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What really bugs me

There have been a few things getting on my nerves over the last few years, so I've decided to write a piece on them. Not all of them may be rational, logical or even have any point, but they annoy me none-the-less. Here they are, in no particular order:

The nanny state of computing

One of the many things that really gets to me is epitomised in the recent showing of an advert for a magazine called 'PC know-how'. Now, you may think, surely this is a good thing. People can go out, buy this magazine and learn how to do simple things like wordprocess, use spreadsheets and e-mail. Fair enough, I say. I'm quite happy for people to know how to do stuff like that, because it stops them bugging me when they can't form a mental connection between the little underline icon at the top of the screen and the concept of underlining text.

What your average person doesn't need is something like Visual Basic, or any of the other Visual programming applications. I mean, what is the point of spending fifteen years learning programming, then learning stuff like object-oriented design, Z specifications, functional decomposition and the four types of recursion when you can click a couple of buttons and chuck out a windowed program. I mean, if you tell some know-nothing idiot who can just barely manage to hit the 'send mail' button that they can write their own programs, do you think they'll consider designing their program first? Maybe sketch out a bit of pseudo-code, do a little flow diagram or at the very least consider the sort of things they need to do to accomplish the task at hand?

No. What they'll do is go into VB or whatever, draw some nice looking buttons and forms, chuck in a load of stock code and end up with something that occasionally works, is about twenty times too big, and has design flaws even the most idiotic or junior of programmers wouldn't implement. God it annoys me. They should scrap all visual programming tools, and get back to proper coding, with languages like C++ and Perl. If it keeps going this way I'm going to end up out of a job.

Oasis - What a bunch of cunts

Well, the title says it all really doesn't it. God I hate Oasis, they are such a bunch of puffed-up, egocentric, arrogant bastards. And people like their records.
I used to like Oasis, once, about three or four years ago. This was around their first album, which was actually okay. Then they suddenly became really famous, and started acting like a right pair of gits with no sense of social decorum. And now they seem to think they can just release any kind of rubbish, and the public just lap it up. Take 'All around the world' for instance. That was the most hyped-up, over-produced, unoriginal, cliched piece of white trash released in the last year. But thats not exactly new for O'Beatles'asis is it?

The inevitable push for graphics

Well, not graphics specifically. But the general publics seemingly unanimous opinion that all computer programs regardless of use or complexity should in fact be huge multi-media orchestras of sound, light and interaction. Why? What was actually wrong with text-based interfaces? They're fast, easy to use (once you remember all the commands), and are very accurate. None of this "Oh no, I've just dropped the file on the trash can instead of the program!". If you want to delete a file, you had to type in 'rm' or 'del'. Far safer than messing about with GUIs and WIMPs. I mean, you can't exactly accidentally type in 'rm -r *' without realising it can you? Whereas it's a relatively simple task to drag your 'My Computer' icon onto the recycle bin. Watch Windows try and sort that one out. And if you've looked at some of the other pages I've written, you'll know I play MUDs. I like MUDs. They're text-based, fast, have practically zero latency between one side of the world and the other, and they're nice and easy to play. But you try and tell that to a user nowadays, and they'll say "Where's the pictures? And why doesn't it make any noise?". I ask you, users should just be shot on sight. They only make your life difficult.

This many people: agree with me.