obive.net

Tuesday February 1 2005 @ 2:22 AM

The point of the computers being so fast article wasn’t to make fun of Windows sucking. Think about this: That computer that crashed could have re-launched the application that crashed. It would have been constantly saving its state to the hard disk and the resumed. It could have checked whatever it was that made it crash before it crashed so that it didn’t crash.

When you use an application that needs to know where file on your disk is, what does it do? It asks you. How efficient is this? We have the technology to search the contents of every single file on your computer instantly for anything. Why the hell is it asking you where some obscure file is? When you open some web editor and it wants to know what browsers to use for previewing, why not just search your hard disk for them? It couldn’t take more than a second. But instead, it asks you, and you have to spend 5 minutes locating them, make sure all the parameters are correct, clicking all these buttons, etc.

Obviously the answer to all these questions is: Because programmers are stupid or lazy. It could also be the operating system designers fault for not making these services available to the programmer. Can you search your disk like this in Windows? Of coarse not. Why not you ask? Well, the answer isn’t because its not possible. This technology was in BeOS YEARS ago, like 7 years ago. It’s been in Linux and MacOS for years too. Microsoft was planning on making this available in a horrible abomination in the form of a layer over the top of NTFS called WinFS in Longhorn. Well, this was delayed until Longhorn Server. Well, guess what! It was delayed again!

Blame who you want. Computers suck because people suck. People suck because other people suck. Other people suck because …. Shit. I already said why other people suck. Well, in that case… Try not to suck. If you don’t suck, then maybe other people won’t suck and maybe it will eventually lead to the government not sucking with this “no child left behind” crap… Or as my Java professor put it: ‘no child left without his or her fair share of tests, we don’t want a kid not getting enough tests!’ Maybe it will lead to every one not being assholes. Who knows, it could just be wishful thinking. So folks, that’s why computers suck. It’s not the hardware, it’s the software. Hopefully I will be able to make things better.