During the course of the week, Apple took another torpeo to their already rapidly sinking ship of a company as CEO Gil Amelio and executive VP Ellen Hancock decided to jump ship while there were still lifeboats to be had. Years of sheer conceit anf managment by ego rather than by common sense have taken their toll on this company. Once again, the takeover rumors have begun to fly, and once again the possibility that someone will buy them with the intent to turn the whole company to churning out braindead little machines that kinda' resemble computers ("but hey, at least they have Java!") which seems almost appropriate, as Apple has already been doing this for years now, and calling the things Macintoshes. For reasons which I have explained repeatedly over the past few columns, lusers are gullible enough to actually buy these things, and considering that most of them have a tendency to have about 96% of their cranium space free, some people have even managed to mistake some of these things for computers. This is understandable, given that most of the people who actually try to use these things have brains with a high tapioca pudding content.
Yet still, despite this fact, and despite the enormous size of some of the egos trying to push this thing in our faces, there is still no way on either side of the River Styx that this whole "thin client" idea has any chance of taking over the world, like some of it's most rabid proponents would like to claim. Sure, there are plenty of users out there with the intelligence of the puddle of primordial soup that they just crawled out of, and sure, some of these will be voluntarily lobotomized into buying these things (and unfortunately, most of these lobotomites will be employed in upper managment, making life miserable for the rest of us.) Still, most of us are never going to give these braindead facsimiles of computers any consideration whatsoever (just look at Apple's dwindling market share, proving that less and less people are being fooled these days.) There are several reasons that these things will never work out if any sane person has anything to do with it.
For one thing, these NC-thingies are pretty much braindead. They are completely dependent on the servers that they are running on for anything that they need to do, which means that unless you spend plenty on a server that can handle all of these things, you could end up having a whole network of whiny lusers complainign that the network is too slow (which is, of course, a lot more than they deserve in the first place. And all it would take to fry the entire network would be a single glitch in the server. Most companies would not enjoy the prospect of this occurring. Of course, any company who is brainless enough to trust their entire operation to machines based on pure ego and are about half as useful as a brick is probably not long for the world anyway.
Another fundamental flaw with these infernal contraptions is that nobody in their right mind would want one. In the ever-growing home market, most of the computers beign produced cater to people who are nowhere near being in their right mind, but as of late most of the fancy upgrades for computers are being made for only one purpose: Gaming. Somehow, I think that there are few legitimate business reasons that one would need a 3D accelerated video card for. Of course, if your so-called computer thingy is so braindead that even Windows chokes on the sucker without having a big ol' supercomputer ramming the thing down it's throat, you can probably imagine that it's going to choke just as badly on any game. For this reason, there are going to be quite a few people out there that are not going to want to have anything to do with the suckers, and will continue to stick with their PCs and stuff like that. An increasing amount of the hardware being out out these days has no practical purpose other than making all of the games out there look cooler and run faster. In fact, most people would never need more than a typical pentium with about 16MB of RAM if it weren't for all of the really spiffy looking games out there that require a MMX with 64-128MB of RAM, with about 2-3GB of disk space... All because you want to make it look a little more realistic when you blast people into tiny little pieces halfway across the globe.
Ok, now to change the subject totally and rather abruptly... Recenty, in a discussion with Brian Townley (one of my readers) we got to discussing some not-so-nice things to do to co-workers (cow-orkers?) such as messing with their desktops, making their screens flip upside down, and all sorts of other fun stuff in that vein. Do you think that at some point you've messed with the minds of some of your co-workers in a particularly creative way? Well, e-mail what you did, and in a future column I will include some of these. Don't just sit with your C: drive shared out with full access over the network, send your pranks today!