Computer Technology Drives Me Crazy!
Here’s the deal. I’m an alpha computer geek. The whole sack of potatoes. I carry USB flash drives on my person, I have a portable hard drive in my pocket most of the time (no jokes please–not in the mood!), I read the magazines and review blogs, and I browse newegg.com for fun. In my home are no fewer than five PCs. I have a quad-core PC with a gamer’s dream video card, SATA hard drives, an expensive three-rail power supply, a groovy dark aluminum case–the whole works.
And you know what? I’m fed up with all of it. From an objective point of view, it’s all junk. You read that right–I called it “junk”, because that’s what all of this computer stuff really is. I’m fed up with computer technology. In my opinion, in the last decade, this industry (hardware and software) has progressed backward not just a few, but many steps. Today, warranties are all the rage, and are pushed heavily by employees at stores like Fry’s Electronics and up on newegg.com’s site–and don’t even get me started with Circuit City or Best Buy because I can’t even stand to walk into those places any more. (Don’t call me a noob or any other word from the dictionary of 1337 for this rant–I’ve earned it with hard time, plus I have four C++ compilers on my PC, and I can port the game of Breakout from DirectX to GBA to GameCube in a single day–so there!).
Now I wonder how an average person who is not a geek puts up with this stuff? That, in my opinion, is the $64,000 question that no one seems to be asking. My retired parents sure can’t figure any of it out, much as they want to. They like e-mail, and enjoy receiving photos of the grandkids. My mom tried once to burn a CD with all the photos they’d received via email, and of course it didn’t work. I had to send her a USB flash drive. My folks buy a PC from Sams Club every year or so because they know, as in, from experience, that it’ll screw up after six months or a year and they won’t have a clue how to get it to work again. Which brings up an interesting question: Should the user interface (i.e. the operating system) be included as a component in computer warranties? After all, Windows “screws up” more often than hardware. What errors, you may ask? How about, for starters, Windows’ inability to remember anything I’ve worked on for the past year, let alone yesterday. Is that an error? From an interaction design point of view, absolutely. From a programmer’s point of view, not at all. But programmers are no longer the primary users of computers these days.
It’s not just computers that drive me crazy, it’s all of the poorly-designed, poorly-built, made-to-die accessories and gizmos and gadgets in this field I used to lovingly call “gizmos of geekdom”. I used to love this stuff as a kid and 20-something. I loved staying up all night playing with my first CD-R burner (back in 1997 when discs were $10 each). They were so expensive I didn’t dare waste a single one, so I bought a new whopping 2.5GB hard drive in order to build an ISO image before burning, and then would cross my fingers hoping the throughput was enough to keep the laser fed–this being the era before BurnProof came along, when you knew the disc was hosed if your mouse ever hopped. So I’d sit there slowly moving my mouse around while the drive cooked a new CD-R disc, and pretty much if the mouse remained in smooth operation for the whole 40 minutes or so, I knew it was a good burn!
Which is, of course, absolute madness, but madness of a sort that it’s acceptable behavior because of the perceived (and incorrect) belief that this technology improves my life. I couldn’t afford to keep buying 100MB ZIP discs to back up my data, even though I liked the reliability of IOMega’s products. I needed to burn a CD in order to remove data from my over-burdened hard drive (again, going back a few years here…). What was the end result? After several expensive coasters, I finally had a backup to CD-R of all my important data. But would I dare rely on that single disc for important photos and documents? If only. Even today, I don’t trust a CD-R with my vital data–out of experience, I must have several copies, on more than one medium. What, after all, is the best form of backup? Duplication. Excessive duplication. Or a paid service such as carbonite.com as a secondary backup to one’s own CD-R, DVD-R, or flash drive backups. While I’m on the topic of backups, I use a free tool called Cobian Backup, which is simply wonderful. I have a NAS drive (Airlink101) set up as a drive letter on every PC in my home, and Cobian is set up on a schedule to back up certain root-level directories to the NAS. Everything I work on is stored in one of three or so major directories, all of which are backed up, automatically, every day (incrementally). It runs as a low-priority thread in the background and does not interfere with my productivity (or gaming). Adding to a NAS the carbonite.com service is a great overall solution for personal data preservation. In summary, the surest way to preserve your data is to use more than one type of media. If you have a second hard drive in your PC, use web space or FTP or DVD-R or carbonite.com (or all of them). That one smallish problem being resolved for the time being, it still required an excessive amount of manual setup on my part, which drove me crazy.
Today, the technology is a little better once I get Windows set up with all the third-party applications installed that I frequently use (since the OS is all but useless on its own). Building a new PC is at least an 8-hour affair, though. After building and configuring the system, installing Windows and all of my oft-needed applications and development stuff, I’ve burned pretty much an entire day, and the end result is a system that does only exactly what I tell it–nothing more, nothing less. There is no intuition. At Google, I feel a little bit of intelligence in operation, and experience similar intelligence behind Amazon.com (smart advertising). But the OS is hopelessly stupid and hard to use. (Why do toolbar pop-up notices not automatically hide themselves? Why do pop-up message boxes from other applications interrupt my typing?).
Enough ranting. Computer technology still isn’t there yet. Here’s hoping that interaction design improves during 2009!
Arrowofdarkness16
January 4th, 2009 at 2:05 pm #
Don’t feel bad, I have a a freenas server running at home mapped to a drive, I also backup my latest builds onto 2 flash drives.