Excuse me for critizing MS Windows! (853 views)

Yeah, I mean it. Why the sudden realization you ask? Listen then to my tale of woe regarding my accursed Palm III Xe running Palm OS 3.5 and me!

I wanted a Palm top computer for many reasons ( A very important and significant one being “for showing off” ). My cousin in Canada offered to buy one for me and she did. I had to wait for a year to get it to India because I could not afford to get it shipped fearing the hefty customs duty.

The month I got it, I was mesmerized because that was the first time I had handled a touch-screen and Grafitti nearly took my breath away. I spent the following weeks downloading applications for it.

Slowly but eventually I realized that the Palm OS in it was very very buggy. It kept crashing once in a while and I had to keep soft resetting the device. Although this was a nuisance, It did not really hinder its usage. What I dreaded was the hard resetting which erases all the memory and the only way to restore from backups on the PC. The device also has a zillions problems with graphics and the 16Mhz DragonBall Motorola processor inside is a joke when it comes to running applications with even slightly demanding processing requirements.

So the one application I really found useful was one that painted the whole screen black and effectively converted the palm into a mirror where I could study my harried face (very thoughtful of the guy who wrote this wonderful piece of software. Also I’m surprised that the OS could actually run this complex resource hungry program without a hitch – As an aside, this might be because I did not realize the difference when the screen froze).

It is then that I had this divine vision where I saw Bill gates with a copy of Windows 98 and many people around him. Wait a minute!! These people were really angry. Really, Really angry! The whole place was stinking. Oh ok, these guys had rotten tomatoes and eggs loaded into giant catapults ready to cut the restraining ropes. Then I saw myself manning one of them with a Palm III xe. I was showing off to all the people around me about how I could calculate the exact trajectory for my load of rot to strike Billy’s face. People walked me to the front lines and elected me the chief rot-thrower and gave me the esteemed job of launching first. I aimed the catapult and started taking the reading off my palm when it crashed. I was flabbergasted and did not know what to do. The dumb thing just would not work. I closed my eyes – thought hard and came up with a random angle and aimed my catapult. I launched with closed eyes and listened with closed eyes for a while. I heard the sound of tomatoes and eggs landing and breaking. I risked a quick look from in-between closed eye-lids and saw the horror of horrors. The catapult has misfired and people around me were covered with rot (they looked very funny and I might have laughed but for the fact that they all seemed extremely angry).

I heard catapults being moved and aimed and a angry buzz all around. I huddled up and waited for the inevitable and it did come. A thousand “Splotches” on and around.

You know what, I am going to sell that damn thing. Also, I’m going to stop blaming MS for writing buggy software.

What did you say? What am I going to do with the cash I get for selling the palm? What else?

A KILOGRAM OF BATH SOAP, SHAMPOO AND A LITRE OF BODY SPRAY