A fat day and Windows

My department had a meeting today, and we clubbed together to get a buffet, which was really good. I had three piece of a particularly good chocolate cake, and then found that another department in the building had got the same buffet, so had another piece of the cake.

The Shuffle crashed today. It was playing Metallica happily enough in the car, and then died with the disco lights of death (flashing green and orange). Not a good sign. iTunes refused to touch it, saying it was corrupted and then it failed to restore it to default settings. I downloaded the iPod Reset Utility, which worked after a few tries, and some stupidity from the Optiplex. So it's now full of music again and appears to be working fine. A bit of a relief as quite often they don't return from the dead if you get the disco lights.

Watched the Smooth Criminal segment from Moonwalker on YouTube. Actually quite good, but it's funny how much of a bastard he is. He attacks several people and vapourises one, and then forces the hapless people to join in his ankle destroying dancing before going mad with a machine gun. What a great example for kids, eh? Also the song is actually about a woman who has been attacked by a hit man.

Here is a rant about Windows:

The interface is inconsistent and allows applications to grab focus at any time, incredibly annoying if you have stuff running in the background. The layout of the system files is a complete mess and the registry is just a massive, huge ball-ache. Application installation is a total farce, with installers and uninstallers that hardly ever work properly, spreading files all over the place and adding registry keys galore. How many times have I clicked 'Remove...' in Add/Remove Programs to be told 'The uninstall file is corrupted/lost/broken' and then having no way to tidily remove the program.

One of my biggest gripes is drive letters. This is an example: if I plug a card reader with four slots into a Mac, nothing appears until you insert a card, whereupon an icon will appear with the card's name. Insert another card, you get another icon.

On Windows, when you connect the reader, you get FOUR identically named drives with four separate letters. You then have to choose the drives at random to find the one with the card in it. I don't know how enterprise systems running Windows handle it with massive amounts of disks, but it can't be pretty. Drive letters were fine when it was MS-DOS and all you had were floppies and hard drives but in this day and age of network drives and vast storage? Get real.

Windows is a sloppy and kludgy operating system. Don't get me wrong, XP SP2 is a world away from the horrors of Windows 98 and ME, but it's still fundamentally broken in so many ways. Just because it's become the de facto standard does NOT mean it's great. Linux isn't the answer just yet, but it's getting better and my experiences with Gutsy on this machine have been excellent). Mac OS X may have it's own flaws, but it has a much more consistent interface and handles drives and applications much, much better than Windows, something it inherited from the old Mac OS.

Ah...now I feel better.