It's Like the Internet. Only Slower.

Mark Goldston, CEO of NetZero, a vulture and, in the words of Dickipedia, a dick.

NetZero, in case you have forgotten, is a supplier of dial-up Internet service. Goldston's pitch is that the 56 million households in the U.S could save billions of dollars a year by ditching broadband and going back to dial-up.

That compares to the amount of money that people will save if they put on really heavy clothes, heat their homes with wood fires and draw water from a hand-dug well in their back yards.

More and more websites are video and image heavy. If you try to view those with dial-up, you have to click on the link to the website and then go pour yourself a drink while the web page loads. If you want to watch any video on YouTube or anywhere else, you'll have to get a video downloader (like UltraGet) and then a video player like FLV Player. You paste the video URL into the window in UltraGet and then go have a snack while the video slowly downloads.

Remember, you've got a 56Kb/s modem, maybe. If, for example, you want to download the "Mom's Day William Tell" video:



that's about 7,750Kb. At the fastest possible speed, that's a bit over seven minutes. Most 56K modems tend to connect a tad bit slower, so you may have time to cook dinner while that one video is downloading.

The "Rick Roll" video is 8.3Mb, which will take you nearly 8 minutes to download. The "Passport to Pluto" documentary that I mentioned over at my home blog will take over 37 minutes to download.

Those numbers assume that you do not try to open another browser window while the download is going on. They assume that your youngest kid doesn't pick up an extension and start whistling into it.

Oh and while all that is going on, your phone line is tied up (and you presumably still have wired phone service).

Want to work from home and telecommute into the office by a remote link? Do research online for a project? Not with dialup.

Goldston's ad campaign is an attempt to use a bad economy as a means to rescue a dying method of connectivity. If anything, it is vulturism at its worst.

Hang this bastard high with a modem cord.

Smash. Smash!

The Incredible Hulk

For this post, Hulk is a stand-in for CGI animation in general. I hate watching CGI characters fight on the screen. There is no drama, no story, just the output of a bunch of computer geeks who should have "`Can` is Not the Same as `Should`" tattooed on their foreheads. CGI is becoming more and more the province of lazy movie-making: "More CGI! More gun fights! More car chases!"

(An all-CGI movie is a cartoon, those do not count.)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have a killer CGI team. Big fucking whoop. Reliance on CGI is just pitiful. You need only watch the first Star Wars movie (before Lucas fucked it up in `97) and compare it to any of the last three to see that. CGI is how Lucas was able to wring three movies out of this premise:

"Anakin Skywalker grows up, becomes a Jedi knight, schtups Princess Padamane and knoocks her up with twins, turns to the dark side with the assistance of Dick Cheney, slaughters all but two of the other Jedi knights, is horribly wounded by Obi Wan, and has to put on the black suit. The end."

Just as in every movie since Bullitt, a long car chase is a sign of "we haven't got much of a story, so we're going to drag it out" (think Ronin or Bourne Supremacy), a lot of CGI is a pretty good indication that there is going to be no there, there in the movie. CGI is the movie equivalent of "hamburger helper" or sawdust.

There ought to be a tax on the use of CGI. Or the directors need to be beaten with chains. Frankly, either solution is fine with me.

Shrink, I Wanna Kill. Kill! Kill!

Clippy.
Clippy is fully annoying in its own right. That paperclip should be folded, spindled, mutilated and thrown into the recycle bin.

In this instance, I am using that critter as a stand-in for the evil fucks at Redmond, WA, home of MicroSoft, aka MickeySpooge, aka the Root of All Evil.

So there I was, getting ready to shut down. I was reading one last web page, no other apps were open. I turned my head to pet a cat when, out of the corner of my eye, I spied the Blue Screen of Death, which flashed and then my computer rebooted itself. Then it had to check the disk for inconsistency, in case one of the platters had turned into tapioca.

I hate Microsoft. Hate, hate, hate. I hate their bloatware and their vaporware. I'd hate their souls, if they had any, which I seriously doubt. The only thing I love about Microsoft is that every time one of those pompous fucks leaves the computer world and tries to do anything else, they take a serious financial beating. In the world of computing, Microsoft is a cross between Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Il and George W. Bush. There is nothing to like about them and each OS they develop seems to be suckier than the one preceding it (except for Bob and Windows-ME, which achieved rarified levels of suckiness only reached by Heckuvajob Brownie and Herbert Hoover).

About the only thing worse than Microsoft are the Apple-bots, which are almost as annoying as your local door-to-door evangelists. Everything is "proprietary" with those clowns, meaning "you're going to pay 50% more." Apple's greed and maniacal desire to control everything is the reason why the PC whipped Apple's ass in the 1980s, allowing PCs to gain a death grip on the American workplace. Not knowing how to run a PC means you might as well be bragging about how well you can use a slide rule, so even if Apple products are "better," for most of the business world, Apples are about as useful as Strom Thurmond.

Anyway, I'm seriously considering going back to writing cuneiform on mud tablets. It can't be any more of a pain in the ass than dealing with software from Microsoft.