I recently watched a comedy special featuring Jeff Foxworthy. He talked about the fact that we have so much that in many cases what we need is less. His examples were, as usual, side-splittingly funny. But afterwards I found myself thinking of some other things that we could use less of.
In particular, I’d like it if I had a control panel where I could go in and turn off all the battery hungry options that the vendors insist on adding to the operating systems of my computer and various other devices. I’d love it if they would boot instantly, do the things that I actually want them to do, and still have a substantial charge left in the evening when I go to bed.
I know this is possible. With every new generation of hardware they keep beefing up the battery life and then they turn around and add features that suck the battery dry so that we don’t see any obvious difference over the previous generation of hardware.
I’m not against innovation. I’m just for individual choice. There are a lot of cool features that have been added with each successive generation of hardware and software. I just want a say in which ones are turned on at any given time. If you want to spend time and effort on nifty intelligent features, create an application that will help me turn off the things I don’t actually need. Oh, and have it turn itself off when it’s through.
Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the people you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.