(s)os.
|
I’m
not a computer engineer, but I know this much: modern operating systems
are
more bloated than Rush Limbaugh’s ego after winning a hot-dog eating
contest. Operating
systems should be transparent; that is, they shouldn’t get in the way
of you
doing your work. You shouldn’t notice
them. As far as I’m concerned, an OS
should trust me to organize, manage, and store my files where and how I
want to
and not try to force me into an overly simplistic categories like “my
documents,”
“my music,” and “my pictures.” I don’t
want to have to use search tools every time I need a file, so I
organize things
in a consistent, logical way. I only use
the clever search or indexing tools in the one-in-a-thousand case where
I can’t
find the file I’m looking for, usually because it’s from the distant,
distant
past, when computers made sense. Remember
the old days when you only updated software once or maybe twice a year? Now it seems like literally every other time
I boot a machine there’s a new patch that needs to be installed. Have coders gotten more incompetent? Or has quality control lapsed because they
know they can keep fixing things with patches and there’s no pressure
to just
get it right the first time? It used to
be that software updates were more about feature upgrades with a few
bug fixes
thrown in. These days I install a new
patch and the changes are invisible; I assume it’s all about plugging
holes in
security, but who really knows? Maybe
Microsoft is just keeping track of what I buy on Amazon.
(By the way, can you think of any other
category of consumer product that ships with as many known defects as
software?) And
why does it take so long to boot or shut down?
CPUs get faster and faster, and systems come with more and
more RAM, but
the OS with the double jumbo Swiss-army-knife feature set takes two
minutes to
boot and longer to shut down. (And even
longer if the machine has been downloading updates the whole time it
was
on.) I have an old clunker machine
running Windows 2000 with a hard drive that’s scotch-taped to the
bottom of the
case, and it boots in about ten seconds.
And it pretty much does everything I need. In
retrospect, I have to admit that Windows XP with Windows Explorer was
pretty
good. You could turn off or ignore most
of the annoying features and set it up to use the Windows Classic look
to give
a reasonably streamlined GUI that was also pretty stable.
I’m seriously considering investing in a copy
on ebay and just using that for the rest of my life.
If that’s possible. But
Microsoft threw all that out for “Too
clever by half,” as my Mac-addicted boss would say.
Interestingly, nearly all of the managers in
my division at work use Macs. But these
guys are from the generation of techies that cut their teeth on Apple
II’s and
never switched over, not the generation of punk-ass kids that picked
their
first machine because it was ooooooh! Translucent blue! If
the software companies wrote bug-free, usable code, they’d all be out
of
work. So they keep force-feeding us new
updates and inventing new features that we don’t need and dressing them
up with
fancy graphics to sucker us into upgrading (or force their new systems
on us
when we upgrade). I
don’t want fancy whooshing graphics. I
don’t want games. I don’t want the
machine to be hijacked while installing updates once a week. I want the computer to boot fast, shut down
fast, to not
crash, and to let me remove external media whenever I damn well want to. I want a decent scientific calculator, a text
editor, and a simple file browsing tool with tool panes like Windows
Explorer. I want Internet Explorer to
disappear from the face of the earth and never be mentioned again. I want a simple photo editing program that
will let me view jpgs and tiffs, make simple alterations like cropping,
rotating by fractions of a degree, and making brightness adjustments,
and let
me add text and arrows. I want a simple,
intuitive, bullet-proof CD writer that doesn’t store up files to write
to a CD
at some indeterminate time in the future.
I want a simple media player that plays all main variants
of mp3s and
wavs. And that’s
pretty much it. I
swear, it’s getting worse, not better.
There may be all kinds of behind-the-scenes reasons to
update the OS
(64-bit processing and all that), but in the process they’ve messed up
the
front end, and that’s the part I really care about.
But
I have to admit, all those PC-guy/Mac-guy commercials are pretty funny. |