I hate my PC, so does Paul W. Homer at Programmers Paradox. He did an excellent rant and I, unfortunately, have to agree with him. In search for a better systems, we fell in terrible mess.

Few years ago, I would recommend to anybody to buy a PC, I would carefully and systematically explain why and how to use a computer for things like music, photos and movies and Internet stuff like email and forums. I explained how to find information on the Internet and how your life can be simpler if you have a PC at home. Now, I don’t do that anymore. It’s not worth it. Neither will their life be simpler, neither will mine.

Let say my parents buy a computer and I’m helping them to use it. Can my mom just plug the camera in their PC and send some photos to me by email? There’s too many things that can go wrong and one of them surely will:

• Computers have few USB ports but for some reason they work unpredictably. I have 6 USB ports. I can plug in my USB stick to front panel but external USB hard disk and cellphone do not work there: I must crawl under the desk and connect them behind. What should I say to my mom? Where should she connect the camera?
• Some cameras need drivers to work. Drivers are bad for users.
• What will happen if connection works? Nothing predictable: maybe nothing, maybe windows will open their autoplay dialog, maybe some flashy manufacturer’s application will run.
• Login to email account and attach the photos. It’s easy, except that photos from the camera can get pretty large, 3 MB being common size. Email service providers can limit you to 5 or 10 MB per email. You can either:
  • Send one email for every photo and spend probably a hour doing this
  • Compress the photos with JPEG compression. That’s very complicated procedure to explain over the phone.

The simplest action I could think of is for her to sit in the car and bring me the camera.

It’s the same for almost everything one can do on the computer.

• Burning a CD? Do you have a CD or DVD? DVD-R or DVD-RW. You want data disk or audio disk? Did you mean mp3 audio disk or normal audio disk for your car?
• Connect a PC to TV? 4-pin S-Video or 7-pin S-Video connector? Mirror or stretch the picture? PAL B, Pal C, Pal D or Pal E? No picture? Go to display properties in Windows control panel or maybe drag and drop your devices in ATI control panel.

Malware is spreading again. You need to regularly update your windows (auto update helps), have an antivirus software and firewall. Most of the time, firewall will nag you (alert, Sims want to connect to Internet, firefox application is different (after upgrade), svchost wants to connect…) and when real threat is reported, user will probably allow it to do whatever it wants because that’s the way to remove this alert.

I could go like this whole day. I can only hope that there will be someone smart enough to simplify things. Someone who will do to the PC the same thing Google did to Internet search, Wikipedia did to knowledge sharing and Amazon did to books. Someone who will analyze and use existing systems, connect them in a new way and make us all happier and billionaire of himself.

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