup menue icons, and shower caddies (alright, I made that last one up, but I'm sure the Nero sponsored Shower Caddies aren't far behind), you go to use your system, only to find it takes twice as long to startup as normal. you find a virtual (FAKE) CD-Drive on your My Ciomputer window and say to yourself "HEY!!! I never knew this computer came with THREE CD-rom drives on it! Neat!!!! Now I can make copies on the fly . . . . oh Wait. . . . Nero Virtual CD Drive?? What the fuck is this shit??!!" You then find a new Yahoo toolbar occupying your Internet Explorer window, along with numberous Nero or Yahoo! or MSN "Web Assist" toolbars and search bars not only running on your Internet Explorer (sorry Mac and noobs . .. . . In your case I guess you're using Firefox or Safari) window, but also a shitload of new icons of programs running on startup, in your tray, taxing your valuable computer's resources.
Here's my message to these software houses getting too big for their britches: LEAVE US ALONE!!!! When I PAY FOR and INSTALL Nero Burning ROM, I don't need toolbars, web assists, and virtuals drives, among other assorted "goodies" (I.E. distilled SHIT you don't need and didn't ask for or authorize) that I didn't ask for. When I install Nero Burning Rom, I want Nero Burning Rom. Period.
This all oges hand-in-hand with another related trend: Computers are astill not entirely user friendly (read the last three software or hardware error messages you've recieved and tell me you understand them with a straight face if you don't beleive me) but they are also getting dumbed down as our population's collectyive IQ, abilitity to research, think, and question authority, and attention span drops, and as the "greying of America" continues and more older users come to occupy the user base for PCs, software programs are increasingly trying to do more of our work for us, to make our jobs "easier," and to "help us" too much. The problem: they don't help. They make things even more difficult. Using Nero, for example, was a lot easier once you got the hang of it, seven years ago than it is today. Now you get Nero Express, which babys you through such menial tasks as "backing up your precious digital photos, videos, and memories!" and "backing up you computer's data in case of emergency." This is great, and real easy . . . . . if your 65 and have grandchildren your kids have preserved on their HD Cameras just for you. If you're 65 and you don't understand computers and never backup, pirate, rip, or burn games, isos, dvds, music CDs, mp3s, or download using torrents or Beemp3 then this is all great. If you're over 65 and need someone to hold your hand as you trying to drag those confounded HD photos of family and friends and last years barmitspha to your blank CD or DVD for later pleasure viewing, then this is all great. But if your in your teens, twenties, even 30s and 40s, you grew up at the dawn of the information age, when the internet really was "free," and before dipshit corporations came to homogenize information and gained absolute fucking iron grip control over almost all of what we poor citizens see and hear, and when there was a modicum of independent spirit and creativity and, dare I say it, piracy, on the internet, minus the constant viruses, this all SUCKS ROYALLY.
Nero: The universe does not revolve around you, and you can't do everything for me jusy so I have more opportunities to look at your corporate logo. Thanks, but no thanks. AOL: You're a fading giant. All of us youngins have discovered your MO, and we don't like it. We're glad you stopped sending us those "coasters," those stupid, plasticine "AOL FREE FOR 40 HOURS" trial CDs. We're gladder you stopped sellingthem next to big-box PC games in Office Depot years ago. But, please accept your position as a fading giant whose sleight of hand was discovered and stop making everything abotu AOL. Apple: Just because I use i-tunes doesn't mean I want more apple shit on my HD. I have an i-pod I never would have bought myself that someone gave me. I don't want an i-phone and I doubt i-tunes really needs to update itself every three days (it likely just force feeds my poor, strangled, overburnened PC with more of your shitty spyware. I don't appreciate it. Lastly, Yahoo! I use your e-mail html programs for my chief e-mail address, but I don't need any of your internet search bars. Google works just fine. Thank you.
Ease of use, eh? We have the technology to implement it now. ey? Don't think so. KLast time I used a public restroom I was yet again confronted with another one of those annoying "motion activated" paper towel dispensers. Suffice to say that I leftthe bathroom to go back to class two minutes later than I normally would have because I was waiting for this "hands free" "Motion activated" piece of moneky shit to respond to my increasingly frustratted and wild hand gestrus. Is there a secret hand-shake here I am not privy to? A secret gesture that makes these damn things work every time? If so, I don't know it. Hands free faucets that never work, hands free pedestrian cross walk buttons that either don't work, or they do, leaving the abnoxious basterd who actually knows how to work them, to hit the damn things incessently over and over again for three minutes until the damn traffic light lets them go on their not-so-merry way.
In case you all aren't getting the picture here: we don't need this dhit. We are not babies (most of us) and we don't appreciate corporate toolbars and spyware doing market research on us, asking us for constant feedback, and, essentially, taxing our privacy and computer's valuable resources. "Motion activated" isn't progress. It's us vainly flexing our technological muscles so that we can all stand back and say "my what CAN'T we do these days?!" It uses up tax dollars, freuqnelty doesn't even work, and let's face it: not that many of us are really germaphobes who are deathly afriad to touch a public faucet.
Whew! That felt good!
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