Tuesday, August 28, 2007 12:24 AM
I have another dead laptop. Yep, that's another. I bought a gorgeous HP laptop two or three years ago -- 3.2GHz, Hyperthreaded, 15" widescreen, full-sized keyboard, DVD burning, and it worked like a champ -- except that you could cook on it. Seriously, it was the hottest laptop I'd ever seen. It routinely shut itself off due to heat unless I propped it up just right. Eventually I think it damaged itself. The monitor flickers funny sometimes, it blue screens at random, and is just generally unstable. HP will fix it for roughly the cost of a new laptop.
I bought a Viewpad for the cool, Remote Desktop feature. It locks up and needs to be restarted more often than I'd like. It's completely non-upgradeable.
I bought a CLI thin client terminal for Remote Desktop. It frequently acts like the Start key is being pressed and you can't really type anymore as every R, E, D, and L trigger things you never intended. CLI doesn't really support the hobbyist market. I'm on my own and there isn't much to go on.
I've tried two different wireless keyboards for my media center. The first stopped responding well as a mouse. The second one I just bought and it doesn't seem to be able to muster up the range to function from seven feet away.
An MP3 player I bought stopped responding to all the buttons a few months after buying it. A scanner didn't work out of the box (at least that one has a happy ending). All USB ports around me seem to suffer identity crises and randomly suggest that I "locate a USB 2.0" port, even though they all are. Other than in-warranty replacements, there's nothing to do with them.
Now, for the second time, my Gateway tablet is on the fritz. Several months after sending it in for repair, it is completely dead again. I put it in Standby, went to bed, and when I woke it up in the morning it made loud clicking sounds on the hard drive and refused to resume. It now gleefully reports "Windows could not start..." on the BIOS screens.
Sigh. It just makes me hate technology so much. Am I really that cursed or is this just the current state of technology? Are we so pumped for new features and new products that we can't wait for the kinks to be worked out. Just gimme -- I don't care if it works or not. Windows Vista has been reviled in many circles for not being enough substance. I personally reverted to XP, despite a number of features that I really wanted, due to incompatibilities with both hardware and software. Why couldn't they properly virtualize XP so you would never have that problem? For that matter, what about all the cool features that were announced then taken away (hello, WinFS...)?
All of us techno-geeks want cooler and cooler stuff, but it's such an endless cycle. As soon as production starts on one killer technology, research finishes on another. The cool, new gadget is yesterday's news almost immediately. Then come the reports of what went wrong and what to expect in v2 (oops! sorry to those who bought it). If we just chilled a bit, devices could really mature, software could truly be debugged, and we'd get devices worth having.
By the same token, so many devices are really just a firmware or software update away from being truly good. Lots of good hardware has been released, but the software has killed it. Go back to my Viewpad. If not for manufacturer apathy and the ever-present focus on growing profits, I could download the right updates and start running Windows Mobile 5 on it. Maybe Linux. Maybe Be. Even a dedicated .NET CLR would be nice. As it is though, ViewSonic washed its hands of it and it can never grow. It's slower than some modern PDA's, but it's actually amazingly strong (it was pretty high-end at release).
We need better code testing and debugging, more usability testing, periodic software releases to address bugs and new features, and opening up of products after a five year window (or something reasonable...).
Innovation is being stifled by the amount of throw-away product lines and throw-away products. It's not good enough to create the killer device in the moment. Make it cool for as long as anyone cares. When it's no longer profitable to support it, let it go into the wild. If it's not profitable, what's the worry? Sure you might cannibalize a few new product sales, but it's more likely that people with the passion to keep older products going wouldn't have bought the new products anyway.
I'm ranting. I know. It's time for bed! This just bugs me and I feel like a rant every now and then is justified. Anyone care to comment?