Bytes And Pieces

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Howard (Howie) Merrill is the Master of the Web Manor website, as well as the author of the wonderful newsletter The Funnies.  Comments, questions, and anything else about Howie's Corner should be sent to Howie.

After many years of "working the web", reading PC magazines, reading and posting to various newsgroups, and just being another PC user, I have developed quite a sense for the frustrations of computers and the software we suffer with on a day to day basis. This column is dedicated to those that have suffered along with me

• WYSINWYG: What You See Is NOT What You GET
  
  
  Ever use a WYSIWYG software package and actually see what you expected?  I teach web design for the coders and non-coders of the world.  I'm sorry but what you see in Netscape Composer or Microsoft FrontPage is NOT what you get in Netscape or Internet Explorer!  OK, maybe the simple stuff coded in FrontPage looks the same in IE, and vice versa the composer stuff looks the same in Netscape. What did you expect?!?!? STANDARDIZATION!?!?!?!??? HA!
  
  
• The average web user stays on a web page for 10 seconds
  
  
  If this is true, the average web user sees a blank screen 99.6% of the time! The average web page, unless it is strictly text or the average web user has DSL.... They ain't seeing much!  I do not code for "the average web user".  Yes, I am a type-A ex-New Yorker with a 3 second attention span but I have enough patience (most of the time) to wait to see if a site is worth waiting for...
  
  
• As soon as your "NEW" PC arrives, it becomes obsolete.
  
  
  I'm sorry but this is true. Many one day, technology will advance to the end of its capabilities. But right now, every order that Dell, Gateway, Micron, IBM, etc... fills, is a machine that is being outdone as it ships. I still have a 233mhz Pentium II with a 4.3GB hard drive and a 56k (capable) modem (U.S. Robotics yet). I ordered the "state of the art" PC at the time. The top of the line available was a 266mhz. I was so happy to get this incredibly fast, ultra souped up, lightning speed, internet ready, WIN95 loaded, unbelievably expense piece of....
  Now I read the PC magazines and see ads for PCs that are 20 times more powerful and 1/6th the price! I could buy 6 "state of the art" PCs for the price I paid for this obsolete dinosaur!
  
  
• Win ME is better than WIN98 which was better than Win 95 but not as good for graphics as MAC and all crash but Linux is good if you don't run this or don't do that, but Win2000 won't run DOS programs and your hardware is obsolete and will not install properly or be supported or you can't get drivers and you should never upgrade any software because when you do, it will corrupt your registry or the uninstall will make a mess of your hard drive and scan disk will fix it but leave 400,000 kb chunks of trash in your root directory which you will never delete because you don't know any better but I do and I deleted them along with every file that had a "D" in it because a tech support person told me to and after I did that, all my printouts were green instead of black but HP said that it is normal for green to occur if you deleted the directory called "%#%#HP-DELETE-ME" because that directory contains mystical files that are invisible unless you change the attributes to archive and read-only which you should never do because then green will become the default but only after an upgrade from IE4 to IE5.01.02.3.21.4 which has bugs in it but you can download a patch from Microsoft which will install and reboot your PC automatically (and isn't that special!?!) but the reboot will fail with a message that you can't read because your splash screen will flicker every 3.4 seconds in between each message that occurs in your normal boot sequence but that is not the problem since, you see, every installation program has a different logic built in to ensure that most operating systems will comply with the programmer desire to destroy all software in the living world by creating rogue installation programs which, on demand, send e-mails to every friend, relatives and your current boss with an attachment that, of course, everyone will open because no one pays attention to the 50,326 warnings that state that you should never open an attachment from anyone except the Pentagon or the IRS or the IRA, because these attachments, you know, are part of a terrorist plot and once they are opened, they morph into various types of files, most of which have "D" in them, and if you delete them, they turn your monitor on and off at random times... but I digress.

• Howie will be OK after a short nap. Until then, please listen to the MIDI music supplied by Napster...

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Last Revised: 04/08/2001