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Musings Report #47 11-20-15 When Did Technology Get So Finicky?
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
When Did Technology Get So Finicky?
All of us who use technology daily have a list of frustrations and complaints about glitches, crashes, unproductive complexity, changes in operating systems that mess up perfectly good interfaces that we'd finally mastered, etc.
My topic today is the way in which technology has become increasingly finicky, by which I mean: the fixes and work-arounds required are increasing in frequency and increasingly convoluted. I find myself Googling how to fix tech problems on a practically daily basis. When I do so, I find dozens or hundreds of others have experienced the same hard-to-diagnose failures, glitches, crashes, etc.
Recent examples include a mystifying failure of Windows 10 audio to function in Skype. Hello Microsoft--did nobody test Win10 in Skype? (I actually bought an external microphone as an attempt to solve the problem. It didn't work.)
My colleague Gordon Long helped me reconfigure Skype's audio settings, and this was only after fruitless attempts to find a solution online. (Hundreds of people were seeking or commenting on the same mysterious failure.)
Every test of the internal mic in Win10 showed the mic was working, yet there was no audio in Skype.
Skype has its own mysterious glitches, too, as a few months ago I found I couldn't log into Skype. Even changing to a new password didn't help. It turned out there was a complex work-around to this problem, which had also plagued untold hundreds of other Skype users.
But there is another layer of mysterious tech problems that arise below the user interface, and as the person who must keep the complex oftwominds.com platform functioning, I have plenty of experience in this "behind the public interface" realm.
One recurring source of incomprehensible failures is Google's Custom Search, a search box that web masters can customize to search a specific website or domain.
I find this tool invaluable on my site, as there's over 3,600 pages on oftwominds.com and I often look up a topic I've written about years ago.
Periodically, with no warning or explanation, Google Custom Search just stops working. As I search for fixes, I discover once again that hundreds (and presumably thousands) of users are experiencing the same mysterious problem, yet there is no universal fix on Google help boards or other websites.
I've tried using new Google Custom Search code, but it doesn't work on my site, despite hours of slaving away trying to figure out how the new code functions.
I managed to fix the problem by pure experimentation: by deleting "cse" in one line of this code, I restored its functionality:
<form action="http://www.google.com/cse" id="cse-search-box" target="_blank">
<div>
<input type="hidden" name="cx" value="001016021288866797937:ps5hpp-bioc" />
<input type="hidden" name="ie" value="ISO-8859-1" />
<input type="text" name="q" size="16" />
<input type="submit" name="sa" value="Search" />
</div>
</form>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/coop/cse/brand?form=cse-search-box&lang=en"></script>
How crazy is this, that Google can't maintain a simple legacy search code, or maintain a site that informs us of changes to the legacy code?
Note that the new horrendously complex custom search code does no more than the old code. It simply does the same task in a far more convoluted manner.
Even though I searched dozens of sites addressing broken Google Custom Search, I had to find this fix myself.
This is only one small example of broken stuff that must be laboriously fixed behind the public user interface.
Getting my mobile site to function took numerous coding changes to the site, and I gave up trying to resolve some javascript incompatability in the bMobilized template. (Their tech support team was equally useless in locating the problem.)
Finding someone to help in official channels is often problematic, and so we all turn to other users who kindly post fixes and explanations online. Without them, we'd truly be adrift.
Sometimes the problem is very basic, but still baffling to new users. For example, I couldn't figure out why my iPhone wasn't ringing until I looked it up and discovered the little switch on the side turns the ringer off--yes, that little switch that gets turned off every time I put the phone in my pocket. (Duh, right?)
Why is technology so finicky? Certainly the complexity of new features is one reason, but there may be others. Perhaps companies feel so much pressure to release new product cycles that debugging is hurried. Perhaps the proliferation of other software that interfaces with every system is an issue.
But I have a sneaking suspicion that many tech giants are adding complexity and marginal features just to have something new to sell, or to maintain the appearance of "advancement," when the reality is that the customer base was perfectly happy with the old operating system, interface and functionality.
I also suspect that the rapid changes made to every function/system has made it easier for companies to just ignore legacy systems and let users twist in the wind rather than maintain the legacy software.
Where is the money, after all, in keeping technology, simple, robust and stable without upgrades or new product cycles?
Is complexity yielding diminishing returns? The answer in many cases is a definitive yes.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
Is This How the Next Global Financial Meltdown Will Unfold? 11/20/15
The Federal Reserve, Interest Rates and Triffin's Paradox 11/19/15
Why The Status Quo Is Doomed: Income Stagnates, Costs Rise 11/18/15
Why The Status Quo Is Doomed, Part 1 11/17/15
No Serious Financial Repercussions from the Paris Attacks? Don't Be Too Sure 11/16/15
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Heard a performance of Sibelius' violin concerto, which had never struck me as very accessible or warm until I heard it live (violinist was Leonidas Kavakos).
Market Musings: is gold ready to bounce?
Gold's slide has been relentless, as we see in this weekly chart:
Gold has been pinned under the 50-week moving average for months, and previous forays above that resistance were quickly sold.
Is there any hope for a reversal? The stochastic is approaching oversold levels that typical spark a rally of some sort, and while MACD is not yet conducive to a rally, it wouldn't take much to turn this positive.
On the daily chart, we see a very similar setup to the one in August that launched a 90-point rally in gold. A preliminary target is the 50-week MA at $1173, just above the 200-day MA at $1159 and around the upper Bollinger band on the weekly chart.
For gold's multi-year downtrend to finally end, gold will have to stay above its 50-week MA for longer than a week or two, and start notching higher lows and higher highs, rather than its recent pattern of notching lower lows and lower highs.
From Left Field
why capitalism makes us sick (27:15) (via Freeacre)
Global Joblessness: The Real Number
Worst Economic Impact Still To Come, Fed's Fischer Warns As Dollar Soars To 12-Year Highs
New York Times Describes New Fed Policy In Its Fed Interest Rate Explainer
How much U.S. currency is in circulation? $1.34 trillion (US GDP is $17 trillion, US household wealth is $90+ trillion, global wealth is $250 trillion)
The USD-Euro Divergence Trade Is Just Getting Started -- now that everybody's a believer, look for the USD to sag...
Mireille Mathieu singing La Marseillaise (via U. Doran)
Urban Farming Revolution: Impact Farm Allows You to Grow Fresh Produce in the Middle of the City
(via GFB)
Two Clintons. 41 Years. $3 billion. A Washington Post investigation reveals how Bill and Hillary Clinton have methodically cultivated donors over 40 years, from Little Rock to Washington and then across the globe. (via U. Doran)
Time to Stop Worshipping Economic Growth (via Steve K.)
The JET Bicycle - The most dangerous unsafe bike EVER (2:30) (via John D.)
Is evil a disease? ISIS and the neuroscience of brutality (via John D.)
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one." Marcus Aurelius
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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