If being covered in custard pies wasn't bad enough, Bill Gates slipped on a banana skin of global dimensions last week. Windows 98 crashed in the demo during his keynote speech at Comdex in Chicago, and the "Blue Screen of Death" was relayed to millions of TV viewers across the planet.
It was a fitting reminder that even if you're the richest man in the world (or just one of the millions of ordinary computer users who made that man rich), when it comes to those unpredictable Windows breakdowns we're all equally mortal. Windows is unreliable. So much so that PC Week once wrote: "Windows 95 is like a B-1 bomber with a belly full of fuel and bombs flying on three engines." Only, it might have added, B-1 bombers don't crash as often.
So many things go wrong with the computer industry's products and services that you can't blame its consumers for thinking that on the eighth day God said: "Right Murphy, you're in charge." As modern living becomes increasingly dependent on software and silicon, life is becoming a series of operations which you are supposed to [A]bort [R]etry or [Q]uit. "End users" (this is computer industry-speak for victims) come to expect unreliability and glitches in today's software and tomorrow's gizmos.
So finally it's time for us to come clean. In Computimes we might write about exciting new developments in computers, but here are 33 reasons why this particular writer really hates them.
Amstrad's PCW: ask anyone who still owns one but finds the stupid flippin' machine has stopped accepting "start-of-day" disks.
Buggy programs released prematurely. Software comes as version 3.1, 3.2, 4.0 etc., with "patches" and "bug fixes" and what have you. Why didn't version 1.0 get it right in the first place? Software has become a product which is inherently never finished, and you can define an "upgrade" as: "Take old bugs out, put new ones in."
Web browsers in particular are notoriously prone to freeze or crash - thanks to the increasingly ruthless "browser wars" they are being rushed out in indecent haste, several times a year instead of truly stable packages.
Computer mag prices: how come the latest issue of Total Mac Shareware, published in London, costs £4.95 sterling in Eason's in Belfast (or about IR£5.90), and IR£7.49 in Eason's of Dublin? (And then you notice that besides the cover CD-Rom of shareware and demos, this particular magazine runs to a mere 36 A4 pages.)
Early adopting: "Early adopters" of new technologies are the enthusiastic, often evangelical consumers who think they are way ahead of everyone else. In reality, being an early adopter means you suffer all the problems of the earlier versions, and you're stuck with prehistoric hardware that cost a small fortune just a couple of years ago.
Error messages that don't mean anything to the people who will actually read them.
Data death: Even CDs can deteriorate in less than a decade. As a computer scientist at RAND Corporation told Business Week last week: "Digital information lasts forever, or five years - whichever comes first."
Email fluff: messages are increasingly bloated by useless gunge, which has been deposited by mail programs that recipients don't happen to use. Email discussion groups, too, are becoming increasingly bogged by those superfluous HTML tags.
"Environmentally friendly" PCs, whose manufacture involves a staggering amount of pollution. PCs also give out a surprising amount of heat and radiation in enclosed spaces, and air conditioning systems are often introduced to protect the machines rather than their human users. In-built obsolescence is a driving force within the PC industry; unlike most other consumer commodities, PCs lose their resale value within about four years, and there's no proper national policy to recycle them.
Faxmania: people who treat their new PCs as glorified fax machines, for sending messages to other people with PCs and fax modems, who then have to retype the messages.
Floppies on a Mac: that terrible design flaw where you're basically expected to ignore the menu-bar's "Eject Disk" option and to do the incredibly counterintuitive thing of dragging the floppy disk to the Wastebasket. Why?
Government-speak: this emphasises our computer-literate workforce, yet the cost of going online in this State continues to be the highest in Western Europe, stifling the evolution of online culture.
Helplines: when you ring the PC manufacturer or your ISP's helpdesk, isn't it funny how your call takes 183 times longer to answer than when you rang the sales desk?
How people on listservs >>>>quote excessively.
Lingo: the hackneyed, near-vacuous terms "multimedia" and "interactive". Is a panto interactive? Is a circus multimedia? Is "interactive" synonymous with "requires a mouse"?
Managers who can't type: much computing still requires a modicum of typing skills, but several layers of grey-haired, male middle-managers are waiting for the technologies developed for disabled people (e.g. dictation packages) to hit the mass market. These managers distrust keyboards so much that they even get their secretaries to read their email for them or to print it all out. And these the same people who are making the major decisions about how their organisations should embrace electronic commerce.
Manuals. "Where's the Anykey?"
Microsoft.
Online newspapers that are shovelware - they plonk the printed version's contents onto their Web sites with no attempt to rewrite and rework the stories to take account of the online medium's specific possibilities, apart from a dodgy search engine. They see the Net as an extension of their traditional media instead of a new medium in its own right.
Online shopping, currently often just a facade, a shop-front. The online mall - a virtual collection of virtual businesses - is a particularly clumsy metaphor which deserves to fail. And while we're still waiting for proper online supermarkets (with Web ordering and home deliveries), we're gonna miss the touchy-feely nature of real shopping, the smell of the coffee and those freshly baked baguettes. . .
Over-reliance: so much of our social and economic activities now rely on a handful of companies. A fortnight ago, for example, AT&T's data network in the US stopped working. Went dead. Many companies that rely on AT&T for comms weren't able to verify credit cards, for example, and the out-of-order ATM machines were the least of many banks' problems. At a much more basic level, how many times has your modem dialled your ISP to download your mail, and you've done everything right but you keep getting (a) continuous engaged tones (b) dropped line signals (c) server problems (d) a cranky slow modem at the other end?
Palmpilot technology, which makes you change your handwriting style to be understood by it, instead of making its software adapt to understand your style. Give us a Psion any day.
PC paradoxes: word processing has led to excessive report generation syndrome, spell-checkers create more mistakes, and calculators make kids innumerate.
Pentium's latest adverts, those ones with the guys in the day-glo clean-room suits. Don't let them put you off - Intel will still always be number 0.9994520118 in our book.
PR: how computer and telecommunications companies contact you about their instant electronic "solutions" by sending you reams and reams of press releases. On paper. Then ring up to see if you've received it yet.
Read-only memories (in humans): "I'm sorry sir, it's not on the computer."
Service: n. a rare achievement. After all their bar-code inventories and computerised tills, fancy Web sites and so on, the service in most department stores is worse than ever. And since your local bank became more computerised and more profitable you have to do more and more inputting (and don't get paid for it) - and the queues for ATMs are often much longer than those at the cash desk. Worst of all, the people behind the desk are even less likely than ever to recognise you (even when your account has been there for several decades) unless you have a computerised card or bring along your passport.
This is called "personal banking".
Several Internet service providers are also notorious for expanding rapidly in the marketing department and advertising budgets, without putting a corresponding investment in modems and support staff.
Spam: unsolicited bulk email isn't "just" a bit of harmless junk, it's a significant cost to ISPs, and a significant social cost in terms of attention spans and brain cells.
The first "computer users' law of thermodynamics": this states that you get out of your computer or piece of software in proportion to the energy you put into it. This isn't a problem - it's a fact of computing life. But newcomers still expect to be able to use their powerful new PC to its fullest or navigate the Net instantly - and are then bitterly disappointed when nothing seems to work. A typical example is the first-timer sitting in front of a search engine, who decides it's stupid/useless because it generates either 50,000 hits or none. They want perfect results without any investment of time and energy, even though they know full well that many other activities (from learning how to drive a car, to swimming, getting a pilot's licence or even reading a newspaper) might take hours, days, weeks or even years.
The other side of the coin is, of course, featuritis. All those features that the manufacturers keep adding but the vast bulk of owners will never use, in systems that continue to be designed without watching how the end users will actually work at them. Also known as bloatware.
Upgraditis: how you go along to a Web site and it insists on using the most obscure plug-ins imaginable.
Uninstalls: How removing a program you don't want from Windows can involve having to reformat the entire hard drive.
University Web sites: some are really superb, but there's a surprising amount of terrible academic Web sites in Ireland and abroad which treat the digital medium as nothing more than the place to plonk an unglorified reading list and a bad lists of bad links, with no other original content.
Voicemail? Voice jail, more like.
Waffle: about 30 years since the start of the Net, many newspaper stories waste three or four column inches telling us what it is again (and that it has just been invented).
Web congestion: if the networks are like a sort of plumbing system, it's suffering from very low pressure, thin and leaky pipes, and the information which does come out is usually a trickle. The result is like watching American football rather than South American soccer: the Web stutters, stops-and-starts, and has too many time outs.