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
Showing posts with label Univac. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Univac. Show all posts
Sunday, September 01, 2019
Saturday, January 26, 2019
Where did the “computer for the rest of us” go
Where did the “computer for the rest of us” go.
I have been programming and using computers since 1959, some self-taught, some with help of others.
I wrote my first small program for Ohio Oil on an IBM 650 (cards in, cards out). I started with Elliot Organik’s Programming the IBM 650 and the help of other programmers.
I next encountered the Burroughs 3500(?) as a graduate student at Case Institute of Technology.
Then I worked nearly 20 years at Univac working on the Univac 1107 and later models.
Then the personal computer became more interesting and I went out on my own. Then in 1984 Apple came out with the Macintosh. This was the “Computer for the Rest of Us”. It was simpler to use, almost intuitive. I was smitten and have moved up whenever I chose or could afford to.
But somewhere along the way Apple lost its way. Each new group of Apple programmers had to change the Mac OS to their way.
One of the most gratuitous changes was a couple of years ago when printer orientation went haywire.
For a long time I could put an envelope in the back tray of an Epson WF-3640. Push it in so far and tell my Mac to print the envelope. Whoosh! Done!
Then somebody in Epson or Apple decided to change the software. The orientation displayed on the Mac was different. I forgot all the little things I had to do differently. The envelope had to be put in the back tray opposite what was shown on the tray. I forget all the details but sometimes the envelope went through without even being printed.
I just looked up on the Epson website about printing envelopes from one of the front trays. I followed all the directions, but the printer insisted on an envelope being in the back tray!!!
Enough debugging for the day. I would rather read a history book.
I have been programming and using computers since 1959, some self-taught, some with help of others.
I wrote my first small program for Ohio Oil on an IBM 650 (cards in, cards out). I started with Elliot Organik’s Programming the IBM 650 and the help of other programmers.
I next encountered the Burroughs 3500(?) as a graduate student at Case Institute of Technology.
Then I worked nearly 20 years at Univac working on the Univac 1107 and later models.
Then the personal computer became more interesting and I went out on my own. Then in 1984 Apple came out with the Macintosh. This was the “Computer for the Rest of Us”. It was simpler to use, almost intuitive. I was smitten and have moved up whenever I chose or could afford to.
But somewhere along the way Apple lost its way. Each new group of Apple programmers had to change the Mac OS to their way.
One of the most gratuitous changes was a couple of years ago when printer orientation went haywire.
For a long time I could put an envelope in the back tray of an Epson WF-3640. Push it in so far and tell my Mac to print the envelope. Whoosh! Done!
Then somebody in Epson or Apple decided to change the software. The orientation displayed on the Mac was different. I forgot all the little things I had to do differently. The envelope had to be put in the back tray opposite what was shown on the tray. I forget all the details but sometimes the envelope went through without even being printed.
I just looked up on the Epson website about printing envelopes from one of the front trays. I followed all the directions, but the printer insisted on an envelope being in the back tray!!!
Enough debugging for the day. I would rather read a history book.
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
A newspaper’s takeover of subscribers’ computers
Given the increasing complexity of software and its decreasing user-friendliness, I think 1984 has arrived. We are supposed to follow robotically through the latest commands of the software designer, aka Big Brother. And like in 1984, we have no idea what we are doing or should be doing.
I have almost 59 years of computer experience. I started with a summer job in which I used a textbook to learn to program an IBM 650. That was a set of large refrigerator size boxes with punched cards in and punched cards out.
Over the next twenty-plus years I went on to program and debug larger and larger computers. I was often an advocate of newer techniques, like using compilers instead of machine code or using email instead of typed memos.
Then personal computers appeared on the scene. Some of them easy to use, some of them opaque to use. In 1984, the Macintosh appeared. It was a real break-through in ease of use. Many laughed at WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pictures). They preferred the complex set of coding that had to be done for the simplest tasks.
I was hooked and became a Certified Macintosh Developer. I was eager to get the latest Mac with many great features: color, faster and smaller storage devices, and more.
Then OS-X (operating system 10) appeared. It had many nifty features except ease of transferring older programs to it. I never got around to rewriting my genealogy program and have lost all that data (except that which I had printed out). On the other hand, there were many new features that were a delight to use.
But as one OS X after another followed, the Mac started being persnickety. Printers that were easy to use became a nightmare. Where is the setting to print an envelope. Why does the scanner work well with an old OS but gives dark blobs on a newer OS?
Then sin of sins, without asking me, Apple decided I should install the latest operating system just because I was using wi-fi at a coffee shop. Not only did Apple decide that I should upgrade, it decided that all my files in the Document folder should go to iCloud. But that was more data than my free 5GB. It asked me to upgrade my account to 50GB. The extra $0.99 a month was no big deal, but I still haven’t completely reorganized my Document file so that I don’t need be hooked up to the web to use those files.
The same increasing difficulty has struck many web-sites. I now subscribe to four newspapers. Most of them generally work well with only a few quirks that take awhile to figure out. Just like the print versions, the newspapers are filled with ads. Generally you can just scroll past them.
But sometime last year, the Star Tribune began to have intrusive ads. They would take over the computer with no obvious way out. Not only would the ad page take over the tab slot on a browser, there was no way to get out of it except close the tab or follow it on to other pages in the ad chain.
A similar annoyance is a side-bar ad with a misleading message: “Log In”. It is not a log in to the newspaper, but an ad for using a Google product for signing in to web sites.
A friendly guy at Star Tribune’s support department helped me try to clear things up. But it was drastic, including resetting my iPad. Guess what that did? It wiped out all my cookies so that I had to enter saved passwords all over again. Good thing I have the passwords stored in an obscure place.
Rather than making my life simple by easily accessing my bank accounts, reading the latest news, and sending email to friends, I seem to have gone into standby debug mode.
Unfortunately, one of those pop-ups appeared again this morning. That’s it. I asked the Star Tribune to cancel my subscription. Bye to “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee” and many other comics that are not in the Duluth News Tribune. Good-bye to many in-depth state stories and editorials.
I do have relatives who spend a small fortune calling Geek Squad every time time they need to make some software change. Do you think the Star Tribune would pay me for all my efforts? Do you think your phone will run forever without re-charging?
P.S. Well, maybe I'll keep the Star Tribune subscription for a few more days. It worked fine this morning.
I have almost 59 years of computer experience. I started with a summer job in which I used a textbook to learn to program an IBM 650. That was a set of large refrigerator size boxes with punched cards in and punched cards out.
Over the next twenty-plus years I went on to program and debug larger and larger computers. I was often an advocate of newer techniques, like using compilers instead of machine code or using email instead of typed memos.
Then personal computers appeared on the scene. Some of them easy to use, some of them opaque to use. In 1984, the Macintosh appeared. It was a real break-through in ease of use. Many laughed at WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pictures). They preferred the complex set of coding that had to be done for the simplest tasks.
I was hooked and became a Certified Macintosh Developer. I was eager to get the latest Mac with many great features: color, faster and smaller storage devices, and more.
Then OS-X (operating system 10) appeared. It had many nifty features except ease of transferring older programs to it. I never got around to rewriting my genealogy program and have lost all that data (except that which I had printed out). On the other hand, there were many new features that were a delight to use.
But as one OS X after another followed, the Mac started being persnickety. Printers that were easy to use became a nightmare. Where is the setting to print an envelope. Why does the scanner work well with an old OS but gives dark blobs on a newer OS?
Then sin of sins, without asking me, Apple decided I should install the latest operating system just because I was using wi-fi at a coffee shop. Not only did Apple decide that I should upgrade, it decided that all my files in the Document folder should go to iCloud. But that was more data than my free 5GB. It asked me to upgrade my account to 50GB. The extra $0.99 a month was no big deal, but I still haven’t completely reorganized my Document file so that I don’t need be hooked up to the web to use those files.
The same increasing difficulty has struck many web-sites. I now subscribe to four newspapers. Most of them generally work well with only a few quirks that take awhile to figure out. Just like the print versions, the newspapers are filled with ads. Generally you can just scroll past them.
But sometime last year, the Star Tribune began to have intrusive ads. They would take over the computer with no obvious way out. Not only would the ad page take over the tab slot on a browser, there was no way to get out of it except close the tab or follow it on to other pages in the ad chain.
A similar annoyance is a side-bar ad with a misleading message: “Log In”. It is not a log in to the newspaper, but an ad for using a Google product for signing in to web sites.
A friendly guy at Star Tribune’s support department helped me try to clear things up. But it was drastic, including resetting my iPad. Guess what that did? It wiped out all my cookies so that I had to enter saved passwords all over again. Good thing I have the passwords stored in an obscure place.
Rather than making my life simple by easily accessing my bank accounts, reading the latest news, and sending email to friends, I seem to have gone into standby debug mode.
Unfortunately, one of those pop-ups appeared again this morning. That’s it. I asked the Star Tribune to cancel my subscription. Bye to “The Brilliant Mind of Edison Lee” and many other comics that are not in the Duluth News Tribune. Good-bye to many in-depth state stories and editorials.
I do have relatives who spend a small fortune calling Geek Squad every time time they need to make some software change. Do you think the Star Tribune would pay me for all my efforts? Do you think your phone will run forever without re-charging?
P.S. Well, maybe I'll keep the Star Tribune subscription for a few more days. It worked fine this morning.
Thursday, January 07, 2016
If...
Some have said that “if” is the biggest word in the English language. It certainly does have a lot of import on our thinking, be it blame, regret, or thankfulness. Our lives are certainly filled with choice points of our own doing or the actions of others. “If my teacher hadn’t suggested,,,, then I might not have…” “If I hadn’t asked for a raise, would I have ever gotten one.”, and on and on.
I have so many “if’s” in my life that got me to this moment of typing on a laptop that I could probably fill this issue of the Reader. And you would have fallen asleep by the fourth page.
One of my early if’s is if my parents hadn’t divorced, would my mother have moved us in with her aunt and uncle? That determined where I started school. If my great aunt and uncle hadn’t bought a house on the other side of the city, would I have have gone to a second elementary school. At that school I met many others who would become life-long friends.
I did lose those contacts when my mother decided to rent an apartment on the other side of town. By the time I started high school, she remarried and we moved back to the other side of town.
That house was in a school attendance area different than the area many of my old friends were in. I made the choice of asking for an exemption to go to that smaller school to be with my friends again.
One of the math teachers at the smaller school punctuated his remarks with “When you go to Case…” meaning Case Institute of Technology. Five of us started as freshmen there a year or two later.
But would I have been able to afford the $750/year tuition? The assistant principal suggested that I apply to the Huntington Fund for a scholarship. I did and was granted a full scholarship.
With my job at Kroger’s, suggested to me by one of the friends I met in the second elementary school and with whom I still correspond, I was able to afford books and bus fare across the city to Case.
Shortly after we moved back across the city, I attended a Methodist Church within a half-hour’s walk and was active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF). This continued into my Case years.
I don’t know the exact cause, but I started losing interest in my engineering studies. I ran for president of the area MYF council and won. Also on the council was the daughter of a doctor. After I flunked out of Case, I started dating her.
We both went to Ohio Wesleyan the following fall, she as a freshman and me as a junior. Despite my flunking out of Case, the Huntington Fund kept funding me. They had long dropped their maximum scholarship to $500, and I had to take out student loans to supplement it and my own part-time job earnings to make the $1,100 annual tuition.
I got good enough grades in mathematics that Case took me back in the graduate program with a full fellowship in the computer center which included a $75/week salary! I also married that sweetheart from two paragraphs back.
I don’t think you want to put up with two thousand words of all the twists and turns of the next fifty plus years, but I have many, many “If I hadn’t done this, would this interesting thing have happened.” I’ll try to collapse those into the few paragraphs remaining of my space.
We chose to move to Minnesota and my employment with Univac because we liked canoeing. After five years I became restless and managed a transfer to Europe. We started in Switzerland for a few weeks and then lived in Italy for the next two years.
I became unhappy with the management in Rome and transferred to Sweden. We liked Sweden so much that we stayed four years. But then my wife decided our kids should go to junior high in the United States. Another “if” I must stick in is that my wife met an American women on the subway who had a cabin in Brimson. She extended an open invitation to visit them.
I gave a wishy-washy description of my interests to my previous bosses at Univac in Roseville, and so we didn’t move back to Minnesota. Instead I wound up in “exile” in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. I was “rescued” when Univac needed people to work on a new computer in Roseville. That computer was cancelled and I was put on another project, on which I didn’t shine.
Meanwhile, the microcomputer revolution started and I jumped into it. I blew that too and wound up as a bus driver. But my wife was doing quite well in her work. What we didn’t do well on was co-ordinating when we would take our annual BWCA visit. With the background of a whole bunches of “if’s” we finally visited our friends in Brimson and did so annually.
Yikes, what if I could have 2,000 words!
Our son went to Japan and when we visited him we missed an annual visit to Brimson. We went in fall instead and found property for sale. We bought it, and a few years later had built our own cabin.
This time my wife engineered the transfer and we moved from the Twin Cities to Duluth to be nearer our cabin. But she found more and more things to do in Duluth and has less time to spend in Brimson. And we’re both getting older and mowing lots of paths and cutting firewood seems to take longer and longer.
We have lots of memories of all those if’s and we know lots more if’s are coming.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
- Robert Frost
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2016-01-07 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2016/01/06/6522_if.
I have so many “if’s” in my life that got me to this moment of typing on a laptop that I could probably fill this issue of the Reader. And you would have fallen asleep by the fourth page.
One of my early if’s is if my parents hadn’t divorced, would my mother have moved us in with her aunt and uncle? That determined where I started school. If my great aunt and uncle hadn’t bought a house on the other side of the city, would I have have gone to a second elementary school. At that school I met many others who would become life-long friends.
I did lose those contacts when my mother decided to rent an apartment on the other side of town. By the time I started high school, she remarried and we moved back to the other side of town.
That house was in a school attendance area different than the area many of my old friends were in. I made the choice of asking for an exemption to go to that smaller school to be with my friends again.
One of the math teachers at the smaller school punctuated his remarks with “When you go to Case…” meaning Case Institute of Technology. Five of us started as freshmen there a year or two later.
But would I have been able to afford the $750/year tuition? The assistant principal suggested that I apply to the Huntington Fund for a scholarship. I did and was granted a full scholarship.
With my job at Kroger’s, suggested to me by one of the friends I met in the second elementary school and with whom I still correspond, I was able to afford books and bus fare across the city to Case.
Shortly after we moved back across the city, I attended a Methodist Church within a half-hour’s walk and was active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF). This continued into my Case years.
I don’t know the exact cause, but I started losing interest in my engineering studies. I ran for president of the area MYF council and won. Also on the council was the daughter of a doctor. After I flunked out of Case, I started dating her.
We both went to Ohio Wesleyan the following fall, she as a freshman and me as a junior. Despite my flunking out of Case, the Huntington Fund kept funding me. They had long dropped their maximum scholarship to $500, and I had to take out student loans to supplement it and my own part-time job earnings to make the $1,100 annual tuition.
I got good enough grades in mathematics that Case took me back in the graduate program with a full fellowship in the computer center which included a $75/week salary! I also married that sweetheart from two paragraphs back.
I don’t think you want to put up with two thousand words of all the twists and turns of the next fifty plus years, but I have many, many “If I hadn’t done this, would this interesting thing have happened.” I’ll try to collapse those into the few paragraphs remaining of my space.
We chose to move to Minnesota and my employment with Univac because we liked canoeing. After five years I became restless and managed a transfer to Europe. We started in Switzerland for a few weeks and then lived in Italy for the next two years.
I became unhappy with the management in Rome and transferred to Sweden. We liked Sweden so much that we stayed four years. But then my wife decided our kids should go to junior high in the United States. Another “if” I must stick in is that my wife met an American women on the subway who had a cabin in Brimson. She extended an open invitation to visit them.
I gave a wishy-washy description of my interests to my previous bosses at Univac in Roseville, and so we didn’t move back to Minnesota. Instead I wound up in “exile” in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. I was “rescued” when Univac needed people to work on a new computer in Roseville. That computer was cancelled and I was put on another project, on which I didn’t shine.
Meanwhile, the microcomputer revolution started and I jumped into it. I blew that too and wound up as a bus driver. But my wife was doing quite well in her work. What we didn’t do well on was co-ordinating when we would take our annual BWCA visit. With the background of a whole bunches of “if’s” we finally visited our friends in Brimson and did so annually.
Yikes, what if I could have 2,000 words!
Our son went to Japan and when we visited him we missed an annual visit to Brimson. We went in fall instead and found property for sale. We bought it, and a few years later had built our own cabin.
This time my wife engineered the transfer and we moved from the Twin Cities to Duluth to be nearer our cabin. But she found more and more things to do in Duluth and has less time to spend in Brimson. And we’re both getting older and mowing lots of paths and cutting firewood seems to take longer and longer.
We have lots of memories of all those if’s and we know lots more if’s are coming.
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
- Robert Frost
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2016-01-07 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2016/01/06/6522_if.
Friday, August 28, 2015
Clawing out of the Abyss
As of this writing, we are into week two without cellular access on our iPhones (See “Cutting the cord and falling into the abyss” in last week’s Reader).
I think the biggest thing I miss is reading the Duluth News Tribune, Star Tribune, and the New York Times at breakfast and lunch. To check email, statements, and other important and unimportant information, we have to go to the library or coffee shops. I’m drinking a lot more coffee than I normally do.
The easiest is to walk to Chester Creek Café at the corner. But we don’t want to take up a table when there are many lunch or dinner customers.
Perk Place is a quiet place, but for some reason I could not log on to their server. Another Mac user had been successful. I wonder if he was using a newer operating system. A staff member did get me signed on using the coffee shop account.
Once upon a time I would walk to Bixby’s and other shops at Mt. Royal, but every year the hill up Woodland Avenue seems to get steeper, especially with a backpack with a computer. And so I wimp out and drive.
The Mount Royal Library may or may not be crowded. When I went on Thursday it wasn’t, but it did take a bit of effort to log in. I was successful with my iPhone and iPad, but I never managed to click all the right buttons for my laptop.
A diversion at the library was looking for a follow-on book after viewing “The Young Victoria”. The movie had a lot of follow-on summary information. I wanted to know more about her reign and her successors. I used my iPhone to sign on to the catalog and select some books. Having the call numbers of the desired titles on my iPhone sure beat copying those numbers onto paper from the library computers.
Caribou at Mount Royal Market is spacious and quiet. It’s biggest drawback is that there are no power outlets at the tables.
And at the cabin we are completely disconnected from the web. At least, we can still use our phones.
So, I have to carefully plan all my work before hand. I am writing this at home and will go to one of the coffee shops to email it to the Reader. I have to write most of my email beforehand. I have to plan ahead what web sites to visit.
One of those plan-ahead sites was the Apple Support Community. While at a coffee shop I downloaded thirteen threads about excessive data usage. It’s nice to know that I am not alone with this problem. Some useful advice, some blaming the user, but no really clear cut advice.
I do know first hand that solving computer problems can be a long, arduous project. Relevant information comes in dribbles from the customer and lots of digging by programmers. I was the lead investigator of frequent crashes of a Univac 1108 in Sweden. Many of the memory dumps showed a particular program was active. I badgered to customer into giving me a copy of the program. I took the copy to another site and the program crashed because it was putting data outside of its assigned space. To make the story short, the problem was they were using an outdated library and that their computer had a memory protection failure. I think it took three months from the first alarm to final resolution. And those computers were a lot simpler than what we carry in our pockets now!
Once upon a time it was said that Mac owners never used a manual. I did look up a few things now and then, mostly just what keys did I need to push to get å, ä, é, î, ö, and other western European characters. The Mac’s were described as WIMPs: Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pictures. Just about everything you needed to know was obvious from one of these.
Even then, many users came up with seemingly intractable problems. Apple’s answer was to encourage user groups. Unfortunately, often there was nobody at a meeting who had an answer. I remember somebody asking why they couldn’t make their “Whiz Bang” printer work on a Mac. The leader would ask if anybody had a solution and look around the room. Not a hand went up. This happened over and over again.
The human interface, the computing power, and the range of software has improved exponentially in the last 31 years (remember the 1984 Apple ad). We can do many tasks quickly and easily just by poking the screen or dragging a finger over it. But when things go wrong! Hoo boy!
I think I caused my problem with an inadvertent reset. My choices include going back to the last iCloud backup, but would that be done before the coffee shop closed? By reading the manual, I found that I can double-click the home button, swipe up on the screen, and then slide through all the open apps. I can close an app by sliding its image up. This doesn’t remove the app from my iPhone, it just stops it from doing any harm.
Once September rolls around, we’ll have the data part of our Consumer Cellular contract restored. I think the closing apps plan is my best alternative. I’ll start with only keeping the supposedly harmless apps open: Weather, Mail, Calendar, and a few other standards. Then I’ll have to wait until all the data is in for that six-hour period. If usage seems normal, I’ll keep a few more apps open. Either I’ll eventually find the run-away app or that the conditions are such that the app is now behaving.
Meanwhile, I’ll be drinking lots of coffee. I thought of having beer instead, but it will be just my luck to knock over the glass…
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/26/5837_clawing_out_of_the_abyss.
I think the biggest thing I miss is reading the Duluth News Tribune, Star Tribune, and the New York Times at breakfast and lunch. To check email, statements, and other important and unimportant information, we have to go to the library or coffee shops. I’m drinking a lot more coffee than I normally do.
The easiest is to walk to Chester Creek Café at the corner. But we don’t want to take up a table when there are many lunch or dinner customers.
Perk Place is a quiet place, but for some reason I could not log on to their server. Another Mac user had been successful. I wonder if he was using a newer operating system. A staff member did get me signed on using the coffee shop account.
Once upon a time I would walk to Bixby’s and other shops at Mt. Royal, but every year the hill up Woodland Avenue seems to get steeper, especially with a backpack with a computer. And so I wimp out and drive.
The Mount Royal Library may or may not be crowded. When I went on Thursday it wasn’t, but it did take a bit of effort to log in. I was successful with my iPhone and iPad, but I never managed to click all the right buttons for my laptop.
A diversion at the library was looking for a follow-on book after viewing “The Young Victoria”. The movie had a lot of follow-on summary information. I wanted to know more about her reign and her successors. I used my iPhone to sign on to the catalog and select some books. Having the call numbers of the desired titles on my iPhone sure beat copying those numbers onto paper from the library computers.
Caribou at Mount Royal Market is spacious and quiet. It’s biggest drawback is that there are no power outlets at the tables.
And at the cabin we are completely disconnected from the web. At least, we can still use our phones.
So, I have to carefully plan all my work before hand. I am writing this at home and will go to one of the coffee shops to email it to the Reader. I have to write most of my email beforehand. I have to plan ahead what web sites to visit.
One of those plan-ahead sites was the Apple Support Community. While at a coffee shop I downloaded thirteen threads about excessive data usage. It’s nice to know that I am not alone with this problem. Some useful advice, some blaming the user, but no really clear cut advice.
I do know first hand that solving computer problems can be a long, arduous project. Relevant information comes in dribbles from the customer and lots of digging by programmers. I was the lead investigator of frequent crashes of a Univac 1108 in Sweden. Many of the memory dumps showed a particular program was active. I badgered to customer into giving me a copy of the program. I took the copy to another site and the program crashed because it was putting data outside of its assigned space. To make the story short, the problem was they were using an outdated library and that their computer had a memory protection failure. I think it took three months from the first alarm to final resolution. And those computers were a lot simpler than what we carry in our pockets now!
Once upon a time it was said that Mac owners never used a manual. I did look up a few things now and then, mostly just what keys did I need to push to get å, ä, é, î, ö, and other western European characters. The Mac’s were described as WIMPs: Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pictures. Just about everything you needed to know was obvious from one of these.
Even then, many users came up with seemingly intractable problems. Apple’s answer was to encourage user groups. Unfortunately, often there was nobody at a meeting who had an answer. I remember somebody asking why they couldn’t make their “Whiz Bang” printer work on a Mac. The leader would ask if anybody had a solution and look around the room. Not a hand went up. This happened over and over again.
The human interface, the computing power, and the range of software has improved exponentially in the last 31 years (remember the 1984 Apple ad). We can do many tasks quickly and easily just by poking the screen or dragging a finger over it. But when things go wrong! Hoo boy!
I think I caused my problem with an inadvertent reset. My choices include going back to the last iCloud backup, but would that be done before the coffee shop closed? By reading the manual, I found that I can double-click the home button, swipe up on the screen, and then slide through all the open apps. I can close an app by sliding its image up. This doesn’t remove the app from my iPhone, it just stops it from doing any harm.
Once September rolls around, we’ll have the data part of our Consumer Cellular contract restored. I think the closing apps plan is my best alternative. I’ll start with only keeping the supposedly harmless apps open: Weather, Mail, Calendar, and a few other standards. Then I’ll have to wait until all the data is in for that six-hour period. If usage seems normal, I’ll keep a few more apps open. Either I’ll eventually find the run-away app or that the conditions are such that the app is now behaving.
Meanwhile, I’ll be drinking lots of coffee. I thought of having beer instead, but it will be just my luck to knock over the glass…
Also published in the Reader Weekly of Duluth at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2015/08/26/5837_clawing_out_of_the_abyss.
Thursday, October 09, 2014
Programmer, heal thyself
The New York Times recently had a link to the Wired story, “Why the New Obamacare Website is Going to Work This Time” by Steven Levy, originally published in the June issue of Wired. Levy almost gushes how the Ad Hoc team, a small group of young programmers from Silicon Valley and President Obama’s election campaign, greatly simplified the Website. “[T]hey worked 80-hour weeks to salvage the botched creation of thousands of technocrats employed by 55 different contractors,”
Duh! A small team can make breakthroughs that a large group cannot. Think of the original Macintosh team, much smaller and squirreled away in a small building away from all those working on Apple II software.
IBM trumpeted it had a thousand programmers in seven cities on OS 360. We in Univac smirked that we had less than 40 programmers working in one city on EXEC I. Even then a contractor built a leaner OS (EXEC II) to build and test the FORTRAN and COBOL compilers they had contracted to build. EXEC II was much more popular among customers than EXEC I and even its successor EXEC 8.
Making deadlines? Hah! We were always shifting ship dates later.
What I wonder is if these same programmers from private industry are so great, why are software “user community” boards so filled with questions, often unanswered? If these programmers are so great, why are reviews often mixed, some love the program, others hate it.
Way back in the 80s when the Macintosh was the latest “hot thing”, I was eager to get the latest version of the software and found the enhancements great. Thirty years later, I am reluctant to move up to a major new release. To often things that worked fine are changed to something that is more difficult to use or doesn’t even work anymore.
With each generation it seems that programs run slower and slower. Maybe it’s because I’m using a three-year-old Mac with one-year-old software. I have found suggestions for “cleaning up the system”, but they involve a whole day of backing up data and then another day of creating a “clean install” disc and actually running it.
Consistency of design often seems to be lacking. If my iPhone is asleep and I get a call, the screen only gives me the option of swiping to accept the call. However, if my iPhone is active, the screen gives me the choice of accepting or rejecting the call. Buried in the instruction manual, or was it in the “user community”, in the first case I can reject the call by holding the sleep button and the home button at the same time. Only a bureaucracy would allow different actions for the same result.
In one of the recent releases, certain buttons may or may not appear for starting and stopping a podcast. The intent is to have a right-pointing triangle to start or resume a podcast and a double bar to momentarily stop it. When these symbols suddenly started disappearing, I was glad that I knew where they were supposed to be. And I have no idea why these buttons sometime appear and sometime don’t.
I have a new problem to research: why does the return button no longer work on my Logitech Solar Keyboard folio for my iPad? I’ll have to set aside some time to check out the Logitech community about this.
I love all this technology because of all it does for me. I can write this column on my laptop and email it to the Reader. I can keep notes and to-do lists on my laptop, phone, and iPad and keep them synched. I can call my wife from the grocery store to remind me what it was she wanted. I can use my iPhone as a hot spot at our cabin to write and email this column.
BTW, I’m not writing this at our cabin as planned because another simple technology became an irritation. Our smoke alarm started going off randomly. Sometimes it would beep and beep, sometimes it would only give off one set of beeps. I had a lousy night Saturday night! Could it be too much moisture in the small tight cabin? Well, I brought the alarm home, closed the battery compartment, and put it on the bed. Within twenty minutes it gave off a single set of beeps. We bought the seven-year warranty alarm in March!
Much is made about about government bureaucracy and corporate efficiency, but corporate bureaucracy in GM led to many deaths because of faulty ignition switches.
To err is human, but to really screw up it takes a computer. Humans and computers are both in corporations and governments.
Mel considers himself perfect; he never makes mistakes. Oops, the computer won’t let him misspell mistakes as “misteaks!
Also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-10-09 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/10/09/4191_programmer_heal_thyself
Duh! A small team can make breakthroughs that a large group cannot. Think of the original Macintosh team, much smaller and squirreled away in a small building away from all those working on Apple II software.
IBM trumpeted it had a thousand programmers in seven cities on OS 360. We in Univac smirked that we had less than 40 programmers working in one city on EXEC I. Even then a contractor built a leaner OS (EXEC II) to build and test the FORTRAN and COBOL compilers they had contracted to build. EXEC II was much more popular among customers than EXEC I and even its successor EXEC 8.
Making deadlines? Hah! We were always shifting ship dates later.
What I wonder is if these same programmers from private industry are so great, why are software “user community” boards so filled with questions, often unanswered? If these programmers are so great, why are reviews often mixed, some love the program, others hate it.
Way back in the 80s when the Macintosh was the latest “hot thing”, I was eager to get the latest version of the software and found the enhancements great. Thirty years later, I am reluctant to move up to a major new release. To often things that worked fine are changed to something that is more difficult to use or doesn’t even work anymore.
With each generation it seems that programs run slower and slower. Maybe it’s because I’m using a three-year-old Mac with one-year-old software. I have found suggestions for “cleaning up the system”, but they involve a whole day of backing up data and then another day of creating a “clean install” disc and actually running it.
Consistency of design often seems to be lacking. If my iPhone is asleep and I get a call, the screen only gives me the option of swiping to accept the call. However, if my iPhone is active, the screen gives me the choice of accepting or rejecting the call. Buried in the instruction manual, or was it in the “user community”, in the first case I can reject the call by holding the sleep button and the home button at the same time. Only a bureaucracy would allow different actions for the same result.
In one of the recent releases, certain buttons may or may not appear for starting and stopping a podcast. The intent is to have a right-pointing triangle to start or resume a podcast and a double bar to momentarily stop it. When these symbols suddenly started disappearing, I was glad that I knew where they were supposed to be. And I have no idea why these buttons sometime appear and sometime don’t.
I have a new problem to research: why does the return button no longer work on my Logitech Solar Keyboard folio for my iPad? I’ll have to set aside some time to check out the Logitech community about this.
I love all this technology because of all it does for me. I can write this column on my laptop and email it to the Reader. I can keep notes and to-do lists on my laptop, phone, and iPad and keep them synched. I can call my wife from the grocery store to remind me what it was she wanted. I can use my iPhone as a hot spot at our cabin to write and email this column.
BTW, I’m not writing this at our cabin as planned because another simple technology became an irritation. Our smoke alarm started going off randomly. Sometimes it would beep and beep, sometimes it would only give off one set of beeps. I had a lousy night Saturday night! Could it be too much moisture in the small tight cabin? Well, I brought the alarm home, closed the battery compartment, and put it on the bed. Within twenty minutes it gave off a single set of beeps. We bought the seven-year warranty alarm in March!
Much is made about about government bureaucracy and corporate efficiency, but corporate bureaucracy in GM led to many deaths because of faulty ignition switches.
To err is human, but to really screw up it takes a computer. Humans and computers are both in corporations and governments.
Mel considers himself perfect; he never makes mistakes. Oops, the computer won’t let him misspell mistakes as “misteaks!
Also published in the Reader Weekly, 2014-10-09 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/10/09/4191_programmer_heal_thyself
Tuesday, August 26, 2014
Berlin Wall - May 1968
Last Tuesday, November 9th, was the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Not being much of a TV viewer, I did not get the full thrill of seeing it come down. But 21 years earlier I did get the full impact of seeing it up close.
In 1968 I transferred to Europe with Sperry Univac and was assigned to work in Basel, Switerland. Within two weeks of my arrival I went to Berlin for a user conference. I arrived early the day before the conference began and spent the day sightseeing.
I went through parks, into shops, and up into buildings to look out over a thriving city. Unlike other cities, there was one place I was blocked from seeing the whole city: The Wall. Unlike the green parks, the elegant shops, and the modern buildings that invited you in, the wall was grey, shabby, old-looking and uninviting.
The Wall was a combination of grey concrete and the façades of old buildings. The concrete was topped with barbed wire. Mounting one of the many observation platforms, one could see more fences and walls, with tank traps and other impediments between them. There were light towers and watch towers in both directions. It was a gross caricature of a high-security prison. On some streets the wall joined the fronts of a series of apartment buildings. But there were no apartments behind the fronts whose doors and windows had been filled with concrete. Every so often there would be a cross with flowers and ribbons; the cross marked the spot where somebody had been killed crossing over the Wall.
My wanderings took me to a large park that had a sign pointing to the Brandenburg Gate. Over a half mile from the gate was a little gate house. An unarmed guard indicated that we should follow the walkway that went way around the barricades on the road leading to the Brandenburg Gate.
Halfway to the Gate and on the other side of the broad street there was the Monument to the Soviet Soldier. Two Russian soldiers marched stiff-legged back and forth. Two others did some repair on the paving. The only thing separating us was a normal crowd-control barricade on my side of the street.
About three-quarters of the way to the Gate, I encountered the first armed West Germans that I had seen. Two policemen with machine pistols were chatting in the street. They didn't even look at me when I took their pictures. Behind them and on the other side of the street was the Reichstag, an imposing building with almost no activity around it. And right behind it was The Wall.
In the middle of the street, a few yards before The Wall, was a block house with the main floor about a half-story above the ground. It had large windows in front, and a balcony. On the balcony stood an American soldier looking over The Wall with a pair of binoculars. The Wall made a great semicircle around the Brandenburg Gate. In that semicircle stood a number of East German soldiers looking back over the wall, some with binoculars.
I was free to walk in front of the block house to either side of the semicircle. Inside the semicircle it was barren except for grass between some of the cement blocks and the soldiers. Outside the semicircle on the "west" side of The Wall there were numerous small trees and many propaganda signs directed to the east. Among them were a quote from Bertold Brecht and a count of the number who died trying to cross The Wall.
Back at my hotel I met three people from one of our Swiss customers. They said they were going to go to Checkpoint Charlie (one of the few openings in the wall); they invited me along. We hopped in a taxi and went to what appeared to be a normal European mixed residential/business district. That is, stores below and offices and apartments in the one to three stories above.
However, right in the middle of the street was a white frame bungalow. It was the office of the American soldiers who monitored that section of The Wall. And beyond it was The Wall. Nobody paid any attention to us as we walked towards The Wall. I don't remember how it looked as it crossed from one side of the street to the other. I just focused on the little overlapping opening that we walked through.
On the other side we were met by an armed East German soldier who handed each of us a numbered ticket off a roll of tickets. He directed us to a wooden building on the right side of the street. Inside we had to write out a customs declaration, and give up our passports and the numbered ticket. When we did this we were given another numbered ticket and directed to the next wooden building.
In the second building our passports were called out by number, in German, no name. We turned in our second ticket and were given our passports back with a third numbered ticket. Each ticket was a different color. We were then directed to a third building.
As we walked between buildings we saw a car parked in front of the wooden building on the other side. Several soldiers were around it and one soldier was on his knees looking under the car with a mirror on a stick and wheels. We didn't watch long enough to know if the car was allowed to pass or not.
In the third building we turned in our ticket and ten West German Marks (about $2.50 at the time) in exchange for ten East German marks (almost worthless). I put my East German ten-mark bill into my passport. We were given a fourth ticket and allowed to go outside. We were met by a soldier who took our tickets and allowed us to proceed down Friedrichstrasse.
What a difference met our eyes. When we got out of the taxi, we were in a neighborhood that has been normal in European cities for a couple of centuries. Not elegant but well-kept. In front of us on the other side every other building was just as it had been at the end of World War II. A few partial walls and a pile of rubble.
Every now and then there were some buildings undamaged or restored. One of them was the Berlin Comic Opera which displayed playbills for coming performances.
We continued on to Unter Den Linden, before World War II one of the most fashionable streets in Berlin. Now it had some rather plain looking shops with nothing much in their windows. We continued on to the Brandenburg Gate but we were not allowed to get as close to The Wall as I had from the other side. We were stopped by a line of crowd control barricades. Nothing more was needed because there were plenty of soldiers around The Wall.
We returned to Friedrichstrasse down the other side of Unter Den Linden. At the intersection we found a popular restaurant, at least among East German soldiers. They seemed to be about one-third of the customers. We found a table and ordered our food. When it came it had a medium sized portion of meat with potatoes and vegetables filling almost all the space left on the plate. I thought the restaurant was trying to show how good life was under Communism. It was many months before I learned that serving style was typical of ordinary restaurants all over Germany.
We finally finished our meal and paid in West German marks, which pleased the management very much. When we got outside it was late and dark, and so we took a taxi back to Checkpoint Charlie.
We were met again by a soldier who gave us each a numbered ticket. We went into the wooden building on the right side of the street leading to The Wall. We handed our tickets and passports to the sergeant behind the single, long counter. He opened mine and saw ten East German marks. One was not permitted to export East German marks.
A long conversation ensued between my Swiss companions and the sergeant. With not 200 words of German vocabulary yet, I could only turn my head from speaker to speaker. Finally, the sergeant looked me directly in the eye and asked, "Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" I responded without hesitation, "Nein!" This brought out laughter from everyone.
Just as two officers came in the door, the sergeant pointed to a Red Cross box at the far end of the counter. The Swiss told me that I should deposit the ten East German marks in the box. I later dubbed it the "Officers' Coffee Fund".
Now all our passports disappeared through a window to a back room. After several minutes they were returned to us with yet another numbered ticket. We left the building and went to another overlapping opening in The Wall. We handed our tickets to the soldier at that opening, and walked through. Nobody in the white frame building on the other side paid any attention to us.
It is amazing to think that we walked into freedom by entering a city that was completely surrounded by The Wall.
Friday, May 30, 2014
Reading, writing, and coding?
Some parents, school districts, and companies are pushing for kids as young as seven to be involved in programming computers. See “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding”, New York Times, May 10, 2014. Part of the rationale is it is a “basic life skill, one that might someday lead to a great job or even instant riches.”
Or, “Computer science is big right now — in our country, the world,” a mother said. “If my kids aren’t exposed to things like that, they could miss out on potential opportunities and careers.”
Really?
Coding is a means to problem solving. One can code all kinds of things, but if one doesn’t use the “right” language, no amount of coding work will get one a job. The job market is littered with people who were whiz-bang coders but can’t get jobs because they don’t have the right “skill set”. Never mind that many programmers have learned and keep learning new languages, if they haven’t learned the language of the day yet they won’t be hired. See the writings of Norman Matloff.
Matloff, a college professor, is in an enviable position. He can learn a new computer language, write a book about it, and get people to buy the book; no personnel department checks on his “skill sets”. He wrote “The Art of R Programming”. R? What is that? I bet most readers never heard of R. I don’t have space for more description here, but it “is the world’s most popular language for developing statistical software”. According the publisher, No Starch Press, “Archeologists use it to track the spread of ancient civilizations.” Didn’t learn R in elementary school? According to the statements of some, there goes your career in archaeology!
Remember when learning BASIC was the rage. How many who learned BASIC got jobs using BASIC?
I posted the following comment to the New York Times article. Unfortunately, it was not accepted, possibly because there were so many more like it already.
“I have been involved with computers for over 50 years, and in some cases was considered a whiz. But I feel somewhat left behind. Not because my problem solving abilities have deteriorated, but because programming languages have become more obtuse.
“The real skill people need is problem solving, whether its why their computer doesn't behave as it did yesterday or why the answering machine message disappeared. I just replaced the answering machine message, now to figure out how to get my wife's iPad to once again access my iPhone hotspot through Bluetooth.
“I might do it, or I might not. I do know I recently figured out a problem that the Geek Squad couldn't. In short, it was about what program was active at the time of the problem.
“Oh, by the way, how well did the rush to learn BASIC a few years ago really work out.”
A better approach might be courses in problem solving in many different disciplines. How do you make a pleasant melody? How do you draw? How do you settle an argument? What is the true meaning of a set of “statistics”? What data is needed? Are we working on the right problem? How to read a map and plan a route?
“Corporations increasingly are looking for skill-sets. Thinkers need not apply. But is that what we want emerging from our schools? Easily disposable cogs?” A comment by RuthMarie to “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding?”
As an example of how narrow skill sets are, consider that energy traders in Europe are being laid off because of the move to alternative energy. They are considered so specialized that they aren’t being hired for other trading jobs. “Energy Trader Turned Caribbean Surfer Watches Wind for Waves”, Bloomberg, May 21, 2014. So, a trader in energy can’t learn to trade in steel or bonds or …?
What is happening in the Duluth Public Schools regarding computers and other skills? You can find the middle and high school course catalogs on the schools’ website (http://www.isd709.org).
Sixth graders take a one semester course on computers (see Business Education). The primary focus is on development of touch typing. Along the way they learn to produce “letters, flyers, memos, tables, outlines, spreadsheet[s],…and slide show presentations.”
To me, these are skills almost all of us need sometime in life. How many people do you know that still hunt and peck at a keyboard? How often have you watched a speaker get lost in his or her own PowerPoint presentation?
I had to wait until 11th grade to take typing; it was an elective for me, not a requirement. It has been one of the two most important classes I took in high school. The other was driving. I use these two skills more than anything else I learned in high school. Driving is no longer offered in many high schools. I did not find it in the Duluth “High School Course Book”.
What I did find is something for more interesting than the shop courses I took (wood working, metal working, and printing): Pre-engineering! Who sets print by hand anymore? All seventh graders are required to take it, and the focus will be on design and modeling. They will work both individually and in groups. The lone coder bent over a coding sheet is a myth; his or her work has to mesh with that of lots of other people.
Pre-engineering is part of the “Project Lead the Way” curriculum. It continues in high school with other courses. One of the objectives is to “develop students’ innovative, collaborative, cooperative, problem-solving skills.”
Now all we need is more employers who look for generalists rather than narrow specialists.
Mel learned coding at 20, programmed main frames until 44, programmed personal computers until 57, and is still debugging the coding of hotshots at 76.
Published in the Reader Weekly, 29 May 2014 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/05/29/3449_reading_writing_and_coding.
Or, “Computer science is big right now — in our country, the world,” a mother said. “If my kids aren’t exposed to things like that, they could miss out on potential opportunities and careers.”
Really?
Coding is a means to problem solving. One can code all kinds of things, but if one doesn’t use the “right” language, no amount of coding work will get one a job. The job market is littered with people who were whiz-bang coders but can’t get jobs because they don’t have the right “skill set”. Never mind that many programmers have learned and keep learning new languages, if they haven’t learned the language of the day yet they won’t be hired. See the writings of Norman Matloff.
Matloff, a college professor, is in an enviable position. He can learn a new computer language, write a book about it, and get people to buy the book; no personnel department checks on his “skill sets”. He wrote “The Art of R Programming”. R? What is that? I bet most readers never heard of R. I don’t have space for more description here, but it “is the world’s most popular language for developing statistical software”. According the publisher, No Starch Press, “Archeologists use it to track the spread of ancient civilizations.” Didn’t learn R in elementary school? According to the statements of some, there goes your career in archaeology!
Remember when learning BASIC was the rage. How many who learned BASIC got jobs using BASIC?
I posted the following comment to the New York Times article. Unfortunately, it was not accepted, possibly because there were so many more like it already.
“I have been involved with computers for over 50 years, and in some cases was considered a whiz. But I feel somewhat left behind. Not because my problem solving abilities have deteriorated, but because programming languages have become more obtuse.
“The real skill people need is problem solving, whether its why their computer doesn't behave as it did yesterday or why the answering machine message disappeared. I just replaced the answering machine message, now to figure out how to get my wife's iPad to once again access my iPhone hotspot through Bluetooth.
“I might do it, or I might not. I do know I recently figured out a problem that the Geek Squad couldn't. In short, it was about what program was active at the time of the problem.
“Oh, by the way, how well did the rush to learn BASIC a few years ago really work out.”
A better approach might be courses in problem solving in many different disciplines. How do you make a pleasant melody? How do you draw? How do you settle an argument? What is the true meaning of a set of “statistics”? What data is needed? Are we working on the right problem? How to read a map and plan a route?
“Corporations increasingly are looking for skill-sets. Thinkers need not apply. But is that what we want emerging from our schools? Easily disposable cogs?” A comment by RuthMarie to “Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding?”
As an example of how narrow skill sets are, consider that energy traders in Europe are being laid off because of the move to alternative energy. They are considered so specialized that they aren’t being hired for other trading jobs. “Energy Trader Turned Caribbean Surfer Watches Wind for Waves”, Bloomberg, May 21, 2014. So, a trader in energy can’t learn to trade in steel or bonds or …?
What is happening in the Duluth Public Schools regarding computers and other skills? You can find the middle and high school course catalogs on the schools’ website (http://www.isd709.org).
Sixth graders take a one semester course on computers (see Business Education). The primary focus is on development of touch typing. Along the way they learn to produce “letters, flyers, memos, tables, outlines, spreadsheet[s],…and slide show presentations.”
To me, these are skills almost all of us need sometime in life. How many people do you know that still hunt and peck at a keyboard? How often have you watched a speaker get lost in his or her own PowerPoint presentation?
I had to wait until 11th grade to take typing; it was an elective for me, not a requirement. It has been one of the two most important classes I took in high school. The other was driving. I use these two skills more than anything else I learned in high school. Driving is no longer offered in many high schools. I did not find it in the Duluth “High School Course Book”.
What I did find is something for more interesting than the shop courses I took (wood working, metal working, and printing): Pre-engineering! Who sets print by hand anymore? All seventh graders are required to take it, and the focus will be on design and modeling. They will work both individually and in groups. The lone coder bent over a coding sheet is a myth; his or her work has to mesh with that of lots of other people.
Pre-engineering is part of the “Project Lead the Way” curriculum. It continues in high school with other courses. One of the objectives is to “develop students’ innovative, collaborative, cooperative, problem-solving skills.”
Now all we need is more employers who look for generalists rather than narrow specialists.
Mel learned coding at 20, programmed main frames until 44, programmed personal computers until 57, and is still debugging the coding of hotshots at 76.
Published in the Reader Weekly, 29 May 2014 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/05/29/3449_reading_writing_and_coding.
Friday, May 09, 2014
Equal pay for equal work; will it work?
In “Minimum Wage, Inflation, and Personal Experience” (Reader Weekly 2014-03-27) I wrote that I didn’t think wages for many jobs had kept up with inflation. At least in Minnesota that seems to have been ameliorated a bit. Congress is still dithering about a minimum wage with the usual suspects filibustering it. Those members of Congress who think that Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” is determining wages should read his words about masters organizing to keep wages down.
Now the hot legislative topic is “equal pay for equal work”. And again, the masters will probably have more sway than the workers.
Just what does “equal pay” mean? One figure bandied about is that women earn 77 percent of what men do. But this is the aggregate pay of all women is 77 percent of the aggregate pay of all men. But this is reflection more about the jobs and hours worked by men and women. No law is going to change this.
On the other hand, there have been many cases of women starting the same job as men with the same relevant skills but getting less pay, just because they were women.
Equal pay for equal work is a great idea if all other things are equal. If all other things were equal, we would be robots or bees in a hive. "Brave New World" anyone?
First what is equal work?
Suppose John and Mary start on the same day with the same pay at a fast-food restaurant. John is somber, takes orders and money with a minimum number of words, and never smiles. Mary is outgoing, shows a bit of interest in every customer, and always has a smile. John takes more orders per day than Mary. Mary on the other hand takes bigger orders and gets people to come back often. Should they get the same raise whenever that may happen?
If Dale and Marty graduate from the same school taking the same courses and getting the same grades, then they probably should be offered the same starting salary for doing the same thing.
After a year the company hires Lee and Jan from the same school. They took the same courses and got the same grades as Dale and Marty did. They are placed in jobs doing the same thing as Dale and Marty.
After a year on the job, Dale and Marty expect an annual raise because of their increased experience. Should Lee and Jan get the same pay as Dale and Marty? If the pay of all four were equal, the first two might consider going to another company where they will get more pay.
Now suppose after five years Dale takes a year off to have a baby. When she returns should she get the same pay as Marty or the same pay as Lee and Jan?
Suppose after another couple of years Jan takes a year off to go skiing all over the world. When he returns should he get the same pay as Dale and Lee?
Suppose after a few more years Dale has a very good year. She solves some really tough problems and implements some great innovations. She gets a raise that gives her a higher salary than Marty. The next year she performs about the same as Marty. When annual raises are given, should she get none thus once again getting the same pay as Marty? Oops! There goes another employee to the competition.
After a couple of more years Lee takes some leadership on a project. As a reward management gives her a supervisory position which raises her pay to greater than that of Dale. But she spends only half of her time on supervisory tasks. The rest of the time she is doing exactly the same work as the other three. Should her pay go up and down with what she is doing?
When I worked some late hours at Univac, we defined a good manager as the person who operates the copier when things get busy late at night. That is, the manager is not just reading a summary of the work the next morning, but providing moral support with presence. Should the manager get less pay for the time spent observing and doing menial tasks?
Consider the varied tasks of a grocery store manager. The manager obviously hires new people, sees that they are properly trained, and evaluates their performance. The manager has to oversee the accounting of receipts and bills, ordering of groceries, and the stocking of shelves. The manager might also bag groceries, check out customers, stock some shelves, and even sweep the floor when everybody else is busy with customers. Should the manager track his or her time so that he or she gets equal pay for equal work?
Fair pay takes more thought than a simple slogan. To achieve fairer pay for more people, you have to do two things.
Join a union. Unions have a long history starting with the American Revolution. Remember “United we stand, divided we fall.” “We, the people,… to form a more perfect union…”
Always vote. Don’t be a stay-at-home who lets the “wrong” side win. Remember “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Now the hot legislative topic is “equal pay for equal work”. And again, the masters will probably have more sway than the workers.
Just what does “equal pay” mean? One figure bandied about is that women earn 77 percent of what men do. But this is the aggregate pay of all women is 77 percent of the aggregate pay of all men. But this is reflection more about the jobs and hours worked by men and women. No law is going to change this.
On the other hand, there have been many cases of women starting the same job as men with the same relevant skills but getting less pay, just because they were women.
Equal pay for equal work is a great idea if all other things are equal. If all other things were equal, we would be robots or bees in a hive. "Brave New World" anyone?
First what is equal work?
Suppose John and Mary start on the same day with the same pay at a fast-food restaurant. John is somber, takes orders and money with a minimum number of words, and never smiles. Mary is outgoing, shows a bit of interest in every customer, and always has a smile. John takes more orders per day than Mary. Mary on the other hand takes bigger orders and gets people to come back often. Should they get the same raise whenever that may happen?
If Dale and Marty graduate from the same school taking the same courses and getting the same grades, then they probably should be offered the same starting salary for doing the same thing.
After a year the company hires Lee and Jan from the same school. They took the same courses and got the same grades as Dale and Marty did. They are placed in jobs doing the same thing as Dale and Marty.
After a year on the job, Dale and Marty expect an annual raise because of their increased experience. Should Lee and Jan get the same pay as Dale and Marty? If the pay of all four were equal, the first two might consider going to another company where they will get more pay.
Now suppose after five years Dale takes a year off to have a baby. When she returns should she get the same pay as Marty or the same pay as Lee and Jan?
Suppose after another couple of years Jan takes a year off to go skiing all over the world. When he returns should he get the same pay as Dale and Lee?
Suppose after a few more years Dale has a very good year. She solves some really tough problems and implements some great innovations. She gets a raise that gives her a higher salary than Marty. The next year she performs about the same as Marty. When annual raises are given, should she get none thus once again getting the same pay as Marty? Oops! There goes another employee to the competition.
After a couple of more years Lee takes some leadership on a project. As a reward management gives her a supervisory position which raises her pay to greater than that of Dale. But she spends only half of her time on supervisory tasks. The rest of the time she is doing exactly the same work as the other three. Should her pay go up and down with what she is doing?
When I worked some late hours at Univac, we defined a good manager as the person who operates the copier when things get busy late at night. That is, the manager is not just reading a summary of the work the next morning, but providing moral support with presence. Should the manager get less pay for the time spent observing and doing menial tasks?
Consider the varied tasks of a grocery store manager. The manager obviously hires new people, sees that they are properly trained, and evaluates their performance. The manager has to oversee the accounting of receipts and bills, ordering of groceries, and the stocking of shelves. The manager might also bag groceries, check out customers, stock some shelves, and even sweep the floor when everybody else is busy with customers. Should the manager track his or her time so that he or she gets equal pay for equal work?
Fair pay takes more thought than a simple slogan. To achieve fairer pay for more people, you have to do two things.
Join a union. Unions have a long history starting with the American Revolution. Remember “United we stand, divided we fall.” “We, the people,… to form a more perfect union…”
Always vote. Don’t be a stay-at-home who lets the “wrong” side win. Remember “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Minimum wage, inflation, and personal experience
My first wage job that I remember was at Saywell Drug in Cleveland, Ohio. I probably started in the summer of 1951 after I quit my paper route. I started at fifty cents an hour. This was a low-skill entry job. I was a soda jerk, stocker, and small-item cashier.
Using the US Inflation Calculator, anything I bought for fifty cents would now cost $4.50.
Note: these figures were requested on March 16, 2014. A week later, many were a few cents higher.
I had a couple other jobs in that range. Then in late fall 1954 I started at Kroger’s as a stock clerk and bagger. My starting union-negotiated salary was $1.05. A dinner at a small diner then would cost $9.13 now.
When I flunked out of Case Institute of Technology in January 1958, I was earning $1.75 at the same Kroger’s store. Anything I bought with an hour’s wage then would cost $14.16 now. I was also a relief cashier on weekends.
No Kroger store had any full-time openings then. I eventually was hired as “third man” at a new Pic’n’Pay. Third man was sort of meaningless. I was after the assistant manager in groceries only. Produce and meat were separately run departments under the manager. I was only a glorified stocker and bagger. They wouldn’t let me be a cashier because I wasn’t bonded. They also did their best to make sure I never worked close to 40 hours per week. They would have to give me more benefits. My wage, in a union store? $1.54! I had to get the help of a union business agent I knew to get my $1.75. That $1.54 is now $12.46. Don’t you think a fast-food manager has a harder job with more responsibilities than a grocery clerk?
When I went to Ohio Wesleyan in the fall of 1958, I worked my first year at a local Kroger store. My wage was $1.54!!! I made the mistake of not putting that in writing to the union steward. He was sort of in the pocket of the manager and never really acted on my behalf. When I called the union office in Columbus they pointed out that I had waited too long without filing a written claim.
In June 1960 we were married and I started graduate school back at Case. I also had a graduate assistantship that paid $75 per week. Our upstairs apartment cost $65 per month and $75 when we moved downstairs. That $75 per week would be $592.69 in 2014 dollars. If I supposedly worked 20 hours per week, that would be almost $30/hour. I checked current graduate assistant salaries; the average is about $20,000/year or about $384/week. I was treated like a king! I was allowed nine credits per semester, I had use of the gym and library, and I had free parking in the lower lot.
I didn’t go on to a PhD program and opted for a full time job. My interviews were with Sikorsky in Framingham MA, GE in Syracuse NY, and Univac in St. Paul. I don’t remember the exact offers from each, but it was something like $8,400, $7,900, and $8,100. All things considered, I took the job nearest the Boundary Waters starting on Feb 3, 1963. The things I could buy then with that money would cost $61,918.94 today. Ah, a bright spot! A computer software engineer with a master’s degree can start around $85,500! But, the complexity of the work is far, far greater than when I started on mainframes that were giant toys compared to my iPhone. No wonder the computer industry wants to increase the number of H-1B visas for programmers.
When personal computers came along I saw no future in mainframes and started my own one-person company. I never implemented my grand visions and after over ten years tried getting a computer job. Ha! The checklist for “skills” was far longer than just a Masters in Mathematics. I eventually wound up driving a school bus in the Twin Cities and then moved up to transit buses, aka city bus. I started at $8.50/hour in 1995 and wound up with over $12/hour in 1999. These translate into 2014 dollars as $13.05 and $18.42 or $27,144 and $38,314 per year. According to salary.com, twenty-five percent of school bus drivers in Duluth earn over $35,623 per year. I assume that those have to get a lot of charter work.
My last job was as a ski instructor. I think my final pay in 2007 was around $8.00 per hour. That would be $9.03 in 2014 dollars. But the work was spotty depending on the weather and the people who show up. I don’t think I ever got more than 30 hours per week. I don’t know what the current pay is, but I did get nominally priced season passes for my wife and myself, a nifty jacket at a good price, and discounts at Ski Hut.
Other than the ski instructor, which often is a fun job, a computer programmer, which takes far more specialized learning than I had, and some school bus drivers, I think too many workers are worse off than I was way back then.
I think Adam Smith is being shown right again, it is lawful for the masters to organize to keep wages down, but it unlawful for the workers to organize to raise wages.
- Mel
You can find more of my thoughts at
http://magree.blogspot.com
Using the US Inflation Calculator, anything I bought for fifty cents would now cost $4.50.
Note: these figures were requested on March 16, 2014. A week later, many were a few cents higher.
I had a couple other jobs in that range. Then in late fall 1954 I started at Kroger’s as a stock clerk and bagger. My starting union-negotiated salary was $1.05. A dinner at a small diner then would cost $9.13 now.
When I flunked out of Case Institute of Technology in January 1958, I was earning $1.75 at the same Kroger’s store. Anything I bought with an hour’s wage then would cost $14.16 now. I was also a relief cashier on weekends.
No Kroger store had any full-time openings then. I eventually was hired as “third man” at a new Pic’n’Pay. Third man was sort of meaningless. I was after the assistant manager in groceries only. Produce and meat were separately run departments under the manager. I was only a glorified stocker and bagger. They wouldn’t let me be a cashier because I wasn’t bonded. They also did their best to make sure I never worked close to 40 hours per week. They would have to give me more benefits. My wage, in a union store? $1.54! I had to get the help of a union business agent I knew to get my $1.75. That $1.54 is now $12.46. Don’t you think a fast-food manager has a harder job with more responsibilities than a grocery clerk?
When I went to Ohio Wesleyan in the fall of 1958, I worked my first year at a local Kroger store. My wage was $1.54!!! I made the mistake of not putting that in writing to the union steward. He was sort of in the pocket of the manager and never really acted on my behalf. When I called the union office in Columbus they pointed out that I had waited too long without filing a written claim.
In June 1960 we were married and I started graduate school back at Case. I also had a graduate assistantship that paid $75 per week. Our upstairs apartment cost $65 per month and $75 when we moved downstairs. That $75 per week would be $592.69 in 2014 dollars. If I supposedly worked 20 hours per week, that would be almost $30/hour. I checked current graduate assistant salaries; the average is about $20,000/year or about $384/week. I was treated like a king! I was allowed nine credits per semester, I had use of the gym and library, and I had free parking in the lower lot.
I didn’t go on to a PhD program and opted for a full time job. My interviews were with Sikorsky in Framingham MA, GE in Syracuse NY, and Univac in St. Paul. I don’t remember the exact offers from each, but it was something like $8,400, $7,900, and $8,100. All things considered, I took the job nearest the Boundary Waters starting on Feb 3, 1963. The things I could buy then with that money would cost $61,918.94 today. Ah, a bright spot! A computer software engineer with a master’s degree can start around $85,500! But, the complexity of the work is far, far greater than when I started on mainframes that were giant toys compared to my iPhone. No wonder the computer industry wants to increase the number of H-1B visas for programmers.
When personal computers came along I saw no future in mainframes and started my own one-person company. I never implemented my grand visions and after over ten years tried getting a computer job. Ha! The checklist for “skills” was far longer than just a Masters in Mathematics. I eventually wound up driving a school bus in the Twin Cities and then moved up to transit buses, aka city bus. I started at $8.50/hour in 1995 and wound up with over $12/hour in 1999. These translate into 2014 dollars as $13.05 and $18.42 or $27,144 and $38,314 per year. According to salary.com, twenty-five percent of school bus drivers in Duluth earn over $35,623 per year. I assume that those have to get a lot of charter work.
My last job was as a ski instructor. I think my final pay in 2007 was around $8.00 per hour. That would be $9.03 in 2014 dollars. But the work was spotty depending on the weather and the people who show up. I don’t think I ever got more than 30 hours per week. I don’t know what the current pay is, but I did get nominally priced season passes for my wife and myself, a nifty jacket at a good price, and discounts at Ski Hut.
Other than the ski instructor, which often is a fun job, a computer programmer, which takes far more specialized learning than I had, and some school bus drivers, I think too many workers are worse off than I was way back then.
I think Adam Smith is being shown right again, it is lawful for the masters to organize to keep wages down, but it unlawful for the workers to organize to raise wages.
- Mel
You can find more of my thoughts at
http://magree.blogspot.com
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Malaysia Airlines and problem solving
It is very hard to imagine the anguish of the relatives of those on the missing Malaysia Airlines flight, but we should give some slack to those involved in trying to determine what happened to the flight.
I’ve been involved in several computer situations in which crucial information was not available at the outset. It was only when the right question was asked or the right information was volunteered did a solution become apparent. All of these situations were much simpler than the tasks facing the Malaysian and other investigators.
My first memorable lacking-information problem was in Sweden. One customer’s mainframe kept crashing. We looked at memory dumps, we asked questions, we had meetings, nothing became obvious. It was only when I had a copy of a program that often seemed to be present when the computer crashed that I was able to take some more deductive steps. The customer had not upgraded their software from a version that had a memory violation. That program crashed at other sites with the same software. Thus, the memory protection of the crashing computer was faulty. The technicians fixed the memory protection problem, the subject program crashed, and the customer upgraded the software.
My latest memorable lacking-information problem was in Duluth last fall. The keyboard on my MacBook Pro locked up. None of the proposed solutions in the user community seemed to last for long. I took my computer to the Geek Squad. They kept it for a few days and found nothing wrong. I brought it home and the keyboard locked up again. After a bit of head scratching, I realized that the tech shut down all my applications before testing it. Then I figured out that MicroSoft’s Outlook was the problem. I reorganized Outlook’s database and the problem went away.
I hope those investigating the Malaysian Airlines crash find that crucial missing clue soon, but the ocean in that area is bigger than one laptop or one 1970s mainframe.
I’ve been involved in several computer situations in which crucial information was not available at the outset. It was only when the right question was asked or the right information was volunteered did a solution become apparent. All of these situations were much simpler than the tasks facing the Malaysian and other investigators.
My first memorable lacking-information problem was in Sweden. One customer’s mainframe kept crashing. We looked at memory dumps, we asked questions, we had meetings, nothing became obvious. It was only when I had a copy of a program that often seemed to be present when the computer crashed that I was able to take some more deductive steps. The customer had not upgraded their software from a version that had a memory violation. That program crashed at other sites with the same software. Thus, the memory protection of the crashing computer was faulty. The technicians fixed the memory protection problem, the subject program crashed, and the customer upgraded the software.
My latest memorable lacking-information problem was in Duluth last fall. The keyboard on my MacBook Pro locked up. None of the proposed solutions in the user community seemed to last for long. I took my computer to the Geek Squad. They kept it for a few days and found nothing wrong. I brought it home and the keyboard locked up again. After a bit of head scratching, I realized that the tech shut down all my applications before testing it. Then I figured out that MicroSoft’s Outlook was the problem. I reorganized Outlook’s database and the problem went away.
I hope those investigating the Malaysian Airlines crash find that crucial missing clue soon, but the ocean in that area is bigger than one laptop or one 1970s mainframe.
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Immigration: in an ideal world…
In an ideal world, anybody should be able to move anywhere they can find a place to live and work.
I was fortunate to live in a time when I was welcome anywhere as a Univac employee. I requested a transfer to Europe and wound up in Switzerland and then Italy. I requested a transfer from Italy to Sweden and was given it. From both places I worked in or traveled to almost all of the countries of Western Europe.
Because I was "from Roseville", the place where most of the 1100 series of Univac computers originated, I was perceived as an "expert", even when local people could solve many problems better than I could.
I had friends ask me to transfer to South Africa or Iran, both of which I declined.
I really think that anybody anywhere should have the mobility that I have had all my life. I grew up and was educated in Ohio. But I chose to work in Minnesota. From Minnesota I spent six years in Europe. Then I spent three years in SE Pennsylvania. Then I was able to transfer back to Minnesota. After 22 years in Plymouth MN, my wife was able to get a transfer to Duluth.
I think everyone should have such chances for the changes we had.
But... It is not an ideal world. Many of those who claim to want immigration reform don't want reform for its own sake, but "reform" to exclude those they don't like and “reform” to have access to those who will reduce their costs.
The people that "immigration reform" proponents want are immigrants who are highly-skilled. If you think about it and look behind the curtain, what they really want is lower-paid workers and is having somebody else pay for the education of these "highly-skilled" workers.
These potential immigrants were educated with the help of taxes in other countries. When "immigration reform" proponents entice these people to the U.S., they are depriving those countries of the benefits of their investments. Those investments could pay off for a better political and economic culture in those countries. As the saying goes, "Those with get up and go, go!"
The irony is that who want more "skilled" immigrants are destabilizing many of the countries where they immigrants come from. Rather than paying taxes for a bloated military that goes more places than it should, these people should be willing to pay for taxes to give the children in the United States a high-quality education.
I was fortunate to live in a time when I was welcome anywhere as a Univac employee. I requested a transfer to Europe and wound up in Switzerland and then Italy. I requested a transfer from Italy to Sweden and was given it. From both places I worked in or traveled to almost all of the countries of Western Europe.
Because I was "from Roseville", the place where most of the 1100 series of Univac computers originated, I was perceived as an "expert", even when local people could solve many problems better than I could.
I had friends ask me to transfer to South Africa or Iran, both of which I declined.
I really think that anybody anywhere should have the mobility that I have had all my life. I grew up and was educated in Ohio. But I chose to work in Minnesota. From Minnesota I spent six years in Europe. Then I spent three years in SE Pennsylvania. Then I was able to transfer back to Minnesota. After 22 years in Plymouth MN, my wife was able to get a transfer to Duluth.
I think everyone should have such chances for the changes we had.
But... It is not an ideal world. Many of those who claim to want immigration reform don't want reform for its own sake, but "reform" to exclude those they don't like and “reform” to have access to those who will reduce their costs.
The people that "immigration reform" proponents want are immigrants who are highly-skilled. If you think about it and look behind the curtain, what they really want is lower-paid workers and is having somebody else pay for the education of these "highly-skilled" workers.
These potential immigrants were educated with the help of taxes in other countries. When "immigration reform" proponents entice these people to the U.S., they are depriving those countries of the benefits of their investments. Those investments could pay off for a better political and economic culture in those countries. As the saying goes, "Those with get up and go, go!"
The irony is that who want more "skilled" immigrants are destabilizing many of the countries where they immigrants come from. Rather than paying taxes for a bloated military that goes more places than it should, these people should be willing to pay for taxes to give the children in the United States a high-quality education.
Monday, July 01, 2013
The learned wanted, learners need not apply
Back in the bad old days before the Internet was ubiquitous, I was the sysop of the Genealogy Roundtable on GENIE (General Electric Network for Information Exchange). It had a very primitive typed command interface that many users had difficulty mastering.
One user either couldn't print or couldn't save a file from the Genealogy Roundtable. My being in the Twin Cities and he being in Cleveland made it very difficult for me to know exactly what was on his screen. I went to Cleveland for personal reasons and as a side trip, went to his house. I forget what terms were on his screen, but he had a completely different idea what those terms meant than I did. Once I explained them to him, he was able to do what he wanted.
During this same period, I wrote a genealogy program called Family Events. One user complained that certain printed charts had lines that shouldn't be there. I couldn't visualize or understand his problem because my printed charts looked OK. It wasn't until we were both at the same genealogy conference that I understood the problem. He was using a non-Apple printer and I was using an Apple printer. As a shortcut I had given unneeded lines a negative length. The Apple printer didn't print these lines; the non-Apple printer printed them as long extraneous lines. I think once back home I recoded the problem in about an hour.
It's sort of like the urban legend of the kid who solves the problem of the truck jammed under a bridge: let some air out of the tires.
Once I wrote the above paragraph I thought of a related subject that I wanted to write about - the "shortage" of "high-tech" workers. From this thought, I changed the title of this entry from "More on problem solving" to "The learned wanted, learners need not apply". This "shortage" has been going on for decades.
The basic problem is that too many employers want somebody who can begin working on complex problems on day one. Once those problems are solved, you may be replaced by someone who can begin working on the new problems on day one.
I've never had a job that I did not require some training after I was hired – from grocery clerk to bus driver to main-frame computer programmer. My very first computer job I had to teach myself the basics of programming the company's computer. For my nearly 20-year job with Univac it was constant change and new things to learn. I didn't know FORTRAN, but I was set to finding and correcting errors in the compiler and its library. In fact, our supervisor, John Macgowan, never did learn how to write a FORTRAN program, but he was a real whiz at finding and correcting errors in the compiler. I won't bore you with the details, but it was nearly 20 years of constant learning and change. I burned out when microcomputers came on the scene and I didn't feel like Univac was keeping up. So, I started my own company and learned how to program several microcomputers without the benefit of special training.
What I didn't learn was how to run a business. Then I learned that businesses don't want new employees who will learn. That is, learners need not apply, we want the learned.
See "So-called high tech shortage".
One user either couldn't print or couldn't save a file from the Genealogy Roundtable. My being in the Twin Cities and he being in Cleveland made it very difficult for me to know exactly what was on his screen. I went to Cleveland for personal reasons and as a side trip, went to his house. I forget what terms were on his screen, but he had a completely different idea what those terms meant than I did. Once I explained them to him, he was able to do what he wanted.
During this same period, I wrote a genealogy program called Family Events. One user complained that certain printed charts had lines that shouldn't be there. I couldn't visualize or understand his problem because my printed charts looked OK. It wasn't until we were both at the same genealogy conference that I understood the problem. He was using a non-Apple printer and I was using an Apple printer. As a shortcut I had given unneeded lines a negative length. The Apple printer didn't print these lines; the non-Apple printer printed them as long extraneous lines. I think once back home I recoded the problem in about an hour.
It's sort of like the urban legend of the kid who solves the problem of the truck jammed under a bridge: let some air out of the tires.
Once I wrote the above paragraph I thought of a related subject that I wanted to write about - the "shortage" of "high-tech" workers. From this thought, I changed the title of this entry from "More on problem solving" to "The learned wanted, learners need not apply". This "shortage" has been going on for decades.
The basic problem is that too many employers want somebody who can begin working on complex problems on day one. Once those problems are solved, you may be replaced by someone who can begin working on the new problems on day one.
I've never had a job that I did not require some training after I was hired – from grocery clerk to bus driver to main-frame computer programmer. My very first computer job I had to teach myself the basics of programming the company's computer. For my nearly 20-year job with Univac it was constant change and new things to learn. I didn't know FORTRAN, but I was set to finding and correcting errors in the compiler and its library. In fact, our supervisor, John Macgowan, never did learn how to write a FORTRAN program, but he was a real whiz at finding and correcting errors in the compiler. I won't bore you with the details, but it was nearly 20 years of constant learning and change. I burned out when microcomputers came on the scene and I didn't feel like Univac was keeping up. So, I started my own company and learned how to program several microcomputers without the benefit of special training.
What I didn't learn was how to run a business. Then I learned that businesses don't want new employees who will learn. That is, learners need not apply, we want the learned.
See "So-called high tech shortage".
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Computers: How the times change!
Twenty-eight years ago last month, I left Univac to form my own software company based on the new microcomputers. Partly I felt Univac was stuck in old paradigms of big boxes, and partly I wasn't doing very well myself on creating new ideas.
A few years after that, Burroughs bought Univac and called the new company Unisys. Unisys continued making mainframes for a few years and slowly moved to being more of a consulting company.
Before that really happened, I moved to using Macs only and haven't stopped since.
Now, Unisys is now considered a "technology services specialist", and some Motley Fools think that Apple and Unisys may reach some agreement to help Apple seek enterprise and government contracts.
Also, once companies started adopting personal computers, the "gold standard" became PCs and Microsoft. The Mac was a toy and not a business computer. Now "Apple's Tim Cook [acting CEO] says the iPad is being deployed or piloted in 80% of the largest corporations today, and 88 of the Fortune 100 companies are testing or using the iPhone."
See "3 Stocks Ready to Roar", Motley Fool
And older readers may remember all the predictions of Apple's demise in the 80s and 90s. I read somewhere that Apple now has more market value than Microsoft.
And as I've said many times before, we ain't seen nothing yet in technology.
A few years after that, Burroughs bought Univac and called the new company Unisys. Unisys continued making mainframes for a few years and slowly moved to being more of a consulting company.
Before that really happened, I moved to using Macs only and haven't stopped since.
Now, Unisys is now considered a "technology services specialist", and some Motley Fools think that Apple and Unisys may reach some agreement to help Apple seek enterprise and government contracts.
Also, once companies started adopting personal computers, the "gold standard" became PCs and Microsoft. The Mac was a toy and not a business computer. Now "Apple's Tim Cook [acting CEO] says the iPad is being deployed or piloted in 80% of the largest corporations today, and 88 of the Fortune 100 companies are testing or using the iPhone."
See "3 Stocks Ready to Roar", Motley Fool
And older readers may remember all the predictions of Apple's demise in the 80s and 90s. I read somewhere that Apple now has more market value than Microsoft.
And as I've said many times before, we ain't seen nothing yet in technology.
Sunday, January 09, 2011
Are fewer manufacturing jobs always a bad thing?
Dick Palmer picked a poor example about the decline of manufacturing when he mentioned Rochester, New York, home of Eastman Kodak. How many rolls of film has he been buying recently? Few people use film anymore; most cameras are now digital and can take many more pictures than film cameras. In fact, it is difficult to even sell a film camera on eBay. "State exports may be up but nation still hurting", Dick Palmer, Duluth Budgeteer, 2011-01-06.
Technological changes have led to many more job changes, but I'll come back to these in a bit.
Another contributor to job changes for over two hundred years has been low cost manufacturing, whether by low-cost labor or high productivity. Weavers in England and India were put out of business by power looms in England. Instead of high-skilled weavers, children could and did operate the machines.
New Englanders stole some of the designs and set looms up in Massachusetts. They hired hundreds of young women to operate the machines. Feeling exploited, workers organized into unions to push for more rewards for their labor.
Then the textile mills lowered their costs by moving to the South where unions were not tolerated. Even then, people found opportunity for better paying jobs and to attract labor, the companies had to raise wages.
Then shipping became cheaper, and textile companies found even lower cost labor in Asia and Central America. And as labor becomes more expensive in those countries, the companies move on to other countries.
Higher productivity means fewer people are needed to manufacture the same amount of goods. Higher productivity comes from more and more mechanization and now computerization. Even in the 80s, Ford could produce cars for less than GM because it used more mechanization and fewer workers. Fewer highly skilled machinists are needed thanks to numerically-controlled machine tools. Write a little program to make the cuts, put the code into the machine, and have a cup of coffee.
My father was a well-regarded dental prosthetic technician specializing in crowns. I have a folder of letters from dentists praising his work. When I got a crown last year, the dentist waved a wand over my teeth, an image appeared on the computer screen, he rotated the image and made some adjustments, he clicked OK, and a machine in the basement proceeded to make the crown. We chatted awhile, and then he went downstairs to get the crown. He put it in my mouth, pulled it out, made some adjustments with his drill, put it back in again, had me grind my teeth, and so on. In two hours, I had a new crown in my mouth, not a temporary to be replaced in three weeks and several visits later.
What is manufactured has changed dramatically in the last few decades.
When I worked at Univac programming mainframes mainframes in the 1960s, dozens of people would thread wires through little iron donuts for the main memory. When I started, a large memory had less than 400,000 characters, each character represented by six donuts. When I left nearly twenty years later, a large memory had about six million characters on an array of integrated circuits on several sets of large circuit boards. Now I carry eight billion characters of memory in my shirt pocket.
The miles of film that Eastman Kodak spewed out and put in little boxes have been replaced by memory cards the size of the end of one of those boxes. On a 1991 trip to Japan I shot nine rolls of film; my cost was over one hundred dollars for film and processing. On a 2007 trip to Japan I shot almost forty percent more pictures on a single memory card that cost less than fifty dollars, and I used the card over and over again for many hundreds of pictures more. My cost of processing was my time to download the pictures to my computer.
What is considered manufacturing has changed even more dramatically. We don't consider software on a disk or downloaded from a website as a manufactured product, but it is. It's just that the balance between design and physical rendering has moved dramatically to the design side. I haven't checked, but I assume that Apple Computer has more employees today than IBM and the "Seven Dwarves" of mainframes had thirty years ago. Apple definitely has more customers spending a lot more money than the mainframe manufacturers did.
The problem is not the decline of an economic sector, but the rate of change of the economy. I think few people, whether individuals or people in government, business, and education, have sufficient understanding of the change. Too many people are judging tomorrow by what happened a decade ago. And too many people are assuming that solutions that seemed to work twenty years ago are going to work today.
Abraham Lincoln said it 165 years ago, "As our case is new, so must we think anew."
To his credit, Dick Palmer has started to think anew. He does end his column with and elaboration on "The secret ingredient to success today is education…"
Technological changes have led to many more job changes, but I'll come back to these in a bit.
Another contributor to job changes for over two hundred years has been low cost manufacturing, whether by low-cost labor or high productivity. Weavers in England and India were put out of business by power looms in England. Instead of high-skilled weavers, children could and did operate the machines.
New Englanders stole some of the designs and set looms up in Massachusetts. They hired hundreds of young women to operate the machines. Feeling exploited, workers organized into unions to push for more rewards for their labor.
Then the textile mills lowered their costs by moving to the South where unions were not tolerated. Even then, people found opportunity for better paying jobs and to attract labor, the companies had to raise wages.
Then shipping became cheaper, and textile companies found even lower cost labor in Asia and Central America. And as labor becomes more expensive in those countries, the companies move on to other countries.
Higher productivity means fewer people are needed to manufacture the same amount of goods. Higher productivity comes from more and more mechanization and now computerization. Even in the 80s, Ford could produce cars for less than GM because it used more mechanization and fewer workers. Fewer highly skilled machinists are needed thanks to numerically-controlled machine tools. Write a little program to make the cuts, put the code into the machine, and have a cup of coffee.
My father was a well-regarded dental prosthetic technician specializing in crowns. I have a folder of letters from dentists praising his work. When I got a crown last year, the dentist waved a wand over my teeth, an image appeared on the computer screen, he rotated the image and made some adjustments, he clicked OK, and a machine in the basement proceeded to make the crown. We chatted awhile, and then he went downstairs to get the crown. He put it in my mouth, pulled it out, made some adjustments with his drill, put it back in again, had me grind my teeth, and so on. In two hours, I had a new crown in my mouth, not a temporary to be replaced in three weeks and several visits later.
What is manufactured has changed dramatically in the last few decades.
When I worked at Univac programming mainframes mainframes in the 1960s, dozens of people would thread wires through little iron donuts for the main memory. When I started, a large memory had less than 400,000 characters, each character represented by six donuts. When I left nearly twenty years later, a large memory had about six million characters on an array of integrated circuits on several sets of large circuit boards. Now I carry eight billion characters of memory in my shirt pocket.
The miles of film that Eastman Kodak spewed out and put in little boxes have been replaced by memory cards the size of the end of one of those boxes. On a 1991 trip to Japan I shot nine rolls of film; my cost was over one hundred dollars for film and processing. On a 2007 trip to Japan I shot almost forty percent more pictures on a single memory card that cost less than fifty dollars, and I used the card over and over again for many hundreds of pictures more. My cost of processing was my time to download the pictures to my computer.
What is considered manufacturing has changed even more dramatically. We don't consider software on a disk or downloaded from a website as a manufactured product, but it is. It's just that the balance between design and physical rendering has moved dramatically to the design side. I haven't checked, but I assume that Apple Computer has more employees today than IBM and the "Seven Dwarves" of mainframes had thirty years ago. Apple definitely has more customers spending a lot more money than the mainframe manufacturers did.
The problem is not the decline of an economic sector, but the rate of change of the economy. I think few people, whether individuals or people in government, business, and education, have sufficient understanding of the change. Too many people are judging tomorrow by what happened a decade ago. And too many people are assuming that solutions that seemed to work twenty years ago are going to work today.
Abraham Lincoln said it 165 years ago, "As our case is new, so must we think anew."
To his credit, Dick Palmer has started to think anew. He does end his column with and elaboration on "The secret ingredient to success today is education…"
Thursday, December 30, 2010
1968 Letter from Europe
My mother-in-law kept many of our letters from Europe in a scrapbook. After she died three years ago, my wife kept the scrapbooks. This week she has been rereading our old letters. She pointed out to me one I wrote from Basel 29/30 October 1968.
I was in Basel, Switzerland to prepare a demo for a potential Univac customer. Univac didn't have one of its own computers in Europe yet, and so we borrowed or bought time on customer computers. For this demo I was working with an 1108 at Sandoz in Basel. Sandoz is now called Novartis.
I don't remember much of the trip except I was introduced to raclettes, cheese melted on a board in front of a fire. The German I was working with took me to a restaurant near the bahnhof that specialized in raclettes. I've had and have made raclettes since then, but none have compared to those at that Swiss restaurant.
And I don't remember if we made the sale for which we did the demo.
Letter to my in-laws, Jean and Fred Smith, 29/30 October 1968
Dear Folks,
I am back in Basel on a four week assignment and back to learning German, but tomorrow or Thursday I go back to Rome for the rest of the year, I hope. Not quite, we hope to take a two week ski vacation at Christmas time, but in Switzerland. I tried calling three hotels in Davos yesterday, and found out you have to make your reservations in the spring or in January when you leave, so we will probably spend this year in Italy.
All this travel is not as exciting as it may seem. As I generally work nights and have to see people during the day it often becomes an eat-sleep-work cycle. Right now I am writing this while waiting to get on the machine [a Univac 1108 computer]. Hah, just as I finished the last sentence, the machine became free. Now I am baby-sitting the machine at the console.
The most interesting and frustrating experience of being in Europe is the language problem. My minimal French, German and Italian gets me throughout quite a variety of situations, but general conversation is a rare and difficult thing. The missing ingredients are vocabulary and listening ability. I really think that in the U. S. not enough emphasis is put on foreign language ability and they are are treated as an academic subject. Throughout most of the world to much importance is given to grammar and not enough to vocabulary. I always cringe when a grammar author boasts that he only introduces 20 words per lesson. I have found, especially in Italian, that one can use a grammarian's nightmare of a sentence but still convey the thought if one has sufficient words. Conversely with a bit of vocabulary and little grammar one can at least get the sense of newspaper stories. To me the best method would be to have classes using conversation and reading newspapers and magazines. Tests would be on the things read just as they might be in English lit or History. (Most Europeans who graduate from high school can speak 2 foreign languages, of course not all finish, but still.)
Sincerely,
Mel
I was in Basel, Switzerland to prepare a demo for a potential Univac customer. Univac didn't have one of its own computers in Europe yet, and so we borrowed or bought time on customer computers. For this demo I was working with an 1108 at Sandoz in Basel. Sandoz is now called Novartis.
I don't remember much of the trip except I was introduced to raclettes, cheese melted on a board in front of a fire. The German I was working with took me to a restaurant near the bahnhof that specialized in raclettes. I've had and have made raclettes since then, but none have compared to those at that Swiss restaurant.
And I don't remember if we made the sale for which we did the demo.
Letter to my in-laws, Jean and Fred Smith, 29/30 October 1968
Dear Folks,
I am back in Basel on a four week assignment and back to learning German, but tomorrow or Thursday I go back to Rome for the rest of the year, I hope. Not quite, we hope to take a two week ski vacation at Christmas time, but in Switzerland. I tried calling three hotels in Davos yesterday, and found out you have to make your reservations in the spring or in January when you leave, so we will probably spend this year in Italy.
All this travel is not as exciting as it may seem. As I generally work nights and have to see people during the day it often becomes an eat-sleep-work cycle. Right now I am writing this while waiting to get on the machine [a Univac 1108 computer]. Hah, just as I finished the last sentence, the machine became free. Now I am baby-sitting the machine at the console.
The most interesting and frustrating experience of being in Europe is the language problem. My minimal French, German and Italian gets me throughout quite a variety of situations, but general conversation is a rare and difficult thing. The missing ingredients are vocabulary and listening ability. I really think that in the U. S. not enough emphasis is put on foreign language ability and they are are treated as an academic subject. Throughout most of the world to much importance is given to grammar and not enough to vocabulary. I always cringe when a grammar author boasts that he only introduces 20 words per lesson. I have found, especially in Italian, that one can use a grammarian's nightmare of a sentence but still convey the thought if one has sufficient words. Conversely with a bit of vocabulary and little grammar one can at least get the sense of newspaper stories. To me the best method would be to have classes using conversation and reading newspapers and magazines. Tests would be on the things read just as they might be in English lit or History. (Most Europeans who graduate from high school can speak 2 foreign languages, of course not all finish, but still.)
Sincerely,
Mel
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Look who's outsourcing!
It is tax time and time to figure out all the labyrinthian details that Congress has charged the IRS with implementing. I must say that the IRS had done a lot of work to make our work easier - PDF savable files for forms, online calculators to determine if you need a particular form, and many other features that often make it easier than wading through all the paper instructions. Oh yes, no more trips to the library to get forms that weren't included in your personal mailing.
I used one of those calculators yesterday. It's fields were to small to enter in the number of digits that I should enter. I found a contact link and filled out a web mail about the problem.
Within a few hours, maybe less, I had a response from IRS Help Desk asking what operating system and browser I was using. I sent all the requested information back this afternoon and within an hour or so I had a response that my info would be forwarded to the appropriate department for review.
Hey, that is speedy government service. Wait a minute! The email address is not irs.gov but speedymail.com. Hm! Who's speedymail.com?
It is AFFINA, a "one-stop-shop solution for customer relationship management." The story doesn't stop there. In 2006 AFFINA joined Hinduja Global Solutions Limited http://www.hindujagsl.com Hm! One guess in what country that company is located.
Some may complain that the U.S. Government should not be exporting jobs. But I can't say that it is. I don't know where the work of AFFINA is conducted. Besides, the idea of where jobs for a government are done often gets down to we can export our stuff but you can't export yours to us.
When I worked in Europe, for an American company, I was called in for software assistance to the French Army, the Swedish Police (Rikspolisen), the Swedish Auto Registry (Bilregistret), and a few other government agencies. They all had bought American-made Univac computers.
And even more crazy, many European customers thought the American programmers knew more than the local programmers. On some things this was true and on others just the opposite.
Back to speedymail.com, the writing of the messages was straightforward. None of the elaborate "It is my pleasure to serve you today" or turns of phrase that almost shout "Non-native speaker".
I used one of those calculators yesterday. It's fields were to small to enter in the number of digits that I should enter. I found a contact link and filled out a web mail about the problem.
Within a few hours, maybe less, I had a response from IRS Help Desk
Hey, that is speedy government service. Wait a minute! The email address is not irs.gov but speedymail.com. Hm! Who's speedymail.com?
It is AFFINA, a "one-stop-shop solution for customer relationship management." The story doesn't stop there. In 2006 AFFINA joined Hinduja Global Solutions Limited http://www.hindujagsl.com Hm! One guess in what country that company is located.
Some may complain that the U.S. Government should not be exporting jobs. But I can't say that it is. I don't know where the work of AFFINA is conducted. Besides, the idea of where jobs for a government are done often gets down to we can export our stuff but you can't export yours to us.
When I worked in Europe, for an American company, I was called in for software assistance to the French Army, the Swedish Police (Rikspolisen), the Swedish Auto Registry (Bilregistret), and a few other government agencies. They all had bought American-made Univac computers.
And even more crazy, many European customers thought the American programmers knew more than the local programmers. On some things this was true and on others just the opposite.
Back to speedymail.com, the writing of the messages was straightforward. None of the elaborate "It is my pleasure to serve you today" or turns of phrase that almost shout "Non-native speaker".
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