On the unstoppable dynamism of Open-Source
In some ways, this post is just an excuse to re-post a list that turned up on Reddit today. It's a "will you please not fucking do this any more" list to Windows application developers... and every single item rings truer than a... really really true thing (that rings).
It comes from Wiseman1024 who has lived up to his name, and I'm reposting here in the time-honoured tradition of asking forgiveness rather than permission.Almost every Windows application (commercial or freeware that is not free software) is made by retards (that's kind of obvious though, working on Windows) who think their application is the most important one in the world and certainly the one you bought your computer and installed your OS for. Therefore, it will:
- Require its own download manager, because what you're downloading is so special it can't be done with your regular Internet.
- Install in C:\Program Files\\ Special Edition 2008 Woohoo Professional XP. Surely it's from a huge developer, you'll have hundreds of apps from them and you want them classfied by vendor.
- Create a "My ..." directory in your personal directory; for example, if you install a digital version of the Kamasutra, you'll get a "My sexual positions" directory. The "My" prefix makes it so personal, it's 100 times better and more user-friendly.
- Create a folder for its vendor (of course, you want everything classfied by vendors because vendors are the important factor for you), with a single icon inside, in your start menu.
- Create an icon in your desktop.
- Create an icon in your quick launch bar.
- Hijack all file extensions from its own to .TXT files, just cuz.
- Break Explorer in some amusing way that can't be undone.
- Hijack the Internet Explorer homepage into its vendor's site, because every time you browse your Internet (which, obviously, has to be done from Internet Explorer, well, the Internet I mean), you want to go to that vendor's website to see which other amazing pieces of software it has (namely, screensavers advertising the product).
- Install an Internet Explorer toolbar with a cute banner so you can go to their website with one click.
- Install an updater that runs on bootup because you're devoted to having it updated. The updater is written in .NET or something disgusting that will take no less than 20 MB RAM, and sit a cute, animated icon in your system tray because it's awesome to know you're connected for your one application, and it most certainly justifies a running process for it.
- When ran, it'll also drop extra icons on your system tray because everybody knows you love collecting bullshit there.
- When closed, it'll "minimize to system tray", because you don't really want to close that one program.
- Use its own drawn windows, borders, colours, controls and style (for just an extra 20 MB RAM and a 400% impact on performance), because it looks so slick nobody will realize it's an horrendous pile of shit that looks like ass next to everything else you have.
- If uninstalled from an obscure icon and description from Microsoft's obnoxiously slow and retarded appwiz.cpl, never uninstall completely, not just because Windows' filesystem is broken and shitty, but because you'll feel nostalgic about your application and will still want to see that vendor's folders.
Along side this in the stream of newsy things that greet me every morning was this 10 things songbird does that itunes can't
Because let's face it possums, iTunes is a bit of a dog when it comes down to it... I immediately thought of this - the 5 most annoying programs on your PC, with which I heartily concur - in a nutshell: Acrobat ReaderiTunes
Real Player
Internet Explorer
Microsoft Outlook Each of which is an opportunity waiting to happen... (and most of which have pretty good alternatives now) - but the point (vaguely) is, you simply don't get this sort of cobblers with open-source design. As a fundamental process, it's so much more agile. So much more adaptable. A really quick study, as they say in the theatre etc. It's something I've been noticing more and more... the latest being in response to this:
where someone's attached a router to a little robot and now it can make things from CAD designs. It's incredibly cool in its own right, but whenever I've shown it to anyone, they've come up with really interesting ideas of their own - my Brother immediately came up with "that's cool, you could use it to create detailed parts inside containers"... and insisted I give him a link, because he knows someone who make their own one, the size of sofa.
I mean the crowd-sourcing of testing and useability is one thing. (I first "got it" when I heard some MySQL people going on about somone releasing a proprietary database saying that "it hasn't been tested yet"). A thousand eyes are better than one. Unpaid fanatics are better than paid experts. Anyway, that's one thing... ... the thing that's the real killer though, the real killer-feature... the real mouse vs dinosaur thing... is the ability to create little memetic/developmental ecosystems. The ability to crowd-source imagination. We can live with annoyances... god knows, we have been for a long time now... but any "successful" application that doesn't crowd-source imagination is basically an opportunity waiting to happen for an application that does.Crowd-sourced imagination is the new Intel-Inside.
