When a piece of hardware ships with a piece of software called EasyMumble, you just know that:
– The software will slam ten icons onto your desktop. The icons will be obvious (“Oooh, arrows pointing every which way, and doggies or blobby things, and little jaggy lines!”)
– Hey, look! A new snazzy dialog appears every single time the system boots. You’re not sure what the dialog about “Optimizing the system Perforamance” [sic] means, but you’re pretty sure that dismissing it before it is good and ready causes a crash;
– One of your favorite Emacs bindings, control-shift-L, now brings up one of those apps that the desktop icons point to. It seems to be all about mucking with network protocols. Why would a disk product want to do that?
– After about an hour of using the thing, the working set of the software will be approximately five hundred megabytes and you are no longer able to launch any applications;
– The uninstaller will leave your system a nearly unrepairable, smoking, unbootable mess;
Look: Disks store bytes. If they do anything else, I don’t want to hear about it.