Ramblings From Justin Penney

My day job is in computers. I work for a company that makes Linux clusters for the high performance computer market. Linux is a Unix like operating system and is a platform that I feel very comfortable on. One of the principles of tools and applications on Unix systems is to "do one thing and do it well." Meaning that if a program is a text editor, it edits text and it tries to be the best damn text editor ever.

So at home I use Windows. For some reason Windows developers seem to want to make every piece of software to every possible thing.

I went to listen to this weeks This American Life and they have it in RealAudio format. No problem I have RealPlayer. So when I click on the link for the show RealPlayer wants to update itself. I click "Ok" and it starts going. So after the upating it comes up with the latest version. So there's this huge window that comes up. There's a music store, a video player, an audio player, an automatic butt wiper... I must have twenty programs that play mp3s and video files. The all suck, they are all slow and it's rediculous! I want and mp3 player that and mp3 player. A video player that's a video player.

There are a few jewels out there but overall it's frustrating that all these applications taking up disk space, eating resources and being completely redundant.

# posted by Justin @ 5:15 PM