I feel that a lot of software these days operates under the idea that 'you can have any colour you want, as long as its brown'.*
But would Henry Ford be proud ?

I remember when software was limited by the hardware itself. Even doing things like readable fonts was hard. So why does software now seem mostly limited by the programmers themselves?
Maybe you only can build as big as you can dream, but--holy smokes!--we need some better dreamers.
Looking at what the previous generations accomplished with the equivalent of sharpened sticks and chipped rocks, can you even begin to imagine what they could have made with access to the tools we have today? Today, for almost every situation, software is only limited by its designers.

Can you look at the world we have built, and feel that its improved by hammering every user into the same die, insisting on one mode of use, one code of concept, one expectation of utility?

We are not all running on the same hardware.
We are not all using software for the same reasons, the same purposes or to the same ends.

Its been thirty-six years of software, folks. But somehow we became 1984 after all.



*yeah, I know Ford said 'black'. But he wasn't really addressing this issue at all.

Empire of Crap

Allow me to remark that of all the shit moves Google has pulled, locking out the ability to manually backup bookmarks on the mobile version of Chrome is probably the most irritating one I have encountered yet.

 Guys*. Seriously. This is the Twenty-First Century. 
Does it make sense to you that everything should run slowly, unresponsively, and badly?
Does shipping intentionally crippled software get you hard? Is this a sexual kink thing?
Are you jacking off in your headquarters, imagining my cries of desperate futility?

"Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows!"

Allen Ginsberg

...And yes, posting while angry is always an excellent strategy.

*This is, I feel, is totally a Patriarchy thing.

"Nuts and Gum, together at last!"

"The other day, I came to the conclusion that the act of writing software is actually antagonistic all on its own. Arcane languages, cryptic errors, mostly missing (or at best, scattered) documentation - it's like someone is deliberately trying to screw with you, sitting in some Truman Show-like control room pointing and laughing behind the scenes. At some level, it's masochistic, but we do it because it gives us an incredible opportunity to shape our world." ---Chris Granger.

Damn straight its antagonistic; its also fully masochistic.
We program like this because we like to.

And after six weeks of working on Linux again, I think that's the animus primum behind that operating system. Built by programmers for programmers.


...And I can't believe this is the first time I've used a fetish tag.