Nothing Lasts Forever

Nothing Lasts Forever

Car

I am dealing with a remarkable day of trivial loss. I was going to buy a car yesterday, but I was quite tired, and re-scheduled the test drive for today. Somebody else bought the car. Too bad, as it was a honey, and a steal for a thousand bucks.  A 2002 Toyota Estima van with one ding on the side, otherwise clean inside and out. Supposed to run great, recently passed inspection, and has two new tires. All four tire match, and I’m hard-pressed to identify the two new ones — all in great shape. Therefore, I suspect that they were the fronts, as aggressive driving with front-wheel drive simply eats tires.

Frankly, I don’t mind driving a car that may have been driven aggressively, as I drive aggressively, and I’m glad to know the machinery has been tested. Now this is not driving like a jerk, or abusing the machinery. I just mean not hesitating to punch it when duty calls, and not slowing overmuch for turns with good visibility.

Here’s the thing — I am probably a thousand bucks away from passing an inspection in my current car. So trading up to a newer, larger, cleaner car would probably cost me nothing in the long run.

And I really want a van anyway. I would like to “research” using the car as a mobile hotel room. Not a live-in car, but nice enough to work in, and okay to sleep in for, say, two days. I don’t want to host a potty and I’m not going to install a shower. I’m not going hermit — I would just like an alternative getaway that costs next to nothing so long as it’s just me.

Phone

I woke up this morning and checked my phone to see if the car had been sold. Phone was dead. It’s been a good phone, and this has been coming for some time. My iPhone5s has been to Afghanistan and back, and has taken more drops and smacks than it should have. It owes me nothing. Apple owes me nothing. “Several” years is a reasonable time for a powerful, portable, all-environment tech device to last. My complaints with Apple have always been about software and interface, not the excellent hardware.

If Android worked on the iPhone, I would pay whatever Apple wanted. But that’s a different topic.

The battery began swelling several months ago. At first I wan’t sure what was going on. I thought the phone was just seated poorly in the Mophie JuicePack Air (another highly recommended piece of gear), but the truth soon outed. Just as my excellent iPhone3GS/32 swelled up and died, this one is going the way of all things.

One of the things which I dislike about Apple is the push to get me online at all times. Well that doesn;t work for a number of reasons. I do not wish to “connect to” my possessions, but to possess them. I do not want to be forced into a proprietary online backup strategy. Apple in all things, from music and photographs, to backups and OS updates, wants you to be online. Their flagship music software iTunes has become downright hostile to managing a local music collection. And as iTunes is the only way to manage your iPhone, you have to dance to their tune or lose it all.

A Rant is Born

Which is too bad, because the crap OS on my MacBook Pro has been dead for a long time, and I have not been able to back up anything but photographs. My MacBook Air is kaput as well, so I cannot even vouchsafe a blind backup. Windows will not take a backup of the iPhone, as it is formatted for Mac, and with no operational Macs in the house, I am truly hoofed. Note a very old PowerBook is running fine, but the OS is so old that even it cannot speak the right lingo to access the file structure on the phone.

See a pattern here? Old Apple stuff work because the hardware, always top-notch, is accompanied by software that doesn’t suck. The newer devices, still great hardware in their own rights, are all dead because the OSs are too fragile, and the changes come too quickly.

I tend to be at the forefront of what sucks because I want a lot from the technology, and I am unwilling to become an expert in it. Robust technology allows this, and fragile crap does not.  Well, the excellent iPhone5s is now dead, it seems.

A long time ago, I heard that there was a recall/replace for batteries in the iPhone5s, but I checked my serial number, and I was not eligible Well, now it seems that if you take your stuff to one of their “genius” ghettos, you might get a free replacement phone. This was in 2015 anyway, so there’s hope. But the nearest Mac ghetto is in Tokyo, which is not close. And when they give you a new phone, they will restore it based upon your “iCloud” backup. Well I don’t use iCloud. First off, I don’t want the whole 64GB synced online. Second, I want control over where and when my data goes. I *sometimes* have security concerns that mean I will never go with a proprietary online backup and sync strategy. I don’t want to manage that off and on lest I forget to turn it off at some point. My discretion is exercised by not signing up for the damned thing in the first place.

On the other hand, there is a video showing how to replace the battery in your iPhone5s. Four screws, and they are the five-lobed blob style… so this means I’m not doing it today at any rate. Fair enough. Lots to think about there. I’ve never opened the case, but I’m also WELL beyond any warranty.

So, off to Starbucks to drown my woes. I had to come on base to get a printout and to update some healthcare “settings”, so there I was. Fired up the computer, and I can;t catch a Wi-Fi signal. No sweat, I’ll just turn on some music and sit down to write.

Windows Media Player won’t play the file. Hmmm, that’s odd. Never been a problem before. This is my inaugural Windows10 machine, but since my Windows7 machine keeps chugging along, I’ve never really migrated everything to this one. I have let this machine flow with everything Microsoft wants. The only non-stock thing I have going is a paid subscription to McAfee’s top-level covers-your-whole-universe anti-virus & whatnot protection money scheme. Other than that, this machine runs the way Windows wants it. Frankly, if I were to re-engage on the Mac front, I would do that as well. These things have grown too complex for the non-expert, and I am no expert. Some say that wisdom is the recognition of ignorance. I disagree. Any fool can tell you that you are ignorant. For me, wisdom is the decision not to pursue expertise for little return. In my job, I say “I have people for that.” At home, I say “I am paying for that service.”

Gone are the days when I could sort out the conflicts between anti-virus products, and neither should I wish to.
Well Windows Media Player wouldn’t open a particular file. Then the bundled bloatware CyberMedia Something or other also choked on that file. I went to use Audacity to open the (.mp3) file, and it choked and hung. Well Audacity is well-respected peer-reviewed code, so when you have a problem with Audacity, you have a problem.

So I rebooted. And it installed deferred updates for forty-five minutes. Remember that I have no internet connection. These are all updates which had been waiting for Heaven knows how long. This machine almost never gets a reboot. It comes out of the bag and gets woken from sleep. So the updates began, and dragged on.

I pulled the Kindle 3G and the Kindle Fire out of the bag. I was going to read on the 3G, and listen to music from the Fire. Except that the battery was dead on the Fire (notorious short battery on those — it cost all of $49 bucks, so fair enough). So still no tunes. Back out to the car to get a charging cable, set it up, all good.

Well just how connected should I be? Recall that I am the owner of an elderly iPhone now, and one which may have heaved its last packet aloft. I have been considering this for some time, as I would like to ove to the Google Pixel phone, for a host of reasons, many of which are detailed above. But it’s not approved for the Japan market yet, and as it turns out, it may never be. Japan has more stringent water-tightness requirements than the rest of the world. It’s one more way that they take accepted engineering practices and call it “not good enough fo rthe Japanese consumer”, which translates to a closed market, a playground for Japanese companies who of course find it worthwhile to engineer to those standards. Meanwhile, you have t buy their apps, play their games, subsist on their servers It’s like Apple on steroids.

The Google Pixel may not happen for me.  I have used several Android phones, and I have no problem with Android. Frankly, I was warming up to the Microsoft/Nokia Windows/Lumia thing, but it looks like that one failed to thrive. Too bad. Nokia is another kick-ass hardware maker whose software misadventures have taken a toll. Oh, and they got taken to the cleaners by Japan, Inc., which did the same thing to Nokia that it had done to IBM decades ago. Invite them to play in a closed market, adapted the market to the superior outside technology, then kicked the foreigner out. But what ultimately doomed Nokia was a pig-headed insistence on their own software and infrastructure, followed by a Hail-Mary OS partnership flurry that saw them recognize the truth, but too late. The truth is this — Nokia makes great hardware. The rest of the truth is that they tried to lever that advantage into a vertical silo, which right now only works for one player — Apple.

What keeps Apple from opening up the platform? Why should they be hostile to making some of the best hardware in the world, and letting OEMs install whatever OS they want? It’s a strategy aimed at domination, but which has serially failed to dominate anything except a small group of users. Granted, “small” is relative, but when your small group is literally millions, why on earth would you not take advantage of a market opening?

Likewise, MacOS could be run on any hardware. The heavy lifting is already done, as MacOS is really Unix which can now be run on any hardware. All modern software depends upon various layers of abstraction. Remember when you had to install a particular printer for WordPerfect5.1? Notice how those days are gone? That was not a shortcoming of WordPerfect (which is NOT dead), but of the entire computer+printer paradigm of the time. Likewise, WordStar3.3 cannot run comfortably on modern machines because it pre-dates abstraction of any sort, and relies upon speaking directly to memory management in order to save files.  Abstraction is the opposite of this, where an application has to ask the OS to perform some service.  The advantage is that the OS is the only thing that has to know the vagaries of a particular service — the parity settings of a connection, or the cabling setup of a particular printer.

Annnnnd, I’m back home.  With Wi-Fi.  Back on my trusty Windows7 machine.  A little Dropbox sync, a little editing, and Voila!

Bookmark the permalink.

7 Responses to Nothing Lasts Forever

  1. EThompson says:

    “I would like to “research” using the car as a mobile hotel room. Not a live-in car, but nice enough to work in, and okay to sleep in for, say, two days.”

    Ok, now I’m getting worried. It was bad enough you chose to start a site and accepted all of us hellions but this … this is going too far!

  2. EThompson says:

    If you don’t agree, pls watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nhgfjrKi0o

    :))

  3. TKC1101TKC1101 says:

    I enjoyed this, it reminded me of a classic Jerry Pournelle rant at Chaos Manor as he fought his way through trying to be cutting edge in the late 80s and 90s.

    We are once more at a point where the path forward is unclear and I am enjoying watching MS, Apple and Samsung make their moves with Google playing it’s own game.

    The market is splitting into people who use the devices to consume and those who use them to create and control.

  4. EThompson says:

    “We are once more at a point where the path forward is unclear and I am enjoying watching MS, Apple and Samsung make their moves with Google playing it’s own game.”

    You forgot to mention The Master- Mark Z who I think is even smarter than Steve Jobs and the new guy at Google. I did a day trade with SNAP the day it went public and made some bucks, but got out of it by 3:33 p.m. because I believe FB will do it better and more efficiently sooner rather than later.

    • TKC1101TKC1101 says:

      I do not see Zuckerberg defining the direction of hardware and operating systems and what we will use for work and play when it comes to what we used to call ‘computers’.

      Now, either Microsoft of Apple or Google will buy Sony to grab the PlayStation franchise and we may see a Samsung-Microsoft alliance on phones and desktop. It will be interesting.

  5. EThompson says:

    I disagree; it’s all about the algorithms and that kid knows everything about computer and software engineering, computer science, information systems, and information technology.

    He will own this world sooner rather than later and yes, I’ve put my money where my mouth is.

  6. ctlaw says:

    “What keeps Apple from opening up the platform? Why should they be hostile to making some of the best hardware in the world, and letting OEMs install whatever OS they want? It’s a strategy aimed at domination, but which has serially failed to dominate anything except a small group of users. Granted, “small” is relative, but when your small group is literally millions, why on earth would you not take advantage of a market opening?”

    I cannot translate that passage into a coherent set of thoughts. Apple is the OEM (original equipment manufacturer).

    The number of users who would buy a premium piece of hardware like a MacBook to then run linux on seems quite small.

    Would publicizing hardware specs compromise security of customers running MacOS?

    Would such a strategy create a huge customer service burden?