On the one hand, I like how they’ve picked up that I’m not using a specific version of Windows.  On the other hand I can still see the whole document where none of it is relevant, sp they haven’t disabled anything…

Computers were once large, unwieldily things, operated by a series of trained individuals.  Today, you have read this merely by punching a few keys (onscreen or physical) or clicking a link or two, everything from fetching the data on a disk, assembling it, processing it, sending it to you and assembling, processing, and displaying that has been done for you.

Computers have evolved to make jobs easy.  Once upon a time when your boss asked you to send a personalised letter out to a few hundred people, you would have had to have found each contact, copy the relevant details onto the letter, then the relevant details onto the envelope.  Today when your boss asks you to do this, technologies such as mail merge mean that you can point your letter and envelope templates at a bunch of addresses and have your computer churn out all of the details you need.
Why, then, do people still try and do this manually?  Why do people still manually search through electronic documents, one document at a time?  Why do people paste screenshots into Microsoft Word!?

I argue that some functions of a computer have become really simple, while other concepts are still quite obscure.  While someone might be able to piece together a simple mail merge using their address book, the thought of using the same principle to read details from a spreadsheet and input them into a word processing document just never crosses their mind.

This very situation has arisen before.  I was working in an office almost two years ago, the staff regularly used such things as mail merge for letters using the companies network address book.  They were migrating to a system where they needed a form filled out for every directory created (detailing access rights, when deletion was due, etc.), the problem was that they had already created a shed load of directories…The staff had started to catalog these by hand, getting somewhere between twenty to sixty forms done a day (they had other duties as well).  
For me, it took a day of messing about with some VBScript and I could list all of these directories in a text file.  I could import this text file into Excel using ” as a delimiter, this meant I could separate the path names as the form requested.  I found that it was very easy to see what group of directories had what attributes and found I could copy & paste an awful lot.  When finished, all of this was mail merged into the Word document which held the form.  After a day of downtime, I could now process eighty directories an hour.
OK, the VBScript was a little specialist, but no general user thinks of doing this kind of thing.

Users generally don’t even know what applications are there for.  Most people know that if you want to put a nail in a plank of wood, a hammer is the tool for the job, not a kettle.  Sure the kettle is hard and has a handy handle, but that’s not what it’s for.
The word processor is so often misused.  Many people seem to use their word processing application as a place to paste that image they just copied (or screen grabbed), they then send this document to other people using email.  At school we were encouraged to use Microsoft Word to create a poster, this was supposed to be both fun and educational of which is was neither.  Word doesn’t lend itself to creating posters, alignment of images, text boxes, and the like go squiffy when you decide to rearrange another element. 
Though other members of the Microsoft Office suite are also abused.  Excel is used to standardise the input of information, and PowerPoint has been known to create ‘screen savers’.

While it is easier than ever to write a letter, few people know how to write one, those who do will use a word processor and completely ignore the fact that for the last however many years they have placed the receiver’s address in the top left corner and the sender’s address in the top right, instead we get a mishmash of one address below the other on different sides of the page, or a complex arrangement of spaces and tabs, which gets completely thrown when you change the margin sizes…
I can’t recall the number of times I’ve been sent a document and found that when the author wanted to break to the next page they have held their finger on the ‘return’ key until the cursor jumps to the next page, without a thought that perhaps the software might do this for them, forgoing them the hassle of removing the extra empty lines when the add more text later on and find the page blow suddenly starts halfway down the page.
Headings are another one, people want something large and bold, so naturally they set the font size to around 18 and make it bold, they then moan that after writing 20,000 words for their report that all the headings are slightly different.  If they had used the various headings (you know, the ones generally found in the top left of your word processor), then all the headings would be the same, and could be changed in one fell swoop by adjusting the documents styles.

Email is still used to transfer important files around an organisation.  Despite the fact that email wasn’t developed to transfer files, it is a terrible waste of resources, with each recipient holding their own copy of the file.

It is so easy to shove a mouse around a desk that people are no longer taught how to use the tools placed in front of them, and these same people don’t seem capable of using two of the worlds biggest resources available to them: The Internet and Google.  If you don’t know how to do something it’s bound to be explained on the internet…

Thankfully computing is now heading in the right direction.  Our smart phones and online services do even more for us than our computers do, they organise us and our data – be that photos, music, emails, etc.  People don’t have to worry so much what format their data is in.  Especially in the new wave of smart phones and tablets, we are finding new and intuitive ways to achieve tasks.
These ‘post PC’ devices are generally managed from a PC but after reading an article in issue 90 of the iCreate magazine, a reader had written in and said that they had used their iPad for six months (since last summer) and had not plugged it into their computer, this shows us that people are using these as standalone devices connected to other devices through the Internet.  The iPad or online service was organising photos, music, email, RSS feeds, etc. The user just had to get on and use it.

A new wave of computing is upon us and I hope it strips the complexity from tasks, rather than stripping away the functionality altogether.

Rémi Denis-Courmont, one of the original contributors to the VLC project, objected to a GPL’d project being available on the Apple App Store and what restrictions Apple forced upon it.
On 9th January Rémi posted on his blog “On January 7th, I was told by an Apple attorney that VLC media player had been removed from the App Store. That is how I was able to break the news first. However as can be expected from an attoryney, there was not really any explanation.”
Applidium, the iOS VLC developers, received a letter from Apple stating that they were sorry the dispute couldn’t be resolved, see Rémi for details…

So there we have it, the VLC has gone from the App Store…It has yet to be deleted from my iPhone, but I can be sure there will be no updates in the future.

Another triumph for the consumer friendly GPL!

VLC is licensed under the open source license called the GNU General Public License, this license has very extreme views on how the code can be used in an open way.  For example it can’t be used with closed code unless code under another specific license is used between the GPL and closed code, you can’t relicense code that is under the GPL, you can’t restrict people using it for anything.
Which this all sounds good, it’s not always great for the consumer.

Apple operates a pretty much closed shop (OK, they do do a lot of open source work, but a lot of what they do is closed).  This works for them, they sell a you single copy of OS X for each machine  you own (there is, of course, volume and family packs), they make more money this way.
The GPL doesn’t work with Apple’s way of doing things.  Apple say “You shall be authorized to use Products on five Apple-authorized devices at any time” (from here), the GPL doesn’t like things like that.

A man called Rémi Denis-Courmont who contributed some of the original source code to the VLC project has called for the VLC app to be pulled from the App Store.  Over on Planet VLC Rémi’s blog post is mirrored (published 26th October).  He states “users of iOS-based devices would be deprived of VLC media player, as a consequence of the intransigently tight control Apple maintains over its mobile applications platform”.  Some might argue that the GPL forces similarly tight control over code that is licensed under it.

So, for the time being VLC is available.  But we’ll see how long it stays there for.  If everyone who wants it buys a developers license, we can all download the source code and install it on our own devices, of course.

UPDATE

I’d like to quote something Gavin, the author of TechBeast, said on the x404 forums about the GPL:

As this VLC debacle is showing, the GPL is just as much a barrier to free software reaching critical mass. How many new desktop VLC users would have been gained by the app store presence? It’ll presumably prevent VLC from entering the Mac app store too.
How many more free software gems will be hamstrung by the GPL, doomed to languish in obscurity?

Over 1000 stories for me to look at…I’m never going to have the time!

The old 6200 has been dropped in photo chemicals, dropped many a time and has been run over by the Faye’s KA.  This new one seems to have broken because it has a small amount of photo chemicals dripped over it…

Why oh why isn’t technology today more robust?  Or at least as robust as it used to be…Yes, phone manufacturers want you to upgrade your phone every now and again, but every six months!?

$ pwd
/var/tmp/test
$ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x 1 user1 other 7 29 Jul 08:00 link_test
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user1 other 29 29 Jul 08:00 foo
$ cd link_test
$ pwd
/var/tmp/test/link_test
$ ln -s ../foo bar
$ ls -l
lrwxr-xr-x 1 user1 other 7 29 Jul 08:01 bar -> ../foo

I know that I wouldn’t be able to do this in Windows anyway, adding the fact that the command line here is off bounds to everyone there was no chance.  But Windows users don’t touch ‘cmd’ anymore, right?  That’s why Linux is for geeks…So, there must be a way to do this in the GUI.  Give it a go, you’ll get an error like this:

[IMAGE TO BE INSERTED]

I wrote to the technical team who, after 24 hours, told me that it couldn’t be done.  The worlds most common* Operating System can’t perform this simple operation.  They did give me two work arounds:

The usual work around for this is to create a shortcut to the command prompt executable cmd.exe with a switch to start a program or open a file, i.e. cmd.exe /start ..foobar.exe

And:

Create a simple VBS script and run this instead of the shortcut. The code would be as shown below, create a text file and rename the extension to .vbs to execute the code, obviously changing the path as needed.
dim objShell
set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
objShell.ShellExecute "..foobar.xls", "", "", "open", 1
set objShell = nothing

I was very dissapointed ,and now we have to settle with duplicating files to achieve the same thing (the work arounds didn’t work on our system).

*taken from the W3C page, here