Friday, November 16, 2012

The Old Crystal Ball: Looking at Microsoft...

An expert gazes intently into his crystal ball and tells us what he sees as the Mighty Microsoft of the emerging future, and it's a terrible tangled web, Folks.

Engineered obsolescence isn't as simple these days as it was back when cars still had fenders and using a keyboard involved all ten fingers, not just your two thumbs. And back then, we actually had to know how to spell something before we wrote it, because the spell-checker hadn't been invented yet. Speaking of which, what we really need now is a grammar-checker and a proof-reading tool, because editors are about as common as Dodo Birds. They always were a little 'iffy' anyhow, coming down from the hills as they did, after the battle, to shoot the wounded.

 But wouldn't it be nice if those hormonal youngsters with their overactive thumbs knew how to spell 'shit' before they tried to write the word? And where I come from, OMG is just unintelligible nonsense, it never meant 'Oh My God'. If that's what's meant, then write the damned thing out in full or shut the hell up! And please don't tell me there's already grammar checkers available for downloading. Have you tried the one claiming to be best? It doesn't work! But good luck with that.

2 comments:

  1. "grammar checkers available"

    I love it when the MS grammer checker puts that little squigly green line under a sentence. When you try to click on it to get some help, the only message is something like 'incorrect grammer, try restructuring your sentence.' What the hell kind of HELP is that?

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  2. Yes, this takes us back to the kind of "help" we got from Microsoft's Help in the old days - they'd show us five or six multiple-choice questions, none of which had the remotest connection to the problem, and then ask us to pick something, and when none of those applied, they'd suggest we call a friend or search the web for answers. Why didn't we do that in the beginning?

    Shouldn't a 'Help' section offer something more than agreeing with us that we need help?

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