Bob Hayes Online

An excellent essay. Read, as they say, the whole thing.

Empty desktop. Right click on background, select “New Word document”. Rename it, but forget to type “.doc” at the end of your filename. Bam, operating system forgets that it’s a Word document. Come on, guys. Make the leap of faith that if the user has asked for something to be done, that’s probably what they wanted to have done. I don’t want a generic file of unknown type, I want a G-D Word document. You know how you could have figured out that I wanted a Word document? By the fact that I just asked for one!

If I don’t type in “.doc”, it’s not because I’ve come to this wildly devious method of creating a generic file of unknown type. It’s because I’ve typed the name of my file and I’m ready to go on. You’re the operating system. You’re the one that needs to know that Word document = “.doc file” and you’re the one who needs to make that happen.  (Yes, I am yelling at an OS. I’ve yelled at stranger things. Go away.)

ASSUME THE “.DOC”.

Please, my former cow orkers at the house Bill built, please – put some thought into these things.

I knew some of these, but others are new to me. Great stuff.

I disagree about the BASIC one, though.

What he said.

Via Colfax.

Damn. I remember a lot of these ancient video games – not usually from having them, but from seeing them in stores, in Sears catalogues, and such like. I had the advantage of a father with an electronics background; he wasn’t averse to getting us these kinds of games, but he also pushed me in the direction of computers. Not that it took much of a push!

Via TwentySided.

Not for the operating system itself. No, no, no.

For opening the box it comes in.

Some things simply defy parody.

One of the funnier bits in the early seasons of offbeat scifi epic Red Dwarf has the gang, fleeing from yet another twisted alien overlord, bemoan “How come we never meet anyone nice?”

I’ve always wondered the same thing about AIs, and Dean Esmay writes entertainingly about the prospect for friendly AI in fiction, specifically, the Terminator TV show currently airing.

Coding Sanity bites the bullet and upgrades from buggy, slow Vista to the high-performance reliability of Windows XP. Snicker.

My own Vista experiences have been relatively painless, at least personally, for the very good reason that I didn’t install it on any of the machines that I actually use. My long-suffering assistant has a laptop with Vista pre-installed; it’s a buggy, slow, piece of crap. It sucks to be her, and not just because she has to work for me. (I’ve got a desktop with XP for her, but we’re still working on getting it hooked up to the Internet so she can use a real computer again.)

So why DID Microsoft drop billions in R&D and untold billions in direct programming costs to shoot themselves in the foot? I don’t know, but I can guess: it’s the same reason that schools of education are still trying to find new ways of performing basic pedagogy 2500 years after the principles were first, and adequately, laid out. It’s boring to do things the same old way. It’s boring to say to people “this is our OS core, and it will remain stable into the indefinite future, and other than bug fixes and new device drivers, we will leave the kernel untouched.”

Programmers love to re-invent the wheel. Re-inventing the wheel is fun, satisfying, and achievable – and this time, we’ll do it properly with our new wheel flange code… Microsoft has a lot of programmers to keep happy and maybe throwing umpteen thousand person-years of programming time at reworking something that was working perfectly well is the best way for them to do that.

I just wish the rest of us didn’t have to use the resulting crap code.