Auto-lock settings

Maybe it was a blessing that the iPhone came with auto lock set to 30 seconds by default.  It was so horrible I was forced to immediately change it.  Though it may have also been better to follow the rule: make the defaults nice.  With 30 second auto lock the screen was often dimming before I could figure out which button to press next.  I think one minute would be a nice minimum for this, even for battery fascists.

But the options are less useful than it might at first appear.  There are many options, but only from 30 seconds to 5 minutes and then Never.  I actually went straight from the 30 second default to Never.  But after a day or two that wasn't working out either.  I thought 30 minutes would be just about right.  But I could only chose the longest non-Never option, 5 minutes.  That has actually worked out fine, but it still seems stupid to offer choices 1,2,3,4,5 minutes.  They should be more like 1,2,5,10,20, as 3 and 4 minutes are not that much different, nor 4 and 5.

This should be pretty obvious.  Was the 1,2,3,4,5 choice a last minute decision by the battery fascists?

And though it's less "simple" what about just letting people select the time continuously by typing or rolling odometer numbers?

iPhone text notifications

This is wonderful.  My phone is sitting to the side, auto-locked.  Text comes in, and it's shown right on the screen just long enough for me to read.  Afterwards, no blinking lights for embarrassment or distraction.

I can even turn on the phone without opening the screen and see the message.  That's great!

My Android phone would never show anything useful about texts or phone calls without opening the text or phone app, which takes some time (and in fact it always took time just to open the phone, even without security, I had to swipe multiple times just to get it right).

Not so intuitive: Album sorting in the Music app

OK, I want to see if I added Amused to Death to my iPhone.  I hadn't realized that I only yet have a 24/96 version.  I wonder if it would play that.  Probably, though to get the best quality might one have to have a audio-mixer-bypassed like Amarra on Mac?  Otherwise, you aren't really getting 24/96.  I doubt that the iPhone is a bit-transparent hirez music playing device like Pono, but I don't know at all.

Perhaps that is what is clogging up all the memory on my phone for only 30 59 albums.  I have determined that 59 albums seem to be taking about 40 Mb.  I believe now that's not unreasonable for 59 CD's to have that much uncompressed data.  But I was still wondering if a likely degraded-in-playback hirez file is lurking on the phone.  So I thought I'd take a look at the phone (I know now….would have been easier on the computer…but isn't the phone supposed to be ultra-intuitive and all that)?

So I open Music on the phone, and it shows my Albums (by Album) with Hope by Klaatu on top.  Well I'm sure that can't be the very first album alphabetically, and sure enough it isn't.  What may be the first alphabetically is Aja…which appears about in the middle of the list.  What kind of order is this?  There is a pulldown giving me different things

Now I can hold down on the Albums pulldown, and what I get is a list of things I can select from.  I can select Artists instead of Albums.  But nothing I select comes up in alphabetical order, even if I select it several times.  I can't see the logic to the order things do come up in.  Actually it seems to put the same Album on top regardless of whether sorted by Artist or Album.

Must keep an Android handy anyway

Apparently there is nothing like "Wifi Analyzer" for Android on iOS.  Apple doesn't allow use of any "frameworks" that can access that information, and hasn't since iOS 5 or thereabouts.  Speculation is that Apple is worried things like this drain the battery faster.

As everyone who has used it notes: everyone using wifi must have Android Wifi Analyzer.  It's the most useful wifi analyzer.  Once you've used it, you can't imagine getting along without it.  iPhone has a number of "wifi analyzers" that give you detailed information but only about the wifi network you are attached to, nothing about the RF strength and relative RF strengths of other wifi networks, which Android Wifi Analyzer shows dynamically on a graph calibrated in dB.

There is something called Wifi Explorer for Mac OS X that looks even better, just not in your pocket.

This is a significant disappointment, and I blew about $15 on iPhone wifi analyzers that give comprehensive information I'm rarely interested in, and spent a couple hours searching for what I actually wanted.

Why the iPhone virtual keyboard is better

I was making tons of typos texting with the Samsung Galaxy S4 keyboard.  Many of these typos were strange including numbers and letters, and the spell checker let those right through (even suggesting other combinations of numbers and letters).

I hardly make any typos texting with the iPhone 6S Plus keyboard.  Not only are the keys substantially larger (and they look larger still, thanks to flat top appearance and grey back with black letters on white: which would be more readable even at the same size).  There's no row of numbers on the top, and somehow just having three rows of all letters makes it easier to type right.  Of course it's a bother when you do actually have to use numbers, but not so much.

Lightning connector

I hated the idea of a new proprietary connector giving up the rich iPod connector heritage with all those lovely digital and analog AV outputs.

I embraced the rest-of-industry USB (its it mini USB or micro USB ?) connector with my Galaxy S4.  But I had lots of cables that didn't work, it was a troublesome connector that had to be just right, and ultimately that aspect of the Galaxy phone broke, the connector losing connection.  My replacement Galaxy was better, but by then I had discarded scads of troublesome cables, and just the few that worked with Galaxy (notably, not the one provided with the unit…) seemingly identical.

Every single time it was an issue to get the orientation right.  Usually had to turn on the lights, get out of bed, and examine it closely.

So, the Lightning connector is appreciated now.

Hey Siri fails

I've had a lot of Siri fails, not even related to unsupported apps like Sonos.

I'l try to keep a record here of juicy ones, starting now.

[Hey Siri assumed.]

Close the iPhone.

Syncing music: ALAC wanted!

When I last sync'd my iPhone 3G, it took over 24 hours.  I now believe this was largely because I was using an attached storage device with PC type formatting, and that OS X doesn't handle that efficiently for syncing operations which I guess rely on the OS X filesystem journaling feature.

Syncing my iPhone 6S Plus took an hour or two, but that was copying "50G" of music.  Syncing is now much nicer too, especially in that you can select individual albums.  I thought I selected about 30 albums but they took 50G of storage.  I will need to check this out.  I would think an uncompressed CD would require 0.5G of storage on average, so 50G would store 100 albums.

I will not ever store lossy compressed music, which is garbage IMO.

Unfortunately, that's the only choice Apple gives me other than the original files.  The best quality compressed format that can be done on-the-fly is AAC 256.

What they really should be able to do is convert to ALAC (if not FLAC) on the fly, so I could have ALAC on the phone and keep my universal AIFF files on the Mac.

Needed: Siri controlling Sonos

Siri is nicer than I expected.  Siri popped up while I wasn't paying attention, I recall being told about it after I had replaced my iPhone 3G with a Samsung Galaxy S4 in 2013.

Siri can play music on the phone itself.  Which is kinda cool.  I saw the suggested command "Play some blues" and sure enough it worked, though I wasn't sure where it got the Blues from or whether I was getting charged.  I hope not.

I then sync'd my phone.  Since my last iPhone experience sync'ing has gotten much better.  I can select the albums I want on the phone.  My entire library would take about 300Gb.  So I selected something like 30 albums, and it filled up 50 Gb on the phone.  That didn't seem right.  I'll have to investigate.

As I was doing this it was dawning on me: due to communication issues I never copied ANY music to my Galaxy phone.  The only way I found to copy large folders was to actually remove the memory chip, and I decided not to bother.  And it turns out that Android File Transfer is just as broken wrt the Samsung Galaxy S4 as it ever was…I downloaded the latest "version" (actually it looks identical to what I have) and it still can't even open a large folder.

So with 30 albums on my phone, I asked Siri to play some William Orbit, and I was Orbiting the rest of the night.

But it would have been nicer to be able to have Siri control Sonos…then I could have it play music over my real high end audio systems in every room, rather than just the puny iPhone speaker.  I tried a command to do that:

Hey Siri,
Play some Beethoven on the Bedroom Sonos system.

Of course that didn't work (even after I had downloaded and opened the Sonos app) and a tiny bit of web searching revealed that people have been begging for this feature for quite some time and still are up to last week.  They seem to be begging Sonos to add Siri support to the Sonos app, though I wonder if the limitation doesn't come from what Apple allows Siri to do.

Then, here is an article titled so as to make you (falsely) believe that Amazon's Echo will control Sonos.

No dice there.  But what I have found is a kit to make Siri control any kind of home automation, including Sonos and X10.  (Insteon please!)  The author says this is for truly dedicated geeks for now, eventually we hope the product developers will add their own custom shims.  But it looks sufficiently fascinating that I might try.

Samsung Android has been a lousy Smart experience

UPS says my iPhone is scheduled for delivery this afternoon.  Of course it will just be a pet rock until I take it to Sprint and have them switch my service from AT&T.

Meanwhile, before I go all gushy on Apple, let's be clear.  The reason I am returning to iPhone is not because iPhone is wonderful in every way.  I am gradually remembering my universe of complaints regarding Apple and their closed software "ecosystems" including iOS, which I think are somewhat better now in newer phones.  But the problem is this: in my limited experience, Samsung Android was a worse smartphone experience.  It is possible had I decided to devote my life to it, I could have customized my Samsung/Android phone to make it a tolerable smart phone.  But I don't do that sort of thing anymore.  Either it works fairly nicely out of the box or it goes into the junk pile.  My Samsung Galaxy Android phone was a great phone, but the smart features were not only not very smart, they grew positively annoying.  Despite my efforts, I couldn't turn off all the annoying features, or make up for the missing ones.

And now I'm facing one of those major missing features.  I am unable to copy my photos back to my Mac.

At least one person was told in 2012 that Samsung does not support Mac.  And that has been my experience.  When I first connected my Samsung phone to a Mac via USB, I recall it did absolutely nothing.  I had been lured to Android by the siren song of it being an "open" system.  I expected the Android to make itself visible to my mac as a filesystem I could deal with directly instead of Apple's stupid and intentionally limited syncing device.  Instead, it makes itself visible as a "media player" which can only communicate through special apps.  Or, if no such media player is available, as nothing at all.

I was fortunate at the time to have an android guru at the next desk in my office.  He helped me get past a few things, but couldn't help with others.  Samsung had this app called Kies, which they then discontinued support for.  I don't remember the whole story, but in the above blog you can see the recommended path, which sounds familiar: you install then uninstall Kies so it can update your drivers, then you can use AndroidFileTransfer with files larger than 4GB.

I think by the time I got my phone however, this workaround using Kies was no longer available.

Well 4GB files is not my problem.  I don't have any such files.  My problem is that I cannot even open any of the folders that have photos in them as the folders themselves are too big or something.

Somewhere in the distant 2.5 years ago, I copied something called AndroidFileTransfer to my Mac.  Every time I hook the Galaxy phone to USB, AndroidFileTransfer pops up.  It shows a visual file tree, and I have been able to download lots of files through it.  But I can't even open any of the folders where my photos, movies, or music files are.

I recall that's about when I lost interest in Android as a system about two years ago.  I had forgotten the fact that I have never downloaded so much as a single photo from my Galaxy phone to my Mac, despite a couple weeks of messing with apps and getting advice from an Android guru.

You can take all your air gestures and other geewiz features and shove them very deep, IMO.

Just get the basics right, the very simple things, and I can be happy.

My sense was that up and down the line both Samsung and AT&T were deliberately hobbling the Android system so that you had to buy extra cost "services" that make up for the deliberately hobbled features.

If that's the business strategy, you can forget it, and this is a large part of the reason I'm happy to dismiss both Samsung and AT&T.  I felt that I was paying plenty for a top notch phone and top notch service, and that is what I should have gotten.  Instead I got a bloated trojan geared mainly to selling me even more stuff.

I continue to feel this way very strongly.  I am especially not interested in Cloud Storage that I would have to pay for, simply to make up for the lack of basic transfer facilities which should have been standard.

I'm quite happy with storing files on my existing networks of computers.  Just give me a way to copy the files.  Not a path to becoming an even deeper prisoner.

The intent of both iOS and Android is to make you a prisoner, though they go about it in different ways and to slightly different ends.  What we need is the User Smartphone, one that's actually programmed for smartphone users and not corporate conglomerations.  A Free Software smartphone (some have been working on these I see now) would be different.  But I can't say I always like the Free Software product best either (though I love many of them deeply).  A Free Software product like Linux can also be more annoying than it's worth (so I concluded 13 years ago when I dumped Linux and BSD and adopted OS X as my household standard).  Too many options, too many choices, not all defaulted correctly can be a prison too.  Sadly, I decided then, I need to pay a fascist (you remember Steve) to get enough of the details right out of the box.  The fascist does this for us precisely because that's the only way he can get us to accept his bargain.  The Free Software gifter doesn't have to do anything at all, and wrt Smarphones doesn't yet, because Free.  Perhaps someday that won't be true--wake me up then.

Meanwhile, if we choose to go on with this (as some don't for principled reasons), we go with the less painful prison.

And it's sad wrt the Samsung phones, they are designed and made very well hardware-wise.  Unlike Apple, who is just a designer/programmer/marketer, Samsung is an actual industrial company who is a world leader in electronics and especially display technologies, of which the Samsung Galaxy phones are a prime example.  The AMOLED display is the worlds best technology, capable of the truest colors and blacks.  Even here, though it's not clear that Samsung gives us the best color display, they have a "vivid" option which uselessly goes beyond the standard gamut.  The problem is that if standard material is mapped to an extra-wide gamut, there will be color distortion.

Apple does however use the best available other stuff, it uses the world's best LCD displays and gets full color accuracy and the full HD resolution (which is already beyond what is needed, though Samsung gives us twice as many pixels fwiw).  Back when others were thinking of color displays on phones as a gimmick feature, Jobs insisted on display accuracy.  Now most phones are among the best displays and cameras most people will own.

Since I bought my Galaxy phone with the old style plastic removable back, Samsung has decided to compete with Apple in the much ballyhooed cosmetics department, with fancy metal back and generally much greater attention to box construction details.  I will concede I missed the iPhone sylishness and solidity a tad when I went to Galaxy S4, but I though the removable back a good idea, and in fact it turned out to be essential for that phone, I think that was how I copied my iPhone photos into it, by swapping out the memory chip, and I think the plastic back actually protects the device better by cushioning shock, even if it itself doesn't wear as well, but how important is wear for something you're only keeping a year anyway?  Well my phone is 2.5 years old and since I'm planning on keeping it forever now, it's not immaterial.  It clearly shows wear around the trim which my iPhone 3G which was used for 4.5 years doesn't.  But now it's a good thing I can remove the back again to get my photos out.

So now, with no removable back, another Galaxy would be even worse for Mac users?

I see now that Apple and Google have settled their ancient warfare over Android as Stolen Property.  I don't like software patents and I think they are a huge negative for users and still a negative for computer programmers.  They are "not" a negative for corporations that want to rule the earth, or at least they don't think so for the longest time, until they don't.  Funny how in the extra big Apple logo, the bite looks more like a mouth that's going to eat us all.  Continuing in the vein, of course Google is those go go goggley exes that never stop watching us.  It would figure that these would be the ultimate representations of corporatocracy.  Anyway, given a world of corporate klutzes, Apple may have never needed to be a patent warrior.  Just to keep on doing things slightly nicer.  Really good design can't be copied it seems because the copiers always mess it up.  Here are the five patent claims Apple had/has been making.  Nothing here looks all that important, and apparently the crucial one now (last in litigation, perhaps still) is the on-off slider.  I might say that the invisible "slider" on my Galaxy phone has been another nuisance.  Unlike the one on my Apple phone, it doesn't usually work.  I have to slide about 2-5 times to get the phone to turn on.  I never had that trouble on iPhone.  Is that because no slider is visible (Samsung's attempt to evade the patent?)  I've always though it because it's not sensing properly, not because of how I swipe, but it was certainly reassuring if not helpful to have a visible slider too.  This does seem like such a trivial idea it should not be patentable, and I think most software patents are like that.  But it would also seem to be one easily worked around well instead of poorly.  Anyway it seems to me that when I turn the power button on, the phone should just come on rather than bothering me with some secondary trick just to open up.  Or perhaps just double click the power button (is that patented?).

Now here's an ancient link I think I looked at back in 2013 which appears to have "the answer."  First, I can't even follow the advice given by another Samsung device user because the "settings" are organized completely differently.  On my phone all the settings are uselessly (or worse…I can never find anything in Settings) divided in 4 major categories, or so it appears,   Connections (nothing regarding USB), My Device, Accounts, and More.  Of course it would follow that most crucial things are in More.  And even there, most of the essential stuff is under "Developer Options."  And once you get there, there is little organization at all, and you'd have to be an Android Guru to know what is what unless you have some advice like in the above link.  So this is like a car where in order to steer you must have your OBD programmer connected.  And to understand what direction you are going you must be continuously cruising the web on another system.

Anyway, I had apparently already tried unchecking "USB Debugging."  So when I just looked at it now, the box is unchecked.  So that would not explain why I don't see my files in Finder.  I noticed underneath that there is "Revoke USB debugging authorization."  I just now tried doing that.  And now, when I connect my Galaxy phone to my Mac through USB I get…nothing.  AndroidFileTransfer no longer comes up.  But my files do not appear in Finder or elsewhere either.  In short, this esteemed advise (which was actually cross linked from another discussion thereby proving its merit) does nothing for me at all.  On tablets you might get some limited freedom to move your files around, but on this phone apparently Samsung just doesn't want you copying files indiscriminately.  And they're so fixated on this I can't copy my files at all (without removing the back and taking out the memory chip).  At least on iPhone I get this curiously restricted (of course, it's to restrict your ability to use your stuff so you have to get more stuff from them) syncing thing.

Now, funny thing, I just downloaded Android File Transfer again, straight from Android.com.  I had been thinking this was some way off hack, not Android.Com (which is straight from Google, right?).  And right away I was able to open up the DCIM directory that apparently contains my camera photos and copy them all to my Mac.  As soon as I tried to open Photos a friend called and that was that.

Now what I see is curious (and I don't know who to blame, exactly) when I click on the triangle next to the Photos folder icon it just turns darker.  I think that means it is working, but it would be nice to get a clearer indication.

Well I didn't have to wait long.  After about a minute I get that old complaint reasserting itself:

    Can't access device storage

    If your device's screen is locked, disconnect its USB cable, unlock your screen, and then reconnect the USB cable.

Only the screen isn't locked, it's still wide open, and doing those things has in the past done nothing other than repeat the same error report.  I tried again now, and same result.  It just won't open the Pictures folder.

I tried using Android File Transfer to copy the "First Photos" folder on my memory card, which must have been the original photos I copied to Android from iPhone.  Once again, that brought up the familiar error report.

So it's 2015, and Android File Transfer, now proven to be direct from Google, is still broken.

Now it's pretty simple to see how a user oriented phone would work.  If you connect the phone to a computer over USB, it should be a USB storage device from which you can copy files, delete them, or copy files to.  Anything other than that is a deliberate effort to control the User, and a rather ham handed one.  I mean, say you have COPYRIGHTED MUSIC files that may not be copyable.  Then just give some kind of warning message and skip copying those files and copy the other ones.  It's pretty easy to understand how, from a user's perspective, things should work.  It just that the other priorities are so much higher these mega corporations overlook that.  Simple file copying via USB isn't a company priority especially when they are selling the Cloud Storage alternative.

And instead of fixing the fundamental problems, more gloss and hype is added every year.  Well that was why I wasn't getting on the buy-a-new-smartphone every year strategy back in 2011 when my first iPhone contract expired.  I had bought it thinking lifetime purchase, not phone-every-year.  But I've given in now.

Anyway, I should applaud Apple for at least taking one stand..against spying.

http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/20/apple-oppososition-to-cisa/

http://9to5mac.com/2015/10/20/apple-locked-iphone-data/

Moved to iPhone Forever

I've gone and done it.  Switched back to iPhone in a big way.  I've switched to Sprint and started iPhone Forever, with a 6S Plus 64G to start.

The way these things are priced, once you go a particular direction, it only makes sense to go in a big way.  So the 6S and not the 6 (a year newer model with many many improvements, only $100 more) and so 64G and not 16G.  And I've never exactly been an Apple fanboy (most often seems to me the reverse, though I grudgingly go with Apple for lack of equally friendly alternatives) but it doesn't really make sense, or at least it hadn't, not to upgrade every 2 years anyway on a contract plan.  Let me also post my contrarian view that contract plans, or Sprints new add-in purchases or leasing, make a lot of sense.

So why should I pay $399 down and only $5 less a month to own the phone in 2 years?  And forgo the opportunity to have a new phone every year, and to avoid having to worry about trade-in.

Of course it's a risk, and that's the point of a good deal.  To get a good deal, one must take a risk, and here the risk is that you're going to continue liking Sprint service or iPhone selection will continue to appeal.  Part of the deal here is that you're locking in that service.  But even here you can simply wait out the contract, and return the phone, and save $280 on total outlays and not have a spare phone to think about.

Part of my problem, actually, may be that I'm too attached to old things.  I was completely unwilling to trade in my iPhone 3G when offered to do so when getting my Galaxy S4, and I was completely unwilling this time to trade in my android phone…android is another set of things…perhaps good to have at hand, if not as one's pet rock.

But in future, if I stick with iPhones, just having the latest one…unless too unhappy with it, really appeals.  Apple does add stuff, and the newer phones are always better, but also older phones get slower and less friendly with OS updates.  That has been especially true in the past, some say, maybe not so much in future some are hoping as I was.

Well isn't there also an opportunity to get a different color or size?  So if I really screw up on this I have an out in one year.  I personally held a S Plus at an Apple Store and it seemed very fine, shocking me that the power button accident issue I have with the Samsung simply did not occur.  But will it become wearing in some other way, over time?  That's the risk.  I'm onboard for now.  I may be becoming a fanboy after all.

It's actually an upside that I know in advance I will not be keeping this, but getting even greater over time, and staying on top of the planned obsolescence rather than being devoured by it, for what seems now to be a modest charge.

New Cadillacs every year may have been even more a big deal back in the days when people did such things, but at much higher cost.  New iPhones every year has a lower environmental cost too.  And you actually hold and use your phone far more than a car (at least many people do).  It's far more the fashion accessory/status emblem/ego trip even than new cars now.  And then, the new features and staying on top of the world rather than being crushed by planned obsolescence.


Strangely I had a heck of a time subscribing to iPhone Forever and having it start before the Sprint rate increase on Friday October 16.  I first went to the iPhone store on Tuesday October 13, and after deciding I didn't like the sharp edges on the iPhone 5S (a model I had planned to buy because of the top mounted power button) and that I could live with the 6S Plus (because it's power button is beyond my natural grasp and therefore can't be pressed by accident) I asked the very helpful Apple salesman about Sprint service (he said it was fine in San Antonio, and then even looked up my address on a Sprint map to verify that) and then if I could switch from AT&T to Sprint and get an iPhone.  He recommended I go to a Sprint store because they could handle the change from AT&T to Sprint.  This was my first attempt to buy 6S Plus on Tuesday.  A friend at work suggested the Sprint store would be happy indeed to harvest my account from AT&T.

On Wednesday night I went online to Sprint.com.  I went through the ordering process, selecting my phone, entering personal information including my Social Security number, and then the ordering app froze up.  I got a blank browser screen.  The URL made it clear this was a "Review Your Order" page. I waited 20 minutes for slow network or Mac to catch up.  I didn't change.  Then I tried back to the previous page, then fill stuff out and forward.  Same result: blank page.  An hour later going back simply brought me to the Sprint.com home page.  In fairness I learned afterwards my Safari browser was out of date by some months.

So then on the way to work the next day, 3:00 PM, I stopped at the Sprint store near where I work (and would therefore be getting support from Sprint).  I told the Salesman I wanted iPhone Forever and a 64G iPhone 6S Plus in Space Grey.  He said he couldn't sell me one because they had no phones in stock.  He checked the computer, and confirmed there were no iPhone 6S Plus phones in Space Grey with 64G in San Antonio.  He apologized for my experience online, and gave me a card with the phone number to call.

I called the number from my desk at work at 5:30 PM.  The phone call was laboriously slow, with long waits between giving information, and having to spell my email out letter by letter.  Ultimately, it took 50 minutes, including about a 4 minute wait for the credit check.  (Mine should be somewhere between sterling and platinum, FICO about 785.)  The saleslady asked lots of questions like why I was switching from AT&T.  I gave the reason "personal."  She promised not to ask again.  Actually it is because I fear that AT&T is now a right wing company with political clout to lobby for rules not in my interest.  Sprint, not so much, at least I conceive of them as neither right wing nor pushing their (much lesser anyways) weight around so much.  Though I suspected my call, though handled by a lady sounding like a Californian, was actually in Asia.  So Sprint may well be as much into offshoring as much as anyone.  Maybe more than AT&T?  And that may have been the whole reason a local salesman couldn't order the phone for me…

There are other things that have bothered me about AT&T as well.  My Samsung phone was filled with AT&T bloatware as well as Samsung bloatware.  When my phone broke AT&T couldn't source one locally and I had to ship my phone to AT&T for replacement which took a week.  The AT&T store couldn't even ship it for me. Nor could the AT&T kiosk where I got my phone help me with some simple problems.  AT&T is endlessly trying to get me to buy UVerse, something I never will.  My AT&T cellular service has been fine though recently (in 2009 there were still issues, especially on trips, and they continued through 2012 but my cellular service has been pretty much perfect since I got my Galaxy phone in June 2013).  Certainly one gets the general sense that one is not getting the super premium service one is paying for at the highest priced carrier, and one wonders if all the extra money isn't simply being recycled as UVerse ads.  Many people would have and did dump AT&T long ago, but I stuck with them after my first iPhone contract feeling and hoping they were a better company, a feeling I subsequently lost over time.  Well now I'm seeing that my Sprint experience can be a bit difficult even when trying to buy the phone (where AT&T, and most everyone else is flawlessly obsequious--and you know not to expect that later from anyone) and this is not reassuring.  This may just be exceptional for various reasons, anyway, I trust the Sprint store to get my phone dialed in, and hopefully contacts copied. That's basically all the AT&T stores could do for me anyway.  If Sprint can at least do that much, they're fine.  Now that I'm getting an Apple, so I was told at the Apple Store, I can go there to get help even if I buy my phone at Sprint.  Arguably including this week, my experiences at the Apple Store have always been flawless (I hadn't been there in a few years though, and it is notably more crowded now than it was in 2009), a marked contrast to how things have gone at phone stores.  I have friends with Sprint and they've long been happy with it, so I don't think this is going to be a big mistake anyway.  It couldn't be much worse that AT&T was in 2009 when I got my first iPhone.  By and large I don't see my phone carrier as my best friend, mainly I just want them to get out of my way rather than staying in my face and endlessly trying to sell me overpriced add ons I don't need.

I do try to consider the global impacts of my decisions as well as the local and personal ones.  It's very hard to know much, and in situation like deciding which company to use, hard to decide if one company is really better than the other.

I am also getting something that AT&T doesn't even offer: an Unlimited Everything rate, and cheaper than what AT&T charges for just about any level of service.

Ultimately, I did get the confirming emails from Sprint.com before the 50 minute phone call ended, despite my very slow email system taking 10 minutes--the saleslady was as patient as me.  So it's now official, my new iPhone 6S Plus will be shipped to me next week.  I made it just in time to get the old $60 unlimited rate--mere hours before the rate rose to $70.  Sometime afterwards I'll be dealing with the switchover.  And hopefully before long enjoying being one of the kool kids.

I had images of a line around the block at the Sprint store.  Actually, when I got there there was only one other customer.  It ultimately took 4 attempts to order iPhone Forever before the Sprint rate increase, and at least 3 hours of effort (and far more hours of worrying).

Nilay Patel, one of the world's leading tech bloggers, says it bluntly. Buy an iPhone 6S Plus. It's the best, and a mind blowing experience if you have 5S or earlier.  And sign up for an iPhone upgrade service.

Stupid Power Button location on "Smart" phones

For 2.5 years now I have detested many things about my Samsung Galaxy S4.  Not that it hasn't been a good phone…it has actually been a great phone with wonderful voice quality, always reliable navigation, endless apps, etc.

At the same time, it has been extremely annoying and infuriating in little ways that I haven't been able to get used to.  The number one most annoying thing has been just this: the location of the power button on the side.

What seems to happen is that nearly every time I pull the phone out of my pocket I press the power button.  This has often seemed to mess up incoming phone calls and do other weird things.  The shape and resistance of the side power button are also implicated.  It seems that often the power button gets pressed simply by my keys and phone jostling in my pocket.  This never ever happened with my iPhone 3G, which you might think worse--having power button at the top which is therefore resting on the bottom of my pocket.  But THAT was never a problem for some reason.  It's the buttons on the side which get accidentally pressed because of rubbing up against harder things than the cloth at the bottom of my pocket.  I've often had my phone shut down and/or restart all by itself rattling around in my pocket.

Now I can show you, and I've been meaning to take a video, of how when I reach for the Galaxy phone in my pocket it's almost inevitable than while gripping it I will press the power button.  It doesn't even matter which way the phone is turned or how I try to avoid it.  I can't seem to pick up the phone without pressing that button.

Prior to the 6 series, Apple iPhones had power buttons at the top.  This had always worked fine for me. I would even go against conventional wisdom and put the power button for a large phablet right at the top too.  A power button should NOT be right under your finger.  You should have to reach to press it. That's because you do not have to press it often, and you do not want to press it unless you really want to.

So when I started thinking about replacement phones, this was at the top of my list of features I would look for.  Since I had been planning to return to iPhone for other reasons (to get away from the horrid overcomplicated trojan horse otherwise known as the Samsung Galaxy Android user interface) I looked at the newest iPhones for the first time in years and was shocked to learn that the latest two generations had the same huge problem.  Contrary to my wishes, Apple has moved the power buttons on their phones to the side also.

I was just about to order an iPhone 5S which seemed to be the last of the mohicans, an iPhone with the power button correctly at the top.  But I just couldn't get used to the sharp feeling beveling on the side in my hand. I've grown used to smooth sided phones, sharp or square just doesn't work.

So I tried the iPhone 6S Plus.  I put it in my pocket and pulled it out.  And I did not press the power button.  The extra length from the "bottom" of the phone (which is pointing up when in my pocket) to the power button is just right.  I do not press it by accident when reaching for the phone.

You can see how this might be.  Put a smart phone in your hand so that the bottom of the phone fits in the groove of your hand.  Now see where your thumb contacts the side of the phone.  With the Galaxy S4, the power button is right underneath my thumb.  With the iPhone 6S Plus, the button is about a half inch beyond my thumb.  When I reach in my pocket, where the phone is upside down usually, the bottom of the phone hits the groove of my hand and then I close my hand.  This is the natural way to use my hand.  It shouldn't cause the power button to be pressed.

At least in some quick in-store tests, that half inch makes all the difference between a continuous annoyance and a phone which seems to have good ergonomics for me.  So that is why I have now ordered an iPhone 6S Plus.

And yet…I have relatively small hands for a man.  I'm now worried how well this will work for me in other ways, but after handling the Galaxy phone, which is very close in width (the important factor in holding the phone).

People talk about one-handed use, and claim that the 6S Plus is too big for that.  I don't get it.  Even with my iPhone 3G, a one-handed phone if there ever was one, I didn't find I could reliably text with one hand.  My fingers can't easily bend that much.  To do texting reliably, which is important, I hold phone with one hand and press virtual keys with the other hand.  That's what I did with my 3G and what I continued to do with my Galaxy.

Now for holding the phone up to ear with one hand, that is absolutely crucial.  It didn't seem to be a problem in the store with the 6S Plus whatsoever.  I could hardly tell the difference in width between the 6S Plus and my Galaxy S4.  Are some people's hands actually so small it is a problem to hold phone to ear with one hand?

Apple also seems to have done some other things with having the power button slightly inside the edge of the phone.  It doesn't "stick out" like the power button on the Galaxy S4.

These little details can make a huge difference.

Likes and Dislikes about the Samsung Galaxy S4

It's been a couple of years.  I don't actually know what to do know, so I'll probably just keep using the S4/ATT.

Pros have been excellent voice quality, though strangely the first two weeks seemed different, maybe I hadn't yet figured how to hold the phone.  After that 2 weeks, which I've always believed was related to a bandwidth switchover at ATT, voice quality has been superb, and the old iPhone 3g was crappy, and I'm reluctant to recommend iPhone to non-Geeks because I wonder if the voice quality of the iPhone has kept up with Samsung, and nobody does (or maybe can do ) a review with a full quantification of voice quality, they just say "poor".

The phone has a nice OLED screen, which is a very cool idea, however actually the old LCD display of the iPhone 3G held up better in bright sunlight.  I was amazed to see this, but the S4 frequently does get completely blanked out by the sunlight.  I love the saturated colors of OLED, but if I were a frequent traveler, I might worry.  Of course I'm at least two generations behind with my S4.

The worst thing of all has been the button placement.  I still haven't gotten used to it and believe it's just plain wrong.  There should not be buttons on both sides, just one, so you can handle it on the sides more easily.  I always reach for the phone and turn it off.  The on/off button must be at the top right corner.  The iPhone 3G buttons were perfect--and I didn't mind the size largely because of that perfection.

The plastic backing and fake chrome trim has a tinge of dinginess after 2 years.  The iPhone, encased for one and uncased another, looks like brand new in some ways…the sold chrome and metal still gleam.  But of course the Galaxy has removable back and battery.

The S4 from ATT came loaded with ATT and Samsung bloatware and adware, sometimes with both duplicating Google functions, or Google provided functions like internet sharing disabled (with a premium AT&T app provided instead).  One might have 3 different versions, or more, of the same basic function, all with different names, sprawling through the 4 pages (?) of standard apps.

I don't find separate set of pages for system apps and user apps helpful at all.  iPhone 3 had just one set of pages for everything and it was far less confusing.

I like the way the iPhone 3 handled calls and alerts.  I saw information on the start screen.  Then, after opening the screen, alerts for both were cleared.  I wasn't forced to enter the phone app to cancel the phone alert.

Endlessly my S4 has beeped the alert signal for nothing of importance.  Emails on my rarely used Google email account, spam really, especially from Eco Ethernet would set off my alert signal.  I got an app to control the alert signal and even it can't seem to stop the light blinking from whatever things I haven't figured out yet.

Speaking of which I had the hardest time figuring out how to stop a stupid dialog from coming up every time I started the camera.  Nobody could help me.  Finally, I figured out that by scrolling the page there was a previously invisible Don't Show This Warning Again checkbox.  But since the Dismiss button was visible without scrolling the page, I never saw that checkbox.

Because I had the full 32G memory in my phone…when it quit working I had to get a replacement by mail, though once I went through the inspection process AT&T sent a replacement quickly.  I've used far less that 16M for some reason, I just don't bother with so much music and pictures.

Generally, other than in voice quality--which might be different now--and bandwidth, and (when I had it) the failing map app, I liked the interfaces and defaults of the iPhone better.

The kiosk where I bought the phone wasn't much help, the AT&T store was decided less cheery and quick as the Apple Store. which was ultimate (I haven't been there in awhile).  I find all the AT&T extras, services, TV, disgusting.  They're endlessly trying to sell me stuff, which makes me feel even worse about it.

It's my perfect example of the virtue of having a ruthless fascist dictator at the helm, keeping the aristocrats of this or that family from mucking up the rail system or whatever.  Jobs had special talent for selection of features and talent too…of course if you're dictator it has to be done right or it's a sinking ship.

He was picky about keeping those damned alerts in check, and having it just so, and I think it still is.

Anyway, I'm still undecided, I might go back to iPhone.

Signal Strength on Radio Controlled Clock

Why not have RF strength meter on Radio Controlled Clock so you can find the best position to mount?

As it is, you have little way of knowing, except locating the clock in one position or another and seeing if it gets the time in a day or two.  And then you may wonder if your clock is defective, the batteries bad, or some other problem.

My old LaCrosse clock had problems, the batteries had once gone bad and I figured the terminals were corroded, and that might have been the reason why, in the end (after 5 years) it wouldn't start even with fresh batteries.

I got another LaCrosse clock figuring it had improved.  (The old one also had weird daylight savings bug where it would switch back and forth between correct time and previous time during the day of the daylight savings change…then be correct after that.)

Indeed, unlike the old clock which sometimes took many days to get the time signal, and I often wondered if I had done the settings wrong and started all over, the new clock came on and had the atomic clock time reliably from day one.

But it has a different problem: the batteries last about a month!

I figure what is going on is that since the clock can't get the time easily every day, it keeps on trying.  Unlike the old clock, which would only try at midnight, 2am, and 4am, or something like that, the new clock just keeps trying.  And that wears out the batteries fast.

That would be consistent with the other clock not getting time signal reliably.

So I've moved the clock to a new location and will see.  But it's only 5ft from the previous location, so no telling how it will work.  I could move the clock to a different wall of the house.  But that would mean guests wouldn't be able to read it from the couch.

Everything is Cool

Some time ago I read about a study of people's perception of Coolness in Scientific American.  It turns out that people differ as to how people perceive things as cool, according to brain scans.  Some people consider coolness to be the lack of uncool things.  Others see coolness as something different which remains cool even if a few uncool things are mixed in.

Being a professional programmer, however, one has to accept that whatever the client wants or needs is cool.  Criticism at the level of what they want, what they think they need, is likely unhelpful (unless…see below).  So the best one can do is provide the second of coolness, to add some coolness in.  That's natural for me because I'm a second kind of coolness guy.  Though it may not be natural for everyone.

The exception may be if you are large enough.  Both IBM in their early mainframe heyday (50's to 70's) and Apple are large enough and influential enough that they can make their Cool the only Cool.  Any presence of inferior coolness throws the whole game.  So you get the complete IBM or Apple package…don't try to mix in other people's products (like Corel Wordperfect) because they don't get it like we do.

So there we see the madness to the method.  The first kind of coolness is useful if you have a monopoly on the truth.  And it gives such shakers the ability to monopolize a market.  And that usually requires sufficient clout: bigness, intellectual presence, chutzpah.  IBM and Apple could get away with it and make more truth, etc.

Joe Programmer shouldn't try--he hasn't got the resources.  But many have tried, backed by the latest words from IBM, Apple, or Wirth.

There are still a lot of lack-of-coolness buzzwords in programming.  For example, Fortran is old fashioned (actually, Fortran is cool in many ways, and the newest Fortran standards continue to be updated), command line interfaces are uncool (actually, they are now pretty universally recognized as the best interfaces for certain activities…especially technical ones like programming and also science…GUI interfaces turn out to be comparatively inflexible and unadaptable as well as the long standing criticism that they don't shortcut or script as well).

And then there's the never ending war of computer languages.  Face it, every computer language is cool in some way…  The very idea of a programming language is mighty cool.

Scuse Me

Having dealt with a lot of power strips and laboratory grade equipment, I've dealt with a lot of big AC plugs.  This little 8 outlet strip (my electrician suggested a more typical "bathroom & kitchen" strip with plugs every 8 inches--sorry but that does nothing for me i want my 8 plugs right by the sink for all my specialized lavatory equipment) is the perfect form factor for me, with a few exceptions.  One of them is the 10 foot cord (it seems like 16 feet) when I only need about 6 inches (I'm going to cut the cord and use a Marinco hospital grade plug) and the other is this rather unfriendly plug.  It can't not be deliberate that the plug is designed in such a way as you are NOT going to plug in another big plug.  It's as if this plug is saying, "I'm taking over here, you can't add another big one to this box."

This diagonal plug is a good way since it doesn't or doesn't necessarily block the use of a smaller plug.  Maybe I could plug my water pick in there.  But the plan was to plug in my hair dryer straight to the wall.  It too comes with a massive plug, with built-in GFCI (redundant--my entire bathroom circuit is GFCI, as is every outlet in the kitchen, outdoors, and Bedroom 3), and is perfect for plugging in to the lower outlet.  BTW, I'm sure the hair dryer instructions say to plug straight into the wall, and the maximum draw might exceed the breaker of some power strips.

But Tripp Lite has decided to block anything big from the other outlet, despite my plan to use the strip only for the smaller stuff that I keep plugged in like my Shaver/Cleaner and rechargeable toothbrush.

I rather resent this.  It's certainly Tripp Light being my mother.  Or maybe it's even required by UL or ETI.

Anyway, I guess I've got to do more of which I have strenuously avoided.  Changing plugs.  At least by this I know never to do anything half assed.  But my previous strategy, of never changing plugs, was easier, and avoided leaving me explicit things to worry about.

BTW, it's also funny how if you attach this Tripp Lite to the wall, and if you want the plugs going the normal way with ground on the bottom, you must have the Tripp Lite name and all the lettering upside down.  Mom wants the plugs upside down too!  (Do you have a better explanation?)  I'm well beyond caring if things like factory lettering on an outlet strip are upside down.  I use whatever however.  For quite a long time I used a large chunk of abandoned sidewalk as my turntable seismic base.  Now I use a nicer looking state block…which was likely originally cut to be sold for a tomb stone but never engraved.

Actually, I can jam in the hair dryer just well enough for it to work, and that's what I've been doing so far.  That does not seem good to me at all.  But I bet that's what some people keep on doing.

So a bypassed safety trick becomes a safety issue.

It also looks like in order to plug the hair dryer (which I only use on low or medium heat) into the outlet strip I'll need to have 3 free bottom plugs.  The plugs are spaced sufficiently closely and next to the switch on one side that you can't plug in a big plug even next to a small plug or the switch.

Why didn't I just get a straight outlet box, all I really need?  I do try to get the simplest things possible, but after two days of searching I couldn't find any simple outlet box with 8 outlets in a small space like the Tripp Lite Isobar.  But it could be a tad larger for the plugs (and less for the switch and logo) so as to give the plugs themselves more space for larger plugs and wall warts.  The whole reason I outgrew my previous "solution" (two 1-3 outlet adapters) was not because I literally ran out of plugs but because I had to space out the 4 plugs and even then there wasn't enough room for the hair dryer.

All that surge suppression is become redundant.  I've had whole house surge suppression since 2009.

WaterPik?

Waterpik is now a mandatory thing once a day in my oral hygiene, following a long brushing and flossing.

My old Waterpik Ultra (WP-100W) became unusable due to sticking wand button.  They do that after a couple of years IMO from the typical level of minerals in my tap water.  I could eliminate the problem…using RO water I have now?  I might try that with the new one.

But before going out to Tarshay  (my standard place) to get a new one, I tried to re-use the old one I gave to a friend (she gave it back and said she wanted battery powered model…which I later got for her) that was just one model down from the top, the WP-60W.  (That may generally be one to avoid it would seem now.)  And the wand button was almost impossible to press.  I can't say the device was in new condition (it looked new) but still badly designed.  Did they try to use it?  One often asks that question in using software…it generally seems less a problem with uncomputerized hardware.

It was impossible for me to use.  The water level control was on the wand, it was hard to get a good grip without nudging it slightly, and slightly meant the difference between water pick and water torch.  It seemed dangerous anyway.  I barely made it through one session and decided to add it to my power washing kit.

Along with RO water, with the WP-100, which I can safely adjust on the base, I should remember to wear safety glasses, just in case, when using a Waterpik.  I also try to maintain perfect control of the the wand and point away from me at the first opportunity.  I was using level 4 on the old one (seemed less than level 3 on the WP-60) and even that seems pretty intense.

ActiveSnot

It was a great day.  I finally, just before midnight, figured out how to get PPM to install Perl/Tk, and finally the old client application was running.  I was praising ActiveState for having made this so easy.  ActiveState is the answer, I was going to tell my client.  When I got home, I installed Active Perl and all the other modules on my personal Mac, and showed the client application ran under a newer version of Mac OS X also.  What had originally taken all day I was now able to do in 15 minutes.  This was wonderful!

Next morning, I found an unpleasant email in my inbox from ActiveState:

A Moderator has reviewed your recent submission to ActiveState Community   Site. 
The content was deemed inappropriate. The submission has been deleted from   the pre-publication queue, and your account has been blocked from further   posting.

I had posted two questions to the Forum the night before in my attempt to get Perl/Tk loaded into Active Perl.  It turned out that my problem was quite simple, and I was meaning to post it to the forum the next day.  But as it was happening, my best guess was that ActiveState did not allow the PPM to install Perl/Tk.  The only Tk which seemed to be available was Tkx.  That was little help to me in getting an old application using Perl/Tk--a very popular package--to work.  So I posted the question like this, to a 3 message threat comparing Tke and Perl/Tk, which was the most recent thread I could find even mentioning Perl/Tk.  I can't remember the original posting (and will correct the below if I can get at it somehow, but it was just letters I typed on a hypertext page and I don't think I have any copy--another thing worth complaining about as it happens so often that long messages typed into webpages get lost into the great bitbucket in the sky).

     The approach taken by Tke seems to be what Perl/Tk should have been from the beginning…just a thin layer on top of Tk.  But Perl/Tk has been around a long time and is popular.  [A previous poster said Tkx was more actively supported now.]  Actually the latest version of Perl/Tk is from January 2015 and the latest Tkx is from 2010.
     How can I get the ActiveState ppm to even install Perl/Tk?  It only seems to allow me to install Tkx.  Is this a partisan thing?  I need Perl/Tk specifically to run an old client application.

Well, this thread was kind of old, perhaps 2008.  But as I said, this was (or seemed to be) the most recent thread even mentioning Tk.

Maybe I erred in posting to such an old thread.  But my idea is that likely simply using the word "partisan" or suggesting that the selection of packages for ppm might be biased in some way…that was just too much.  "Flaming!"  (Yes this is flaming, I admit in retrospect.  But I think it is very very gentle, and was intended to be quickly retracted and replaced with praise if things went well.)

Perhaps, and possibly quite likely, it was entirely a mechanical thing, though nowhere do I see that "partisan" is a bannable word.  Mentioning Perl/Tk at all ???

Anyway, I think the moderation, in simply dismissing my message and banning me forever without comment as if I had posted pornography--is cruel and stupid.  It ruined my day, and will forever mean that I will not go out of my way to speak well of ActiveState, to praise them as I had been intending to do.  I will generally speak no ill either, except where on my own website where I can vent and tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as is required in any kind of accusation.

I now have, possibly long overdue, just gotten a similar feeling about Candians in general.  Candians are not necessarily the nice people I mainly had in my imagination until today.  Canadians are pursuing tar sands oil, and pressuring the U.S. Government to build a pipeline carrying oil solids dissolved in solvents through a pipeline across the USA, much to the further global disaster of global heating.  Previously Canada successfully sued for billions in losses when California banned a gasoline additive made in Canada (because of it's effects, not because it was made in Canada).  They have had a "conservative" government for some time, one very beholden to oil interests.  Canada is a leading petro state.

ActiveState happens to be in British Columbia.  Actually, British Columbia is banning a tar sands pipeline, interestingly enough, and kudos to them.

I think it's bad to treat anyone as ActiveState forum moderation treated me.  It's bad all around.  It does them no good, me no good.  As far as explaining why, they are apparently legendary for not responding to questions, bug reports, whatever.  No response whatever.  Not even, "sorry, we don't answer questions unless you buy our support service."  I suppose that's correct for the free products.  Free means no support, no reply, nada.  Some claim it works the same even if you have their paid service, but I suspect that some who claim that may not actually know.

They could at least tell me why I'm being banned.  "Political discussions are not allowed."  Well, that wasn't what I meant by partisan, but anyway.  I suppose this is a pipe dream.  Nobody tells you why.  I suppose if you're fine if many people hate you, that's a perfectly acceptable strategy.  Telling you why implicitly allows you to say something like "that isn't what I meant" and so forth.  No reply means you have no recourse…and one might expect that is intended.

That said, ActiveState is providing a useful product to me, something that saved me a great deal of time, and I appreciate that.  So perhaps I should be grateful, and never say an ill word.

No, I'll simply try to be honest as I can in telling the story, that is what this website is about, and not in a way to directly affect my clients work.  I'll try not to let my ego get involved.  If ActiveState has the active solution, I go with that, swallow my pride, I don't have much anyway.  I can well imagine others might not be so sanguine, though, and that is one of many Critical points here.

I'll go to other forums when I need help.  I won't say anything bad about ActiveState, unless in response to a question which permits no other honest answer, like "what is their free support like?"

Meanwhile, the problem I was having, so trivial, and suitable criticism for this column as well.

On all the Mac's I've used, the ppm uses a dark grey to indicate the selected button.  That's confusing because grey also means not-selectable "greyed out".  And further, in the leftmost button, the all important "View All Packages" button, the all critical box in the center is also grey.  It looked to me for the first several hours that there was simply no way to select the "view all packages" button.  The only thing not grey is a tiny arrow in the center which I overlooked.  It seemed like for some reason I was being locked out.  Perhaps you only got to select from the full list of packages if you got the full support.  Especially on my work monitor, which has very unsaturated color.  The only thing which suggests that the View All Packages button has been selected

I also frequently made the mistake of showing the column in reverse alphabetical order, which puts Tkx on top and Tk on the very bottom, after dozens if not hundreds of other Tk* modules.

Another confusing thing, the "Available" button looks like the button for finding out what modules are available for download, but it's actually the the button for those packages Available for Upgrade.

Yes, Yes, I see that already

With iPhone 3, whenever I opened the phone enough to see the message counts for my calls and messages, it would clear the notification automatically so the alerts wouldn't keep appearing.  I already knew who was calling from the alerts.

With Android, I have to open the calls or messages apps specifically to clear the alerts.  I find this annoying.  That notification light can be blinking all night long until I have the energy to open up the apps rather than just checking the phone.

It's like somebody actually tried it first, before releasing the software.  I consider that that the first step toward decent design, but often and strangely a step that never seems to have been taken.

Advice to the (Fellow) Crazy

When you're crazy, you don't have to talk.

Everyone just understands.

Control-Alt-Delete

Control-Alt-Delete is not a mistake.  It is actually the best thing about Microsoft Windows, that it has kept a memorable key combination that works on all keyboards to grab control of the system, and not fallen prey to fads.  But not surprising that Bill Gates himself now thinks otherwise.  He never had much sense in these sorts of details, leaving room for someone else who was only a bit better (but with a different non-user-centric strategy).

http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/26/4772680/bill-gates-admits-ctrl-alt-del-was-a-mistake

The most despicable thing about Microsoft/IBM-PC wrt keyboards was not control-alt-delete.

It was that they moved the barely used Caps Lock key to where the Control key had always been before, and should still be.

I have always maintained the conspiracy theory that the IBM PC keyboard layout moved the control key precisely because the control key was so useful in other operating systems (and also, word processing competitors like Corel.)

I have always taken whatever measures are needed to restore the Control key to it's proper place.  For a long time, I simply used a Sun computer keyboard on my Mac.  Nowadays native remapping has been working reliably and in all programs.  It had been a struggle with 3rd party remapping programs not so many years ago.

Of course I would think this, as a confirmed and dedicated Emacs user.  BTW, Vi is another conspiracy that has, unfortunately, all but succeeded.

More Missing Today

It's 10:30 PM, and Weather Underground is showing "Today's" low temperature of 43 degrees F, because that's the temperature forecast for 6am tomorrow morning.  Menawhile "Yesterday's" low is said to be 31.8.  But in the wee hours of "this" morning, which would have been "Today's" low at this time yesterday, it was actually 41 degrees.  Nowhere in the "Today" or "Yesterday" is the temperature it actually reached in the wee hours this morning shown, because it's too late to be "Today" (meaning until tomorrow AM) and too early to be "Yesterday" (because, ok, it isn't really Yesterday yet, but it was Today Yesterday).

VAX/VMS was a wrong turn

VAX/VMS was a big part of my life in the 1980's.  From 2003 to the end of 2008 I had a VT125 terminal on my office desk, and it was connected to a VAX in our machine room, which had many machines, including at least one 8600 if not an 8800 as well.  The room after 2006 was a showpiece, visible through glass windows, with large climate control machines also.

The earlier room was also visible, but before the 8600 the mere 11/780's tied to many VT125's were dog slow, taking up to an hour just to log on.  And that's where I became familiar with one VMS misfeature.  The fact that while processing was being done, characters typed at your terminal were gleefully ignored.  Basically, you'd watch, and if you didn't see your characters appearing after awhile, you'd type your command again.  I recall one co-programmer (who later became a divinity student) intoned:

The VAX, in it's infinite wisdom, sometimes chooses to ignore your command.

Sometimes, just to keep you on your toes, the ignored character was precisely the carriage return (and it was CR, IIRC, not NL as on Unix machines) which caused the command to be executed.  So you couldn't tell if it was just sitting there, after you entered the command, and slowly grinding away, or whether it has summarily chosen to ignore your CR.

Having been thusly trained, when we moved on from 11/780's to 8600's the problem of having the terminal program swapped out while you were typing occurred less, but never totally went away.  I recall forgetting about this feature, until a Unix programmer pointed it out to me again, and before long I was working on a Sun Unix system also and VAX/VMS and it's foibles were gradually forgotten.

DEC really earned their reputation on, at the time, leading machines, like the PDP-10 in 1966, the breakthrough timesharing machine, used by Compuserve, Stanford, MIT, and many others.  This was not a perfect machine either, but in those days DEC was more honest, less driving by intense marketing.  So their solution to imperfection was to provide the source code for the entire OS.  This was a breakthrough for places like MIT, the PDP-10 became the delight of all "hackers" (as leading computer scientist students were often called then, before hacking became synonymous with cracking), since you could hack the very OS the great timesharing system was based on, and do virtually anything to it, though typical modifications were bypassing the serial input stuff, IIRC.  Interesting.  Meanwhile, for IBM machines, you slipped your PL/1 card deck through a slot and some time later it would come back with the first of many error reports.  Big difference.  Interactive multitasking was available early, but only to the college crowd, who later became the buyers of DEC machines like VAX, which simply had to be good, the best thing ever, etc.  Except that it was way oversold, too slow for the timesharing it was sold for, and VMS was terrible.

I had a parallel experience during the PDP-11 "hacker" era.  I was a enthusiastic PDP-10 user for all of my college years from 73 to 78.  The PDP-10 user of the system for the Claremont Colleges, renowned as one of the last to keep going into the early 2000's.  Though we only had a few dozen terminals on campus, it wasn't THAT hard to get on one, and it was just heaven, being able to solve difficult problems in Basic, or run cool things like Eliza.  In the summer after my freshman year I did a programming job using APL through a Tektronics terminal (which did lots of funny characters) connected through the Dec 10, as we called it.   The Dec 10 was so much more useful and fun than the IBM 360, we actually had in our math building at Pomona College.  The Dec 10 was up campus in the Claremont University Center.  Later I ran my psychology experiments through SPSS on the Dec 10.

But meanwhile, I had also come to know and love the PDP-11 I used for several years in the Psychology department.  Starting in 1976, I programmed in Basic and Macro-11, thanks to a Macro-11 handbook we got.  Using peeks and pokes, and finally Macro-11 programs, I controlled digital audio through a 10 bit multi channel audio interface, and graphical displays on a CRT.

RT-11 was wonderfully crisp, and the system was marvelously simple and open.  For controlling laboratory equipment, nothing could be better.

I sadly missed out on the dawn of Unix, which also happened on PDP-11's, starting in 1970.  Unix had originally been programmed on a PDP-7, something I've never seen, but the first C version was programmed on a PDP-11 in 1970, and PDP-11 became the standard through the key developments of Research System 6 and 7 and BSD.  I only got to use Unix starting in 1989, after gratefully leaving behind VMS.

Last PDP-11 I programmed was an 11/60 running RSX-11m, which was not perfect but helpfully open and fixable.

VAX, sadly, was a step backwards from all these fine machines.  Rather than a leader, it quickly became a laggard in speed.  It was sold to do far more than it could.  A single 11/780 might be a nice personal machine, or maybe two people.  I don't believe DEC was as open with the OS as they previously had been, though the 780 was a departmental machine, maintained by specialists, who at least kept it working.  Unix might have been available, but we were supporting our product under VMS, which was considered something like industry standard, if not high end (Silicon Graphics was the high end).

DEC believed so much in the VAX they cancelled their Jupiter project to create the next generation PDP-10.  This made people using famous systems at Stanford very angry, and may have been the impetus to creating SUN (Stanford University Network) computers.

It was said that the successor to PDP-11/70 was killed because it was faster than the VAX.  The same may have been true for the Jupiter.  The VAX machines were slow and especially unresponsive especially with the 11/780 and 11/730.  The improvement in the 11/785 was minimal.  It took many years before the speed was substantially increased, when the 8600 came out.  Meanwhile DEC had disc clustering, machine clustering (buy more slow machines!), but each machine could simply not work for many users running CAD programs.

I think VAX was a bad turn, not just for DEC.  All systems have become either more closed or more complicated, to the point where systems like the wonderful PDP-11 don't make much sense anymore, but are very much missed.

One of the bigger parts of that mistake was VMS.  DEC ultimately realized the error of their ways and made Ultrix their standard.  As that was happening, I moved on to SUN computers, which had used BSD Unix from the beginning.  Until the late 2000's, SUN occupied a position similar to that which DEC had had, in leading universities.  With Oracle starting to actually charge for academic Solaris licenses, and the decline of the cost competitiveness of Sun desktop hardware, Gnu/Linux is gaining faster than ever to solidify it's position as the leading research OS.  Mac OS X is unix based, and much unix code has made it into Microsoft Windows as well.