Desperate Windows

  I have to watch a lot of commercials, thanks to the money-grubbing folks who post on YouTube (I'd like to point-out that though my content is not really worthy, I don't monetize anything on YouTube or otherwise) and the corporate demons on other online-TV sites.  There's no escaping it.  It's on over-the-air channels as well.  Subsequently, I have to endure quite a bit of it if I want any media these days.  Thankfully, CD music is still void of it, though Bluray discs and movie theaters are shoving it in our faces as well.  I'm at the point where I see the same commercials over and over again.  Some companies are trying too hard.  It's rather sad, really.  Microsoft is batting a fat ZERO with current product releases.  Let's recap, starting with Windows 8...

Worrisome Microsoft uses an emoticon and knew that there'd be problems beforehand and made this screen at-release.

  So Windows 7 is a decent operating system.  It's a bit big, particularly the "professional" or "over-inflated", "unabridged" version that actually makes your PC or desktop weigh more because of all the bits weighing down your SSD or hard-drive (sic).  Windows 7 Professional is fat and unnecessary unless you run a server farm of sorts, then it makes sense, otherwise, Windows 7 Home is quite fine and non-buggy.  Even Internet Explorer 9 it comes with is decent and quick, though you have to tweak it a little in the user interface.  Some people don't like IE9 because of just that fact, but then again, these people also use 85 octane gas and then ironically drive massive SUVs and go to Starbucks for hot corn syrup in a cup, negating the savings on an infinite level.  These haters also prefer to "not think" or set up a computer in any way and prefer iPads so they can mash the picture with their greasy nubs.  Show me the thespian who can navigate a DOS-based game's installation to adjust one's autoexec.bat and config.sys files to get it to work, then adjust the DMU and IRQ settings in their BIOS to avoid their 16-bit Soundblaster soundcard conflicts with a PCI port to play music and have sound effects!  Ah, those were the days of men who knew their stuff!  Still, some had to install the latest and greatest OS, thinking it'll be better in some way, what way they don't know, nor could fathom, but it's new so the dummies who are computer illiterate buy into the newest stuff.  I call these folks, "heat seekers", a nice name for "sucker".  By now, everyone on Earth should know to never buy into the newest technology, like the new Chevy Stingray comming out with cylinder shut-off and direct-injection (thereby clogging valves quicker for the sake of gas savings).



We early gamers earned the right to listen to sound and the prize was rich, 8-bit audio goodness!  When you got it right, and that music started on the game when you loaded it up, such a REWARD!  We EARNED that music by-Jove!

 
Anyway, Windows 7 is easy and it was a good product, but because of the iPad and tablets flooding the dummies market who thrive on low-qual audio and are afraid of keyboards, some very very stupid execs at Microsoft thought to get on the band-waggon and make a tablet-based operating system.  Worse still, instead of calling it Windows CE8, as WinCE has been around for a long time (16 years) made just for hand-helds, they come out with simply, Windows 8.  Even worse still, they shove the whole iPad-like smeary design for tards onto PCs.  This works like crap.  It's a nightmare of a system with retarded giant squares to navigate like some bad PS-One game.  It's not faster in any way, just clumsy and ugly.



Windows Bob was not included in the numbering system as Microsoft was so embarrassed by it.  Imagine an OS ran entirely by Clippy the Paperclip?  Yep.  That's the real Microsoft Windows 4.

 
Most folks are wise to this (ie. never buy an even-numbered Microsoft OS, such as Windows Bob (above) or Windows Vista) [though, grudgingly there are some fans of it, oddly] and do not install it.  Several that did install Windows 8 quickly called the product-support center.  A friend of mine's wife called-in to Microsoft's customer-support asking how to revert back to Win7, to which they obviously hired a team to retort, "Why on Earth would you want to do that?" hoping to get people to stick with Win8, lauding it's abilities and "ease of use" to thwart the strange, new layout phobia, etc.  Ultimately, most low-level formatted their hard-drives and got a copy of Win7.  Indeed, sales of Win7 Home has gone up quite a lot recently, about as much as the sales of pre-installed PCs with Win8 and those who actually bought Win8.  Dell insists your PC come with Win8 as a sort of evil-alliance with Microsoft.  Still, you can format your drive and escape that crap.  I expect an apology from Microsoft with a free option to revert back to 7 in a few months, but they're obviously waiting it out.  I can only imagine the amount of money spent to try to make Win8 and the advertising is horrendous.  Take this vid for example which includes IE10 and Win8 and its Touch feature:

  Ooo!  Is that dubstep?  Kids like that, right?  It's trendy and new, right?  That's that robot music all the movies are doing now in the trailers!  Ooo!  It's so awesome!  I love the dive-bomb subwoofer tone!  That's so cool and new! 

  Ugh.  Okay, firstly Dubstep died last year in the same, sudden way disco died in 1981. Corporations are slow to realize it's a done-deal already, and it's sad. DubStep = modern-day disco. Cheesy and cheap and already spent, and pathetic.  What's with the Don Johnson dude in the commercial above, all by himself like some DJ at an empty club?  No one thinks he's cool.  I bet the actor was only happy he got work, but you know what?  He'll never find work again.  DJs are not musicians.  I admit that XM Radio has a bit of talent in timing one song to the next by matching the previous song's key, scale, and mode with the next and matching mathematically conflicting time signatures to make Holy Diver by DIO match-up with The Whisper by Queensryche (something FM would never play, nor Pandora, because it's too badass) but besides that, it's not cool.  It's sorry and sad, and those guys get fat and think they're heroes and they ain't and eventually the music they spin doesn't match-up with their tastes and they die alone in a U-Haul's truckbed with a pint of Popov Vodka and an emptied prescription of Mirapex. 

  The video is sad and uninspiring, and the Mad Planets video-game arcade controls are annoying at-best.

  Microsoft also released a Touch Tablet that goes something like this:

  Okay, so I see that the band Stomp is working in an office, getting nothing done.  They have a trendy Japanese young dude jumping around like a pansy bitch while various and carefully selected demographics and age genres are represented.  It's so sterile and corporate it hurts, and it's not cool.  No, it's sad, and it comes off as desperate as Dr.Evil trying to do the Macarena dance.

 

  No, Microsoft.  You've over-thought it.  I can just imagine the death meetings some of the guys had to go to, the "oh so smart" higher-ups thinking this was a good idea.  One or two younger fellas might'a said, "Hey, uh.. that whole "Stomp" thing is um.. well.. I.."  They got fired, and it shows.

 

 

Lastly, though I'm a PS3 fan, the XBox 360 was pretty okay a system.  Not great, but fairly popular enough.  There's a new version coming out soon called (no, not the 720, though the 420 might have been a better choice..) XBox One.  It's pretty retarded and doomed from-the-start.  The main feature is that you can watch TV from it..



  This is an incredibly, massively, bad move.  It almost stings the nostrils with it's pungent scent!  It reeks of a corporation wanting to buy-in on the Netflix/Hulu wave.  Dish systems are all but dead, and some folks only keep cable-TV because of the "bundle" they get with internet access, but most people have moved-on to watch TV via Hulu and movies via Netflix.  Even the Redbox kiosks are gathering dust, frequented by no one but the lowest-common-denominators out there.  There's rumor there's even a solitary Blockbuster video rental shop somewhere on this Earth, but I haven't been able to locate it via Google Earth.  Now be advised I give kudos to VHS rental stores still defiant in existence, and I was delighted to find one that even rented-out BetaMax tapes, which is pretty badass, as well as Laserdisc, so there's that novelty, but unless you're somewhere that internet doesn't exist, there's no excuse to not have Hulu Plus and Netflix by now.  Netflix has been around since 1997 (Now) and Hulu has been around since 2007.  That's 15 years and 5 years respectively.  In technology terms, that's about 10 lifetimes.  I hear some people still have old DVD players as well.  Bluray discs were available in 2003, some 10 years ago.  It's amazing some people hold-on to ancient technologies.  Still, vinyl aside (apples to oranges here), the Compact Disc has the highest bitrate quality available (along with Bluray and DVD-A discs which are scarce) so having a CD player makes sense quality-wise.  Oddly, people embrace MP3 players, preferring additional lo-fi compression for convenience over hi-fi quality.  Too bad, but whatever.  In my heart, I know storage size will increase until people will start putting WAV files on their players or other lossless formats over time, which is good.

 
So the XBox One also requires you have constant, online connectivity.  Per my previous argument, there's still an abnormal amount of folks in the US who don't have this.  Some still even use dial-up modems (somehow).  The map here: MAP indicates how many humans have access to broadband internet.  About half the US or so, population-wise.  This limits the XBox sales, as dial-up will be horrible because you have to buy online and download your game to the XBox One.  Yep.  Mandatory.  The PlayStation 4 was considering this move, but Sony wisely avoided it, making it an option, but not required.


So, Strike number THREE with XBox One, already a done-deal.  Microsoft stock will soon plummet, I suspect.  Crap-o-la.  Let's watch it fall together, shall we?  It's obvious Microsoft felt they missed the mark on Apple's simple design and is desperately trying to mimic a lot of it.. badly.  Microsoft, listen to me, just listen.  I'm your friend.  Keep making software for PC users just the way you have been with Win7 and XP.  People who actually use a keyboard and computers who actually do real things are going to still buy it.  Sure, you missed-out on the trendy stuff for the consumer crowd.  That's Apple's thing, for the consumer, but the folks that are creators of things, people who actually do something, folks that make things people consume still use desktop PCs.  Stick with that.  It's what you do best.