Two Slashes

I’ve been a longtime user and fan of GrandCentral.  Being me, the ability to make sure that one phone number means near-constant contact is a very enticing one.  And the way Grand Central’s set up, it also works well as a privacy-protection number – you can let people reach you if you want, or forward them somewhere else if you don’t.

However, GrandCentral has one inherent flaw that I’m consistently running into when I hand the number out to people I know:  It only handles phone communication.  For a number that you’re supposed to hand out instead of your cell phone number (or any other number), it’s rather difficult to use that number for anything that isn’t strictly voice-based communications.  In other words…you can’t send or receive text messages with it.  In this day and age of people text-messaging and e-mailing each other from mobile devices left and right, it really kills the whole point of a forwarding number if it doesn’t forward everything with it – therefore leaving people like myself having to hand out the numbers we are “wrapping” with the GrandCentral number out to the people who need to get in touch with other ways.

GrandCentral has also been stagnant over the past few months following their acquisition by Google.  There are no invitations, so the only way to get an account is to reserve a number and pray that they admit you at some point.  Again, this is a bit of a deal-killer; for someone attempting to promote an open and free service, it’s really difficult for me to believe that without seeing any form of action taken.

I hate to be so negative, because from the inside, the service has been great (other than that “completeness” thing).  But if they really hope to get users, they need to start moving, open up to new users, and bring something new to the table.  Otherwise, they’ll get swallowed up in the vast sea of web services waiting to help people keep in touch.

Since it’s a required part of my curriculum here at school, I’ve been taking a rhetoric class. Recently in this class, we were assigned a research paper on a category of problems in academia, something that we can observe and then propose solutions about. Considering the post topic and me in general, you can probably guess (at least partially) what problems I’m focusing on in my research. This assignment couldn’t come at a better time, as I’ve heard plenty of complaints in particular about password-related issues as of late. You see, the school I attend mandates yearly password cycling, and considering the timeframe at which they hand incoming freshmen their account information, it’s becoming the one-year mark for a lot of people. Mostly, every gripe I’ve heard centers around one of a few major issues:

• The passwords my university requires are much more complex compared to the passwords most people use in their daily lives.
• Most services don’t require password cycles every year, or…ever.
• Since most people keep the same password (or set of passwords) for everything, constantly forcing password changes forces people to forget their password more often since it’s not the same password as other things they use on a daily basis.

While these arguments are perfectly legitimate, the people attempting to use them as rationale against needing to change their passwords also are the same people you find in a typical setting, not groomed in any form of security beyond that of the idea that any password is a surefire protection. (Cue Morpheus’ voice…”Welcome…to the real world.”) Anyway, as part of my research paper, I decided to compare the three pages’ worth of requirements about our university passwords with the requirements used by what I thought to be popular web services. And, after a few hours’ worth of investigative work, I can sympathize with the people who think changing their password is a lot of work. In short, these services, which I thought probably had at least a slight pulse on the idea of security, are grooming their users to be lazy and very unprotective of their data and service access. I’ve put together a table that should at least give an overview of the services I selected (if you have suggestions for more, I can’t promise anything but would welcome the heads-up) and the security procedures they enforce:

The numbers in brackets above correspond to these quick side notes:

1. MySpace’s requirement is an in-between: at least one numeric and one alphabetic character must be included in the password; no requirement is made as to the case of this character, however.
2. Windows Live has two sets of requirements that depend on the services the user accesses. Typically, users only have a six-character requirement, but if necessary due to the requirements of an application they use, Windows Live will force all of upper- and lower-case letters, numbers, and a unique symbol, and mandatory password changes every 72 days. These 72-day password changes are provided as an option to non-qualified users.
3. eBay refused to accept the password ‘aaaaaa’ because it is very poor in security. However, ‘ababab’ works, which means that eBay offers at least a slight security check at registration.

Frankly, I’m very concerned with all of that red, and especially concerned with sites like Amazon, which allow you to store important credit card information in your account for easy checkout, and then allow me to log in with a capital ‘A’. Microsoft even surprises me (though in a good way), if you consider their forced-security dependency to be a good idea. (For once, Microsoft, I like.) Not that these sites and services even compare to the requirements for our university credentials, but it gives you an idea of just how absurd it is. Especially when I throw in the fact that a lot of these places have posted “suggestions” for creating a good and secure password, and then brush them all away in favor of some six-character string. So I apologize if I’m re-iterating what you already know or have seen, but after all of that, I think it’s important that people actually understand what good security is.

• The best passwords are not found in any published or publicly available work, be it a dictionary, your favorite action novel, or some random screenshot you found on Flickr. Don’t use anything important either, like a social security number. And anything personally identifiable or that has a direct reference to your life is out too; that means quit using your aunt’s birthday as a PIN.As one demonstration of coming up with unique but memorable passphrases, try to think of memorable snippets from your favorite written work (you’re probably double-taking right now, but continue reading). Now, develop your own personal algorithm for going through the phrase to select characters (hey, don’t be afraid of punctuation or numbers, because they help too and add uniqueness). For example, try taking the Fibonacci sequence’s digits and pulling those letters out. It sounds tedious now, but if you use the password regularly, your muscle memory will take over and you won’t even realize you’re entering the password anymore. At least, if you use it that regularly.
• NEVER use the same password in more than one place. There IS a reason for this, aside from “the man” trying to confuse you and prevent you from checking your mail; it’s compartmentalized security. If an attacker can compromise one account, and holds a password you use everywhere, you haven’t just handed him one site or a credit card, you’ve handed him your entire life. If that password doesn’t work somewhere else, the attacker’s got to go back to work and start all over again on the new site (if they’re indeed targeting you). If you can’t keep all of your passwords straight, get a trusted and notable password manager, and store your passwords with it. Some suites also provide you the added benefit of randomly-generated passwords like ‘Bs4&nd*D’ – but at the expense that you probably won’t remember them unless you use the application.

Considering these password recommendations are nearly timeless, it only makes me wonder when people are actually going to pay more attention BEFORE something bad happens to them. So quit complaining that you’ve got to change your password. Make it memorable, make it unique, and consider it worthy of a national secret. And for christ sake, ignore the fact that Google isn’t going to check for varied-case characters; force yourself to check for them. And a note to the few, the proud, the WordPress users: WP2.5 RC1 is nice, but I don’t think it’s ready yet. It’s got a few bugs, and I miss my old blue administration panel. I actually think it made more sense doing “Blogroll > Add Link” than “Write > Link” to add things to my blogroll.

It seems that computer users today fall into an almost cookie-cutter fashion. Firefox for web browsing; Winamp, Windows Media Player, or (rarely, but common enough that I mention it) VLC for media playback; uTorrent for P2P, and some AIM client (any of the official client, Trillian, or Pidgin in that order). Of course, while this makes it a lot easier knowing that all of these have a relatively large userbase, this only covers the basic and common tasks people perform every day with their computers. Common being the key word here.

While I’ve seen one or two attempts, I don’t think anyone’s ever actually pulled off recommending some of the lesser-known software; however, niches need to be filled, and someone’s got to do it. The only caveat is that nobody ever actually does. When have you opened your favorite downloads site and actually trawled through hundreds of useless or irrelevant applications to find some backseat freebie nobody’s ever heard of, because it was useful to you? Chances are, you’re probably muttering “never” at your monitor right now.

Sure enough, there are sites like Giveaway of the Day that offer up this rare niche software with surprising regularity; the problem is that they require you to bring your product to them, rather than searching for it and indexing it themselves. (Understandably, this makes more sense given their business model for shareware software, but all the same this means that they don’t actually dig.) Where are those hidden freebies, those things that could be useful to someone, but are never found because they’re the last result on Google, or nobody’s ever thought to go searching for it in the first place?

Given the sheer number of people on the planet at this point (let’s limit that to people ‘with access to a computer’ for the purposes of my example), there’s no problem that hasn’t been encountered at some point that a piece of software couldn’t aid in overcoming. Whether it’s some meaningless, trivial, repetitive task that needed to be done over and over, or some specialized project, chances are someone out there has experienced the same thing, and perhaps they or someone they know was savvy enough to come up with a solution. So it only follows that there are solutions for everything out there; the problem is that these solutions are often buried too deep to be found by more than a select few people.

Forgive me for saying this, but someone needs to get off their backside and come up with a site that shines the spotlight on some of these hidden gems…

I just found and spent the past few hours taking apart a little bugger that seems to turn up a few hits on Google.  Read about “pci32b.exe” here.

You know, there’s something to be said about the feeling when you know you’re going to be handed a pretty big job.  Sure, there’s a lot of work involved, but you also have that big payout at the end to expect too.

Such is the case with an organization that had an idea of where they were going and what they wanted when they contacted me to do some work for them.  After a face-to-face with one of the higher-ups who would be making decisions, I agreed and took on the job.  I put in the work, and even took time out of my day to go to their meetings to present what I had done as progress.  I got feedback and regular communication, and overall things went along more smoothly than I could ever have hoped for; I still don’t think I’ve taken on a job that went together as easily as this one since. (continue reading…)

So it’s been a while since I last posted. Things happen. People have other things to do. And I’m in the middle of my finals right now, so I’m in even more of a time crunch than usual.

A friend in my dorm had a problem had a problem playing his copy of Command & Conquer 3 earlier, and asked me to help.

The system he was attempting to run it on was a Compaq laptop, preloaded with Microsoft Windows Vista, and overall it was a decent machine, with specs that should have been more than enough to play the game, albeit with a trip to the settings to turn down the graphics settings (as the machine had Intel graphics). Indeed, this was something that he had already realized, and had proceeded to turn them down when he first installed the game.

He claimed to have tried numerous solutions, including trying several versions of his graphics drivers and game patches and setting all his graphics options to “Low”, to fix the problem, which was (in summary) that every time he tried to build one of a few particular types of building, the building would be animated as it was spawned…but the moment it finished, the game would be closed by Vista, which would proudly proclaim that the game had had a problem and needed to be closed. However, the game would play fine and run great until those buildings were created, which made for some rather challenging gameplay when you realize that they were somewhat necessary for gameplay.

My first instinct (which still seems plausible) was that one or more files (and probably those responsible for containing the afflicted building animations) had been copied incorrectly or corrupted during installation, so my initial suggestions were to try to reinstall the game (again), and see if anything changed between installations.

Naturally, this did absolutely nothing but waste time. At a loss, I decided to run a few searches on Google to look for anything that might be an indication of the problem. Of course, I had plenty of posts of people with various problems between the game and Vista, even with the same error message, but nothing that quite seemed to match the problems I had been observing with the laptop in terms of recreating them.

After a bit of query manipulation, I came across a post on some far-off forums (I wish I could give credit and a link, but alas my history trail is so long that it would probably take me a month to find it.) that mentioned something somewhat similar, in that the same message occured when they tried to play the game (i.e. it would load, but immediately issue the message when it was ready for the user to play). Curious, I read on, and found that his solution was to (and this is the awkward part) change the shader settings from their lowest settings up to Medium.

Curious, but doubting that this could be a possible answer, I had him try it, and it worked. Now, I’m posting this not only to provide another source for people to find answers to the issue, but because I’m curious as to what would make someone think that this is the solution, and why it would work. The only solution I can come up with after a few hours is that there’s an as-of-yet-unfixed bug in the shader code that causes it to have issues (at least with Vista), but only in the “low” quality settings. Considering the numerous versions of patches released (and the fact that there were at least four in the first week of the game’s release), it leads me to believe that either EA doesn’t particularly care about their Vista userbase, or that they have yet to realize there’s a problem, even though I found several mentions of the same problem in different areas of the game.

Nevertheless, it still seems like a bit of a hacked solution. It doesn’t really matter which of either C&C3 or Vista is to blame; for the most part, something like that probably would have been picked up if someone had done a little Q&A on a similar hardware setup. (After all, the world doesn’t revolve around JUST ATi and nVidia cards.)

It’s a shame people just don’t make things like they used to.

As much as I’ve ranted and raved about how much the current generation of “social networking” (aka “whore-yourself-out-and-see-who-knows-(or-doesn’t)-know-the-most-people” networking, I’ve also realized that they’ve become a part of Internet culture that may very well be just as much a necessity as an instant messenger screen name, or even more importantly your e-mail address.

A pair of students conducting video interviews stopped me today to ask my opinion on Facebook’s recent decision to open up profiles to search engines. (Which if you couldn’t tell already was the inspiration for me delving a little deeper into the issue here and now.)

In a way, I see social networking as not only a necessity, but a beneficial one. Picture your favorite social networking site as a gigantic phone book, only filled with the information people have volunteered. Picture the friends list on that site as a personal address book; those listings out of the “white pages” of the site that you know personally, and have a lot of contact with, but the difference between this address book and a standard paper or personally-kept one is that instead of you updating your information, your friends do it all for you.

Like I said, the interviewers were asking opinions about Facebook opening up profiles to search engines. Having recently acquired an account myself (yes, I know what you’re thinking), I’ve been able to poke around with the site and see exactly what information people have a habit of posting or not posting.

I see the decision as double-sided, really; on one hand, it makes it even easier for the people you want to find you to, well, find you. Perhaps a long-lost elementary school friend will finally catch up with you and get back in touch.

On the other hand, this same information is available and potentially being presented to potential employers, your mother, and anyone else who punches your name into a search engine. And with the ever-increasing rate at which the “background check” for a job includes a Google search to see how much and how well-standing a presence on the Internet you have, it becomes essential that you not only be creative and show your personality, but maintain your dignity and uphold the idea that you actually have a maturity level beyond that of a giggly fifteen-year-old girl.

For most people who have common sense, the content of their profiles is benign, but I would like to point out that I have seen plenty of profiles that could use a bit of a sanity check to more appropriately represent their owners, and in some cases to protect their identities. Let’s be mature and smart about what we do, people.

For example, setting your cell phone number and home address to be visible to the world are probably not the most intelligent things one could do. So to help you stay safe, I’ve compiled a short list of recommendations to help you avoid being the biggest target for miles.

• NEVER, EVER list your street address, and depending on the size of your city, it might be wise to even avoid listing your that. Bigger is better, obviously, since there’s more of a “needle-in-the-haystack” problem with each additional person in your town, but you never want to be able to have anyone come right up to your door without you having given the location to them. I really don’t think I can emphasize enough the importance of this one single bullet.
• AVOID using your phone number(s), especially mobile phone numbers, in a profile. These are very easy to harass (prank phone call anyone) and can often be problematic, not to mention in some cases cell phones can be traced. Instead, use e-mail addresses, and perhaps a seldom-used instant messenger account, both of which you can ditch or filter for unwanted attempts at communication, with no further effort required beyond the “Block” button.
• NEVER post anything that might get you (or anyone you know) charged with a crime, be it something that could get you in trouble with a police department, or even simply your school. And I’m talking anything. And with the movement to online mediums such as social networking sites, it makes it even easier for universities to keep an eye on students and their activities. (Remember how I just pointed out the address book image about how people’s information comes to you? Same thing…all they have to do is wait.)  So, as an example, don’t go around posting pictures of yourself or your best friend holding a beer…someone will find it and you’ll be caught.
• DON’T post anything that you might later regret, even to the slightest extent. Remember, this is the Internet, and news travels faster than the light shining out of my laser pointer. The moment you let someone know, you’ve pretty much let the world know, and that can mean a world of pain when it comes to your romantic or professional lives. And now that Google can come in and read portions (if not all) of your profile, it can be archived for future public consumption, even after you’ve removed it from your profile.
• DON’T add everyone who asks to your profile; there’s a reason they ask you to confirm the friendship – it’s to confirm that you actually know and trust the person requesting to be your friend.  By “whoring yourself out” you introduce hundreds, if not thousands, of people you don’t know to a free-for-all access to all the information you have posted.  So think before that random hottie sends you a message asking to be your friend; chances are it’s not even a female but an obese guy with three layers of skin on his stomach and flies buzzing about his head.

I’m not saying that social networking should be bland and boring; it’s at the heart a form of self-expression, albeit one demonstrated to the world. The problem is that most people just don’t know when to quit – and end up committing the virtual equivalent of streaking around.

A question was posed in the TechCentric IRC channel about why Linux seems to have taken a backseat to other, more graphical alternatives. Of course, Windows. Yes, Mac OS X. Hell, throw OS/2 in there for measure. Well, funny thing I mention graphics, because that’s what it’s all about.

Take a trip back to the age of the Apple II. Yeah, remember? Well, even if you don’t, or had little experience with one, it’s part of my point. If you noticed, they never had mice. Everything was keyboard-driven. There was no such thing as “point-and-click”; the monitor simply couldn’t sense what part of the screen you were pointing at. Think of it as talking to a blind, deaf person; they can’t hear or see you, but they can feel your touch – a la, you can’t dictate orders to it, and (like I said) you can’t just gesture at something and expect the computer to comply. You actually had to touch the thing in certain ways (typing commands, anyone?) to get it to do anything.

This form of input had a few limits to it. For example, you had to know how to instruct the computer to do what you wanted, whether it be some funky acronym for the Canadian French word for the command you wanted, or whether the command wanted to know your pants size in addition to what it needed to do. This required memorization, and a certain amount of brainpower (which is proving to be a really finite resource in today’s world). You couldn’t just type “Move File A on Disk B to Disk C as File D.” and expect the computer to comply with anything other than the DOS equivalent of “WTF?”.

There were some benefits to doing things this way. If you wanted to be anywhere near productive, you had to be able to provide input to the computer as quickly as possible. And if you can follow where I’m going, this isn’t a place for hunt-and-peck typing. Ah, yes…you actually had to LEARN the sacred art of touch typing, with as few mistakes as possible. You never know when one mistyped command makes your 200KB of hard-written letters disappear. (Oh wait, am I jumping ahead past the invention of the software word processor? )

So, fast forward to the introduction of the Graphical User Interface. And the mouse. “Hey! Look over here! I’m making gestures with this newfangled pointing device…and the computer’s following along! I don’t have to type the name of my programs anymore; I just ‘click’ their name and the computer starts them for me!” If you don’t get it already, this is where the trend starts to fall. People are no longer “learning” to use a PC by throwing commands at them or typing; they simply move a bloody box around and watch as the computer does all the important stuff like figuring out what the devil they’re trying to do in the first place.

(Admittedly, the Apple II did have graphics capability – very limited graphics capability – and you still needed a keyboard to control what you were doing. So call my mistake if you want, but you’re forgetting that there’s more than just a pretty red square at stake here.)

Ooh and ahh all you want, but like I said, this is where intelligence begins to lose importance as a prerequisite for computing. You don’t have to memorize commands; you don’t have to lay a finger on the keyboard unless you want to write a note at all. The mouse, with far fewer buttons than a keyboard, is part of the reason.

I’ll stop assuming you’re thinking about old copies of Mac OS a minute and lead you instead to earlier versions of Windows. Yes, my friend, there were Windows before 95. Again, people were dumbstruck by the simplicity compared to previous computers. Not only could people use their blasted mice like with the Apples, but (in the case of those who could remember what a console app was) console apps could be run too; a true case of having your cake and eating it too, if you will. Along comes good ol’ ’95 – “Oh look! All my programs are accessible from this one gaping button, and all the stuff I’m doing shows up on this bar here!” – and people are further retarded by “technologies” such as Autorun. No longer do people have to browse to the blasted CD, find the appropriate application, and launch it; instead, they sit back and watch as the computer brings the contents of the CD to THEM. Same thing with getting a new peripheral; plug the thing in, and instead of installing anything (in most cases), Windows goes through that hurdle all by its lonesome.

So, returning to the question at hand. Why isn’t Linux or some other alternative operating system mainstream? You want the truth? The keyboard…it scares people. When they’re not using it to type letters to their grandmother (which by the way, is now so advanced that the letters can move, show up blue and big and bold, and appear as if on a wooden tabletop), most users don’t want to be hassled with it. It’s a reminder of times past; times where people could only make their computers go as fast as their little fingers could move (which in some cases was not all that fast at all). And with the surging downfall in the mental capacity of most people today, it’s becoming harder and scarier for people to actually have to do more than click a box and watch their worries disappear with the contents of their Recycle Bin.

You see, it isn’t just eye candy that draws people. Compiz Fusion (or whatever the heck it’s called), transparency – anything extra isn’t the primary focus, it’s just a benefit to make things look better while things are (purportedly) getting done. It’s simplicity and automation; being able to walk up, move the mouse as little as possible and avoid the keyboard at almost all cost, and go 1/8 of the way while the computer does the remaining 7/8 and then some. If people actually wanted to put physical movement into anything, would there be such a market or demand for dictation software? Would operating systems even need to include something like that?

People want the computer to follow the fallacy that it brings information to them, rather than bringing them to the information. This isn’t Google…its the operating system, and it’s supposed to make things easy, right? Perhaps we’ve gone too far, and people are just too lazy now to understand that to get the most out of anything, you need to put some of the work in yourself as well.

In short, it isn’t about what you can duplicate from another operating system that draws people to it (since they can get their calculator anywhere), it’s how much work they have to put in to get some sort of benefit to using the OS in the first place. The more maintenance, typing, or dabbling people have to do or hear others doing, the less they become interested in following that footpath.

This is the place where we have our major split. The average Windows users are lazy, and assume they are like magnets in that everything comes to them, be it the Internet, their music, viruses (you have to admit, most viruses DO come TO you), or a girlfriend (I wish. ), and that as far as they’re concerned they don’t care about their keyboards – they’re second class input devices. Mac users, well, they’re not as lazy, since there is still the extremely occasional typing to do, and the keyboard helps out in some of the applications they have. There are 10 types of Unix users as well: GUI users who have no idea what a shell is and are probably only using the OS because a relative with computer savviness realized that they had thirty installed copies of Bonzi Buddy and needed an out badly, and those people who don’t like their mouse, but prefer navigating around a system using all ten (eleven, if you somehow have an extra) phalanges and avoiding the mouse (aka the opposite of the average Windows user).

To sum everything up nicely:  to get the more “common” lazy man, you simply need to provide enough cupholders, and make sure there’s a built-in auto-sensing back scratcher too.  That’s all everyone really wants.

Note: I realize this is somewhat qualified to file under “Geeky”, but I think it can safely stay out due to the fact that I’m not going to get overly technical with anything the average (l)user wouldn’t pick up.

Web browsing, e-mail, chatting…they’re all things we do on a daily basis (and in my case, so does checking my site hit statistics, among other things). And for as long as anybody’s known them, they’ve been strictly two-dimensional. You point, click, and read in an interface designed for you to get the most out of what you want to look at, rather than staring blindly at a 1000-pixel-tall toolbar or a progress bar bigger than the grin on your face when you order your favorite meal.

The point I’m trying to make is that the delivery systems are two-dimensional because the content they deliver is two-dimensional as well. The text on a web page, for instance, doesn’t all consist of WordArt and Flash, especially if the people involved in designing the site had any shred of common sense. In short, there’s absolutely no need to add in a z-coordinate when the information displays just fine using x and y. It’s overkill, and it overcomplicates things.

Not to nitpick anything in particular (especially on an app that’s still in development), but I’ve come armed with examples. Take a look at 3D-Mailbox, for instance. This e-mail client promises to revolutionize the way you look at your e-mail by (what else) giving you a 3D interface with which you can act upon your communications. The e-mails file in one-by-one looking like various beachgoers, and where they go in this “oasis” designates how important they are. The fat people wading too far out into the shark-infested waters are spam, while the scantily-clad women tanning nearby are the trusted e-mails.

Now, here’s my first gripe: Why should my e-mails get so separated that there are only a handful at any one location? I prefer being able to stare at the big picture, but if I have to navigate around so much to do make a mental picture for myself, you’ve ruined everything. Why do unread e-mails go here, read e-mails go here, things the program can’t tell are spam here, and this here and that there? (Yes, I realize the bottom half of the application is a standard e-mail list…but if you’re going to the trouble of making a 3D app to do away with a standard “old-fashioned” list, why should that even be necessary? Eh? Eh? I’m waiting.)

Not to barrage the developer even more, but remember what I said about site traffic statistics? Yup…the same people that brought you 3D Mailbox have also developed a way to see who’s on your site…in 3D. Explain to me why I need to see a Greyhound drop off a few people when someone finds Two Slashes via Google. How about I just open up my copy of FireStats and read about the person who just showed up.

It gets worse beyond these too. If it weren’t for the fact that Second Life has a game(-ish) concept behind it, I’d almost call it a chat client.

Does anyone remember the old Microsoft-developed IRC (Internet Relay Chat for you newbs), aptly called Microsoft Chat (not to be confused with the Microsoft Network or any other Microsoft (blank) application)? That crazy application that turned your “bland” IRC-based communications into a fun, yet colorless, comic strip. Yes, the very same one that bungled up IRC standards so badly, the people who actually know how to use a proper client (who are still horrified when they find MSChat users spamming configuration settings to control their character’s emotional state) shudder and go into fits of rage. (Though on the other hand, I have to commend MS for providing users with a very serviceable free IRC client for their operating system…provided it was used in a standard “line” mode rather than with the comic garbage.)

There are times and places to go right ahead and use the third dimension.  But when it overcomplicates even the simplest of day-to-day tasks, there’s obviously been a step way too far over the line.  People refurbish old computers and sell them (or give them away to relatives) for use as basic web browsing and e-mail rigs.  I don’t get why these should be just as powerful and expensive as the usual gaming rig to look at what would be represented by any other application as meaningful text.

The day I need a three-dimensional client for anything is the day my communications can no longer be expressed in text.  I mean, I thought concepts like the bubbly IncrediMail were horrible (and why the f**k is it still around!?)…but then again I should have realized that if there’s a market for emoticon-splashed messaging, it was only a matter of time.  What’s next – an e-mail client that projects a hologram of some long-since U.S. president to announce new messages in “Ye Olde Englisch”?