Preserving the record 2

Posted by justwilliams on September 19, 2017
Posted in: Computer and Internet. Tagged: . 2 Comments

 

In February 2009 I wrote a post entitled “Preserving the record” in which I queried the reliability of digital media for long-term storage. The following is a comment from one of my readers at the time, followed by my reply:

  1. “I have been a reluctant computer user of one sort or another since about 1979, but always made to feel an ignorant technophobe.(despite publicising them, writing copy and articles about them – even being employed by Microsoft to write erudite garbage for them).

    “It is still the case on a daily basis and I have only just realised why.

    “Computers,and other digital stuff, obviously are good/useful etc.

    “The whole problem is they are being utterly misused in just about every way imaginable.

    “One of the principal reasons is that the software industry has always been dominated by very young, mostly spotty faced inadequates who have traditionally produced all the stuff that makes computers work.

    “Unfortunately, hardly anyone other than the programmers understood what the software was and how it worked because every detail of it was originated in the minds of these juvenile delinquents whose immaturity and lack of understanding of the wider World left them without a clue as to how to use things like ‘graphic design’ principles and just plain ‘common sense’ to make things readable and understandable etc.

    “Also, it takes my breath away to still see software on a daily basis that I am expected to use, but which usually has either no explanation, very little or is totally incomprehensible due to the inarticulate incapacity of the originators to be able use even the most rudimentary communication skills to explain anything about it to anyone else.

    “I went through a period of about 15 years of sharing my London house with three or four young lodgers at a time, many of whom were these very programmers.

    “I saw at first hand how incredibly dim and silly they were and how they inevitably inflicted their endlessly juvenile thinking on others through their infantile software production.

    “It is still the case that the whole computing World is dominated by people like this and riddled with infantile stupidity. It’s that simple.

    “That is the problem.

    “We all have to use computing by using the childish and infantile rubbish that immature people thrust down our unwilling throats.”

    Reply

  2. “Wow! And I thought that I could turn on the heat when peeved about something! Now I can see that I am but an amateur. On the other hand I am sure that you have a point, though it would be too much of a generalisation to apply your remarks to ALL software designers and the companies that employ them. I feel a new post coming on!”

     

    Recently I discovered that my desktop hard drive, bought a few years ago to be an independent method of long-term storage for files and pictures, cannot be accessed by my new Windows 10 laptop. So far, no-one has been able to explain why except to make vague references to “disc formats” – which is not really good enough is it?

2 comments on “Preserving the record 2”

  1. I’ve long since given up trying to understand the intricacies of all this, but I do know that the old nostrum — “Keep it simple, stupid” — is still good advice. I’ve kept a good bit simple by sticking with the tried and true: a Samsung flip phone rather than an iPhone, a new computer with Win7 Pro installed rather than Win10, and so on. I do have an iPad, which is handy as can be, but I don’t use more than a half dozen apps: email, weather, and so on.

    Planned obsolescence is part of the game plan, of course — as is the insistence that we MUST have these devices or be utterly disconnected from life. Fiddlesticks.

    Reply

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