Elegant Chaos

Lauren Dempster asked a question (about a year and a half ago!) which got me going when I read it today:

http://www.laurendempster.com/2007/11/27/the-golden-compass

This was going to be a comment, but turned into a full-on rant!

The BBC news output is of an increasingly poor standard, if you ask me. Much of it is inane, self-obsessed, drivel or pointless "analysis" which actually amounts to stating the bleeding obvious.

For example, a news announcer gives a nice précis of a story. So far so good.

They then "go live" to a correspondent who is standing outside the venue describing how events are "unfolding". Said correspondent then repeats the précis, often word for word, adding no additional information. As with most events, the unfolding generally takes the form of nothing much happening for long periods of time. Often, nothing more is going to happen anyway, because the "event" has already taken place.

To fill in the gaps, the correspondent is asked to speculate on why/what/how "it" happened. They happily do this with minimal recourse to factual information (as they have none at this point). Quite often this speculation will end with a reiteration of the précis.

No better informed than we were when we started, we now return to the studio, and cut to an "expert" who has joined the announcer. They are then asked to comment, generally resulting in further reiteration and inane speculation. They have minimal actual knowledge because nobody actually knows what's going on.

Aaaargh!

This is all bad enough, but it becomes much, much worse when the story is about the media itself, and exponentially worse again if it is about the BBC. Ross & Grant anyone?

Then there's the use of phrases like "stepping up" and "the pressure is mounting" or "is under increasing pressure". These are typically used to indicate that something is still happening, or even just that the media are still talking about something that happened a while ago. So they will say "Gordon Brown is under increasing pressure today as revelations about the donuts-for-honours scandal continue to emerge" - when what they actually mean is "Remember that thing yesterday about the bloke with the donuts, well, we're still talking about it because nothing else has happened".

Most of this isn't unique to the BBC of course, but I'm certain that the BBC is getting worse.

And as for the "arts" slots on the Today programme - give me strength!

Right, calm down, deep breaths...

Despite being a bit of a Mac fan, I don't make a habit of bashing Windows or Microsoft - I got bored with all that religious warfare 20 years ago, and I happy live and work on a combination of OS X, XP, and Vista.

There are times, though, when I am rudely reminded why exactly it is that I like Macs, or rather, why I don't like Windows. Today is one such occasion. All I'm trying to do is install the "Service Pack 1" update to Visual Studio.

You'd think - naively - that it is just a case of downloading an installer, running it, perhaps restarting. Sadly, when I did this, the installer sat there for a couple of hours, stuck at an unknown point of the install. Four or five slightly different attempts later, it is still doing the same thing.

After various searches of the internet I came across the release notes for SP1:

http://download.microsoft.com/download/A/2/8/A2807F78-C861-4B66-9B31-920...

This read me lists nineteen different known issues with the installation process!! WTF?

These are major issues which prevent you from installing an update to an IDE. That. Is. Fucking. Pathetic.

As if that wasn't bad enough - none of them appear to be my problem. Remind me again why I bother using this shit?

One thing that really annoys me these days is applications which dont support automatic updating.

If you've written code to check for new versions (not exactly hard these day), not bothering to go the extra step and write the code that will download the new version for your user is just annoying. Even writing some extra code to optionally install the new version and restart it isn't exactly rocket science. Grrrr...