What the hell is happening to software and technology in general?  Why do I see computers around me making this needless shift to supposedly easier to use crap?  It’s such a joke and it’s really beginning to frustrate me.  I remember when I was in junior high, obsessed with the idea of a new computer.  Oh lord I thought, if I could just have Windows 98 running smoothly on a machine I would be good to go.  This was close to a decade ago.  A decade ago I was running software that is essentially the exact same as it is now, and wanting a machine that had 500 MHz processing power to run it.  I hadn’t even seen nor could I fathom of the Giga- prefix being in front of the Hz, in the processing power.  No, 500 MHz would be just fine.  100 Gigabyte hard drive?  More than plenty.  Now, I wish I had a best buy advertisement just for nostalgia’s sake.

I guess I was fantasizing back then about a time that will never come.  I didn’t realize it then and well, I’m still attempting to entirely comprehend it now.  I was thinking that my word processing document would load quickly and that folders I open would do the same.  I was imagining an overabundance of speed and storage capacity.  But these were foolish dreams.

While looking at Wikipedia entry on “bloatware” I came across the following table,

Do you see what happened there?  We were doing just fine with minimal increases in hardware to run the latest operating systems and then bam!  Just when the hardware was beginning to make software run effortlessly the way that it should, in my opinion – Vista came and shit on the parade.  Then Vista picked up the shit and threw it at innocent bystanders.  Finally, Vista made nasty faces before hopping in a car with no license plates and speeding off.

Now, I’ll grant the fact that Wikipedia is probably completely incorrect (although I did see little reference numbers next to the statistics), because Wikipedia usually is.  And I’ll also grant the fact that I know very little about hardware.  Quite honestly those numbers mean very little to me.  Nonetheless, I’m calling bullshit.  Some sort of pattern was trying to emerge before Vista.  For instance, assuming the Windows versions in that list were released in like chronological order to the way they descend down this page (95 being first and Vista being last), then from one release to the next, the system requirements seem to be doubling, sometimes tripling, in some instances marginally more and in others marginally less – Except from XP to Vista.  My point?  No idea.  It just seems fishy.  I think I smell a rat, Jack White.

My whole beef jerky here is that brand new computers with essentially nothing running on them are just as slow as computers 5 years ago.  Which is sickening.  I recently had the opportunity to piss around on a fancy spancy new laptop with Vista preloaded and I was frustrated enough to find that my MS Word no longer had a menu bar (not one that I could fucking distinguish that is).  What’s a menu bar?  It’s that thing that every single fucking program has had since the beginning of fucking programs.  It normally has things like, “File, Edit, Help, Insert, View, History, Options,” you know all of the things one might conceivably attempt to accomplish with any given program.

If this looks familiar, it is probably because you've seen it a billion fucking times.  (MS Word 2003)

If this looks familiar, see a doctor immediately.  (MS Word 2007)

It was easy to find, because it was right at the top of the screen, and it was easy to use because anything you could click was self-explanatory.  It can’t get any easier than that!  But, now it is easier… it’s so easy now!  Because, instead of self-explanatory words in that place where you expect them to be, there are a bunch of bulky fuck buttons that you’ve NEVER seen before.  I’ve retyped this paragraph like 20 times attempting to not use all capital letters and bold to get across how angry this makes me.  I even fiddled with that 72 font for awhile.  You’ll just have to take my word for it, when I say that this makes me want to pull a Sayid Jarrah in the season three finale of Lost, and just fucking break somebody’s neck with my ultra strong Iraqi leg muscles. 

In a grade school gymnasium on fold-out chairs sit a group of people ranging in age from 15 to 53; they form a circle of trust in which dark secrets see the light of day.

The group clasps hands with each person next to them and the circle grows tighter; salty solution pools on some peoples’ tear ducts, while others seem content to let their tears stream freely.