Just over a year ago I got my Unicomp Model M Mini, a newly manufactured version of what is in my estimation the best computer keyboard ever, the IBM Model M SSK. The Minis and the SSKs are like a regular IBM Model M, but they don’t have a number pad at the right, so I can put the trackball there and not have to reach for it.
Seems to me that it is an affliction primarily of men, though I know of exceptions. It is the compulsion to take any object, machine, or device, and somehow “improve” it. I know of no man who does not suffer from this — and suffer is indeed the word — and if there is any I’m not interested in knowing him. We compulsive improvers make the world a more interesting if less efficient place.
When I made a list of suggested replacements for Windows on those machines which Microsoft Corporation has deemed unsuitable for Windows 11, I left one out because I hadn’t heard of it. We’ll remedy that shortly, but first a little history.
Let us begin by my saying that in my estimation Microsoft Corporation is a distillation of pure, if not always competently executed, wickedness. Microsoft has distributed evil since it expanded beyond BASIC programming language interpreters (which may or may not have been evil) in 1980. It is continuing its assault with perhaps its boldest attack on its customers ever.
Were a list compiled of my manifold sins and wickedness, near the top of that very long list would be my affection for gadgets that I imagined I needed and therefore purchased. Usually it turned out I didn’t actually need them at all. Sometimes they did end up being useful, though none of them will be mentioned here.
It wasn’t devastating news, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you want the first thing Saturday morning, either. According to the report, which I guess had been kicking around for a few days but I didn’t see it until Saturday, the Google company has plans to destroy my Google Pixel 6a cellular telephone. They had already done it to Pixel 4a telephones.
I’m exhausted. Worn down from dealing with the medical system that is supposed to heal us. It shouldn’t be this way and we have the technological means to fix at least some of it right now.
Google is worse than Microsoft ever was. With a stranglehold on search and online advertising, backed with an Orwellian surveillance of users, dominating the browser market is too much. The solution cannot be to sell Chrome to OpenAI, however.
My recent column on Apple’s declining software quality hit a nerve. So why do any of us put up with software that grows increasingly buggy? One word: hardware.