+ Rants & Raves
The following extracts from Mel’s published work originally appeared in edited format in the esteemed publication Computer Shopper.
+ CATHARSIS
Windows Vista? Ha! I don’t want it, I don’t need it, and you can jolly well stuff it. Something wonderful has happened with my attitude towards computing, and I’m skipping towards the future with two fingers raised and wiggly. My catharsis heralds a breakthrough in the way we store and access data, and it marks the beginning of the end for desktop computers running dopey operating systems. For me the revolution had been unseen and unsung, until my youngest colleague, the flame-haired Erin, emailed me a 50Mb file, which my inbox struggled with and I managed to screw up. “No problem,” breezed Erin, “pick it up again off the web.” Huh?
I discovered there are dozens of web-based services offering gigabytes of free storage, where 50-Meg file transfers are the norm, and where Erin archives everything. Main players like Yahoo!Briefcase look downright stingy with only 25Mb of space to store, access and share, but the harbinger of death for clunky personal computers that run silly operating systems like Windows is Google. Let us shout the news from the rooftops.
Google’s Gmail service provides a hefty 2.8Gb of free server space to play with. The Google philosophy declares, “do not sort, never throw anything away, you should never have to delete.” This should send shivers down the spine of old farts like me. We spend large chunks of our lives deleting, organising and archiving data, because we were brought up in the age of the nib and inkwell, surrounded by shelves groaning under the weight of box-files. If I had not regularly purged my paper mountain, I would have run out of living space years ago. But anyone brought up in the computer age, regards me as an anal retentive, and they are quite right of course. They also think I’m sad, and possibly mad, when I fret about being separated from my desktop and laptop hard drives, and my back-up drives, and my back-up-back-ups on CD, DVD, memory stick, and, yes I admit it, shelves full of box files, just in case.
I like young Erin. I like all young people. They teach me things. They’ve taught me that if you send Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets, or graphics files as attachments using Google’s Gmail, they get stored safe and sound on remote servers that are infinitely more secure than anything I’ve got. What’s more, any file can be published on the web with its very own URL, which means I can access it from any location, using any internet connection. And I can share it with anybody else for collaboration, illumination and dissemination. Do you see where this is heading? That’s right, I don’t really need my bomb-proof desktop computer at all, I don’t need to worry about back-ups, and I certainly don’t need to shell out for horrors like Windows Vista because there are great browser-based utilities out there that can handle everything. All I need is a free web browser and a connection.
In the future, creation and manipulation of documents, utilities, audio, video, and everything else that a computer does will be browser-based. Kids know this already, and have absolutely no problem with it. As for me and you, relax and let go. The safest place for your data is also the cheapest to store and simplest to access. It’s called the web.
© Mel Croucher, March 2007
+ PUBLIC CONVENIENCE
I pimped my wife for twenty quid last week. It was a pleasure to arrange, but not without pain when it came to the aftermath. I sold my wife to Kwik-Fit Insurance, because they promised to bung me a score for any family and friends I could sign up as new customers. I have no friends and only the one wife, so twenty quid was the best I could expect to earn from Kwik-Fit. What I did not expect was the eruption of fury when my wife received their insurance policy document. It arrived in her inbox as a 48-page PDF email attachment, and ”bloody annoyed” is inadequate to describe her incandescent phone-call to their customer-relations chappie, hiding behind his rip-off 0870 number. He calmly stated that “Kwik-Fit customers prefer the convenience of self-printing,” at which my wife was able to put him straight in a most succinct way. And that’s when I realised what a bunch of suckers we’ve all become. And we hardly even noticed.
I upgraded my Motorola mobile earlier this year, and then found I was too daft to operate it. So I rooted around through all the oversized packaging for the instruction manual. There wasn’t one. Instead, there was a DVD that featured grinning halfwits having added-extra fun thanks to their Motorola added-extras, all in a choice of twenty-two languages. Somewhere among the downloadable dross was a user-manual, which was also in twenty-two languages, but I had neither the ink or inclination to wade through it all. Instead I used my fall-back technical helpline, which is to ask the nearest child who has eyes like a rat. These are increasingly numerous in most modern cities.
When I bought a beautiful Sony digital camera, there wasn’t even a useless silver disk. Instead, I was invited to visit a corporate website, where a fully-interactive course on how to hold the damn thing awaited me. If I wanted to own the user manual, then I was obliged to download a file and print it out myself. And the more I thought about this phenomenon, the more I saw how we are all being duped. My most recent writing contract was emailed as yet another self-print jobbie, but any amendments I wanted to make had to be initialled by hand in duplicate, and then snail-mailed back to the indolent publisher. And now my wife has been told she must download and print her entire syllabus for all the courses she is teaching next term. Any errors she makes in terms of receipt, security, collation and action have been neatly dropped into her sphere of responsibility.
This is an outrageous cop-out. Service providers and manufacturers not only presume everyone has access to the necessary hardware and software, but they also assume we are able to use it, willing to use it, have the time to use it, and are prepared to pay for printing out sheaves of A4 loose-leaf paper. They have shifted the duty of information provision away from themselves, and dumped the inconvenience onto us, by a cynical process of stealth and arrogance. I protest.
© Mel Croucher, August 2006
+ BETTER THE DEVIL YOU KNOW
I am not a pornographer. However, in December 1982, an article appeared in The Sunday People in which their Ian Brandes accused me of marketing obscene computer software designed to corrupt the minds of children. This resulted in Dr. Oonagh McDonald MP demanding a Government probe into such games. The software in question was a compilation of puzzles I had written, each occupying the entire 1K of memory available on a Sinclair Z-80 machine. I had given the puzzles snappy little titles like Seduction, where the computer wrote random sonnets, and On The Job, where kids had to pick a career. The graphics were as subtle as a pile of bricks, and slightly less colourful. Needless to say, neither the hack at The Sunday People nor Dr. McDonald had ever clapped eyes on my software, but you can see where the confusion crept in. A quarter of a century on, there is no confusion whatsoever in what I think about obscene computer software. I think the designers, manufacturers, retailers and purchasers are to be pitied. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not computerised sex that I find obscene, it’s computerised violence.
The society in which we find ourselves confuses aggression with strength, it promotes attack as defence, it equates killing with winning. The computer games industry markets aggression because it is run by the same breed of morons who market the real thing. I do not subscribe to the theory that the two schoolboys who killed twelve people, wounded 24 others and then committed suicide at Columbine High School did so because a computer game called Doom turned them into monsters. They did so because they were part of a society that glorifies guns. I do subscribe to the theory that the 85,000 players who have downloaded Super Columbine Massacre RPG off the web in order to re-enact the Columbine school killings are in serious need of therapy. The fact that the software was written by a guy who was born in 1982 saddens me greatly, as that was the year when I began this long campaign against computerised violence. There is only one thing worse than those who promote the obscenity of violence in the name of the free market, and that is those who promote the obscenity of violence in the name of their god. If I wasn’t such an amiable pacifist I’d go round to their house and punch their corporate faces in.
Over the next few months a bunch of extreme right-wingers, cloaking themselves as Christians, plan to distribute at least one million copies of a computer game called Eternal Forces via “evangelical megachurches”. The mission statement on their website declares they intend to “become the world’s leading developer and publisher of interactive entertainment products that perpetuate positive values and appeal to Christian audiences, while remaining committed to increasing shareholder value.” I think the expression “bully for you” is chillingly appropriate. Aimed at young males, the game exploits the latest spyware to record details about the players’ identity and behaviour, with the intention of feeding the database of Christian supremacists. Players are encouraged to roam the city streets killing unbelievers, and “live out how they would defend themselves and their faith from the Antichrist and his Global Peace Keeping Forces." Yes folks, Global Peace Keeping Forces are portrayed as the tool of Satan. The United Nations, already the target of certain Christian fascists, features strongly in the game, and UN peacekeeping vehicles are to be destroyed before they spew forth demons. To hell with that. I’m with the devil all the way on this one.