1. They strive to find new and creative ways to rip off their customers. The HP Printer/Ink scam is exactly what it sounds like – they sell cheap printers and profit by selling ink at exorbitant prices. It’s actually cheaper to just buy new HP printers (with ink included) than to buy new ink.

2. Their tech support is aggressively awful. I’ve luckily had very little experience with HP tech support, but when I first bought my HP printer a few years ago, none of the software would install correctly on my brand new laptop computer, despite claiming that it would work fine. After literally hours of being transferred, I was finally sent to the “Mac Help Desk” which was closed most of the time, and most definitely closed at the time of my call. Before getting there, I was berated for not taking up the reps offers on discount paper and ink. When I asked them what they thought I would do with paper or ink for a printer I couldn’t get to work, they got exasperated and impatient, and hung up on me. My personal experience is merely the tip of the HP Tech Support iceberg.

3. They think their customers are idiots, and treat them as such. Sure, this is probably obvious from items 1 and 2, but it becomes down right insulting with their new video campaign on Amazon. Hosted by lab-douche Thom Brown, in the HP Inkology videos he deigns to explain to us weak minded morons why HP ink is actually a good deal. His smug attitude as he presents us with bullshit math is almost as annoying as his haircut.

And that is just three reasons why HP sucks. If you have more, leave them in comments.

1. “…we are actively helping set the standards for the modern web.”
2. “Through our investments in standards and interoperability, we hope to help bring predictability to web programming.”
3. “Because when you can spend less time rewriting your sites to work across browsers, you can spend more time creating amazing experiences.”
Source: www.beautyoftheweb.com

What irks me about all of this isn’t that IE9 is clearly trying. What bothers me is that Microsoft is making some bold claims and delicately skating over the fact that IE has held back standards for “the modern web” for 10 years. It’s a bit like having five companies develop better green initiatives while one company sits around polluting unapologetically for ten years. Finally, the polluting company comes out and says, “Wait, wait you guys, we should stop polluting. Our company is going to set the standard for green initiatives. Aren’t we super awesome!?”

In 1996, during the height of the browser wars, it was common to see websites built for use with one browser only. In those days, you could download most browsers (including IE), regardless of operating system, and have at least an approximate experience cross-platform. Unfortunately for all versions of IE released after 6, they only work on the Windows operating systems. With IE9, that pool is even smaller, as it cannot be downloaded on any system except Windows 7 (the most recent).

Couple this with the fact that most IT departments stopped upgrading IE at version 7, and there’s a wide and growing gap between IE7 and IE9. Likewise, these same IT departments wisely decided not to upgrade to Vista, instead opting to stay with the older but vastly more stable WindowsXP. Consequently, Windows 7 and IE9 present a UI experience radically different from the UI the vast majority of PC users are accustomed to.

My point here is that IE9 is woefully exclusive. It makes massive demands of its users: you must have a new computer that runs Windows 7 in order to download and use IE9. Unfortunately, the internet is not browser specific. The true beauty of the web lies in its ability to transcend geography, demographic, platform, and yes, even browser. When we begin seeing alerts cautioning us against using any browser except IE9 which the vast majority of internet users cannot download, we’re severely limiting not only a user experience, but the ability for users to access information. The ugly fact is that despite being a self-proclaimed leader of standards development, sites built for IE9 mean sites built only for IE9.

We learned in the 90′s that this is detrimental to businesses. The more people who can access a company website, the better for the company. The last thing I want to see with IE9 is a repeat of those miserable user experiences that plagued us ten years ago.

So what does IE9 mean for these people? Initially, it sounds good – IE9 will support CSS3, HTML5, (allegedly) out perform other contemporary browsers in speed and graphics rendering. It sounds great, but there’s one critical hitch: It will not run on XP.

I won’t sit here and tell you that Windows 7 isn’t a good OS. It’s a great OS, and it corrects many of the mistakes made with Vista. But the fact remains that a huge market still uses XP, and that market is primarily office networks. Until network admins upgrade every computer in their system to Vista or higher, and subsequently upgrade all browsers to IE9, designers and developers will still be locked into using IE6.

This isn’t inherently Microsoft’s fault, but it isn’t not Microsoft’s fault either. XP was launched in 2001. It’s an almost ten-year old operating system, and it’s been the most reliable and well-loved Microsoft OS until 7 was released in 2009. That’s eight years of stagnation, and eight years of business standards to overcome. As time goes on, it will be harder and harder for system admins to update their systems and force their users to adapt. IE9 is a step in the right direction, but the jury’s out on whether or not it will be widely adopted. That it promises to bring IE into the modern era is only brag-worthy because it’s Internet Explorer. If it were any other browser or any other company, it wouldn’t be news.

Facebook
Facebook allows you to search for friends by plugging in their email address. Email addresses that aren’t registered with facebook will get email messages telling them that So and So has invited them to Facebook. If you’re already on Facebook, you can link your accounts.

There’s one hitch – you can’t look at the person’s profile without logging into facebook, and if you search for them, well, odds are you’ll get a good couple hundred of results. So here’s the scenario:

1. I have multiple email addresses.
2. I don’t know immediately who this person is, but I can’t view their profile to confirm one way or another
3. Facebook keeps sending me reminders that this person has friended me on their site.
4. I can’t stop this email from sending without blocking all future emails (from people I may in fact want to be friends with for sure).

Now, I don’t arbitrarily have multiple email addresses. I have multiple email addresses for an excellent reason, namely that I use them on different sites and they help me preserve my anonymity. My facebook profile is public in one sense, but I don’t want to link it to say, an old forum account where I was a site administrator for a few years. While all of these profiles are public, they aren’t all tied to me.

What pisses me off is that Facebook doesn’t allow for the possibility of someone wanting to keep their online identities separate. Facebook is arrogant enough to try and force me to connect all of them. I don’t have any desire to do that. I can’t identify who’s trying to friend me on that email, but it doesn’t really matter – I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be friends with that person. Still, there’s no way for me to contact them outside of Facebook, and Facebook won’t let the subject drop and stop emailing me about it.

If I block the Facebook notification emails, I block all emails of that variety, even from people I might know and care about and want to reach out to on my existing account.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Facebook.

kyo:

me: don’t be that guy

kyo: not in those words

me: doesn’t matter

kyo: it’s just a little warning in the footer

me: out of curiosity, does the old version if IE give you a security warning when you click the link to go to the new version? because if it does, i suspect it’s become self-aware and afraid of its own mortality
“nooooooooo fred! I thought we were frieeeeeends”

kyo: it does not. do you really think it’s that much of a problem? i think we should at least try to convince people to switch, plus this layout is impossible to get to work in IE6 (it works, that’s an exaggeration – but there’s no transparency)

me: there are two kinds of people in the world;  people who understand that IE is not the only browser out there and people who do not

kyo: it’s not like I’m doing this on every one of my layouts.

me: the people in the first set (aka your target audience on this issue) don’t know that there are any other kinds of browsers, and they haven’t upgraded their version. do the math, dude. do you think they’re a) going to even notice the footer text much less b) take your advice?

kyo: no i don’t, but if someone bitches to me about how there is no transparency, i will point to that warning

me: that’s just it, THEY HAVEN’T SEEN THE INTERNET OF MODERN DAY

kyo: i don’t think I will change anything

me: THEIR INTERNET IS STILL FROM OLDEN TIMES!

kyo: but I want to try anyway

me: it’s all sepia tone and people in pictures all wear funny hats and high waisted pants. listen, you watch porn on old versions of IE and just see how cranky you wind up. “that young lady showed her ankles!”

kyo: lol

me: “ankle peekers II”

There are two sides to the personal privacy issue. One is that most companies, programmers, organizations, et al, figure that if the same data is available anyway, aggregated in a different format, it’s fair game. In other words, if I can take the time to hunt down all the information about someone in a time consuming way, how is it any different if a web site aggregates that data for me in one easy-to access format. The logic being that if the data was already out there, it’s no different in a new format. In one universe, that’s true, but in our universe it just isn’t.

The thing that worries me is that most people address issues this way, without second thought to how people might react, or more importantly, how it may jeopardize the private information and make it more likely for personal information to become compromised.

Are there legitimate uses for this data? Sure. But the bottom line remains that in our society, identity theft is by and large a crime of convenience. When data is made easily accessible, or, conversely, when doing a bit of work can get you a lot of personal information (e.g. debit card skimmers), it becomes not only feasible for malicious individuals to harm people, but it makes it very, very tempting.

When people had to dig up data the old fashioned way, by visiting government offices and sifting through paper work (or waiting for someone else to do it), it made data mining inconvenient and expensive in terms of time spent. It was not an efficient or effective way of stealing. It was, however, effective for people with more legitimate interests, who likely were interested only in a small amount of data pertaining to their individual interests.

With new technology comes a new way of thinking about things, especially privacy. What distresses me as an IT professional as well as a person with shit to lose, is how little these issues are considered. I have no problem being the voice of reason. I’ll continue to bring up this issue. It just scares me when I’m the only one who considers it.