Evil AOL

I've always disliked AOL. When I lived in England I recall they decided to enter the ISP business and charge people by the minute to be online, which is a bit much given that at the time the phone call itself was about 2c-5c per minute. Still that was a little less arrogant than Compuserve that decided to price their plans in dollars and expected the Brits to simply pay whatever the exchange rate dictated for that month.

But back to AOL. I never liked their attitude. I didn't like how they would compress images on the web to a lower quality to save bandwidth. I didn't like how hard it was to uninstall AOL software and how it always seemed to mess up some internet related Windows settings when you removed it. But that is a long time ago, I've not used AOL since 1997.

But I always rather liked AIM. It was clean and reasonable as IM software goes. But as per usual corporate greed has made the software become more intrusive. My current version starts playing audio and visual commercials when I open it, which is just lovely when I am listening to music. It also chooses to open a browser window to their crap web site even though I switched off that option.

My wife installed the latest version of AIM which has even more crapware built into it. That one practically wants to take over the computer and make it an AIM station as opposed to a Windows PC. Frankly I would rather pay for the damn software than deal with all this shit.

The one thing that really annoys me about software companies is when they feel that just because you install a piece of software on your machine you give them full permission to mess with anything on your machine as they see fit. What ever happened to the good old days when you just ran a program and it did what it was supposed to do until you closed it? Stop taking over my damn machine with your crap!