One of the most irritating things an operating system can do is interrupt your work with updates. Luckily, in the real world we have the option to postpone those updates until the ideal moment, but imagine for a second if the update system were controlled by a virtual assistant that gives you barely 30 seconds to save everything before it restarts your computer. Welcome to RadOS, your new nightmare.
The Virtual Assistant Problem
"It looks like you're writing a letter..." "No, genius: I opened Word to play soccer." That was one of the many comments that Clippy, the nefarious Office Assistant who annoyed millions of users for years, managed to get out of me... and probably the only one I can publish here for reasons of language and etiquette. Virtual assistants in the 1990s and early 2000s were a real disaster. Today we have much smarter options like Siri, Cortana, and Google Voice, but there are very good reasons for these three assistants to be just a "presence" on mobile devices and not have any more elaborate digital avatar. Even so, the quality of a virtual assistant lies in its subtleties, not its persistence, something that monsters of the past like Clippy never managed to understand.
RadOS: The Game
How disturbing would it be to have something like Clippy managing your operating system updates? If you have the courage, then you can evaluate that nightmare thanks to the video game RadOS, developed by a certain nkornek for the last Toronto Game Jam that took place in the first days of May. The goal is to save your last eight hours of work spread across four applications in a 30-second window, before the dreadful virtual assistant restarts the system and makes you lose everything. Four applications might not seem like much... but the person bothering you in the instant messenger is out of control, the image editor is a trial version full of limitations, the notepad asks you to accept a license agreement, and the home banking process was sent by the Enemy.
In summary: Download a copy of RadOS, play it three or four times, delete it with extreme violence, and pray that no software developer ever gets the idea to resurrect that assistant. Even the wallpaper with the dolphin and #YOLO on it makes us want to break something...
Editor's note: Bitdefender Free reports RadOS as malicious, but it's a false positive.
