Note to dumbass software companies (I’m looking at you, Blizzard; and maybe Valve, though never had a problem since HL2’s release so many years ago) –

When you release a patch to an application, do _NOT EVER_ disable the application from working ‘until the user gets the patch.’ In the case of a game, sure, if it has a single player component, that has to work. Multiplayer, I could see a case for disabling it if the patch would cause disadvantages. But here I sit, with my new Starcraft 2 game, ready to play the single player component (offline, if it can manage such an incomprehensible thing) … but alas it wants to patch up from 1.0 to 1.0.1 — and the game will not run until I get it. And the patcher is broken, probably due to server clog. Brillant.

Lazyness is a virtue … but stupidity is unforgivable.

This is the same as setting the default action to “yes, please!” when presenting the option “Format your hard drive, destroying all data?”; don’t default to pissing your users off.

I may have said it before, but I’ll say it again as its bothering me right now.
One of the big problems with DIY (Doing It Yourself) is that you have to.. well, do it all yourself; running your own mailserver is pretty easy, but to this day setting up a CalDAV calendar server is still a right pita, imho; certainly, integrating services is a pain, and more to point .. keeping configuration, and software versions and patches up to date for security is an awful time sink. So the spammers and naughty-doers of the world are really just driving everyone to Google Apps, Yahoo Mail, etc. In addition to wasting everyones time, they’re actively driving people to centralized systems .. the privacy destroying systems. Great.
Likewise my point — one of the problems with MS Windows as an OS is its vast instability, driving people to online apps, or alternative OSes and environments (phones, etc.) By extension .. if your system starts acting weird, you just don’t know if its a virus or not; you can run all the anti-virus applications you like (and your kids will laugh at you for having to have done this, when they grow up..) and you’ll never really know. You could even boot from a clean disk and analyze the suspect disk, but theres just no way to really know. Certainly, this problem afflicts all operating systems, but none so much as Windows.
In this case, I suspect my CMOS battery is shot, so the system can’t keep the time; boot up Windows, and sometimes the date is 2058. Whats great is it can’t run Windows Update or do an Internet based Date Sync (ntpdate etc).. they fail, which sure makes me think virus; but if I set the date back manually, things work again. Leave it to MS to build a time-sync system that only works when the date is actually right (!).
Anyway, so here I have a problem.. is the battery kaput, or is the system virused?
Answer: is this the last straw that finally makes me just shoot this OS? I live in unix and linux most of the time anyway, but I do like having Windows around for gaming, and am stuck with it for itunes to sync to my phone. (Most of which could be done in a VM, to keep Windows contained.)
So here again.. the bad guys are driving us, changing us. Meh.

–

Aside: If you go to McDonalds (yech!) to get a happy meal.. for boys, they’ll give super hero toys; for girls, little bobble-headed kitten things. bleh :)