Is the Internet overhyped?

Is the Internet overhyped?
Melvyn D. Magree
Originally published in
Northland Reader
now
Reader Weekly
May 25, 2000

“We know we must connect all our classrooms to the Internet...”  (Pres. William J. Clinton, State of the Union Address, January 27, 2000) (1)

Really?  The band room?  The wood shop?  The English class?

Does the band room need Internet access to provide music?  Or would the money be better spent on buying sheet music and acquiring and maintaining instruments?

Does the wood shop need Internet access to provide project plans?  Or would the money be better spent on acquiring and maintaining tools?

Does the English class need Internet access to provide copies of Shakespeare?  Or would the money be better spent on buying hardcover copies of Shakespeare, Richard Wright, and Ursula K. Le Guin?

Clinton’s statement and similar statements by many others are indicative more of a mania to adopt the “latest and greatest” without thinking through all the consequences.  This mania is seen both in government and private organizations.  Sometimes it comes from the top down, sometimes from the bottom up.

“OK, Mr. Author, if the Internet is such a mania, how come you make so much use of it for your articles?  And if you use it, shouldn’t school kids learn to use it?”  Yes and no.

Yes, the Internet can be a wonderful tool, but it can also be a great waste of time.  “A library is where you go to find facts. The web is more like a garage sale: it's possible you'll find what you want, but only with a lot of digging, searching, and wading through things that smell funny.” (2)

I found out just how true this was in researching this article.  I’ll come back to this later.

No, school children can learn to use the Internet at anytime in their lives.  I am active in the University for Seniors at UMD.  Many of the members are using computers for a wide variety of tasks.  Many of them first used a personal computer within the last ten years.  The successful users among them have two common traits: a love of learning and an ability to type.

“Even some usually pro-technology types, like Apple Computer Co. founder Steven Jobs, have expressed doubts [about computers in schools], suggesting that what students need is more classroom focus on basics like writing and mathematics and higher-level skills such as critical thinking.”  (3)

Because Frank James paraphrased Steve Jobs, I wanted to find Jobs’ own words.  I did a search with Alta Vista for “critical thinking”, “steve jobs” “apple”, and “education”.  Alta Vista found 39 web pages.  The first page was an Apple page of “Hot News”.  I searched it for “critical thinking”, but it had changed!  It was the only Apple page of the thirty-nine.

I checked a few other pages, but most of them “smelled funny”.  So, I decided to start with Apple’s home page and search within Apple’s own site.  I did a search of “critical thinking, steve jobs”, but my browser (Internet Explorer 4.5 for the Macintosh) wouldn’t load the page!  The URL (or address) that Apple’s search feature created was so long that it wouldn’t even fit in the error message window!  I couldn’t even search for “Jobs”!!!

One of the Internet success stories is Amazon.com, a bookseller!  In fact, if you do a search for something on the internet, you are quite likely to find reviews of books on the subject rather than the text as written by the original authors.  Of course, you can search the Internet for free because the search site depends heavily on revenues from booksellers who want to sell you books on the subject of your choice.

One of the most optimistic works on the future of technology is Bill Gates’ The Road Ahead.  It is available in good old-fashioned paper form.  The only way to get the electronic form (a CD-ROM) is to buy the book.  I searched for “the road ahead” on the internet, and no Microsoft page was in the first 10 pages of the 3,997 found.  I went to Microsoft’s home page and did a search for “the road ahead”.  The first 10 pages of the 67 found were not the text of the book.  I did find that the CD-ROM might have an error!  (However, on August 2, 2007, the page describing the error is no longer available.) (

Should computers be in schools at all?  Of course computers should be in schools, in appropriate places.  The first is in typing, sorry, keyboarding.  Who wants to learn to type on a big heavy mechanical typewriter like I did over 40 years ago?  But we don’t need to have the latest, biggest, fastest computers to teach typing.  Even a Commodore 64 can do that.  The second is in the library as an addition to a great, humongous collection of books.

For it is from books and great mentors that we learn writing, mathematics, and critical thinking.  Let us make sure we have well-stocked libraries and highly-respected teachers.  When we have achieved those two goals, then maybe we can think about adding computers.

(1)I accessed this quote May 4, 2000 at http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/SOTU00/sotu-text.html.  That page is no longer available.  I imagine each President deletes his predecessor's records after the National Archives has copied them.  However, the Clinton library's copy of the speech does not have that phrase or any other mention of connecting classrooms to the Internet!  After an exchange of emails with an archivist I learned that there is a briefing copy and a transcript.  My search had only turned up the briefing copy.  The archivist gave me the link to The American Presidency Project's copy. and the correct link in the Clinton library.  I couldn't find the latter because I searched on the date of the speech, but the speech was indexed under the date of inclusion into the web site!  Searching the web is not always a solo endeavour.

(2) “Kev's Collection of Cool Quotes”, Kevin Killion, accessed August 2, 2007.  Kevin moved from the URL that I originally had.

(3) “Plan to wire all schools to Internet falls behind”, Chicago Tribune Online, Frank James, Chicago Tribune Washington Bureau, June 22, 1999,  file available in Chicago Tribune paid archive.

©2000, 2007 Melvyn D. Magree

Who decides radical design change?

After the dust for "Seamless" settled, I went to the Star Tribune web edition, expecting to see the usual facsimile edition.  Instead I found a clutter with a page occupying less of the screen than before.

Why do management and designers make radical changes that maybe only a few want?  Many users like the way things work and only want tweaks to fix a few things that don't work well.

Apple is notorious for this.  What worked one way well suddenly works in a completely different way.   Way back in the first decade of the Mac, I looked forward to updates, especially new levels.  Now, I won't touch a new level unless I buy a new gadget.  And many times, I wish I had stuck with the old gadget even if the newer is faster and has more data capacity.

I think the problem is "focus groups".  Management pays a few selected participants to attend a meeting while management watches behind one-way glass.  The moderator works and works to get the participants to agree to management's proposal.  Only when the participants agree to management's proposal do they get their honorarium and get to go home.

I know!  I was in a focus group to approve "Comfort Systems" for the Duluth gas and water department.  Few of us were happy with "Comfort Systems".  We didn't know until later who the entity was; we assumed it was a private utility.

Back to technology: "New and Exciting" may mean "Frustrating and Buggy".

To add insult to injury, Google won't let me scroll the text I pasted here.  It moves the window as a block instead of the text in the frame.  It didn't do that for the last post!!!

“Seamless" came apart at the seams

At about three last night, I was woken by constant thunder and lightning.  It was continuous, more continuous than I have ever heard in my life.  Then strong winds and heavy rain were added.

Fortunately, we only had one set of windows open and I was able to close them before much rain came in.

Then the lighted clock went dark.

I tried to sleep, but the light of every lightning bolt went right through my eyelids.  I laid on my stomach and hid my face in the pillow.

I don’t know how long it took the storm to pass, but it did.

At about seven, I woke up and checked Duluth news on my iPhone.  It was quite a wide ranging storm causing outages and deaths.  Trees were toppled blocking roads and damaging houses.  No travel was advised.

All day our cell phone service has been erratic.  Sometimes our phones work, sometimes we can’t even get a signal.

I can see a cell phone pole from our house, but I can’t remember if it had visible equipment at the top or not.

My wife couldn’t even call on her phone.  The call could not be completed.

The strength of signal was one bar most of the day; my phone is now up to four.  But instead of 4G or LTE service, it only shows E, whatever that means.

I was able to get websites, now loading some of them gets stuck.  I wonder how much local data there is.  Just now I could not load Yahoo! Finance, but I could get most of the New York Times.  But going to a different article is going very slow, but maybe that is because convention news is so popular.  On the other hand, the online banking page of my bank is not making any progress loading on my iPhone.  Meanwhile, I started and finished reading a convention article.

So much for the seamless, at-our-fingertips operation of our gadgets we rely so much on.  We are retired and it is only a nuisance.  But there are many people who depend on these gadgets to do their work.

Now, how long will this take to post?  Essentially, quite a while.  As soon as I typed the first sentence, I tried loading blogger.com.  Firefox could not find the page!

Finally!  At 4:30 pm the web seems back to normal.  I have five dots and LTE on my cellphone and Yahoo! Finance came right up!

Can our electricity be far behind?

STEM is only part of a plant

It needs roots, leaves, and flowers.

STEM refers to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.  It is all the rage to ensure that a large number of public school students be grounded in STEM.  That’s “where all the jobs are.” 

But is that all our public schools should produce: “skills” that are “hot” today for large corporations?  What happens when large corporations want different “skills”?  How many FORTRAN or COBOL programmers are still working?  How many large corporations were willing to let them learn C on the job?  Or would the large corporations rather let them go and hire C programmers taught by a university?  Programmers who would be cheaper because they didn’t have seniority.  Or programmers who would be cheaper because they were H1-B hires?  The old programmers would be familiar with how the company functioned.  The new programmers would probably take longer to learn how the company functioned than the old programmers could upgrade their “skills”.

Tech innovation in and of itself is devoid of meaning.  We need the humanities and art to give meaning.  The humanities are the roots of a learning plant.  They feed the STEM with ideas of what has worked in the past and insight to what might work in the future.  The arts are the flowers of the STEM.  Without music, drawing, and theatre, STEM is only more and more gadgets which became ends in of themselves.  See Sherry Turkles’ “Alone Together” for how much are society has become tools of our gadgets rather than our gadgets being our tools.  The leaves are the parts that extract learning from whatever sources are available.

Even before STEM became a buzz-word, I had plenty of STEM training.

I had the science of Physics and Chemistry in high school and college.  I really haven’t used much Physics or Chemistry since then.  I do remember that speed equals the acceleration multiplied by the square of time.  I don’t know what use this has been to me except that I don’t think sky diving is a good idea.  I do remember that water is two-parts hydrogen and one part oxygen and the carbon dioxide is one part carbon and two parts oxygen.

In college I took the technology of AC Circuits and flunked it.   But all I really need to know today is that the wall sockets are AC circuits that when properly used can provide light as well as power for the computer I am typing this article on.

Oops, an aside.  From English I learned the last phrase should be “for the computer on which I am typing this article.”  And of course, from other reading I have learned that this is a forced construction based on the idea that English should follow Latin grammar.

In college I had “Engineering Tools and Processes”.  I don’t remember my grade (not an A), but as all the others did, my brazing of one piece to another exceeded the base line.  On the other hand, I never did get the hang of arc welding.  I always got the rod stuck to the work.

Now Math is something I really got immersed in: calculus, differential equations, complex variables, mathematical logic, and more: two years at a liberal arts college and two years in graduate schools.  But what do I use math for now: balancing my checkbook, doing my taxes, and guessing an appropriate tip.  I do remember that the squares of the sides of a right triangle equal the square of the hypotenuse.  But might I have learned this just doing some carpentry?  The 3-4-5 rule for making a right angle.  About the only other formula I remember is the integral of e to the x equals a function of u sub n.  I didn’t learn that in the class room!

With all that STEM, how did I learn so much about computers?  On the job training and my own curiosity.  I got a summer job between my junior and senior years to learn computing.  With a text book from the company library and the help of others, I successfully completed a program that was used after I left.

When I went to graduate school as a graduate assistant, we were given some manuals and pointed at the computer room.  It was the days of cards-in, cards-out but it was self-serve.  None of this priesthood behind locked doors that gave back your work when they damn-well decided to.

Now computers have gotten both easier to use and harder to use.  But how many of those who get the full STEM treatment will get and hold jobs in industry.  Will a programmer be able to easily change jobs if he or she doesn’t have the right “skill set”?  Or will companies look for new grads from other countries on H1-B visas.  And after the visas expire just send them back home because the companies can get new grads with “up-to-date” “skill sets”.

This all reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano”.  Workers were spit out of the system because their jobs were replaced by computer systems.  Even managers were getting spit out.  Vonnegut saw this back in the bad-old-days of cards-in, cards-out.

But what I really learned in school and on my own that was of lasting importance was in the roots, flowers, and leaves.  What would my life be without all the literature I learned?  Would I have enjoyed and learned from Shakespeare and other great books without being exposed to them in school?  Would I have learned about government without civics and American history?  Would I have enjoyed a wide range of music without a class in music appreciation.  It is all of these that allowed me to enjoy life and contribute more than sitting in a cubicle designing “the next great thing.”

Also in the Reader Weekly of Duluth on 2016-03-24 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2016/03/24/6930_stem_is_only_part_of_a_plant-1.

Also "complex various" was corrected to "complex variables".

Magree's Law on technology

Magree's Law: the occurrence of user problems is proportional to the square of the "improvements".

I came up with this contemplating how as computers get more powerful and "user friendly" they seem to have more and more head-banging user problems.  See Apple Support Community for verification.

Actually, this applies to all sorts of technology.  Just think of all the great stuff there is our cars and how much harder it is to find the right buttons.

Technology is great! Technology grates!

Technology is great!  Using my computer and the Internet, I can write and submit this column.  I can pay bills online rather than write and mail a check.  I can order a large assortment of goods online and sometimes even track their shipping.

Technology helps me research without buying lots of books and magazines or making many visits to the library.  But unless you make to-do lists on paper or on a computer, it doesn’t help you remember all you plan.  One web-site I forgot to include in last week’s column, “Hunter, know your ground”, was the 2014 Minnesota DNR Hunting regulations: http://dnr.state.mn.us/regulations/hunting/index.html.

Technology lets me carry in my shirt pocket symphonies, the Bible, the Constitution and commentaries, Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations”, manuals for all kinds of tools and gadgets, hundreds of notes to myself, and many of my Party of One columns.

Technology grates!  It seems the more things I can do on my computer and gadgets, the more things go wrong.

Rather than paying bills, reading books, or listening to music, I am spending an inordinate time trying to resolve computer and other gadget problems.  In this month I have had a keyboard whose return key might not work, Bluetooth earbuds that wouldn’t charge, lots of software that doesn’t work (properly or at all) and a smoke alarm that went off when there was no smoke.

I wrote about some of these problems in “Programmer, heal thyself”; let me tell you about the resolution (or non-resolution) of some of these.

Whenever a smoke detector ceases to work properly, I try to buy the same model again.  Because there is no standardization for mounting that I know of, I buy the same model again so I don’t have to drill more holes in the ceiling.  The model of detector that we use in the cabin has a seven-year warranty.

Being frustrated with the smoke detector that gave false alarms, I contacted the online store that I bought it from.  I thought it was the manufacturer because of the name similarity.  Nope, I have to contact the manufacturer for the warranty.  The manufacturer, First Alert, had no email address for U.S. residents.  OK, forget the warranty because I’ll never get a replacement in time for our next stay in the cabin.  I ordered another one from the online store with three-day delivery.  Yay!  It came the afternoon before we planned to go to our cabin.

I should take some of the blame as the directions do have a warranty procedure.  The address isn’t even the same name as the manufacturer label.  I still have the malfunctioning alarm on my desk.  But why bother making a warranty claim?  If the new one I had already bought works for its warrantied life, then the warranty on the replacement would have also expired.

I have a Logitech Solar Keyboard Folio for my iPad.  It functions as a keyboard, stand, and cover.  I finally set aside some time to research the non-functioning return key.

The Logitech web site would not take email address and password, and I never received email to reset password.  I sent email to the address I used for same problem in February/March, and I received a form that I should go to the website.  I eventually called the non-800 number, and reached a non-native speaker of English.  It was more corporate bureaucracy; she was a level one filter. We just went around in circles with no technical help

I went back to the friendlier email I had earlier in the year for the same problem that had a set of steps that would supposedly resolve the problem.  I followed them, but the return key didn’t work!  But as I had done before, I repeatedly pressed the return key and it eventually worked.  Was that all I needed to do in the first place?  The return key didn’t work again a few days later!  I pressed it less than a dozen times and it worked again.  To be a computer user, you really have to believe in magic:)

I had a much friendlier set of email exchange with Jaybird.  I bought a set of their wireless earbuds the same time as I bought the iPad keyboard.  Just after the warranty period expired my earbuds couldn’t be recharged.  Jaybird offered me 50% credit for a new set.  I did need to send the device back before getting credit.  Once they had the tracking number for my package, they told me I could place my order.

I worked on balancing my wife’s checkbook this week.  To help me, I printed out a bank statement.  I couldn’t find a transaction that she had in her register.  I finally found it lost between pages on the bank statement copy I printed.  The bank statement saved as a PDF was OK.  Adobe or Apple lost the item in printing!

I printed out a website form for a mail order, and the result had two pictures that were not on my screen.  Both pictures on the printout covered text!  At least it wasn’t on the part with my information.

I still believe we ain’t seen nothin’ yet on the benefits of technology, but whatever happened to WYSIWYG?  What you see is what you get!

Even with over fifty years of computer experience, Mel feels he is falling farther and farther behind.

Technology: A Big Bother We Can’t Do Without

Technology: A Big Bother We Can’t Do Without

Melvyn D. Magree
Originally published in the
Northland Reader
now the
Reader Weekly
March 2, 2000

 

Life is so much easier with technology,
but it's care and feeding can be time consuming at the wrong time.

Harvey Mackay, author of Swim with the Sharks without Being Eaten Alive, recently wrote a paean to technology (Star Tribune, 3 Feb 2000).  In the main I agree with him that technology has given us lots of freedom: freedom to travel, freedom to communicate, freedom to enjoy art, and on and on.

Many of us have traveled far and wide thanks to technology.  Even in our local travels technology has given us more and more freedom.  I remember when tires lasted 10,000 miles and oil was changed every 1,000 miles.  Now many tires are guaranteed for 50,000 miles and oil can be changed every 6,000 miles.  And I’m glad “they don’t build them like they used to.”  My current vehicle has nearly 60,000 miles and has never broken down (not including a flat tire); it’s the first of over a dozen vehicles to give such reliable service.

Many of us no longer write letters and articles with pen.  I have moved from pen to mechanical typewriters whose keys stuck to electric typewriters and carbon paper for copies to computers from which I can send as many copies as I want anywhere in the world.

Unfortunately, computer technology has not become as reliable as the modern automobile.  In fact, the reliability of computer technology seems to be inversely proportional to the complexity of the technology.

In a speech given in 1998 Gary Bachula, then Acting Undersecretary for Technology in the Department of Commerces, tells a good anecdote about the computer/auto comparison.  Bill Gates said that if autos were like computers they would weigh 30 pounds, get a 1,000 miles per gallon of gas, and cost less than $500.  Bachula responds that if autos were like computers they would crash twice a day, stop and fail to restart, and have to have the engine reinstalled periodically.

Bachula's speech contains several other items where computer technology fails to meet our needs.

Ten years ago, some software crashed but online connections seemed rather stable.  We could send email without problem though only to people on the same network.  We could download kilobytes of software but it seemed to take forever, or at least all evening.

Now email packages contain a great array of editing and formatting features, a number of user defined mailboxes to organize messages, and more features than most people can use.  We can send email to almost anyone with a computer anywhere in the world.  But the email software might crash when organizing the mailboxes and lose all the mail we just sent.

Now we can download megabytes of software and it still seems like forever, but it takes only an hour or so.  But, the browser may crash or decide that it has received everything even though it has a few megabytes to go.

Now we can print pages that look like they came out of a book and with multiple colors.  But then when we have a deadline, the system may say that it can’t find the printer or the cartridge starts smearing or the system crashes every time we try to print more than a few pages.

To make matters worse, we have to maintain our computers a lot more.  In the simpler days we only had to dust the computer once in a while, change the printer ribbon occasionally, and clean the disk reader head periodically.

Now there seems to be lots of care and feeding of the operating system and many programs.  We have to make sure all the programs are compatible with our settings of the system.  We may have to track down some weird setting that is not even mentioned in the manuals to make something work.  Every so often we have to do a “clean install” of the system or a program to get rid of an accretion of stuff whose purpose we know not.  We have to defragment our hard drives periodically to make our software run more efficiently.

It is ironic that as the computers become easier to use, they require more work to use.

This is but a part of a trend of a larger issue: pushing costs off to the end user.  Costs may be monetary or may be of time.  ATMs can be a great convenience but banks push the costs to the user with transaction fees.  Public Radio’s 75Music closed its 800 number and opened a web site.  It saved on personnel costs but it takes more customer time to gain information online than it did to talk to a live person.

This trend was brought up over 25 years ago in a computer publication that few even in computer professions read, which is too bad.  The article was “Guidelines for Humanizing Computerized Information Systems: A Report from Stanley House” by Theodor D. Sterling; it was published in Communications of the ACM, November 1974.  The portion that has stuck in my mind is “One of the most common methods of increasing the efficiency of a system is to employ the recipients of the service as unpaid components whose time, effort, and use of intelligence do not appear in the cost accounting.”

I missed my calling.  Instead of being a pseudo-retired programmer, I should have been a successful envelope salesman like Harvey Mackay.  Then instead of spending so much of my time in the care and feeding of my computer, I could have passed the problems on to my IT department and forgotten about it.

Addendum: 2014-09-18

Our use of technology has changed greatly in the ten years since I wrote the above.  And the change will probably be even greater in the next ten years.  In the ten years since the above, the number of problems has probably increased even more than the benefits.  I sometimes I think I spend more time searching for solutions to things that don’t work right than I do actually doing something with the technology.

For example, I have a more powerful computer with software that can do much more than ten years ago.  But it seems like it takes ten times as long for a program to load now than then.  Supposedly, I can take some steps to improve this.  However, I think it will take me two or more weeks of full time effort to back everything up, weed out unnecessary files, and do a “clean install”.  When do the two minute waits for a program to load accumulate to be more than the two weeks of new installation?  I think I might just hold out until the next time I upgrade, possibly two to four years from now.

©2000, 2004, 2007, 2014 Melvyn D. Magree

keywords: Harvey Mackay, technology, computers, software, problems, cost benefit, end user, crash, slow response, clean install, Theodore D. Stirling, Gary Bachula, ACM, Association for Computing Machinery

Quote of the day: Humanities are still relevant

“So, yes, the humanities are still relevant in the 21st century — every bit as relevant as an iPhone.”

Nicholas Kristoff, “Don’t Dismiss the Humanities”, New York Times, 2014-08-13
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/14/opinion/nicholas-kristof-dont-dismiss-the-humanities.html

He discusses that thoughts of Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and Peter Singer and their relevance to ideas today.  He points out that “the humanities are not only relevant but also give us a toolbox to think seriously about ourselves and the world.”

The value of an iPhone is not the same as the values that guide our lives.  For the first, we need the technologists.  For the second, we need the philosophers.

A bad tech week

Besides the problem of my iPhone not turning on yesterday, I spilled coffee on my laptop keyboard this morning.  I tried holding too many things at the same time.  Now the shift key on one side doesn't work and both option keys don't work.

Besides that, I've been trying to sync my calendars among my laptop, my iPhone, and my iPad.  I've read post after post on this problem and have found no satisfactory answer.  People on one device never get transferred to another device.  I used Contact Cleaner on my laptop address book and wound up deleting a couple hundred people on my iPad.  Needless to say, I did not sync my address book to my iPhone.

Then I received a letter from my bank that they had moved money from my savings account to my checking account.  On my first try to access my account, their system was unavailable.  When I finally got on, I found that there had been yet another transfer made.  As I reviewed the online statement, I found that I had transferred money from checking to savings instead of the other way around.  At least I have an account that makes sweeps rather than overdraft charges.

Now I'm off to Best Buy to find out if the Geek Squad can repair my keyboard with little time and no charge.  I assume there will be a charge because it was my fault rather than Apple's.  I do hope that I move money the right way to pay any charges.

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.

Was Microsoft Office 2011 for the Mac written by the government

After a long wait for a replacement for Office 2008, which took away Virtual Basic macros, I was able to buy Office 2011, which supposedly put macros back.

Guess what?  I'm not sure they work.

I put a simple one-line macro back in an Excel spreadsheet, and it worked.  But, every time I typed in a cell, Excel would only except one number and then do nothing.  I had to enter the data in the formula bar.  At least the formula bar seems to be standard in Office 2011; in some update to Office 2008 the formula bar would keep disappearing.

I tried removing the macro and putting it back in again, and now the macro stops with some mysterious error.

If I opened the progress bar in Entourage (Office 2008), it would be there the next time I opened Entourage.  In Outlook (Office 2011), it is never present the next time I open Outlook.

The installation process for Office 2011 ignored many of my preference from Office 2008.

Outlook changed the type font and size, and it only remembers the reset type font but not the reset size.

Outlook automatically includes the message I'm answering in my response.  I had turned this off in Entourage; I have yet to find a preference for this in Outlook.  I have to remember to remove the message in my response, and it is often below my writing area.

Outlook has put some of my old messages in the task list.

Outlook did not get my message categories right.  It put "Family" messages in "Iphone, saved to".

Outlook changed the links to many of my Entourage replies.  The linked messages sometime bear no relation to each other.

Gosh, with these errors and many others, Office 2011 must have been written by the government instead of an "efficient" private company.

To tell the truth, I do have some sympathy for the Microsoft programmers.  When I gave up on my own software programming company, for my far simpler program I had a problem list far longer than the list above.

I do wish Microsoft had had a bit bigger budget on testing.

I also wish that I could just call or email someone with these problems.  Instead, the user has to spend hours looking through forums to find a specific problem, which nobody may have raised yet.  This is part of the larger trend in far too many enterprises to push costs on to the customers.  See "Technology: A big bother we can't do without".

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…"

Jobs: The Times They Are A-changin'

As I drove up Central Entrance in Duluth I was struck by how many billboards were LED billboards. Those that weren't were often a set of big panels screwed to the supports.

What are all those who pasted up great rolls of paper doing now? The panels are probably placed up in a fraction of the time needed for the rolls of paper. "As for changing [an LED billboard], it's as easy as clicking with a mouse button, rather than sending out a crew to pull down and replace a billboard message." - LED Billboards: Outdoor Advertising in the Video Age

But this kind of change is happening throughout many businesses; jobs are going away because of changes of business practices and technology. They won't be coming back and those who think they will are deluded. We have to change our whole education system to train people to adapt to change.

I don't hold out much hope for this. It was in 1963 that Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are A-changin'" was introduced. In the same era Pete Seeger wrote "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" with the line "When will they ever learn".

The times are are still a-changin' and we still haven't learned.

An interesting non-violent counter-attack in Iran

If you have seen many of the pictures coming out of Iran, you may have seen a middle-aged man on the back of a motor-bike pulling a gun out of his belt. According to the Christian Science Monitor, he is a provocateur trying to increase the level of violence. See "Who's behind Iran violence? Website posts video in name-and-shame campaign".

An Iranian website has posted a few pictures of these provocateurs and some have been identified. People are surprised to learn that they are their neighbors. Supposedly one of the identified provocateurs has left town.

Many critics complain we have become beholden to our gadgets and our technology. But these gadgets and technologies are really giving power to the people. Power is held by the few when information is held only by the few.