This article describes some of my annoyances in computing. If you had any problems reading this article, then skip this one. It will only be a waste of your time. There are a lot of annoying things in the wonderful world of computing. Of course, nothing is perfect, but that doesn’t mean we are not allowed to complain and scream and throw our keyboards at our monitors when yet another irritation pops up.
Bootloaders
This must be the thing I hate the most about modern-day computing. Bootloaders have a way of being annoying, even when you only have one operating system installed. They’re vulnerable, basic, ugly, not newbie-friendly and yet they’re one of the most vital components of a computer. I really cannot understand why everything in computing has evolved, except the bootloader. I see no progress or development anywhere on this area, which is truly a shame.
Why? Well, bootloaders are kind of important, as you all know. Yet, they have remained the same over ages. A misconfigured bootloader could mean hell for an average user. I mean, an average user will probably think his computer is broken, and he will send it back to the shop, in order to get it fixed. This costs money. While, in the end, a few commands in a recovery console could also do the job.
Another really annoying thing is that a MBR is not write-protected. Some operating systems (read: Windows) bluntly erase/overwrite your MBR without warning. Of course I know that, but what am I to do when I have the need to reinstall Windows, when using LILO, GRUB or whatever? Of course this could be seen as a flaw on Microsoft’s side (which it is, obviously), but I have the philosophy that possibility creates action.
Why not make booting an OS simpler? Maybe integrate OS booting into the mainboard? It might really be a good idea to let the BIOS boot the OS. Just make sure the BIOS knows how to load the kernel, and the OS itself will take care of the rest. This way we don’t need crappy bootloaders anymore (let’s celebrate!).
There is, tough, no need to completely erase the bootloader. Because if it were, hobby and smaller operating systems would be screwed, because they would not have the possibility to boot their OS. Easy solution: tell the BIOS how to boot a bootloader; much in the same way the BIOS today tries to find a bootable partition. Hard solution: let the user add boot functionality to the BIOS. Both solutions are fine to me; as long as I don’t have to see one more bootloader in my life.
Boot time
This irritation lies in the same path as my hate against bootloaders. Some people who might in fact remember my two “Hell & Bliss” articles from last summer (part I and part II), might also remember that one of my problems concerning Linux (not the kernel, the OS) was it’s relative slow boot time. That comment triggered a lot of silly remarks (“My Gentoo boots 2.720 seconds faster than your Windows XP!” and “So what, my DOS boots in 1 second!”), but fact is that operating systems take too much time to load. Whether it be Linux, Windows, BeOS or whatever other obscure OS: they require so much time to load.
Why does that annoy me so much? Well, frankly, I hate waiting. And I know many other people on this planet also hate waiting. When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check my email and check various websites for updates (OSNews.com of course, but also SkyOS.org and AquaXP). Why do I have to wait minutes before I can take a look at some websites? We are advancing so fast in the world of computing, yet we cannot seem to tackle this issue. We produce graphics cards that have more transistors than system processors (check the new nVidia 6800 Ultra; it has 222 million transistors, while the newest Pentium IV ‘only’ has 125 million!), we have 956.1 surround sound, 500″ widescreen plasma screens, cordless everythings, but yet, with all these high-tech superstuff we still need to wait those silly minutes in front of our supercomputers before we can hear our start-up sound (but, we do ‘experience’ that in 956.1 surround, that’s also worth something).
What I really want, is instant on. Period. I want to be able to just press my power button, and voilà: there’s Windows/KDE/Haiku/SkyOS/whatever. Of course I could leave my computer running constantly, but I find that a waste of energy and money. Besides, no matter how quiet a PC is these days, they’re still pretty noisy. What needs to happen in order to do this? Well, quite frankly, I haven’t got the slightest idea. I am no hardware designer or software engineer. I’ll leave that to the people who have the brains to figure it out.
Let’s say we’re invaded by aliens next summer, and they want to make peace. We then show them our greatest technological achievement in our homes: the PC. We show them our SuperPentium 5 gigahertz, with our Ati Radeon X5000 SuperPro and 5 terabyte harddisk and 956.1 surround sound. And still we’d have to wait those silly minutes before we can show them OSNews.com.
Multifunction keyboards
Probably the most useless invention since some scientists came up with the idea to split atoms inside a bomb. First of all, who in Steve Jobs’ name uses these multifunction keys? I have yet to find one person who actually uses those extra keys. Those keys are completely illogical. Why? Well, most ‘average’ pc users don’t have their hands on the keyboard all of the time. They have one hand on their mouse, and the other hand, well, somewhere else. Not on the keyboard, in any case. Therefore, in order to use the extra keys, he’ll have to make an extra move. And since everyone is lazy, they won’t do that. So, they will use their mice to click the Outlook Express icon, and not that email key on their keyboards. And I don’t blame them.
Secondly, it is getting harder and harder to find a decent quality keyboard without these keys. If you are like me, you want a high quality keyboard. This means you’ll probably have to go with Logitech or Microsoft. But, when the shops in my hometown only sell that multifunction nonsense, I am almost forced into using them. Luckily I found a very special keyboard somewhere else, but still, more ignorant people are forced to spent more money on extra features they won’t use. Stupid, really.
Mice
Yes, I dislike ordinary mice. They need a considerable amount of desk space, they need a mousepad (yes, most people also use a pad even when they have an optical one), and they’re ugly. The best alternative? Trackballs! Yes, everyone, get out, go to your shop, and buy a trackball! They produce less strain on your arm and shoulder, they’re easier to use, use less desk space, don’t require a mousepad, and they’re sexier.
Of course they have disadvantages as well. They are not very suitable for games, for instance. When you are a gamer, stick with your mouse. Another little thing is that they require regular cleaning. Because you operate the ball with your thumb, a lot of dirt gets inside.
But for me, the choice is easy: trackball! It was probably the best thing that entered my household after the Complete Greatest Hits, by The Eagles.
Fanaticism
We all hate fanaticism, don’t we? We all hate fanatics, don’t we? Yet, we are all guilty of it, at least once or twice in our lives. That’s not really a bad thing, nobody is perfect. But, there is a group of people who have taken fanaticism in the computer world to a higher level. Whether it be GPL fanatics, Windows zealots, Apple addicts or whatever, they are annoying. Very, very, very annoying.
I mean, it is of course okay to try to convince others that your platform or belief is the one and only, but try to keep it civilized. And that last thing really is missing these days. Editors are ‘attacked’ at the personal level just because they express their opinions on tech articles! That’s crazy! Think about it, before screaming all sorts of nonsense simply because someone doesn’t share your affection with a platform or OS.
‘Epilogue’
I hope you enjoyed this article, and I would really like it if you use the comment section to express your ever returning irritations in the world of computing. And please, keep it civilized. In the end, it all comes down to 1’s and 0’s.
About the author:
Thom Holwerda is a regular visitor on OSNews.com and has contributed more than once. His first computer experience dates back to 1991 (a 286 entered the household). Over the years he has played around with several computers, but it wasn’t until 2001 that he really started to experiment OS-wise with computers. His favorite operating systems are Windows Server 2003, Mandrake Linux and BeOS. He also has an affinity for the QNX Neutrino RTOS. He is also contributing to the SkyOS project, being responsible for the Dutch translation, and also functioning as an overall moderator on SkyOS’ independent forum, The eXpert Zone.
Under Mac OS Classic I have never seen any problems with the ROM loading drivers from the actual disk, well, other than disks without drivers not working 😉
But the bootloader is indeed not the biggest problem. That is the Windows 2000 boot code, that breaks if the Windows boot partition comes after any partition or disk that was added or removed. And Windows 2000 as a whole, as it breaks terribly when you remove any NTFS partition using Partition Magic.
It seems like boot time can be made faster for most OSs by extending the bootcache idea to write all of the boot-time diskreads to the outside of the platter and pick it up in one continuous transfer. To handle data that gets paged out during boot there could be an image of the freshly-booted swap on the harddrive. Upon shutdown, this swap image could be copied to the system pagefile to be ready for the next boot. This solution may be naive, and you still won’t achieve instant-on because it takes a bit of time to initialize hardware, but some of that can be done while waiting for the memory to fill up from the diskread. Basically, I want bootup to be like resuming from hibernation, except with everything in a fresh state.
Apparently I wasn’t clear enough in my first post.
Trackballs are *demonstrably* inefficient in comparison to mice. This means hard empirical evidence. The constants in fitt’s law are higher given a trackball than with a mouse. It takes longer to point accurately using a trackball. Period. Science has put its foot down on this question. Trackballs are only out there to satisfy the few nutjobs who have got it in their brains that they are somehow superior.
Granted, mice aren’t perfect, but given the technology we have, they are the best indicators.
One day we will have monitors that display horizontally and diagonally, and on that day we’ll use a pen for input and it will be much faster and more accurate than a mouse could hope for. Until then, there is no question.
cf http://www.asktog.com/readerMail/2001-03ReaderMail.html
“Many people like trackballs, too, although you can easily prove, objectively, that the trackball is far less productive than the mouse.” -Bruce Tognazzini, designer of the macintosh interface
IMO, any system that makes use of Slots is far from reliable.
Be it Slot 1, Slot A, ISA, EISA, VESA, PCI, PCI-E, PCI-X, AGP, memory slots or that Atari 2600’s slot.
We are on the Bad Contact Age.
On bootloaders:
Why not make booting an OS simpler? Maybe integrate OS booting into the mainboard? It might really be a good idea to let the BIOS boot the OS. Just make sure the BIOS knows how to load the kernel, and the OS itself will take care of the rest. This way we don’t need crappy bootloaders anymore (let’s celebrate!).
This is already what happens. The “bootloader” is the part of the “OS” that the BIOS starts.
Yet, they have remained the same over ages. A misconfigured bootloader could mean hell for an average user. I mean, an average user will probably think his computer is broken, and he will send it back to the shop, in order to get it fixed.
The average user will never see a bootloader.
Complain about the archaic x86 boot process if you must, but don’t try to pretend it’s an issue for anything more than advanced users (and only a small minority of them, at that). Most people have one OS on their machine, that they didn’t install themselves and will never see a “bootloader” or, indeed, with most new machines, even a single character-based screen as the machine starts.
You are complaining about how the system works, and then suggesting it should work in exactly the same way it already does. The “annoyance” isn’t the bootloader as a principle, it’s the poor execution and fragility of software like LILO and GRUB.
Another really annoying thing is that a MBR is not write-protected.
Most motherboards have an option in the BIOS that protects the MBR, although it may be rather cryptically named and is almost always turned off by default.
Boot time:
If you want the machine to start quickly, either don’t turn it off, or hibernate it. Macs, in particular, hibernate and restart extremely quickly.
It’s pretty hard to make a piece of multipurpose and extendable hardware like a computer start quickly. As for the comparison to a car, it is simply ridiculous – of *course* cars start quickly, they hardly have to *do* anything to start.
You aren’t going to get a flexible, multipurpose device like a computer starting “from cold” instantaneously, *particularly* if you want to do it within the constraints of supporting existing hardware.
Multifunction keyboards:
If you get so worked up because the keyboard you’d like to buy comes with some extra keys that don’t, in any way, negatively impact on how it works, then you’ve got serious issues.
Personally, I use a few of those extra keys – the volume controls in particular. I have also found the scroll wheel on the left of some newer keyboards quite useful, although unfortunately they often have a useless (and pointless) reconfiguration of the Home/End/Delete/Insert/PageUp/PageDown keys to go with it.
Anonymous wrote:
> “Help” key? Am I missing something? I’m not sitting at a Mac right now, but I’ve used them plenty in the past, and I can’t recall a “Help” key.
You are probably not recalling it because it does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. (Well, in Safari it turns the cursor into a stupid question mark, which makes the OS rudely beep and nothing else when you click on something with it, and there are a few NON-APPLE apps such as Photoshop that do give it its hard earned function). In OS 9 it DID bring help up whatever app you where on.
In my Spanish keyboard it is just over the forward delete key, or left to the Home key (you know, in the subset of keys where Page up and Page down are).
Yes, I agree totally with ‘Wolfgang’. Do yourself a favour — give the OS X a go. By the way, these aren’t the words of a “fanatic”, but of a guy who deals with Win & Mac (sorry, not ‘proof-of-concept’ stuff like BeOS) every day, so is fully bilingual, so to say. Yup, seriously give the OS X a try.
The computing world to some does seem like a very daunting and annoying place. Thom Holwerda, in his article “The Annoying World of Computing” on OSNews.com, states his annoyances with what he considers useless technology. However, each portion of technology has its reason and importance. Unfortunately, some of the parts are annoying, but to try to change them to make them less annoying would be an impossible task. To change how BIOS and bootloaders work together, all computer companies across the globe would need to band together and come up with a better way to do it. However, if someone is having trouble with their individual bootloader, they can design their own or pay a few dollars and get a better one. However, the only person that would be having trouble with a bootloader that is not “newbie friendly” is a person who knows more than a newbie about computers. Patience is often a virtue in the world of technology a lot of times, especially if one does not have the top of the line products. For instance, it does take time to load operating systems because of the complexity of the processes running in the background. Also, webpages do not always load simultaneously unless one is willing to shovel out loads of money for very high speed internet. These issues are things we all have to deal with, unless we are willing to pay a great amount of money because we are impatient.
One of the many things that is nice about computing, especially for impatient or lazy people, are the devices that make common tasks easier. Multifunction keyboards are an example of this. I know for me personally, I can adjust the volume on my music, change tracks, or open up my Windows calculator while typing a paper without having to open up any other applications. For me and many other people I know this is a huge convenience. I do not have to take time and lose my train of thought. Also, if anyone is having trouble finding keyboards, I suggest they just search on the internet for the phrase “buy computer keyboards”. I found a search result of over a million resources, and yes, many non-multifunction keyboards.
Normal mice are another useless product on the market now, as listed by Mr. Holwerda. Most people use normal mice on their personal computers. In fact, the majority of computers bought from companies come with normal mice. Mr. Holwerda talks about the considerable amount of desk space that they take up. However, they take up approximately a quarter of a square foot. The majority of trackball mice I have seen are at least 3” x 6”, which is about half the space. Also, if one is having trouble with moving their arm or wrist too much, they can turn up their mouse sensitivity and the problem should be alleviated.
Being a person who knows a lot about computers myself, I resent the fact that anyone would consider me to be annoying just because I know more than the average person about this field. I personally have never “hated” anyone because they know more than me about a subject. I do not see the need to attack a group of people just because they may be smarter than you. However, with the great ideas of totally changing technology, I can see how someone would get annoyed with a person that like the old style of computing that currently works fine.