Last night I finally figured out why Microsoft ruined Server 2012 with the terrible Metro interface.

If there is anywhere a touch-based interface intended a phone or a tablet doesn’t belong, it’s on an enterprise-class server.

So why do it?

It’s because the server product is 99% the same as the desktop OS. If they hadn’t burdened Server 2012 with the horrendous Metro atrocity, people like me could take Server 2012, remove the server bits and turn it into a good desktop OS. (Many people actually did this with Server 2008 during the Vista debacle.)

So a company is so dumb that they’d ruin their server product to sell a few more tablets. Sure, makes sense to me.

All humans have big egos. Some are better at pretending that this is not the case than others.

It takes a big ego to continue existing in a fundamentally-pointless universe. Of course we imbue the universe with meaning – that’s what I as a secular humanist believe – but even believing that is itself an expression of the hauteur of sentience.

Looked at logically, the most sane response to life is to kill yourself immediately.*

Things will not work out; death is inevitable.

It’s a good thing not one human is truly logical, then, isn’t it?

*No, I am not depressed. In fact, I am quite happy. However I am not normal in any way and do not have many typical human emotions and responses. Not suppressed – they just do not exist. Diagnosing me in a normal way will not produce any truth, only a mirror reflecting yourself.

Oh, bullshit.

Cane sugar has a very different mouth feel than HFCS. It’s completely obvious if you taste the two around the same time.

Yes, I realize there is no “objective” taste of anything, but I also think nearly all of those tasting studies are hopeless flawed as people do taste and experience things subjectively, so attempting to make them do so objectively is kind of like asking a Geiger counter, “If there were some radiation here, how much radiation would there be?”

It’s an example of science extending itself into areas where it has no dominion and is also often conducted by people so disconnected from the actual world that they don’t even understand what it is that they are testing – thus their conclusions are completely wrong.

And don’t tell me mouth feel doesn’t matter. Try tasting soy nog and egg nog back to back. Even if all the ingredients that constitute the actual flavor are the same, mouth feel is what makes them (mainly) differ so much.

(If you think mouth feel doesn’t matter, why do you not blend all your food and drink it? After all, it’d be just the same that way.)

Even enterprise software is not immune to simplification making it useless. For instance, the terrible Windows 8 Metro interface now appears on Server 2012.

The strangest one I’ve noticed lately is that Backup Exec, probably the most commonly used backup software in the Enterprise IT world, removed the backup job monitor screen altogether from their software.

This was the screen that allowed you to see how your backups were doing, what their status was, how long they’d been running, etc. Just gone. Probably the most-important screen after the ability to set up backup jobs, no longer there – making the software completely useless. And according to Symantec (the makers of the software), making it “simpler.”

After a massive and year-long customer outcry, the backup job monitor screen has now been returned.

No one who uses enterprise-class back-end software like this needs a Fisher Price interface. No one. Why enterprise software makers think taking all the bad ideas they thrust on regular users and hobbling their software intended for experts with the same terrible ideas makes any sense – well, I just can’t imagine what they were thinking.

Software that makes it impossible to do what it’s actually intended to do for the sake of “simplification” is utterly pointless. Regular users are so apathetic most of the time that it won’t matter, but enterprise users who actually need the software to do their jobs correctly just won’t accept it long-term.

It’s no mistake that in authoritarian regimes, studies of the humanities are sharply curtailed or eliminated altogether while science and technology (so-called “practical” education) is increased or at least not reduced.

While the US does not quite yet meet the definition of an autocracy, it is subject to unrelenting and ever-increasing corporate control that is acting as a de facto autocracy. This not-quite-conspiracy of large corporations does not quite have the same imperatives as an authoritarian regime but exercises nearly the same control in reality.

As an aside, I think that’s one of the few original ideas I’ve ever had – that as corporate control has increased,  LGBT oppression has decreased as a direct result since corporations simply do not care about this for the most part one way or the other – and in fact, fully-integrated LGBT people make better consumers.

So that is all to say that it’s no real surprise that corporations and their rulers do not care much at all for the humanities – the study thereof is dangerous to them. It directly threatens their power base by showing alternatives both imagined and actual, and allows those who study in the field to think their way out of corporate bastilles.

As universities are captured by more and more administrators from the business world, this will only increase. Expect to see much more humanities departments annihilated in the next few decades; I would not be surprised if in 30 years only one in 20 American universities has any faculty in any humanities area at all.

Someone’s gon’ have to conduct an intervention here. Can’t stop watching the Anna Kendrick music video, especially the part where she smiles at the end and walks out the door.

I was looking for something completely different, and clicked on this only because I saw Anna Kendrick’s name. (I really like her because she’s extremely smart and an underrated actress. And oh yeah, that infectious mirthful smile of hers doesn’t hurt.)

The song’s not great – though it’s growing on me — but the video is excellent. It’s fun, tells a story and has lots of Anna K. No way to go wrong there.

Go here for an HD version since idiotic YouTube doesn’t allow embedding it.

I’ve been using the browser Chrome at work a little, just to see if my bad impression of it was correct.

And it’s terrible.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s fast if you do very little – which I guess is the use case for most people – but if you try to do anything intensive with it, it totally chokes.

In other words, it’s very much made for the “average user” who maybe has 2-3 tabs open and doesn’t do much in the way of real work or power use.

Sometimes in Firefox I have 2-5 windows open with 30-40 tabs in each one. And yes, I am using all of them and do need them all open and know what’s in each window and tab.

Just because you can’t do something doesn’t mean that I can’t. Don’t assume that my use case is yours.

And if you try opening 2-3 Chrome windows with 20-30 tabs in each one, that piece of shit is like using Windows 95 on a 386sx with 4MB of RAM way back when. It crawls so slowly it might be going backwards in time.

So, yes, Chrome is great browser if you need to do very little. Too bad Firefox is going the same direction.

This is a good example of why diversity matters; if there were more women in the tech industry, you can bet there’d be phones of appropriate size.

And for yet another reason, too – more and more children these days have smart phones, and they have small hands as well.

Increasingly, on the latest versions of the kinds of phones I want to use, I cannot type one-handed. I cannot take a picture one-handed. I can barely scroll one-handed—not very well, though. I can’t unlock my phone one-handed. I can’t even turn on my phone one-handed as my fingers cannot securely wrap around the phone while I push a button with a finger.

What’s odd is how companies are content to ignore such a large market. When someone tells me how efficient business is, I point to bullshit like this and say, “Yeah, you really believe that?”

But I think only think tank idiots who’ve never worked in a real corporation can subscribe to that fable of efficiency.

Studies consistently show that women make more purchasing decisions than men. And due to the sexist structure of our society, who do you think most often purchases phones for kids in addition to phones for themselves?

Hey, can someone give me $200 million? I’d rock this market. And that’s about how much I think it’d take to get something started.

One of the things that I really liked about Sony’s marketing stunt for Carrie is that it shows that when people should be running away really fast, they do not. Most of them take out their phones these days and start snapping photos or recording video.

This article covers the same territory about people’s true reactions.

I wonder if this is how people have always reacted, how much race and class matter, and if people now feel more “virtualized” due to not feeling it’s a real experience unless it is recorded?