That scene on the movie Office Space was brilliant. The only way it could have been better wuold be if it were a computer, especiaily some of the ones I’ve owned. Ever wondere why computers suck so much, why they’re so confusing, which is a nice way to say they’re so aggravating they could drive one to violent felonies against innocent silicon wafers? Finally, after I’ve spent the last year in retail tech support, the secret can be revealed.
The number one reason computers suck is because of thieves. Crooks who steal everything they can get their virtual mitts on, often operating freely in countries where corrupt or indifferent law enforcement agencies happily look the other way. These assholes cause all sorts of problems for PC users. A common one is the antiviral software dilemma, too strong or too weak — the digital equavilent of autoimmune conditions vs compromised immunity seen in Lupus vs HIV or cancer patients, where confusing packages of security software must be bought and maintained which either slow every damn thing down when it’s not outright shutting them off, or let malacious programs through slowing or shutting every damn thing down.
The second reason computers suck is because We the Users buy them based on cost but use them based on need. It’s kind of like a farmer buying a vehicle based purely on cost and then hooking it up to a plow. That Kia Soul will pull a combine alright, better than a person doing it with sheer muscle power anyway. But it’s going to get expensive real quick, because it won’t do it well and it won’t last long doing it.
That being said, the PC and software industry could, imo, do a better job. Just one example: the hung web page. We have dual memory cores and graphics cards and blazing fast Internet speeds. And yet windows developers are unable to put out a browser and operating system that will reliably and quickly shut down a webpage that hangs up. You know the drill, the page you’ve been visiting all day and/or all year suddenly won’t finish loading. There’s no indication of when to give up, you just have to guess. Finally, in frustration, you click on the X to shut the sucker down, and then nothing happens or, worse, an annoying message that ‘the page is no responding’ appears. At which point you start task manager, and half the time task manager also informs you the program is not responding to being shut down. In extreme cases the power has to be cut and the device rebooted, all because one web page wouldn’t load.
One would think that ending a connection would be a fairly simple operation. When that X is clicked, that page should close, ideally without resorting to a special program plastering up an annoying messages that the page is not responding on programs when it was specifically opened to end an unresponsive page. And yet this must be more difficult than it sounds because, despite 20 years of web innovation to the tune of trillions of dollars and enough graduate degrees to paper over a small state, it has so far eluded the nerdiacs.
Computers are, hands down, the most confusing, unreliable, over hyped items most people have to deal with in life. And that’s the kicker, that’s why people get so pissed off at computers and software: we have to deal with them. One can no more function in 21st America without a PC than they can without being able to read and write. And what’s even more aggravating is, far from getting a handle on it, meaning operating systems and applications that don’t routinely seize up or crash, that same technology is instead being extended to everything from television sets to cell phones. A few more years of this and I won’t be able to brew coffee without downloading F-secure and Defender and fighting off whatever slips through. Maybe we should just hope future household appliances rely on Apple and not PC based code.
OK, all this whining is just a way for me to vent. What’s a blog for after all? Truth be told, my ASUS came down with fake security virus. And that’s what really sparked this post, or the first part about thieves anyway. /Rant
Update 8 AM CDT: Wow , lots of responses. OK, in rough order, I use every web browser, FF, Chrome, I/E when I have to, etc. My firewall at work is whatever they say, at home it’s the standard Windows Vista or the ASUS XP thing. I’ve opened and closed ports as needed, changed proxy settings, one of my machines is currently in perm safe mode w/networking because i just got tired of it being so slow. Incidentally, found a rootkit virus or at least a piece of an old one when reading the msinfo in that one, got rid of that and it wasn’t easy.
Thing is though, I know this stuff “OK,” or at least I have very good resources to go to for advice when I run into something I can’t resolve on my own. Most people don’t have a lot of experience reading an msinfo or a handy dandy tech assistant guide that parses it down, few people can do a trace route without specific intrusctions and fewer still know how to read it. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been dragged over to a friend’s house on a weekend morning to try and fix their damn PC. For free of course.
In response to the point about Windows or Macs, these devices I have and wrote about will probably be the last Windows machine I ever own. My next PC will be a Mac. That’s not to say Macs are immune to problems, we get some Mac tickets at work. But I’ve been around both kinds now, inside and outside, that I think a Mac is worth a shot even though it’s going to cost twice as much.
What really sucks is having obnoxious “Download” and “Play Now” buttons flashing at the bottom of your posts without giving a clue as to what you will be downloading or playing. (Or even that they are some kind of obnoxious ad in the first place.)
Great way to catch a virus if your not careful. :-(
Are you using Internet Explorer? If so, then that’s your problem. Try Firefox or Chrome.
It sounds like the program is locking up for whatever reason. Us programmers are human. For every bug we fix, another is born. The being unable to kill a process problem is an interesting one that seems to be limited to Windows. I have no problem killing unresponsive programs in Linux, and I haven’t heard any complaints from the other Unix-based OSes (Mac, BSD).
Most embedded systems rely on either their own custom OS (tend to be very small, like your average car) or Linux. Linux is pretty secure, and given that it dominates both the server and smartphone markets, you can’t say it’s because it’s a small target. It isn’t.
I strongly agree with Emily. Even if you decide to keep using (or are forced to use) Windows, you have a choice of web browsers. Embedded systems do not typically use Windows, though this may change due to Microsoft’s marketing acumen and its dominance in other markets.
Your complaint about users buying cheap computers could not be more wrong. Quite low-powered modern desktop systems are very much more powerful than the top systems from just five years ago, and think about what we were already doing then. I have not bought an expensive system since 1995, always opting instead for a cheap generic box or a second hand system. There are some excellent and capable free operating systems around now.
I’ve always wondered about computer viruses.
Being a software developer that has been programming since the age of eight, I fully understand how and why viruses works. What perturbs me a little is thinking about who has the most to gain from viruses.
One might think that criminals don’t do too badly out of the virus creation business and perhaps of late that might be the case but to be perfectly honest, anti-virus companies definitely benefit the most from viruses going around.
If it ever had to come out that major anti-virus creators and distributors were also responsible for creating most viruses I would definitely not be surprised.
I do have a pet hate for anti-virus programs, I will admit.
Your complaints seem to apply mostly to Windows machines. Windows is a widely used monoculture, hence worth attacking; and its security model still isn’t so hot.
Unix has been used on multi-user machines since its inception, so it has always had strong security and facilities to reliably kill runaway processes. It is also quite diverse. Malware for Linux, the most widely-used version of Unix, is very rare. As for hung processes, it does happen. My rather old version of FireFox running on my rather old Debian install does hang up fairly often, usually when watching videos, but all I need to do is start a terminal window and type “killall firefox-bin”. (Actually, I don’t need to type it; I just hit ctrl-R kil, and it comes up. Command history. I could make a hotkey for it if I really needed to.)
As far as I can tell, the reason Windows is still screwed up is that the “nerdiacs” aren’t in charge at Microsoft. The suits are; and their primary concern is revenues and deadlines. Things are different in the free software world.
I think that you have a software problem. I do not have these difficulties. I am running Firefox on Debian behind a FreeBSD firewall.
Are you using something different?
Or you could run a free Unix (Linux, BSD, etc.) on cheap PC hardware. Of course, then you need to learn how to use it, whereas you may already know how to use a Mac; and you have to look to the user community for help, instead of Apple (unless you buy something like Red Hat with a support contract). You pays your money and you takes your choice.
I have to agree with the above posters: run Linux or BSD. They’re far more secure than either of the popular proprietary operating systems, and the available applications are capable of doing what the typical home user needs – send and receive e-mail, surf the web, do word processing and spreadsheets, keep simple databases.
Please note that running your favourite MMORPG is not a “need”. It’s a “want”.
Another big fan of Linux here. I use a Mac at work and it’s terrific, but the prices are high. If your main problem is just the viruses and malware, I highly recommend downloading Ubuntu (user-friendly version of Linux, works a lot like Windows/Mac platform). You can load it alongside windows onto your PC without much trouble, it’ll handle all the partitioning for you. Then you can try it out, see how it works and either get rid of windows altogether or just keep it around in case you need it. My buddy Greg, who’s not terribly good with computers, has been using it for probably 6 months now, and he absolutely loves it, especially since his computer seems about 4 times faster than it used to be. He kept windows for a couple of programs that are obscure enough to not have linux versions, but most everything else is now in linux. If you like Google programs (I use Picasa for pics), they are all available in linux as well.
Uh, lordshipmayhem, bear in mind that OSX is BSD, sort of.
Tualha:
Exactly.
Do you want to know who Microsoft’s customers are? Look at the “Start” menu. Notice how it is organized?
It’s not organized by function. It’s organized by company. (Is it still this way with MS-Windows 7? I haven’t used MS-Windows since XP.)
Microsoft isn’t building MS-Windows for the end-user. They build it for corporations.
See? That’s why everyone is rushing to the iPad.
Try to find a webpage that will not be closed by the Home button on that sucker :-)
” We have dual memory cores and graphics cards and blazing fast Internet speeds. And yet windows developers are unable to put out a browser and operating system that will reliably and quickly shut down a webpage that hangs up.”
Bottom line, software sucks, the god damn soul of the machines. No matter if you talk about Linux, OSX, Winsuck… everything is thoroughly fucked up!!
The worst, the very worst is having to do software and making it work. Man, this is so fucking frustrating! I am a rude man, but I am about to cry :(
Just one example: the hung web page. We have dual memory cores and graphics cards and blazing fast Internet speeds. And yet windows developers are unable to put out a browser and operating system that will reliably and quickly shut down a webpage that hangs up
There was this guy named Turing who once pointed out that it’s, um…. hard – to know when your program will complete. Smart programmers know this, and work hard to make sure that their design is not dependent on solving a very very hard problem.
So, when you download a page into your browser, you’re getting a bunch of javascript and html and all kinds of absurdly badly designed internet goo, goo that often takes advantage of side effects in poor specifications in order to download malware to your system or to provide animated dancing pigs or annoyingly stupid product offers. Anyhow, the user who clicks on a page is expecting the browser to run all that crap – correctly – and to know when something has gone wrong. It’s not as simple as counting virtual CPU ticks or whatever. The whole design – the whole idea of what people are doing – is fundamentally bad.
If you are browsing the web logged in as local administrator, and/or are using windows XP, and/or are not running something like firefox+noscript to whitelist your scripts, you should assume that when your page ‘hangs’ that your computer has just installed sniny new malware courtesy of some asshole or government. In order of importance, do not ever browse as a privileged user, do not use a toilet paper operating system from Microsoft, and do not run scripts that you didn’t approve.
in perm safe mode w/networking
When you’re running in safe mode with networking, you’re in single-user mode. That means that any piece of malware download that attempts to punch through your browsing is going to do so with administrative privileges.
Time to take off and nuke it from orbit. Push your personal data to dropbox or rapidshare (or both), download a unix-based disk-wiper and zeroize the drive, reinstall windows, backload only your data that contains no executable content (i.e.: damn near none of it) and don’t surf the web with anything but an unprivileged account. If there is one thing that Apple gets right in the iPad it’s the priority zero interrupt on the home button and the o/s critical files being whitelisted.
I hate it when people who know nothing about computers complain about them and say they suck. Oh and then they try and say that Apple is the way to go and will solve all your problems.
People just really annoy me sometimes -_-