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.

Two Decades of the Internet in Review

As sort of a historical review, I thought I would list those websites and services associated with "The Internet" that I have used over the last twenty years of being a cyberjunkie.

The first encounter with the Internet that I can remember is being given a pair of 5.25" floppies containing various shareware utilities that a friend had downloaded from 'The Internet'.
He was a retired optical engineer that owned and operated the local computer store. I can't remember the context or even what programs exactly were there, although for some reason I think there was a extended memory manager program I needed, but never managed to make work.
My PC at the time was a 8088 with 512K RAM. I still have the motherboard, but I have no idea what I did with the 1MB memory expansion card in question.

This was some years before I actually surfed the Information Superhighway. I read Neuromancer before I was ever connected to the Internet, which set the bar really fucking high for expectations.

1999 to 2019

IRC / ISP provided email.* : Changed ISP.
Webcrawler: Used until Google, which worked better.
Hotmail: Disliked M$, left after sale.
ICQ: Lifestyle changes.
Geocities: Lifestyle changes, never updated my pages after being sold to Yahoo!
IRC - DALNET: Inconvenience from the DDoS war.Wish some of those channels were still around.  
Yahoo Mail: Disliked GUI changes, and the removal of free SMTP access.
Google Search: Strongly dislike tracking, search results flooded with ads, and results quality fading.
GMail: Bad interface, slow to load, general dissatisfaction with Google.**
DeviantART: lifestyle changes on my part. Website still seems pretty good.
Ebay: Dislike interface.
Paypal: Nothing but bad experiences.
Metafilter: Still use, and still like.
Google News: What was a pretty good service gradually became worse and worse. No variety.
Hackaday: Gradual editorial changes after its sale have made it less interesting.***
Wikipedia: Dicks. Philosophical differences. Philosophical differences and all those dicks.
Youtube: Ads. Really bad suggestion engine. Its either Alt-Right Radicalization or Clickbait.
Amazon: Still using to buy non-local products. No interest in any of its other tricks.
Blogger: Just checking to see if this is being read.
Facebook: The feed tinkering, the tracking, and Zuck.
Tumblr: lifestyle. Generally enjoyed it, and its interface.
Netflix: Still using, but not as impressed as I once was.
Hacker News: Still using, still useful.
LinkedIN: Useless.
StackExchange: Dicks, and Boss Dicks.
Duckduckgo: Still using, wish the results were better, but GIGO, right?

With Web 1.0 long dead, Web 2.0 a festering shitheap, and Web 3.0 being the Panopticon, I am going to be curious to see how many items will be added to this list. Perhaps I will be able to extend this review, in another decade, on this service; but given the success rate of the above items, I fear not.

"Who will save your souls...from all those lies you told?"

                                               ---Jewel Kilcher

* My local ISP hosted its own IRC server, restricted only to its customers. I remember being shown the channel by my girlfriend, and holding my first chat. This still seems a cool idea, and I remember it as being remarkably populated by neighbors and friends.

**I understand the irony of complaining about this on Blogger.com. At some point, my animosity to Google will reach the point that this blog will be extinguished as well.

***Historically, a similar sort of 'en-boring-ing' as the 'Amateur Science' column in Scientific American underwent in the 1990s.

Auto-Pimp -- Now with Social Propositions!

Facebook just suggested Mark Zuckerberg to me.
Seriously.
It just suggested that I might want to friend him.
Mark Zuckerberg.