Windows Vista provides the greatest user experience ever

Yeah, you got me. That sure was sarcasm.

A couple of weeks ago I assisted my dad in buying a new laptop. Their old laptop was state of the art when they bought it about five years ago, but today it's not really cutting it. So, time to buy a new one.

We went to the Sony Center and there my dad fell in love a pretty sweet Vaio-machine. It's really a damn sexy piece of hardware and after inspecting the specs I gave it the thumbs-up. Only one problem really, it ran Windows Vista.

Now why is this a problem besides the fact that I loathe Windows? Well, it's no secret that plenty of people that have gone from Windows XP to Vista have had and still are having a shitload of problems with Microsoft's new and sparkly OS. My dad is not a complete computer imbecile at all, he's a pretty ordinary user. He does some e-mail, surfs the web, plays some simple online games, does his banking online, organizes photos from his digital camera and things like that. Nothing fancy, nothing very advanced or odd at all.

So, while I was sceptical I thought that since good 'ole dad's computer habits were nothing out of the ordinary I said "what the hell" and hoped for the best.

Silly me. Stupid damn fuckin' silly me.

I assisted with starting up the new laptop, installing all of the bundled software (Norton Security-stuff, a bunch of Google-apps, etc.) and configured it as best I could (remember that this was my first hands-on experience with Vista and that I haven't been a regular Windows-user for over six years) and when I left my parents' house it seemed to be working fine.

It took about two days until I received the first desperate call from my dad about his new computer "not working". I googled some stuff and helped him out as well as I could over the phone. That was just the first of a seemingly never-ending series of calls, and all of them had to do with the new and fancy features in Vista fucking up my dad's computing experience. In most cases I managed to hook him up with some sort of temporary work-around to the problem that he could live with until I had the time to get over there and get under the hood of the thing.

This week however things got so bad that my dad called me to say that he needs the old laptop back (I'd borrowed it to do some experimenting on) because the new one was completely unusable to him.

He couldn't send e-mail properly, no applications except Internet Explorer 7 were allowed access to the internet, every time he tried to do just about anything useful he was driven mad by a bombardment of security pop-ups, the list goes on and on. What finally did it though was that IE and Vista wouldn't allow him to install the certificate for his bank, thus making it impossible to pay their bills online. Awesome. Now tell me what's so great about Vista again? Fuck.

So here's someone that uses computers at work and has been using Windows XP both at home and at work for the past five years. Not a dimwit at all, actually pretty computer-savvy for a man in his late fifties. He goes out and buys a brand new awesome computer for $1800 with the "latest and greatest OS" and after three weeks he switches back to his old piece of cyberjunk because he's being terrorized by Vista. Good one Microsoft.

Seriously, Vista must be the biggest piece of shit ever released by Microsoft. When experienced XP-users can't get the damn thing to work properly you gotta call it a freakin' failure, because that's what it is. I don't give a rat's ass if it's "more secure" (I doubt it) or looks snazzier than XP. It's completely unusable to ordinary computer users as proven by my dad and many others I've read about online.

If it wasn't for my dad having to run a few work-specific applications (which requires Windows) on his computer I'd have him buying a Mac or switching to Linux in a heartbeat.

And you know I'm gonna have to go over there next week and spend a hundred hours "fixing" that brand new Sony Vaio. Just because it's been soiled by Vista. Damn.

Windows Vista is a sad piece of shit and once again Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves for releasing such a pathetic excuse for an operating system.

MySpace - BAD! Facebook - better? We'll see.

I make no efforts to hide the fact that I think MySpace is a skidmark in the underpants of web 2.0 and more or less represents everything that is wrong with the internet today. I loathe MySpace basically.

Most of my ill thoughts towards MySpace is because of the way they let people bombard their pages with all manner of crap making most of the pages on the site completely unviewable unless you wanna risk an epileptic episode of grand proportions. I agree that people having bad taste and no judgment is not the fault of MySpace, I already knew that people are idiots way before MySpace got into the game, but the core of the matter is that MySpace is the enabler here. There are tons of other communities that look really neat and that don't make my brain's synapses lapse into a screaming rage when I visit them.

The only thing that I actually enjoy with MySpace, and that I repeatedly curse for being a feature of said website and not some other site less worthy of my hatred, is what it's done for underground music. It's awesome to be able to go on there and listen to and occasionally download songs with less known bands worthy of greater fame. This is, as I see it, MySpace's only feature worth any praise and the only reason that I don't want it completely wiped off the internet.

Sure, it's probably nice that MySpace helps people keep in touch and stuff like that, but that's hardly anything new as far as online-communities go. I've been active on various communities on and off during the past ten years but none of them have even come close to being the cesspool of bad taste and animated GIFs gone wild that is MySpace. This is why I would rather choose almost any other community out there over MySpace.

I actually had a MySpace-account once, but I closed it down after a few months because I just couldn't live with being a part of it. That's how bad I think it is.

It was brought to my attention today through an article on TechCrunch that MySpace are apparently not only enablers of crap but also testy bastards that enjoy shutting down companies that supply services linked to the MySpace-site, i.e. companies that add value to their business without it costing them anything except some bandwidth and CPU-time.

In this web 2.0 day and age I think this is pretty appalling and it's just another reason to steer clear of MySpace. Sure, they're looking into opening up their platform to developers, something that Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and a myriad of other web 2.0 sites have already done aeons ago, but even if they do they're pretty late to the dance and with them having behaved badly towards third party developers already I'm guessing that such a venture could be actually be a failure.

I have very little experience with up and comer Facebook, practically none actually. But although I've told several of my friends that have wanted me to get on there that I'm not interested in another generic online community, I'm actually now thinking about setting up an account. This is partly to check out what all the fuss is about but mainly to play around with the site and its API. Yeah, I know that's a really dorky reason but hey, that's what I am - a dork.

Plus, Facebook doesn't give the members the right to soil their pages with a multi-colored vomit of Flash, animated GIFs and movie-clips. At least, that's what I hear, and if I do set up an account that's what will determine if I stay more than a few minutes or log off immediately and delete my account while screaming profanities at the top of lungs.

Not quite dead

In a recent article Computer World lists the "top 10 dead (or dying) computer skills", some of the spots on the list I agree with but some I don't.

One that I totally don't agree with is number six, "C programming". Anyone who claims that the C language is dead or dying simply doesn't see the software industry for everything it is and doesn't understand how many different kinds of software there is out there.

Fine, you might not see the latest snazzy web applications from Google being written in C or even a huge amount of desktop-applications for that matter (even if I believe that quite a lot of the Linux/Unix-apps are written in C, the Linux-kernel for one). But that doesn't mean there isn't a shitload of software everywhere around us written in C.

To my knowledge most embedded software is written in C. Things like controller software for household appliances, cellphones and such things, devices like that all have a fair chunk of C spinning through their circuits.

Another great example is GNU/Linux-software. The Linux-kernel is written entirely in C I believe and so is most of the apps that make up the GNU-toolset.

So basically, C is not dead or dying. Claiming that almost makes you an idiot.

The claim that the languages Cobol and ColdFusion are dying however, I can basically agree with that. They're not dead though. I don't think it's fair to pronounce a language like Cobol as dead since there is still so damn much software out there that's written in this archaic language.

The reason there's still many mission critical pieces of Cobol code, or any dying language for that matter, running out there is simply that there are a heck of a lot of legacy systems that haven't been upgraded, rewritten and so on. The reason for that is, in my experience, that most companies are cheapskates.

Rather than invest the time and money in upgrading an ancient system they have their developers spend time on patching the system with horrible work-arounds and crappy add-ons just to keep it going. If anybody were to suggest a complete redesign and rebuild of an existing system somebody close to the company's finances probably would say "Why? It still works, doesn't it?" and shut it down with a suggestion of patching it some more if there are any problems with it.

Pretty much the only thing that'll convince the people at the top of the company food chain that a new system needs to be developed is if the old one crashes and burns completely. When that happens though, the software people are most likely to be blamed for it and having a shiny new software bundle in place and up and running will be something that will be expected of them in a snap more or less.

I really wish that the people handling the money in companies that rely on IT for their business had a little more knowledge as to what IT and software is about and how it works. That way we'd see less and less of things like medieval systems running Windows 3.11 software patched into oblivion, and I can guarantee you that most developers would me happier with putting in some extra hours building something new and exciting than spending their days fixing and working around the short-comings of ancient code bases.