by DAVID BROWN | CLEARNFO.com | April 10, 2016

(Unfair Arguments with Existence, Opus 102; filed under productivity)

Whatever happened to honest computing?  At each upgrade it seems to be getting worse.  Lies and damnable lies.  So I finally arrived at Win10 back in 2015 after my journey from DOS 1.0 so many years ago.  I miss the days of computers doing just exactly what you told them to do; and they never, ever crashed, but progress, complexity and distrust have all increased over the years since the unflinching green-screen dog days of DOS.  In the old days, computers were just tools, but today, they provide a rouge government access to your most private activities from turning on your mic and camera remotely, to logging all your keystrokes, to spying on your on-line activities; and of course, let us not forget all the back-doors they have bought and paid for.  Nothing is private and nothing is secure from the prying eyes of Big Bro nowadays.  It’s a matter of ‘National Security’ don’t ya know.  Not yours, but theirs.

Sure Win10 is much more usable than Microsoft’s turkey Bob O/S or Vista but it insists on deception, obfuscation and even out right lying.  There are some good lies like MS shims and stubs from ‘Microsoft Fakes Framework’ (yes, that’s the real name) which allows me to lie to my 32 bit applications so that they will work with Microsoft’s 64 bit operating systems.  But lying to an application and lying to the end user are completely different. Lies to the end user really piss me off.  What are some of the lies?

Well, the first one you will notice is that despite having booted your system, logging in and seeing your full screen in record time, Windows is really not ready for work.  It’s a lie.  It still has quite a bit of housekeeping to do before you actually have a usable system.   This can be several long minutes of frustration.  I would rather it take its time up front and not present my screen until it is actually ready to do some work, but then again that would hurt Microsoft’s phantom boot time.   This reminds me of the totally bogus on-time stats of the airline industry.

Another pisser is that when you write files to your USB drive, you just never know when and if they are actually written to the drive unless you flush the ‘writes pending’ using eject or other means.  This can cause data corruption all because of a lie from Microsoft.  It said it wrote the files, but it really didn’t.  What it did was schedule these files to be written at some time in the future and it never tells you when or if this occurred.

A new lie is that when I shut down my system, the screen now goes blank almost immediately, but if I look at my hard drive indicator light, it may be thrashing for minutes until it goes off.  WTF?  I turned it off, but it doesn’t turn off.

And of course there is the old lie even in the DOS days of deleting files, it just puts a lower case Greek delta symbol as the first character of the file indicating it is A-Okay to over write this file at some point in the future if needed.   I do love the journaling file system, multi-tasking and the graphics, but I would appreciate a little more attention to honest computing.

Another improvement is that the new ‘Blue Screen of Death’ is now a kinder, gentler shade of blue that still provides near worthless information.