Sitting here listening to the satan-induced death metal noise, which someone seems to call music, coming from the EMU Amphitheater downstairs has really got to me. Not only do I feel like I should be sacrificing some small animal and eating it whole, but I realized something else: there a lot of things about computers that just piss me off, probably much more than that infernal racket that’s vibrating this building (but they’re a close second right now).
For example, why is it that programs that are supposed to work together won’t? Microsoft, Macromedia and Adobe all make a ton of very useful products, and are now selling them in bundles to lower costs a bit. But these products (except for parts of Microsoft’s Office 2000 suite), are usually all independent products that just happen to be in the same box. They have a few features that are shared, but integration between the products isn’t done as well as it could be. Doing the exact same things in different programs in the suite will require different tasks. You should be able to open a file created from one program in the suite with any other program in the suite. Or if you try to open it with another program, it will at least clue you in to tell you that you should be using the other program (instead of the cryptic error message you’ll usually get). Or if it were really smart, it would just open the other program. The programs should share common system files, instead of installing several copies of the file in different places. This would also save a pile of disk space, which gets me to my next point.

Why are programs so big? I remember back in the DOS days where they used to have competitions to see who could write the most functional or cool program that fit under a certain byte limit. Writing small programs such as these were critical when hard drive space and memory were at a premium (this was back in the days of 50 meg hard drives and 640Kb of RAM). Programmers now, however, don’t seem to care how large files get. Windows 2000 takes about 500 megs on your hard drive (and needs another 500 free for temporary files). They (read: Microsoft) figured they could do this, because you can’t buy a new computer any more that has less than a 20 gig hard drive and 128 megs of RAM any more. But if programmers still had the mentality from 10 years ago where smaller is better, we could all run Windows 2000 on a 486 with 16 megs of RAM. Luckily there are groups that are creating projects like Mozilla (the core for the next version of Netscape) that are focused on rewriting things to make them faster and smaller. But with other programs, every new version of programs seems to get bigger, clunkier and more annoying. Which leads me to my next point …
Why are upgrades sometimes like downgrades? ICQ is a classic example. I’ve used it for quite a while (my number is 7739361, in case you care), and really like it’s first implementation. It was slick, fast and wasn’t annoying. The newest version, version 2000, adds a ton of useless features that not only make that program more stable. I also know a lot of people who refuse to use Windows 98 because it’s so much slower than Windows 95. RealPlayer seems to have gotten worse with age, too. The client has remained essentially the same, but a bunch of promotional junk is included in the install (a bunch of channels, bookmarks, samples, whatever). That reminds me of another rant …
Why do programs get installed, even when you don’t want them to? Windows 98 is a prime example. I never wanted Internet Explorer on that computer, because it seriously bogged things down. Windows 2000 preinstalls crap that I don’t need. Getting rid of it all is nearly impossible. When I download RealPlayer, I just want the player, not the other garbage that comes with it.
Speaking of RealPlayer, why can’t the computer industry make up its mind about what video and audio standards to use? I have ten different plug-ins in my web browser just to be able to view all the video, audio and animation formats on the Web. It’s getting quite annoying. Why can’t we just bag the useless formats and work on making the good ones better? We can get by on the Web just fine with streaming MP3s, Quicktime and Flash animations and nothing else.
But see, that would make sense — something the computer industry doesn’t seem to understand. Excuse me while I take a bat to this computer.