I though since there’s little on the blog, I’d explain the reason why I express my views in the way I do, so here we go.
I’m a curmudgeon, I have strong opinions only, and a strong hatred of stupidity in any form(even my own), but this is not say I am angry all the time, I tend to build my anger up over a period of anywhere from a few hours(which normally happens when trying to help a person with something really simple which they are just unable to grasp and actively appear to not want help – appendix A ) to days at a time, till I finally burst and have to rant at whatever pushed me over the edge, then I collect comments on what I said that was incorrect, apologise for what I said that was wrong and move on.
Also, it should be noted that I have a very low opinion of Microsoft and the Windows operating systems as a whole, having used Linux for a while now I can’t understand how Microsoft is even remaining afloat given it’s large size, buggy programming and nasty tactics(which I personally see as a reason to avoid the system, not support it). Simple features of an operating system appear to be pay for use on Windows, nero is slower and less useful than k3b on linux, yet k3b is free, firefox(and opera, and konqueror, and kazekage, and links actually…) is many times greater than IE, yet IE is the default browser. I can happy run linux with compix for fancy graphical effects, watch a film, convert a video or 2 into vobs for burning to DVD, and still have enough proccessing power and ram left to play a game in the background, yet on windows XP on the same system(a pentium 3 single core with 386MB of ram) I have a hard time enabling any graphical effects, watching a movie raises CPU usage to almost 30%(and I need to install codecs first, which is harder than it should be), I can’t find any free software to convert files to vobs, and as for playing games, well, it’s what windows is good at right, it’s got a version of Mines(called minesweeper) that’s black and white, ugly, square, and doesn’t have any features(unless you consider the chance to lose on your first click a feature…), pinus isn’t available for windows yet, visualboy advanced consumes all of my CPU to run the game at 40% speed, which is unbearably slow(atleast on linux it averages somewhere between 90% and 120% based on what’s on screen, which is much more playable). Honestly, is there anyone out there who likes windows? The only reason they still have a market share is because people are unwilling to risk switching to another system, after all, “you can’t run a computer if you don’t have windows”…
Oh, and I forgot to mention that if you need to hook your computer to the internet you need an oversized firewall, antivirus, possibly a spyware destroying program, and a ton of other software to make up for obvious flaws in the system.
appendix A
The perfect example of this was a few years ago, when I was trying to help a person who wished to run a server side function client side, which as logic would dictate, is impossible to do, I recommended submitting the data once, running the code then on the server, and allowing the result to be presented to the user, and offered, that if they provided information on what the code was I would help for javascript which would be useful to those users with javascript. The guest then proceded to demand I provide them with javascript to do this, without telling me what they wanted to achieve, skipping forwards a few posts back and forth I posted a link to 2 javascript tutorials and an e-book on accessibility guide lines and unsubscribed from the thread, the user I found later posting on the general talk board of the forum complaining that the support I provided was rubbish.
Now the thing to remember here is my reaction, rather than ranting there, where the guest would have been offended and possibly complain more, I decided that I could offer them no further support, provided a few links that could be helpful to them solving the goal on their own, and left momentarily (and thank you to who’m ever I ranted to about this, although I suspect I just posted on this on my old blog(which I’m not linking to since the blog has a grand total of around 6 posts and hasn’t seen use in over 3 years)).
