I'll begin my rant with the fundamental cause for it.  It's all one giant circle which feeds upon itself perpetuating the problem with increasing intensity.  It all starts with the huge level of hype the media spews out about computers and the internet.  They (the media) usually has no real understanding of what it's advocating and is only going along with various trends.  They hail computers as the solution to every business problem and the internet as the only way to educate our children.

These trends that the media is inclined to follow are generated by the larger computer oriented companies like Microsoft, AOL, IBM and the like.  These companies go on huge add campaigns in an attempt to secure more business; with flashy commercials describing the easy lives we will all live in the future, if only we would buy their products.

The huge media rush and commercial bombardment leads to consumer interest.  Unfortunately these companies have gone so far as to seemingly interest every human being in the modern world when in reality most people really don't need any of this.  These throngs of people swarm to buy all the latest technology and internet connections, much to the joy of the aforementioned companies.  Quite of few of these people I have no qualm with; they will be just the sort of people interested in computers from the beginning.  The rest of the people is where the problem lies...

The trouble with this huge mass of people is that most of them really don't understand computers and never will.  Its not their place, just as not everyone is expected to know how to do taxes, type, or fix a badly shingled roof.  These people having computers and using them is no big problem in itself - however it leads to later problems for us old time users.  These perpetual newbies will only buy flashy, and what is in their limited experience "user friendly" software and products.  This of course leads them to buying software from the likes of Microsoft and AOL who pander especially to newbies.

What's the problem with flashy, "user friendly" software you ask?  The problem with flashy graphics is that many a game or product is bought purely based on its graphics which really have nothing to do with  its usefulness or quality.  Games like Myst are in the top-seller lists years after their introduction because they attract the new users who haven't ever played a real game before and thus don't understand what it means; a pretty picture book to take advantage of their new computer is all they want (I'll talk about the effects of this later).  This "user friendly" software really isn't such at all, it's really just easy to learn from a newbie's standpoint.  To us old-timers, learning how to use new software is almost a non-issue: we can pick it up and figure it out in a matter of minutes with no problem and usually without a manual.  In the past newbies were always discouraged by this initial learning curve, for the computer's OS and other software as well as hardware.  In many ways this was a very good thing for it kept computers to those who really wanted to use them, and it kept away huge media blitz.  Companies like Microsoft and AOL however quickly changed that once they got a foothold.

This new kind of software wouldn't be a problem if this easy-to-learn quality didn't detract from the rest of it.  However, to make something easy to learn for even the most computer illiterate, Microsoft and others had to dumb down their entire software packages, leaving them with no advanced features and little customization.  So what are we experienced users left with?  Monopolic companies producing bad software and attracting newbies even more than before.  Yet another bad point to this obsession with flash and easy-to-learn over real content shows itself in the form of numerous bugs.  Companies feel that most of their sales are generated from newbies in the first few weeks after release before reviews are in so they don't feel the need to thoroughly bug test a game.  It used to be that there was no such thing as vapor-ware and a patch was a rare thing.  No longer.

In addition to proliferating the creation of bad software the newbie hoards cause another major annoyance: their stifling presence on the internet.  In fact we can no longer rightly can it the internet, only the web.  Gone are the days of clean, fast ftp sites.  The newbie presence has continually gotten worse and worse over the last few years.  It began with more and more people asking stupid questions on discussion groups, stupid because they had already been answered literally hundreds of times before.  Then came AOLs much touted web access (a deep sigh is heard).  Now the untamed newbies masses previously confined to their little land of AOL were released onto our once clean web (though not as clean as the internet).  They flooded newsgroups and discussion forums with exclamation points, bad grammar, complete lack of punctuation (besides the aforementioned mark), and improper capitalization (or capitalization of everything) along with rude and inflammatory remarks.  Our once clean waters were muddied irrevocably and us old ones moved onto the private mailing lists (B5 fans should have caught that one).  No more could we read intelligent articles and web pages with real content, instead we must now suffer "HOW I DO THIS!!!!!!!!!" or such other atrocious sentences.  Tabletop gaming and programming sites are amongst the last of our refuges.

The continued presence of newbies on the web en masse gave encouragement to Microsoft and their like, thus creating the vicious circle of newbies.  But I still have yet to thoroughly discuss the real problem with Microsoft's products.  Their main culprit is of course their OS, Windows.  It began with Windows 3.1 which dispite MS's claims wasn't even a real operating system, only a shell working within the confines of DOS (which has its own problems).  Next came the dark days of Windows 95.  Though perhaps faster than 3.1, Windows 95 took total control of your computer; a real OS from Microsoft.  Not only was Win 95 uncustomizable and generally clunky but it had numerous gaping holes in its design.  First is the entire problem of being required to reboot your PC after any system change takes place; this may seem perfectly normal and acceptable to newer users but there was a time when this was unheard of.  Secondly is Win 95's huge and bloated cache files.  Where is the point in them?  Nowhere, that's where.  No other OS uses gigantic cache files to multi-task, let alone open a text document.  These files take up vast amounts of space and aren't even deleted properly, fragmenting your drive terribly.  Windows is also caused to slow down to the pace of a snail while it grinds away at writing gigantic swap files, only to delete them moments later, or forget about them entirely.  DOS was a much cleaner system, though its extremely limited memory "buffer" caused no end of problems to game programmers.  Another problem with Windows is that you have to pay some $100 for it even though Microsoft makes billions already, and then you have to buy their "PLUS!" crap to get an OS that has even half the features of any other.

I'm afraid this brings my computing rant to a rather ungraceful end, at least I'm satisfied to get that off my chest. I'm sure some of my readers will have been rubbed the wrong way by this essay but I'm just an old timer as far as computers go and don't like paying some $50 for a computer game when I used to pay $15 (those were new games by Sierra too). Some of you probably think I'm just some old grizzled person that doesn't like change and is too defensive about his field of experience.  But just think: what if, all of a sudden, the media made a huge push on plumbing.  Now everyone wants to be a plumber, they all buy plumbing gear and fancy themselves very "with it".  All the magazines cover plumbing and plumbing conventions are held all the time by the new people.  Now imagine you are a plumber, a real one, and your field is being walked on like some fad.  Ugh.  Well, this is Jasper McChesney, grizzled old timer, signing off.