Letter to Santa...
As the season of goodwill and Santa's gift-giving is almost here, I thought that I would send "My Letter to Santa" for all the things I'd like to see happen in the software, hardware and general Internet world. See if you agree with any of my wishes!
Plug and "Pray"
Years ago we were promised "Plug and Play" peripherals. All you do is connect it to your machine and away you go! Ha! No chance! It's for good reason that these devices have been termed "Plug and Pray" devices. You plug them in and pray they work!
It IS hard for manufacturers to make their device work with the thousands of makes and models of devices on the market. Therefore, we need standards and we need manufacturers to stick to them.
Wish Number One: REAL plug and play devices that work first time!
Ornamentation
Have you installed a new piece of software lately? A word processor or a database? If you have then you will have noticed the myriad buttons, menus and icons that accompany modern software. This is great but what's the cost of all these whistles and bells?
Usually it's two things. Speed (or rather lack of) and disk space. I am convinced that software houses use a specific calculation when they install. You have no doubt seen the "Checking for disk space" message when installing software. At this point, I believe that the calculation goes something like this...
Disk Free Space x Bill Gates' inside leg measurement x number of basic files needed = the amount of whistles and bells you get.
Therefore the more free space you have, the more "extras" you get. All these extras mean...
Slower performance
More things to confuse you with
More things to crash the program
Half these extras no one uses (a bit like all the extra controls on your video player), and sometimes the things you DO need are lacking!
Wish Number Two: An application that doesn't swallow huge amounts of disk space with potential rubbish
Sensible Software
How many times have you installed, say a game, only for it to ask you what your sound and graphic card is? Quite a few, I bet. Why? Good question!
Too many "specialist" programs (such as midi software) and games ask for this information. It is readily available from the Windows registry or by even querying the hardware itself. (Programs like Norton Utilities have been able to tell me the make and model of my video and sound cards for years), so why can't all software do this?
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