New and improved??

I have been using computers for over 60 years, starting with a cards in/cards out IBM 650 to Univac mainframes to the earliest personal computer to “The Computer for the Rest of Us” (The Macintosh).  Look up the ad “Why 1984 will not be 1984”.

Unfortunately, 1984 arrived with Apple’s OS X.  Everything has changed from gradual changes to complete changes that make previous data unusable, requiring days and weeks to update.  Many of these changes are difficult to decipher or many hours to undo (like an update that moved giga-bytes of data to the cloud.

Now Yahoo! had done that with it Finance pages.

For years, I have kept a spreadsheet of weekly data for several stocks or mutual funds.  I had Yahoo! set up to give me closing prices every Friday.

I missed a week and when I tried to have Yahoo! give me my data, nothing happened.  i went to bed frustrated not knowing what had changed.

On Saturday, I figured out that I had to completely rebuild my list.  When I requested the list, I found out that it had the high and low prices but not the closing prices which is what I really wanted.

I went to Yahoo! help section and found out that I was not alone.  Many commenters were very upset about the changes.

Well, back to figuring out how to get the data I want.

https://yahoo.uservoice.com/forums/382977-finance/suggestions/38499625-think-your-changes-out-before-springing-them-on-us

Has Apple left the “rest of us” behind?

I am sending the following paper letter to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple.

Tim Cook
Apple
1 Infinite Loop
Cupertino CA 95014

Dear Mr. Cook,

It is 1984 and Apple is Big Brother!

I have been debugging software, my own and others’, for fifty-nine years.  In 1983 I left corporate life to work on personal computers.  Some of them were more difficult to program than the main-frames I had worked on.

Then came Apple and the Macintosh in 1984.  By September I had my first Mac (and a Lisa).  Pascal was a joy of simplicity, even if I had to do it through the Lisa.  Every time a new Mac came out, I was eager to buy one as soon as possible.  More storage, more speed.  Hurray!

One of the standing jokes was that Mac owners didn’t need manuals because of WIMP.  About the only thing I needed a manual for was how to use diacritical marks in text (åäéñ).

Then OS X came.  I never did recover everything that I had on my on-the-floor box.  For awhile, I did upgrade to a new OS X.  But changes started making old stuff obsolete.  Or changes were rather gratuitous.  Did iPhoto really need new background colors?  Did iPhoto need to change how photos were annotated?  It seems that changes were made more to keep programmers busy than give the users truly better software.

I’ve been in that position before.  I didn’t want to maintain the old mainframe software; I wanted to work on the new hardware.

I have a long list of peeves of how Apple software changed gratuitously from simple one-step operations to operations with a hidden second step.  I got to the point that I would only change major levels of software when I bought a new computer.

Then, either deliberately or accidentally, I upgraded to Sierra on my lap top.  Fortunately I was at a coffee shop with unlimited internet access instead of at home with a limited monthly access.  One of the big surprises was that Sierra dumped all of my Document folder to iCloud!!  It was lots of “fun” moving it back to my MacBook Air.  I know lots of people who would have to go to Geek Squad or other help professionals to get through this.

My wife’s iMac is swiftly deteriorating.  Again, we have to do a lot of fussing to move data to my old MacBook Pro.  The disk drive no longer works.  Fortunately, we have some large capacity thumb drives so we were able to move her Document folder to the MacBook Pro.

And thumb drives get me to another of my Apple peeves.  If one pulls out a thumb drive without “deleting” it, all the data is lost.  This is really a 1984 nightmare.

How many of “the rest of us” has Apple left behind?

Corporate runaround

For the second time this month, my MacBook Air started emitting a lot of static.  I pushed the on-off button on the keyboard and the screen went dark, but the static didn’t stop.

I restarted the computer, gave my log-in info, and shut down the computer from the Apple Menu.  The static stopped.

I also went to Apple’s Support Communities to look at what others have said.  Apparently this problem has been going on for three or more years.  One user suggested resetting a VRPRAM or something like that.  Even though I have a long computer background, I don’t like getting into the guts of a computer anymore.

I tried to post my observation, but Apple wanted me to sign-in first.  I did sign in and when I came back to the page to respond, Apple asked me to sign in again.  Other pages recognized that I had signed in, but this particular page wanted me to sign in again and again and again and...

Apple gives me two choices to contact support: telephone or chat.  I don’t care for either.  In this particular case, I don’t want to do more than report the problem of multiple signing-requests.

I know, I know, I probably spent more time writing this than I would have following through on Apple’s contact protocols.  But I have found both methods unsatisfactory.  I much prefer leaving a note and being notified of a response.  I don’t have to think fast because the clock is ticking.

I think that Apple’s introductory slogan “Why 1984 won’t be like ‘1984’” has fallen flat.  Someday’s I feel like I am working with the PCs that the Macintosh would replace with simplicity.

Has ’1984’ come to Apple’s Macintosh?

The first Macintosh ad was for the 1984 SuperBowl.  You can find many copies on YouTube such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UZV7PDt8Lw.  The final line was “why 1984 won’t be like ’1984’.

The whole idea of the original Macintosh was that you didn’t need to type in complex instructions to get anything done.  You selected your choices from a menu and you got a window.  In the window you got pictures to look at and icons for any warnings.  Whether disparagingly by PC users or lovingly by Mac users, it was called WIMP.

Several years later, Apple produced the “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” ads.  These stressed the multitude of fun things that could be done on a Mac right out of the box and implied it was difficult to do these things on a PC without add-ons.  You can see some of these at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCL5UgxtoLs.

To me, as an almost 30 year user of Macs (September 1984), the Mac was a delight to use and program for.  Then the new whiz kids decided that it should be programmed in C rather than Pascal.  To me, C stood for complex, and I had programmed mainframes with line-at-a-time assemblers.

It is mind-boggling how much more I can do now than thirty years ago, but with OS X things seem to have gone downhill.  Or rather it is an uphill job to figure out what is going wrong.  The response time seems to get worse with every new operating system.

I’m not alone with this judgment.  Apple’s “Community” seems filled with complaints about things that don’t work correctly.

Advice to correct the problem includes:

Enter the following command in the Terminal window in the same way as before (triple-click, copy, and paste):
{ sudo chflags -R nouchg,nouappnd ~ $TMPDIR..; sudo chown -R $UID:staff ~ $_; sudo chmod -R

In the 1980s it was said that Mac users didn’t read manuals.  I often found that the only reason I needed a manual was for how to type letters with diacritical marks, such as å, é, î, and ö.  Now I find I am going to the “Community” at least once a month for some problem.

These kind of problems may be happening to users with two or more year-old computers; Apple’s programmers are likely to be using computers that are less than a year old, and they probably don’t have the time to test the new software on older computers than those on their desks.

I may be on to something here.  My wife’s iMac is a year newer than my MacBook Pro.  Other than updates within a major level, she is still using the same operating system that came with her computer.  Meanwhile, I’ve updated two levels since I bought mine, skipped one level because of the problem I mentioned in the last paragraph, and then fell for the enticements to move to the latest OS, Mavericks.  This had many benefits, but I keep wondering if they do outweigh the problems.

Do we have these Orwellian people in our midst?

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.  We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.  Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power.
…
The German Nazis and the Russian Communists … pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just round the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal.  We know that no one ever seized power with the intention of relinquishing it.  Power is not a means; it is an end."

- "1984", George Orwell, p. 263, Signet Classic paperback edition

Has this prediction become true?

"In a way, the world-view of the [Manipulators] imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.  They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.  By lack of understanding, they remained sane.  They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."

Who are the manipulators?  In George Orwell's "1984" it is the Party.  Who would it be in our world: corporations, the military-industrial complex, the national security establishment, the Tea Party, …?

Could the attack on public education be an attempt to ensure that people are incapable of understanding the manipulations?  Could the attack on true health care be an obfuscation to cloud understanding.  Could the use (or misuse) of words like patriotism, free market, tax burden, job creation, and on and on be used as "flagrant violations of reality"?

Could all this manipulation be a means to confuse people so that they became "not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening" and therefore not even show up to vote?

Mandate? Landslide? Let's count ALL the voters

Frank Rich used "Reagan" and "landslide" many times in his article, "Let Obama's Reagan Revolution Begin", 2011-01-09.

I was going to post the following as a comment, but I was too late as comments were already closed.

Please stop using the term "landslide" to describe Reagan's win of the 1984 election.  Forty-three percent of the voters didn't even show up, indirectly voting for "none of the above."  Ronald Reagan did receive 58.7% of the votes of those who did show up which is impressive.  But if one considers the no-shows, he had the backing of only 33.5% of the people.  In other words, he came in second to none of the above.

If we reported elections with all the relevant data we could either stop winners from declaring a "mandate" or get more people out to vote the next time.

See also "Voting is not a horse race" and "If you don't vote, you have only yourself to blame".