Whatever Turns You On

I've just spent five minutes staring at a blank screen.

Not something I do as a matter of choice but rather something that I am required to do by someone with a skewed idea of what is 'acceptable'. Five minutes on the face of it doesn't sound like a very long time but when you have work to do and it is stopping you do it, five minutes can feel like an eternity. This particular pause for reflection came courtesy of, who else but Microsoft, a company so firmly rooted in the past it ought to wear a stovepipe hat.

I made the rookie mistake of turning on my second computer - the one that shares my main workstation monitor via a KVM switch that needs to be switched to whichever computer is booted up or else the screen resolution goes haywire. Once the 'on' button is pressed you are committed, and on this occasion I was ambushed by one of those Windows updates that waits till the computer is turned back on to finish installing. The 'installing upgrades' screen, otherwise known as the 'Blue Screen of Tedium', appeared and I just had to wait.

And wait.

Then it rebooted again and I was left staring at the aforementioned blank screen for the aforementioned five minutes. What fun. Eventually it got as bored as I was with this game and fired up but not before I had plenty of time to muse about an oft-considered question: Why?

Specifically, Why does it need to be this way?

Back in the day when Windows was but a small child it would be demanding of time spending an extended period getting itself ready when the on button was pressed. We came to accept that this must be necessary, I mean, why would they take all that time out of your day if it wasn't for some good reason?

I am from a generation when many things were mechanical. Cameras for instance. They didn't need a battery or a USB charge cable, they relied upon the energy put into the system by the simple action of pressing a button to do all they needed to take picture. Brilliant, and instantaneous. They moved on to a point when they needed batteries to do stuff but were still quick. It is a good idea to be quick when taking a picture but modern digital cameras have ignored this managing to do a lot of tedious messing about after the button is pressed and I have lost count of the number of things I have taken a picture of that are no longer there. This is not progress in my book.

Since my first computer in 1994 they have got faster. My first one would process 188,000,000 instructions per second. My current one can process 91,100,000,000 instructions per second - nearly 500 times faster and, if you take into account all the other improvements it should have left that first machine in its dust but it hasn't. The problem is that the growth in software bloat has nearly outpaced Moore's Law. The most obvious result is that programs sprawl all over hard drives that should by now have hardly noticed them. Possibly the most irritating result is that the time between pressing the on button and everything being ready for action is barely any quicker. 

Knowing nothing of the internal processes of a computer I couldn't see why it took over a minute to turn a machine on when a Google search returning millions of hits could be done in a fraction of a second. I mean, what was Windows doing for all that time? It must be a massive task to use up that much time and resource. I put this down to naivety but in recent time Microsoft has found itself with competitors and they seem to have managed the near instant start-up. My Nexus 7 runs on Android and the instant I open the flap on its protective case it fires up. Not quite as quickly as a fridge light but getting there. It is ready for action without having to wait. This is what we want.

Granted, it isn't a serious workstation and I would have trouble running my computer modelling software on it but the principle is established. Even digital cameras are getting with it by constantly 'taking pictures' until you press the button and select one. A bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut approach but it does reduce the number of oddly empty photos.

I am of the opinion that Microsoft's days are numbered. They have been repeatedly late to the party as new developments have come along. They were too complacent. They had too big a market share to fail - or so they thought. Like the dreaded Autodesk they had foisted an inferior product on the

market that had become the de facto standard and everyone was too afraid to not be there with the crowd. Once they had reached that position they felt free to do everything on their terms using their outdated notions of what their customer base could be expected to put up with. But times are changing and the people who have had to put up with their foibles are now in a position to put up serious opposition.

Can anyone port my modelling software to Android?