The Way of the Johnny

My mother-in-law gave me the article Ten Traits of Modern Technology I Hate by Michael J. Rayes and I read it mostly out of curiosity. Here's a link to the article . While I agree with some points in Mr. Rayes's article, I disagree with many of them. I'm probably about 10 years younger than Mr. Rayes (judging from his website and short biography) and I grew up at the tail end of Generation X. Although Mr. Rayes is well versed in technology, I believe I have a different, more positive view of technology because I grew up with it as an integral part of my life in the consumer sense. So, without further ado, here are my 10 responses to Mr. Rayes's Ten Traits: 10. Technology has always created an "artificial" generation gap Every generation in the 20th century has had some kind of technology that separates generations. When the car was invented, I'm sure the grandparents and parents who were used to horse-and-buggies had no clue how to drive them. Were ...

Buying or getting a new computer is great, and it's even better if you get it at an incredible deal. But the deal can quickly be ruined by one thing, and that's software . Yes, software usually comes with a computer and it's necessary to make the computer useful. But, depending on what software you need, things can quickly get very expensive very quickly. If you plan on doing music recording or movie editing and you don't want to get an Apple Mac, be prepared to spend hundreds of dollars on software alone. And we all know Microsoft Office is the standard in productivity software, but it also costs an arm and a leg. I've set up quite a few computers for friends, for my mom, and I've set up virtual machines on my Mac, all needing software to meet various needs. Thankfully, there are a lot of free software alternatives our there that can meet most, if not all, of the average user's needs. Here's my list of software I think will give most users al...

I downloaded the new Internet Explorer 8 last 2 weeks ago when it first came out so I could see what all the fuss was about. I had heard mixed review about IE8 and wanted to see for myself how it ran on my work desktop (3.2GHz P4 with 3 GB of RAM, Windows XP SP 3). Basically, here was my experience with IE8: it was slow and kept crashing. Truth be told, IE7 crashed on a daily basis for me and I was hoping IE8 would resolve this, but it didn't. IE8 was not only slower, but it slowed down my computer in general and crashed more often than IE7. I don't know what it does to the underpinning of Windows, but I noticed the graphical speed of Windows slowed down noticeably after installing IE8. What I mean by graphical speed is the minimizing, maximizing, and switching of windows, refreshing of the desktop, and other graphical animations of Windows. Did I mention IE8 crashes more often then IE7? This is not necessarily an IE8 problem, but more of a compatibility problem. The com...