MY PC IS NOT A PHONE, DAMMIT

This blog entry is an edited excerpt of what I wrote to my bank today when I saw that it has jumped onto  the Window 8/ Google  "The same GUI is good for all computing platforms" bandwagon. But first, a comment about the stupidity of this Google blog site in which "normal" type face is too small to comfortably read but the next size up IS THIS GIANT CRAP. Done.

Excerpt: Sane person to world: I'm not one of the apparent 99% of morons who rushed out to get a 24" touch screen & joined the latest exercise fad & cover my PC monitor with greasy fingerprints. Thank you, I all ready have arthritic shoulders from plenty of  upper-body exercise & I'm totally comfortable  operating my PC with a mouse at waist level on a table top with little movement, so I don't need to buy a 24" touch screen & Windows 8 in order to figure out that a mouse is preferable with my desktop PC. 

Oh and has anyone seen yet  the fancy new specialty ribbon monitors that are apaprently designed by and for String theorists? I jsut can't figure out why they would have such a specialty monitor in Best Buy! But  have 29" ribbon monitors! Or I think they are special purpose because they are physically as well as  resolution -wise no taller than a 20" inch screen! They'er  just 9 inches wider but still 1024 px high!

Meanwhile, like i said, all  the websites have 3 inch tall icons and 36 point type for everything, so that only about 3 lines fit vertically on that screen, therefore the 29" monitor has to be specially made for virtual ribbon cutting ceremonies or watching CinemaScope movies. But last time I checked PEOPLE mostly WATCH movies ON TELEVISIONS, which actually get TALLER as THEY get WIDER. Is there no end to the stupidity that is humanity? I see all this stupid crap that everybody accepts without comment and think to myself that i must be a dumb alien child adopted just after I hatched by even dumber humans cuz on my own merit, i don't feel very smart. It's only when I get out in public and become immersed in all the human stupidity around me that I get to feeling  like I have superior intelligence. It's the same feeling I get around dogs  & 2-year-olds, which I like because they listen  better than 20-year-olds do, which to me, makes the 2-year-olds and the dogs smarter than the 20-year-olds that will jump at the chance to buy a 29" touch screen ribbon monitor for their desktop PC.

But I see 5/3 Bank has jumped on the Windows 8/ Google, 1 platform for all devices, touch screen bandwagon with the giant print taking up my entire 24" screen with 5 bill payees instead of the 15 I could clearly see & use before. Now all I need is a 2" (wait, 5/3 has the banner too)  banner at the top with 3 useless things taking up more space on my screen a la the new PayPal. BUT MOSTLY, on the bill payment page, THERE IS NO BUTTON ANYMORE TO SUBMIT THE PAYMENTS (the button was there but buried in one of 3 side scroll bars due to the oversized payees in it's panel). 

Doesn't anyone check anything before it goes live or stop to think "Hey, you know what, a phone is a different, much smaller platform & maybe neither Microsoft nor Google are right. Maybe 2 distinct GUI platforms for phone & PC was best & there shouldn't be the same  interface across computing platforms." 

I GUESS NOT HUH! 

Of course not, because it's easiest to blindly follow (& not incidentally have the luxury of being able to self justify your jobs) than to think for yourselves, right?

 I DON'T BANK BY PHONE, I don't use a touch screen on my desktop &  I 'M NOT BLIND.

PC Personalities

  I've been saying lately, from experience over the last 10 years that said all PC motherboards have their unique quirks when running Windows & software. Furthermore, it is my contention that the MBs in name brand MBs like Dell are more reliable than aftermarket ones one can build oneself. 

But I  deviate from subject here out of total frustration because composing here on this infernal "blog" that is supposed to be optimized FOR EXACTLY WHAT I AM DOING  is a FRIGGING NIGHTMARE & GOOGLE SUCKS! They come out with products and add all kinds of bells and whistles we don't need and NEVER FINISH THE  program with the key features we needed and never got, nor do they EVER fix the glitches that I constantly run into such as my mail that I am writing in G-Mail SENDING WHEN I HIT THE TAB KEY TO INDENT A PARAGRAPH.

     That is my experience after ditching my Dell for aftermarket ones years ago and having nothing but trouble afterword. Meanwhile, I gave the Dell to a PC enthusiast/friend who repairs them. he cracked the proprietary problems with the Dell, for instance, it wouldn't allow anything but it's  Dell Windows operating system disk to be installed on it first. he got it to accept regular Windows disks.  The result: over the next 6 years, he said, the Dell was his best computer. Furthermore, his overall experience always using used the name brand PCs has been rather good, to my ensuing 6 years of total frustration  using two aftermarket  MBs, a Supermicro one and an Intel one.Plus Supermicro has a total ripoff scheme when I asked for a replacement. But on the rare occasion when HP or Dell manufactures a total turkey, they will replace it without hassle. 

     So now I am back to my original Dell in a custom tower for which I manufactured a 5.25-inch  "Dell Tray" with the Dell proprietary front I/O board mounted in it and a csutom made hybrid power swithc using the Dell power board with a Pentium 3 era HP power button hot glued in front of it.

This 8300 Dimension MB has it's unique quirks when running, but it runs my audio editing software properly and doesn't blue screen at random like my otehr two MBs did for 6 years.

     A specific one with only this MB, when I upload, say a photo and I have to scroll through the contents of a folder to the item I want to upload using the arrows in the window  the mouse wheel, it bolts to the other end of the list every time. It always did that with the 8300 and never did that with my other two motherboards.

     My theory is that since no human endeavor is close  to perfect, but in the PC digital world, the way PS work, it is supposedly designed largely to run on everything happening in order, perfectly, no exceptions. Knowing this is impossible, especially on the web, the PC has been intricate checks and balances to try to keep something imperfect at least emulating perfection enough to function in its "perfect" world.

     However, with each individual piece of hardware, among the billions of lines of code programmed into it, when it interacts with the uniquely imperfect hardware has characteristic flaws either small enough to be labelled "quirks" or large enough to be "junk" and all are different.   With that  understanding, then the hypothesis can be put forward that with PCs its impossible for each not to have it's own "eccentricities" to put it mildly.

     To conclude, it is my contention that MBs used by the well known, companies who maintain a good reputation with customers like HP and Dell, those flaws are kept to a minimum, or are replaced for us becaused these big names have a huge stake in their reputations among consumers, whereas not so much when some PC enthusiast walks shops for the best deal for a motherboard to build his own system.

     Finally, my conclusion is that since NOBODY(that I know of, anyway) is saying anything about this but me I must be right about it. That's because when I think of something like this that is based on my experience and observations even though I am not qualified to judge the situation in most if not all cases, I still  turn out to be right because, invariably, later I find that somebody else has researched, documented and elaborated on exactly what I'd been saying all along. Nobody says anything about this yet & its staying a dirty little corporate secret that they don't want known until somebody publishable writes or talks about it on air, so I must be correct.

      I mean this must be so because the alternative for the PC manufacturers is advertising their products as "Our computers have fewer flaws, suck less than our nearest competitor." People don't want to hear that, so they never say it.