All Hope Lost

Grandpa Gates' GUI

Timing is everything. I had been thinking about writing this for some time before Bill Gates announced his retirement. If it had only been posted in time I could have speculated that the founder of Microsoft must have read it and run away in shame.

In the 1980's Bill Gates was the wonder kid who made the strange technology of computers easier for the masses to use. Windows has continued to advance in many ways, but in some ways it seems a quarter century out of date, the kind of software your Grandfather would use - or write. That's why I'm calling him Grandpa Gates, to remind him that he's not a wonder kid any more.

One thing I hate about Windows are the "wizards," which may have been magical software in the ancient times, but amount to dim-witted assistants today. Just do a search on your computer for all of the files named "wizard." For example, the sound on one of my computers hadn't been working for weeks, so I started a sound troubleshooting wizard. All it did was feed me a list of things that I should check. It did not check anything itself, it didn't scan my system, it gave me no information. It didn't even know if I had a soundcard, or drivers, or a speaker, or a CD drive. It had no idea what the problem was. The wizard had no magic.

A few days later I noticed the volume control on the taskbar and checked it. The sound was turned off! Apparently, a couple of months before I had become annoyed with some noisy software and turned the sound off, and forgot about it. This could also easily happen to someone whose spouse or children ever used their computer. But the point is that not only had the wizard failed to be magical, it had failed to live up to its 1980's dim-witted assistant standard. Checking the volume was not on its dim-witted list!

Another thing I hate about Windows is that it can't count to one. For example, I have an old computer that isn't used anymore. It has photos and other things that I'd like to back up. One day I turned it on and an error box appeared in the middle of the screen saying that a Registry error had been encountered and Windows would restart and fix the problem. I clicked OK, and the computer restarted and a box appeared on the screen saying that a Registry error had been encountered and Windows would restart and fix the problem. I clicked OK again and the computer restarted and a box appeared on the screen saying that a Registry error had been encountered and Windows would restart and fix the problem. Instead, I just said bad things about Grandpa Gates and shut down the computer.

If Windows could count then the first time the box popped up it would look at the count, see that it was zero, and know that this situation had never happened before. It would change the count to "one" and restart. When the box popped up again Grandpa's GUI would now see that it had counted to one and say, "Wait, I've tried this before."

That old computer didn't have an ethernet port. The next one did, and for two years every time I turned it on a balloon momentarily popped up saying that a network cable was unplugged. I just ignored it, but if Windows could count to "one" it would know that the number of times that a network had ever been present was zero. The number of times that there had ever been a cable plugged in was zero. Why did it have to warn me hundreds of times that a cable had become unplugged?

Finally, I bought a new computer that also had an ethernet port. Eagerly I plugged a cable into both computers and turned them both on. No magic happened. In desperation I turned to the network connection wizard, but its dim-witted assistant list contained no solutions. At one point it actually suggested copying the wizard onto a disk and putting it into the old computer. That is not going to happen, I have a network now.

Now I have a new computer with WiFi capability, too. Now I get three balloons popping up every time I turn it on. A network cable is unplugged, a network is unavailable, a wireless network is unavailable. Now it's getting annoying. First, because there are so many balloons every time I turn the computer on, and second, because I know that they're completely meaningless.

posted by Roboto @ 3:12 AM