What’s dumber than a virus intended to “revive the golden era” of virii?
The nitwits what designed and coded it, that’s what.
Here’s how the description should really read…
The virus will then hit at random, but only once. It will not replicate itself, mail itself to your friends or destroy any of your files, but instead provides you with moments of blissful surprise and magic…at least until you get a pink slip for violating your company’s usage policy for intentionally infecting company machines with a virus, that is.
Yeah, I know…harsh. Know what’s harsher? The amount of money burnt on time-wasting productivity-killing b.s. like this.
So here’s a short letter I’ve composed to this kid’s family…
Hey Dumbasses,
You chose the trauma route for your son/brother/etc., you ignorant numbskulls. Not Microsoft, not Engadget, not George Bush, nor anyone else. I hope rabid chipmunks eat out your eyeballs while you sleep, so he can be adopted by rich zillionaires who won’t treat him like crap.
XOXO
The Funcave
Feel free to add your own letter here in the comments.
Let me be utterly clear about this, so there is no lingering confusion in anyone’s mind…
Groove has to be the worst software I’ve ever used in my life.
For something else that was breathlessly touted as a revolution with no downside for so long, I’m amazed that I haven’t yet put my fist through the screen when using it.
Forget the performance hit on an individual machine…
Forget the laggy response…
Groove has the most idiotic user interface seen since cc:Mail.
To top it off, this supposed wunderkind of collaboration, this pinnacle of a more modern way to get stuff done, this enabler of all things great and integrated…
This thing totally sucks at handling the group part of collaboration. Which is the only part of collaboration that makes it collaborative, to be quite honest.
Hey, got 2 folks with similar names? You gotta resolve the conflict manually! How do you do that? Your guess is as good as mine. Which is about the extent of what Groove can explain you need to do.
You want to know who raves about Groove?
Microsofties. And ‘softie wannabes, hangers-on, and nearly everything in-between.
But the fact is that Groove is like the autistic cousin of SharePoint. Now, this is not to insult folks who have autism at all.
Groove’s interface imposes these totally random and arbitrary restrictions on collaboration and communication because you can’t see what’s going on in ways that would actually be helpful, but you can see things that are totally useless. That’s the closest analogy to autism I can think of. Maybe MS should use Groove as a training tool, to drive funding for autism research.
Why do I care where people are at any given time in Groove? This isn’t kindergarten. We don’t have to get in a line and all walk to the bathroom at the same time any more.
While working in Groove, I find myself having to make a conscious decision to ignore all the stuff that is going on in a Groove workspace. That’s not productivity, folks. That’s schizophrenia.
So why does Groove put such an emphasis on what someone else is doing?
I’ll tell you why.
For all its touted collaborative prowess…that’s the one thing above all else Groove stinks at most. Groove’s basically the unholy offspring of a crappy chat client that mated with a P2P transfer engine created by someone with the last name of Frankenstein.
If you don’t know what other people are doing in a Groove workspace, then you don’t know what you have to avoid opening, for fear of your changes getting lost, or split, when a document is open by more than 1 person at a time.
But the final nails in Groove’s coffin should be these 2 simple facts…
Groove offers no mobile client whatsoever
Groove offers no connectivity/sychronization with Outlook
Because of those unforgiveable omissions, except for a very very narrow subset of the populace whose paychecks come from Redmond, Groove is totally unusable for anything meaningful. And even then, there are much better alternatives. Stuff that actually lets you get things done.
I’m surprised at the number of folks who, as professionals, should care about the simple and crucial idea of productivity being at the heart of system design…
But in the name of tech-machismo, ignore it anyway.
Making a digital copy of ANY song from a legally purchased album that you yourself own, even if that digital copy is only for your own use, constitutes music piracy.
That’s right, folks.
I’ll admit right now. I’ve ripped every CD I own to digital copies.
In fact, over the next year I will re-rip all of them, as I’d like higher quality digital copies than what I originally ripped.
And the RIAA can KMA as far as I’m concerned. I consider it more than fair use. I don’t have a CD player in my car. I only carry digital copies with me, and only a subset of the whole at that. And no one else is listening to either the digital copies or original CD at the same time.
This should really go down as the most ignorant business decision in the history of business, all the way to the first time one caveman paid another for a hunk of animal meat with a pair of shiny rocks.
Think of it like George Bush’s cockamamie amnesty program for illegal aliens, in reverse.
And this is huge.fracking.stupid (just like the aformentioned amnesty program).
This runs counter to every idea of non-monopolistic commerce that has ever been. The music industry, as a whole, has had at least 10 years to get their collective heads out of their collective backsides, and they’ve steadfastly refused to do what needed to be done.
Which is work out a reasonable framework for electronic commerce, with actual use rights that make sense for the reality of digital playback.
Not that they haven’t had several options that have been floated past them.
Napster was a dead simple, no-brainer solution that anyone in their right mind should have recognized as a perfect system for the music companies to ride into the next millenium.
Think of it as the eBay for the music industry. Which they promptly litigated into insignificance.
And then there’s iTunes. Which they are also trying to squeeze into oblivion.
Here’s a question…
An artist’s video is uploaded to YouTube. What’s to stop me from recording the audio from that video while it plays?
What will the RIAA suggest next? A ban, or worse yet, a surcharge on short audio cables?
Honestly…
There’s only one response that makes sense for consumers.
An outright boycott of packaged retail music from members of the RIAA.
It’s not they haven’t been price-fixing/gouging for years. To the point of being sued for antitrust violations a few years ago. Which the labels promptly used to send a big F-U to the rest of us by shipping millions of completely worthless CDs to libraries and schools as part of their settlement, basically dumping their trash on non-profits. Real classy, huh?
But it’s time to get serious. And here’s a handy site that can help you out…
This site can look up any release by artist, album, UPC code or label. It’s not 100%, but it’s pretty close. Even better, it offers a mobile version that you can use to check UPC codes while you’re on the go or in-store. And there’s a GreaseMonkey script which will pop up instant RIAA Radar results while you’re browsing on Amazon.
So that’s it. Quit buying from the RIAA mafia. Maybe they’ll get the hint. I doubt it tho. They’re already facing a 21% decline. And they steadfastly refuse to admit that the problem they have is one of their own making.
