Okay. I broke down and bought myself a digital camera. One that's not too expensive, but takes good quality pictures at a lower resolution (max 1600x1200). Specifically the Fuji 2650. I like it. I've been using it for a few days now taking pictures of random things just to get the feel for it.

Until just now, I'd been downloading the pictures to my Apple clamshell iBook running MacOS X 10.1. This consisted of attaching the USB cable to the camera and the computer, at which point it mounts the camera, runs an application that intelligently downloads the pictures (that is, only the ones I haven't already downloaded) and opens the folders into which it stores said pictures. This happened the first time I plugged in the camera.

Now I'm trying to get it to work on my Win2K machine. I say to myself ``It's just a USB Mass Storage device. I don't need their stupid software.'' So I plug it in. Windows recognizes it immediately as a USB Mass Storage device. No big surprise there. But, for some reason, it has no idea what to do with it from that point on. It needs further drivers that it needs to find somewhere else. It's USB MASS STORAGE! You don't need any more drivers, ya putz! But it won't let me do anything, so....

I unplug the camera and insert the driver CD. It comes up with one of those windows that takes a few minutes to figure out which button to push because nothing looks like a button; it's just one big image with words. I press the right button and it goes off, installing several things. At one point, it gets to installing what appears to be some ASPI driver I've never heard of, and it wants to install it in C:\ABCDASPI, using one of those dialogs that's a throwback to Win3.0. (You know, everything's the wrong size, there's that ugly heavy font, etc.) I say ``screw that'' and cancel that installation, at which point, the installation is done, except for this one window:



Also, at this point, the camera is working fine. I can mount the thing, run the Fuji viewer app (though I don't know why I'd want to), and so on.

So that all took me 5 minutes or so, plus a reboot. My Apple did it in approximately 5 seconds. The thing that annoys me the most about this is that Apple simply did it correctly, and people would be amazed. The fact that Windows so consistently does the wrong this has preverted everyone's ideas of how a computer should work.

DAMN THEM!