I am getting all kinds of emails asking whether gmail accounts are secure and whether China is after their information. The real issue isn’t about security, it’s about a public relations shit-storm you just made. China, you now have everybody outside your country getting pissed, and I don’t mean “oh, let them have their way in their own land” pissed, but “you’re coming on our terms now” pissed. This goes beyond the climate summit at Copenhagen where you just made a mockery of the whole situation. Currently, I see Google, VeriSign, the US Department of Defense, and a whole mess of news agencies now chomping at the bit for the next…thing. China, you just shit and fell back in it. Sure, dictate what you want to the people you govern because after being there and seeing many of the people, they’re too backwards for complete autonomy just yet. They can’t even queue properly for proper fairness of the population, and that’s desperately needed. “National queuing day” was a nice touch though; huge laugh from that one because I saw it was severely needed and apparently useless as I was getting slammed into the plate-glass doors at a McDonald’s.

Clean up this mess before I visit again, please. I don’t want to have any problems looking around the country.

I look at the device and see it’s a black brick with a piece of glass. It turns on and I’m immediately supposed to be taking it from Apple in complete obedience? That’s just not how I role-play. I see from the commercials that you’ve got an app for everything, but I must get everything from you guys. I can’t just go somewhere else and get something I want because you might disagree with it, and ban such actions. I’m a sick, twisted fuck, and I like having sick, twisted shit. I don’t want some completely unholy mess of an applications list forcing me to get an additional app just to organize all the apps. I’ve seen the apps my friends have, and it’s worse than Biloxi, Mississippi after Katrina.

I want a damn keyboard I can tell I’m pressing. I don’t want some on-screen display saying “push here for candy” to get a single letter. I want something I can use behind my back when I need to make those “secret” messages. What about the blind? They need phones too, but I guess they’re too different to be able to properly use something that’s only viewed as a fashion accessory. The blind don’t have to look good too, do they?

I can’t begin to explain how many times I’ve had friends iDial me when the phone is somehow becomes unlocked and calls me. I’ve heard some interesting conversations just dropping some eaves, but it gets annoying. What about a physical switch or key combo to actually unlock the phone? There’s just a touchscreen, and nothing special about that aside from getting overly greasy from being pressed against your face. You just have to treat it like a girl and touch it in the right places at the right time to have it act the way you want it to. I’ve actually slid a friend’s phone along the carpet and unlocked it and had it fucking dial someone. Seriously Apple, you can’t make a decent device that actually works well, but instead have to go on aesthetics alone? Oh wait, you guys are the fucktards who want everybody to use single-button mice because two buttons is too fucking complicated to understand.

I hate the iPhone with a passion. So much in fact, that I decided to relieve users of some cash to pad my wallet. I can find my way around a few computers, and decided to make some apps for the device a while back. I started the entire process and got to the point where Apple didn’t tell you anything about their device. It was a complete circle-jerk for current Mac developers. “Remember how wonderful it is to develop for the Mac? We’ve brought that experience to iPhone.” Wait, people actually enjoy this shit? Please pass whatever the hell you’re spiking their drinks with over to me. To make an app, you either have to be a pre-schooler doing point-and-click stuff, or have a PhD in encrypted Gaelic transliterated into fucking Siberian using the Korean alphabet with a Sanskrit accent or some shit. There’s no useful information they provide, and I’d rather have more teeth pulled than deal with their shit again.

This all reminds me of a story involving a monkey and an apple. This guy brings a monkey into a bar and they sit and order drinks. The guy gets whisky and the monkey a Shirley Temple. The drinks come and the monkey takes the cherry, shoves it up his ass, and then eats it. The bartender freaks, “what the hell?” The guy then begins to explain that the monkey used to eat everything in site without caution; cherries, peanuts, whatever he got his hands on. The monkey then grabbed a small apple and swallowed it whole and nearly choked. The apple was fake and therefore didn’t digest, and the monkey was in extreme pain for over a week as he tried to pass it through. Nowadays, the monkey sizes everything up first by shoving it up his ass because he doesn’t want to get raped again like he was by that apple.

What happens when batteries die in a mouse is I’m going about my business and everything just stops working, causing me to lose scores of hours a year fixing everything. What happens when the batteries die in the keyboard is I’m typing and have an entire mental workflow and the computer instantly becomes possessed. Letters start magically repeating. Keys pressed don’t register. The computer hates me entirely at these times, through and through. I have to stop everything and search for batteries, batteries that I don’t always have on hand.

I make my point very specific on having the batteries on hand because I prefer to completely remove myself from my work the moment I leave the office. When I’m out buying groceries and whatnot, I don’t think about work. Hell, I don’t think about much other than what I need to get. Sure, making a list sometimes helps, but I write too much junk on the list and forget why it’s there, and overrule myself at the store. I buy batteries so often, that I always think I have them on hand. Whether they’re in this room or another, I still have to stop everything to fetch them, and that ruins workflow.

I’ve also noticed another annoyance beyond batteries with wireless devices, and that’s radio interference. The FCC regulates that all approved devices must accept all radio signals, so when you have two devices that operate on a close bandwidth, the physically closer one usually wins on signal strength. I had the wireless receiver on this keyboard and mouse combination pushed behind the monitor and nothing happened. The signal kept dropping because the damn monitor was generating an operational frequency that interrupted the wireless signal of the devices. Monitors and desks also have metal and shielding that is designed to disrupt radio signals, and with more wireless devices on the market these days, more and more shielding goes into play screwing with the convenience factor praised by wireless lovers. I move the receiver closer to get an unaffected signal, and it works, but what’s the point in wireless when you have to have the receiver almost on top of the devices. Why not just go with wired devices in the first place?

Wired devices are my preference. They’re always operational, and if the computer is on, they’re on. I love the induction technology of Wacom tablets because the pens and mice are powered from the tablet, and not some battery; genius move guys. You save so much damn money with wired devices, that I don’t see a point in wireless anymore. You pay a premium for the wireless technology out of convenience, but they’re more inconvenient than anything. Then you compound the operational costs with the continuous costs of batteries, and over time the final costs keep piling up and up. Fuck wireless; make me wired and I’m happy.

Oh, Firefox. I remember way back when you were light and fluffy. I remember when you were the new kid in town and were a blast to play with. You could run around all day and never seem to tire. What happened? You just sat your fat ass down on the couch and ate candy for years and years. You’re fat, bloated, and slow. You now resemble World of Warcraft players. Shame on you for letting yourself go like that. Now when I’m working, I’m forced to use you because you have the right tools, but you make it painful to work very long. You need a diet, and you need some exercise. Move it fatso!

Why can’t Mozilla get its act together and fix the memory bloat that Firefox suffers? It’s been years and years of complaining. Sure, it’s open source and I could dive in if I wanted to, but I can’t afford to; I’m struggling enough as it is. The guys at Mozilla are blow-hards, just like all other big software companies. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Oracle, Mozilla, they’re all the same. They think they can engineer the next best thing, but fail to realize there’s a better solution at hand.

Firefox is an application, a browser, and trying to handle memory management with the program is stupid, silly, and just plain old arrogant. Here’s my solution, and it’s one I’ve heard far and wide for years. Let the operating system clean up after you. The operating systems know how to manage their own memory better than you do, because they wrote the damn thing. The operating system is sitting there waiting with the pooper scooper, but only seems to use it when you fall down with a loud thud. Don’t need memory for a page’s cache anymore? Deallocate it and let the system do the rest. The problem with handling it yourself from within the application is the overwhelmingly common mistake of missing something.

Memory leaks are everywhere, in every program, and trying to not fuck up should be the primary concern. Pitch the blame to someone else, and be done with it. Don’t develop something that’s already done and has no need to be redone. I wonder how much smaller Firefox would be if all the memory management subroutines were removed. I wonder how much faster the program would be without having to determine the best course of action. I wonder if the same shortsightedness has been applied to memory management as was applied to “true random number generation” via the usage of every damn file in the temp folder. I wonder…

I hope this issue is properly addressed when they move over to having each browser tab in its own separate process; Chrome really made them eat poi when they came on board about this. Close a window; dump the process; let the operating system do the rest. When you have an option for such a simple solution to such a horrible problem, you have to have your head shoved so far up your ass that your id and ego get along and play checkers to not use it.