Computers still fail to impress

[blatherskite]

It's probably been more than a decade since Eddie Izzard came up with his skit on computer problems. Sadly, not much has changed in more than a decade: computers are shinier and faster and have more bells and whistles, but they still aren't smart enough to tell use that they can't contact the printer because the power's off. You'd think that after more than 30 years of personal computers, someone would have made the paradigm shift that computers should handle all the simple stuff like this for us. But no. Not Apple. Not Microsoft. Not (so far as I know) Linux.

I look forward to the day when computers and the software that runs them is based on a careful analysis of how real people use real computers in the real world. But I'm not holding my breath.