As noted last month, I was facing the deterioration of my laptop after 3.5 years. Over the Christmas period it got worse, regularly overheating (despite cleaning out the fans) and consequently crashing. With the sales on, it seemed like an opportune time to buy a replacement. Knowing that this one is unlikely to make it far into 2018, I spent one third of the money I spent on the last one, so it will not be such a pain when I have to dump it. The trouble is, now I buy a laptop and it is on Windows 8. So much stuff is buried far deeper than in the past. I battled even to change the wallpaper on the main screen. Everything I do I seem to have to log in and re-log in and verify myself. Even to play the Mah Jong matching tile game, which is free, I now have to establish an account with Xbox. I also had to receive a code to my mobile phone, just to play a simple, free game.
What makes it worse is that it is not simply Microsoft which is asking me for verification at every turn, but because I bought a Hewlett-Packard computer, their facilities are constantly on to me to link to its provision often in contradiction to what Microsoft are peddling to me. They have no appreciation of how I work, they want to connect everything in the way they see best. This has long been my concern with computers, that these days, the systems patronise you rather than offer the facilities you need, they try to get you to fit to their approach. With Windows 8, I had to disable a score of apps that I have no desire to use and had to work to put all the stuff I like, such as Word and work packages like Excel and PowerPoint into a place where I could reach them easily without having to dig through recommendations for a New Year diet or trips to places that I could never afford. There needs to be a setting which recognises - 'this person bought a cheap computer at a sale price, thus he does not have the income to afford all this stuff we are shovelling at him'.
Back in the 2000s if I bought a computer, I bought a tool. Now what I have bought is a billboard, constantly piling me with extra things I might want to buy and locking my identity into everything. I got sick of this and so have established an entirely anonymous account unconnected to anything else. This, however, then bars me from playing the Mah Jong matching game. The trade is constantly, 'you can only have basic functions if you allow us to keep shoving advertising at you'. In the 2000s, I paid about the same amount of money and was left alone. Is such advertising necessary to fund the cost of these machines? What is tiresome is that I spend more time disabling all these facilities than I actually do working on what I want to work with. It is as if I have bought a car but on the way to work I have to go by a route chosen by someone else so that I can stop at shops along the way that I have no interest in. Just wait until the 'updates' start and I have to switch on my computer so that it can simply play with itself for 30-60 minutes apparently 'updating' something that looks identical when it has finished. Sometimes it deigns to allow me to focus on what I want, but that is never within the first hour of being on.
The other thing is Cloud storage. The hacking of such facilities is well known and yet I am constantly being pummelled to put my documents and photos into Cloud storage. Microsoft, Dropbox and Hewlett Packard have all offered me totalling around 5TB of Cloud storage. Why on Earth would I want to us that? I am not rich and having bought a laptop I see no reason to go out and also get a smartphone or a tablet. I would get one not all of them. Typing novels on a phone is a waste of time; searching for an address when on the move is something different. However, we are encouraged to see every tool as universal, rather than seeking out the best for what we want to do. Again, the companies feel they know better than us how to live our live - am I the only one for which that is dystopian? I am not a teenager and so I recognise that I might be out of step with current trends and indeed have no interest in current fashions in technology. Then again, I am not a man who would buy a car because it looks good, I buy a car which I hope will work well and is safe. Companies seem to forget that dull people like me make up the majority and many of us do not even want to try to look cool. For me a computer is a tool not a lifestyle choice. If Sony can be hacked, what hope do I have that my Cloud-stored materials will be safe? If Hollywood celebrities can end up with their photos everywhere, people could send mine around without a second thought.
Memory sticks are leaping on almost on a monthly basis. Three years ago, I got a 4GB for £29 (US$45; €37) now I can buy a 32GB memory stick for £20, Yes, you can have memory sticks stolen or you can lose them, but for work stuff, my fiction, even photos, even if I want to use them on different devices, why risk using the Cloud, when I can have them all on a tiny piece of metal affixed to my keys?
What I am seeking, perhaps foolishly, from computer and software companies, is to be treated like an adult. I want a tool that does what I want it to do. If I want extra, I can make that choice in time, I do not need to be advertised to every time I switch on. Indeed, I think they do not recognise that how in so many people it instills hostility to the very things they are promoting. I want tools on my computer that I can use without going online. There seems to be a fantasy at Microsoft and Hewlett Packard as with many companies that the internet is universal and always available. They clearly do not work in the average office let alone try to use it in a cafe. Having to incessantly connect even to use mundane products, slows the whole process up. We have long put aside the concept of the 'information superhighway' and know at best it is a B road. However, these companies seem determined to fill it up with ice cream vans seeking to sell you the latest gimmick.
Each time I buy a computer, I seem to spend a larger amount of my money on getting things I do not want and finding access to what I do want harder than ever. Perhaps in an era when utility companies charge you in advance for energy or water you are never going to use, I should not be surprised that as a consumer, despite the apparent 'choice' it is ever harder to get the right tool for me.
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Microsoft. Show all posts
Monday, 5 January 2015
Thursday, 1 April 2010
Tied to Word
I have battled though my computer treating me like a moronic child to write this. I have declined choosing my browser; I have noted twice (why does it ask you twice now?) that I have rarely used icons on my desktop that I am happy having there and not progressed with the 'wizard' to remove them; I have sat through updates generic ones and specific ones for Java and Adobe software; I have refused my memory stick asking if I want to run software off and declined to decide which sofware I might want to save images through on to it; I have decided not to register the other games and things I have on my system or download new stuff for World of Warcraft add-ons, my Steam account for wargaming or register other packages and have finally go to what I actually want to do. Imagine on 'Star Trek' or 'Doctor Who' or a string of science fiction series if they had to click through a score of demands and could not operate the spaceship or time machine until 9 updates had been downloaded. This was not the future I envisaged as I now have a computer that takes longer to start up than my ZX Spectrum did in 1982 when I had to load in software off audio cassettes.
That is a common gripe of mine and now I move to another computer issue which is around the continued dominance of Microsoft, not in terms of operating systems, which, in the UK, in contrast, say, to Germany, they are really unchallenged, but in terms of wordprocessing software. In 2009, Office was used by 80% of businesses, with 80% of their files stored in one of its packages. For the past year or so, the bundling of Microsoft Office on new computers has ended and you now have to go out and buy all the software at a cost of £200, which for the computers I buy, that is a third or more of the entire cost price of the computer. Now, like many users I do not want to beholden to a particular company and certainly feel monopolies are unhealthy for consumers. Remember that a monopoly does not mean one company has 100% control of sales, it is, as Milton Freeman in 'Capitalism and Freedom' (1962) helpfully summarises a situation in which: 'a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it'. This is why you find other packages resembling the Office ones even when produced by other companies. Furthermore as Blinder, Baumol and Gale in 'Monopoly' (2001) say a monopoly is: 'a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they [the monopoly company] provide and a lack of viable substitute goods'.
Now, I remember the excellent word processor package 'Locoscript' which came bundled with the Amstrad PCW256 and 512 computers in the late 1980s. I have never encountered a word processing package half as good as that since. Year on year the Microsoft take on an increasingly juvenile appearance with soft tones and round edges that do not communicate business to me. There has been criticism of their most recent redesign for Office 2007 with Word have a series of folder tabs. It continued the computing tendency to treat us like children, not certain about what we wanted to do with the facilities, rather than what most business people want to do, which is get on quickly with what we know we need to do. Every time I get access to a new computer I have to go round disabling so much. I have been writing letters from before the concept of the home computer was even taken as more than something in a science fiction fantasy alongside flying cars and domestic robots. I do not need an American system to show me how to write a letter wrongly and try to make me use 'yours truly' at the end which only has a sarcastic use in British letters, not ever one that a business person would use.
In the James Bond movie, 'Tomorrow Never Dies' (1997), the prime baddie, poorly played by Jonathan Pryce is shown as launching a software package intentionally full of 'bugs', i.e. software functioning flaws, that customers will have to keep coming back to the company for 'patches' to repair the errors. People have rather felt that Microsoft Vista operating system fits this kind of approach. While I have seen how difficult it is to make Vista work properly in a business context, I do not think that Microfsoft wants to take over the world, I think they, like all companies, want simply to make as much money as possible. In the age of saved personal information and loyalty card mentality all companies want to capture and hold customers. Microsoft had to address the attempts at capturing unseen metadata in 2004 producing an add-on to expose this and in Office 2007 there is a document inspector to show it. Microsoft has been critcised for its use of proprietary style software rather than open source which gives greater power for users to work on new developments, though gradually from 2004 and especially since 2008 it is moving in giving greater access to the code. It is things like this that make people suspect some sort of conspiracy on Microsoft's part. However, court rulings have shown that while there may be no great sinister intent, the position of Microsoft is seen as being unhealthy for the free marketplace and customer choice.
The big challenge for the average computer user is that while some greater choice may be being opened up by court rulings and legislation, for us, even when we have to buy our own copies of Office, the monopoly position persists. This is because of the number of companies that simply default to Office packages, notably Word. When I went for an interview last autumn I had to quickly teach myself Word 2007 as I was instructed to write a briefing report in 30 minutes using the computer provided. I was quite impressed that I was able to get to grips with the alien layout and produce the report in time. However, the assumption, was, that, of course, I would know Word 2007 (it being 2009). I was in a weak position as not having bought a computer since 2006 I did not have the latest software and my previous employers, being heavily involved in computing, only ever buys the previous Microsoft Office package as it feels that that allows the errors to be ironed out. Consequently up to my redundancy in summer 2009 I was still using Office 2003.
The problems, and thus the pressure to keep up with all of Microsoft's twists and turns with its software, continued as I came to my new employer. I received all the documentation connected with my new job in .docx format which only came into use with Office 2007. Of course, I could not even open the files and when I pleaded for them to be saved in the older .doc format no-one at the new employer understood what I was talking about. So, if I get the money, I am compelled to buy the latest Office version simply to interact with employers and; most companies have no real idea about the changes in the software they are using and simply buy whatever is the latest. I hear there is Office 2010 on the way and I dread what new formats and childish interfaces that will use.
So, what am I asking for? Well it is two-fold. One is that software for business looks like it is intended for business not for the primary school. We need to be treated as adults who know what we are doing without constant, American-specific prompts. We will seek out help and guidance when we need it but most of the time we want to get on quickly with our work. The second thing is for companies to plough on not giving any thought to the software they use or the impact it will have on their workers and customers. Do not simply default to the latest Microsoft package, think about it, and, as my previous employer did, have the courage to stick with something that you have confidence in. Basically, we need to stand up for mature, business-orientated approaches to software.
P.P. 30/03/2015
I have come across an anomalous automatic correction in Word. I am writing a medieval story in which characters use warhammers. For some reason Word does not like this term even though it is historically correct. What it invariably does is change it to Warhammer with a capital 'W'. I have to change it back to lower case. This change presumably is because of the lead figure and computer games named this. However, 'Warhammer' (1983) the initial fantasy wargame was named after the weapon. Thus, we have a situation where the commercial version is acceptable to Word but the legitimate word it was based on is not. I imagine in time it will do the same to 'diplomacy' and 'monopoly'.
That is a common gripe of mine and now I move to another computer issue which is around the continued dominance of Microsoft, not in terms of operating systems, which, in the UK, in contrast, say, to Germany, they are really unchallenged, but in terms of wordprocessing software. In 2009, Office was used by 80% of businesses, with 80% of their files stored in one of its packages. For the past year or so, the bundling of Microsoft Office on new computers has ended and you now have to go out and buy all the software at a cost of £200, which for the computers I buy, that is a third or more of the entire cost price of the computer. Now, like many users I do not want to beholden to a particular company and certainly feel monopolies are unhealthy for consumers. Remember that a monopoly does not mean one company has 100% control of sales, it is, as Milton Freeman in 'Capitalism and Freedom' (1962) helpfully summarises a situation in which: 'a specific individual or an enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it'. This is why you find other packages resembling the Office ones even when produced by other companies. Furthermore as Blinder, Baumol and Gale in 'Monopoly' (2001) say a monopoly is: 'a lack of economic competition for the good or service that they [the monopoly company] provide and a lack of viable substitute goods'.
Now, I remember the excellent word processor package 'Locoscript' which came bundled with the Amstrad PCW256 and 512 computers in the late 1980s. I have never encountered a word processing package half as good as that since. Year on year the Microsoft take on an increasingly juvenile appearance with soft tones and round edges that do not communicate business to me. There has been criticism of their most recent redesign for Office 2007 with Word have a series of folder tabs. It continued the computing tendency to treat us like children, not certain about what we wanted to do with the facilities, rather than what most business people want to do, which is get on quickly with what we know we need to do. Every time I get access to a new computer I have to go round disabling so much. I have been writing letters from before the concept of the home computer was even taken as more than something in a science fiction fantasy alongside flying cars and domestic robots. I do not need an American system to show me how to write a letter wrongly and try to make me use 'yours truly' at the end which only has a sarcastic use in British letters, not ever one that a business person would use.
In the James Bond movie, 'Tomorrow Never Dies' (1997), the prime baddie, poorly played by Jonathan Pryce is shown as launching a software package intentionally full of 'bugs', i.e. software functioning flaws, that customers will have to keep coming back to the company for 'patches' to repair the errors. People have rather felt that Microsoft Vista operating system fits this kind of approach. While I have seen how difficult it is to make Vista work properly in a business context, I do not think that Microfsoft wants to take over the world, I think they, like all companies, want simply to make as much money as possible. In the age of saved personal information and loyalty card mentality all companies want to capture and hold customers. Microsoft had to address the attempts at capturing unseen metadata in 2004 producing an add-on to expose this and in Office 2007 there is a document inspector to show it. Microsoft has been critcised for its use of proprietary style software rather than open source which gives greater power for users to work on new developments, though gradually from 2004 and especially since 2008 it is moving in giving greater access to the code. It is things like this that make people suspect some sort of conspiracy on Microsoft's part. However, court rulings have shown that while there may be no great sinister intent, the position of Microsoft is seen as being unhealthy for the free marketplace and customer choice.
The big challenge for the average computer user is that while some greater choice may be being opened up by court rulings and legislation, for us, even when we have to buy our own copies of Office, the monopoly position persists. This is because of the number of companies that simply default to Office packages, notably Word. When I went for an interview last autumn I had to quickly teach myself Word 2007 as I was instructed to write a briefing report in 30 minutes using the computer provided. I was quite impressed that I was able to get to grips with the alien layout and produce the report in time. However, the assumption, was, that, of course, I would know Word 2007 (it being 2009). I was in a weak position as not having bought a computer since 2006 I did not have the latest software and my previous employers, being heavily involved in computing, only ever buys the previous Microsoft Office package as it feels that that allows the errors to be ironed out. Consequently up to my redundancy in summer 2009 I was still using Office 2003.
The problems, and thus the pressure to keep up with all of Microsoft's twists and turns with its software, continued as I came to my new employer. I received all the documentation connected with my new job in .docx format which only came into use with Office 2007. Of course, I could not even open the files and when I pleaded for them to be saved in the older .doc format no-one at the new employer understood what I was talking about. So, if I get the money, I am compelled to buy the latest Office version simply to interact with employers and; most companies have no real idea about the changes in the software they are using and simply buy whatever is the latest. I hear there is Office 2010 on the way and I dread what new formats and childish interfaces that will use.
So, what am I asking for? Well it is two-fold. One is that software for business looks like it is intended for business not for the primary school. We need to be treated as adults who know what we are doing without constant, American-specific prompts. We will seek out help and guidance when we need it but most of the time we want to get on quickly with our work. The second thing is for companies to plough on not giving any thought to the software they use or the impact it will have on their workers and customers. Do not simply default to the latest Microsoft package, think about it, and, as my previous employer did, have the courage to stick with something that you have confidence in. Basically, we need to stand up for mature, business-orientated approaches to software.
P.P. 30/03/2015
I have come across an anomalous automatic correction in Word. I am writing a medieval story in which characters use warhammers. For some reason Word does not like this term even though it is historically correct. What it invariably does is change it to Warhammer with a capital 'W'. I have to change it back to lower case. This change presumably is because of the lead figure and computer games named this. However, 'Warhammer' (1983) the initial fantasy wargame was named after the weapon. Thus, we have a situation where the commercial version is acceptable to Word but the legitimate word it was based on is not. I imagine in time it will do the same to 'diplomacy' and 'monopoly'.
Monday, 2 July 2007
Computer: Let Me Be!
One irritant that I have not yet tackled is the hassle with computers which seem to think they know what I want better than I do myself. They are not my servant, rather they are like an annoying salesman camped out on my doorstep, who, whenever I happen to open my front door or even look out of my window bombard me with the latest products. Even in my house, they keep changing the channel on my TV and the decor on my walls, with the arrogant attitude that they know better.
Stopping with the analogy. Every time I switch on a computer, and on average, due to my work, I use three different machines in the average week, I have to wait for all the updates from the various companies to load in, plus the ones my own company feels I need. This means it can be 2-3 minutes before I can even start work. I cannot believe that there is that much new stuff every week that they have to take over my machine to load it in. Of course if I was not firewalled then there would be all the spam and the spyware and the adware and so on. In order of priority for access to my machine, I come last. As if this was not enough, when I come to close it down I have to wait sometimes fifteen minutes for it to do all the uploads. With a PC I walk away but with a laptop I have to keep it internet connected otherwise there will be twice as much stuff to wade through. If I happen not to use a computer for a couple of weeks, then it is 30 minutes plus. Why? Surely it is inefficient if each day I am losing 15 minutes' work watching a bar move across the screen.
On my home PC somehow I got an Adobe photo album tester. I have no idea how, but now I cannot rid my machine of it. Every time I log on it asks me if I want to buy it, I say no, but it still proceeds trying to search out photos on my machine and telling me my digital camera battery is low (I do not even have a digital camera) and so on. It tries again later too. For me, no means no, why can it not understand. My house mate's son who is almost 6 and can read a little, gets bewildered when midway through a game of 'Shrek' or 'Finding Nemo' the machine starts binging at him and sending up pop-ups even when he is logged in as his own identity. What is the point of asking him if he wants to upgrade the DVD player, he cannot even understand the words?
It does not stop when you are not even connected to the internet, software is just as bad. I write a lot, and yet even when I have corrected the spelling and grammar checker from US to UK spelling it still keeps interfering, putting in bullet points when I do not need them, telling me effectively that 'which' is not a proper word and you just try typing 'fora' as in the plural of 'forum' (for those of us who use proper plurals)! If I try to write a letter, it says do I need help - no I have been writing letters longer than even Microsoft has been in existence! It tries to put 'yours truly' at the end of the letter, even though in the UK that is a sarcastic phrase and 'yours faithfully' or 'yours sincerely' which it never offers me, are the correct ones. Every machine I have go through disabling all of these interruptions.
I understand that people often need help, but as in the classroom you should be able to ask for it when you need it. I hate my computer patronising me and trying to force words and a culture on me which I do not want. A computer should be about granting you freedom to compose and to explore as you choose, but instead we are driven to behave identically to each other, and coming from a non-US culture, in a way which jars with what I know and is correct for my 'locale'. Give me a computer that treats me like an adult.
Stopping with the analogy. Every time I switch on a computer, and on average, due to my work, I use three different machines in the average week, I have to wait for all the updates from the various companies to load in, plus the ones my own company feels I need. This means it can be 2-3 minutes before I can even start work. I cannot believe that there is that much new stuff every week that they have to take over my machine to load it in. Of course if I was not firewalled then there would be all the spam and the spyware and the adware and so on. In order of priority for access to my machine, I come last. As if this was not enough, when I come to close it down I have to wait sometimes fifteen minutes for it to do all the uploads. With a PC I walk away but with a laptop I have to keep it internet connected otherwise there will be twice as much stuff to wade through. If I happen not to use a computer for a couple of weeks, then it is 30 minutes plus. Why? Surely it is inefficient if each day I am losing 15 minutes' work watching a bar move across the screen.
On my home PC somehow I got an Adobe photo album tester. I have no idea how, but now I cannot rid my machine of it. Every time I log on it asks me if I want to buy it, I say no, but it still proceeds trying to search out photos on my machine and telling me my digital camera battery is low (I do not even have a digital camera) and so on. It tries again later too. For me, no means no, why can it not understand. My house mate's son who is almost 6 and can read a little, gets bewildered when midway through a game of 'Shrek' or 'Finding Nemo' the machine starts binging at him and sending up pop-ups even when he is logged in as his own identity. What is the point of asking him if he wants to upgrade the DVD player, he cannot even understand the words?
It does not stop when you are not even connected to the internet, software is just as bad. I write a lot, and yet even when I have corrected the spelling and grammar checker from US to UK spelling it still keeps interfering, putting in bullet points when I do not need them, telling me effectively that 'which' is not a proper word and you just try typing 'fora' as in the plural of 'forum' (for those of us who use proper plurals)! If I try to write a letter, it says do I need help - no I have been writing letters longer than even Microsoft has been in existence! It tries to put 'yours truly' at the end of the letter, even though in the UK that is a sarcastic phrase and 'yours faithfully' or 'yours sincerely' which it never offers me, are the correct ones. Every machine I have go through disabling all of these interruptions.
I understand that people often need help, but as in the classroom you should be able to ask for it when you need it. I hate my computer patronising me and trying to force words and a culture on me which I do not want. A computer should be about granting you freedom to compose and to explore as you choose, but instead we are driven to behave identically to each other, and coming from a non-US culture, in a way which jars with what I know and is correct for my 'locale'. Give me a computer that treats me like an adult.
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