Fun!

I ... I ...

don't have any new toys.

But I have a wonderful white cat!

I don't believe in any of that stuff. I refuse to even have an ordinary cellphone.

One of the things I really hate about the whole 'computer' industry is that once you obtain one item, you've stepped on the 'planned obsolescence' escalator. It will be 'outdated' within months, if not weeks. The crappy manufacture of much of the stuff insures that with, or without, the slightest jostling or bumps, the thing will cease functioning as advertised. Then there are all the add-ons, whether software or hardware....same thing.

Then there is the incessant unwanted marketing. I had a Norton security program which came with my desktop. My installer (unson #2) doesn't like that and installed a different security system. So...the Norton system basically 'timed-out' when I refused to update a system I didn't use. Then, it started sending me annoying pop-ups about how my computer was going to be bared to potential rapacious hackers...one every time I logged in. By the time it 'ran out', I was assured that I would never, ever again, buy a Norton product. Months and months later, I still get annoying pop-ups telling me that I'm desperately 'at risk' from people I told I don't know how many ways that I was not interested in their product and they should eat shit and die.

Crap, I tell ya....it's crap. All of it.

Just like radio and television before it, the whole internet exercise has done nothing so much as introduce another advertising platform to a captive audience. It is exceedingly discouraging, especially since the public spent so much of its tax revenue to design and build the system (WITHOUT ADVERTISING!). It does hone one's skills at ignoring, though.

I was configuring a new machine at work on Friday. It had a trial version of Norton on it and I chose to uninstall it as we use might lighter solutions for that kind of thing. When I chose to uninstall, it asked some questions, one of which was something like "What could we have done to change your mind and not uninstall the software?" My reply was "Not install it in the first place!"

It's a real shame that Peter Norton's once excellent programs became the travesty that they now are under Symantec's ownership. I used to recommend them to people and now I recommend they stay away from them.

Sadly, for all the technological improvements that have been made over the last 20 years, the amount of crap that has been heaped onto it has cancelled out a very large amount of the benefits. We should now have laptops that can run for days on one charge, but the humongous energy and resource requirements required by the operating system and overcomplicated word processors and so on just sap it all back to the same place it used to be.