Anyone Else an ELSA Guinea-pig?

If you wish to visit any venue where a covid pass is required then access to a smart phone or the internet will be required. My wife took her mother to the theatre last week which required a covid pass. My mother in law does not have internet access or a smart phone so it fell to us to generate the required documentation. A friend in the village was all booked up to visit his brother in France but the online check in was a stumbling block as he does not have a smart phone or a scanner or computer, I offered to do it for him but he had to loan me his passport and booking details, I checked him in and he visited his brother with out any hassle, his brother was able to do the return trip for him. If you are unable to do the online check in I think the budget airlines make a pretty steep charge to check you in.

Mike

I do wonder what Microsoft actually does. It seems to keep bringing out new versions of Windows in a sort of arms-race with the computer manufacturers, and some of both is probably to cope with ever-greater demands to use a home computer as an entertainment-centre; yet does not seem to improve anything!

I used Excel for years at work, from about WIN- to WIN-XP, and it went through a silly phase with daft things like "Bubble Charts", yet could never grasp properly the concept of a polar graph, with 0º and 360º are the same point on a circular grid whose lines and labels can be edited properly! (The values were typically at 5º and even 3º intervals.)

My troubles with the ridiculous 'x' file suffix started when I was preparing for retirement and tried to send home from work, 'Word' documents pertaining to my pensions - and lunch-time Excel projects like change-wheel charts. The system converted them to the useless, unreadable '.---x' files.

Similarly, when on my model-engineering society committee. We circulated each other with our reports before each meeting. They arrived in all manner of formats including .docx and .pdf, preventing collating them neatly into a single document. Some were just plain unreadable.

The only translator available then was Adobe, but only for hire at about £40/month - nearly £500 a year! To hell with that rip-off for something probably worth < £100 one-off - but even free third-party translators should never be necessary.

I do not know if MS now embeds .pdf and .---x translators within WIN-10 and 11. It invented these file-types, after all.

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I have considered Apple Mac, Linux etc as their users do say they are far superior to MS; but cannot afford anything Apple, and do not have the expertise to convert a WIN 7 Pro PC to Linux.

Nor do I know if either system would handle all my years' accumulations of many types of files made under MS and third-party programmes, and those programmes themselves. (Photo-editors, TurboCAD; many 'Excel' spreadsheets of which some are still active, 'Word' documents.)

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Far more serious though than the eccentricities of over-blown software is what is happening generally - a growing divide by which anyone who does not live 24-hours-a-day on a WIN-latest lap-top and "smart" - telephone, will be side-lined, ignored, neglected, treated as inferior, ignorant, worthless, best abandoned.

Nigel gives eloquent examples of an unpleasant truth, which is time marches on remorselessly.

I suppose most of us notice in our sixties that the world is moving slowly away from us. Things we assumed were permanent crumble away, whilst things never heard of suddenly become important. Telephone boxes disappear, Bank Branches close, software becomes obsolete, and a schoolgirl points out that self-satisfied Boomers have in fact made a complete mess of things. What's a Blockchain? Do I need 5G for IoT? It's all very upsetting.

Nothing new. We alpha-males forget that in our time we trampled brutally on the ideas and mores of our parents. And now our turn has come, many do just as our elders did back then by arguing furiously against further change. No point in electric light, gas mantles are wonderful, and my dad saw no value in computers whatsoever. How we laughed at judges who didn't know who the Rolling Stones were and thought we would lose face if our servants read Lady Chatterley's Lover!

I think resisting change is bad tactics. Trying to stop the world is doomed because Juggernaut time crushes all before it. My advice is avoid fighting battles you can't win! A better tactic is to keep a step or two ahead of the Juggernaut for as long as flesh and brain permit.

We have to put the effort in, and sooner or later it won't be worth it. However, in the meantime there's no need to make life extra hard by drawing lines in the sand and hoping someone will stop the circus just for us. It's not going to happen.

I'm sure Nigel could fix his doc / docx problem if he wanted to. Meanwhile, I'm having terrible trouble today downloading a Podcast. Why is nothing ever easy?

Dave

Dave -

Thank you! Actually it's worth looking at some your examples a lttle further.

Why would a judge ask who are the Rolling Stones (and I think also the Beatles)? This was pointed out to me nearer the time. By asking, they would be defined in the transcripts, because the judge knew that time does indeed move on, and anyone needing refer to the trial 100 or even 50 years hence will not want puzzling by loose historical ends.

Gas mantles and computers? Well, with the best will in the world no one is a soothsayer and when gas-mantles were The Thing, and electricity and reliable electric lamps were in their infancy. While the first computers were out of reach for all but the biggest companies and government services. None could have guessed what would happen to them.

The Lady Chatterley trial was different. There, the prosecuting barrister had not realised the world had moved on. The defence and jury had, and destroyed his case.

Incidentally my last girl-friend's father had been an architect and her mother still had his "pattern-book" of sample 1930s homes, from council estates to the plushest architect's-own mansions. Some of the mid-range, leafy-suburban, examples did show homes with rooms labelled "servants'" or "maid's" - the sort of Surrey pied-a-terre that highly-edumificated but very naive barrister would probably have known.

'

You right we cannot stop the juggernaut. My beef though is with the juggernaut making life wilfully or accidentally harder than necessary because its driver will not pause and think. Possibly I could sort out the file-type problem, but by extra work that should never be necessary.

Similarly it should not be difficult to load a pod-cast - such difficulty is not inherent to pod-casts or the internet, but to incompetent web-site design. Ask its designers to create a lathe and they'd probably put the apron on the back.

Meanwhile I paid next year's car-tax this afternoon, not on-line but in the Post Office I had to visit anyway to post two Christmas cards abroad.

The less we use local services the sooner they will disappear - as the juggernaut wants of course - and then we will all bemoan the loss of local services.

The thing to which I object is the way in which the march of progress is used as a disguise for selling a new product.

Win XP worked quite well for me, but eventually not for the speed obsessed business world, or Microsoft; so reluctantly I moved to Win 7.

Thankfully, not Vista, since apparently it had its own problems, and according to friends, I may be better off without Win 10.

O K, so am a Luddite, who can't see the point of paying a lot of money for features that will never be used. (Publisher, Power Point , Games etc for instance. ) Word, Excel, Google and E mail more than suffice for my needs.

So, I am being as selfish as the geeks who invent these gadgets, but in the opposite direction.

SWMBO has just bought her first smart phone, only 'cos her 12 y o simple phone died. And struggles with it, as yet. being a technophobe, most certainly will not use many of the capabilities..

How many of us would be happy to be coerced into buying a Supercar, when unlikely to drive more than 50 miles?

How many of us would enjoy being pressurised into buying a 4 axis CNC machine for our hobby?

This is the parallel with assuming that EVERYONE has a cutting edge Computing facilkity and the latest smart phone.

A lot of us haven't and don't need.

There is a danger that those capable of using such machinery to its limit think that everyone, needs and wanted such sophistication and complexity.

Enzo Ferrari believed that the ideal racing car was powered by a single cylinder engine and failed as it took the chequered flag!

Much as it is nice to have invented a new bell or whistle, and faced with finding a use for it. we should not try to force it onto everyone that we meet..

Has the world in general never learned the radio amateur's KISS outook?

Puts away soapbox

Howard

If I might make a point about Microsoft files. And others.

As I've said before, I use Linux. I also use Libre Office which is available in both Microsoft and Linux versions. Now, I must admit that I haven't much experience of Microsoft files, but I understand that the Microsoft formats are proprietary versions, hence are not necessarily readable by other programs. I understand that being proprietary, they are not necessarily an official standard - although Microsoft would have you believe otherwise. Of course, Microsoft will set their software to default to their own proprietary versions, and people in general are too lazy to look for other options. Anyway, FWIW, Libre Office has what are supposedly options for reading Microsoft's formats, although I do belive that there may not be 100% compatible.

Anyway, with Libre Office being available in both versions, it is quite feasible to discard Microsoft Office in favour of Libre Office and then at some point make the change to Linux.

In respect of TurboCad, a program which I tried once, and that was once too much(!), I use a program known as Wine. Effectively an intermediary program which allows the use of Win 32 bit programs to run under Linux. I use an old (2007) program named Design Cad 3D Max quite effectively under Linux. Wine is being improved all the time, which shows the level of demand for it.

I have to say that I would love to have to send a written reply to someone in authority using a Libre Office format, and then wait for them to say that they cannot read it, at which point thay would be told to learn how to use Microsoft Office properly! Yes, nasty I know, and at my age the possibility of it happening is disappearing over the horizon faster that Roy Rogers & Trigger. Still, one can dream. But in reality, I wonder what would happen if Microsoft went bust? Or if they jacked their prices up so far as to make their programs uneconomic? How would these poor darlings manage?

Peter G. Shaw

Howard -

A very good point.

When software was all sold on discs it made some sense for MS to bundle all its programmes into one lump to simplify the manufacture and sales. Even then you could omit some sections you did not want.

If though it is sold on-line it should allow you full control over what you have - priced to match and as straight one-off purchases.

Not long after I bought this WIN-7 PC I am using now, MS badgered me to "up-grade" (a phrase I consider a lie) to W10, free, over the Internet. Eventually I did. Carefully, I used its "Custom" option to omit gimmicks like Cortana and games; and incidentally reduce MS' eavesdropping powers as MS itself admitted. Naturally MS wants "Full Install".

It was a disaster. I reverted the computer to 7 as was offered, and spent 2 or 3 hours repairing the WIN-10 damage.

Looking at the advertising, Office 365, MS' present offering, contains 'Word', an unimproved 'Excel', 'Powerpoint', and some file-manipulating and communications applications including 'Outlook'. (I thought MS was abandoning 'Outlook'?) Office is "subscription" -only, almost £80 a year, and the publicity tells you little of what you are buying.

There would appear growing a division not only between the Haves and Have- Nots; but also one between those Haves stuck with Mr. Gates' stuff and those able to non-MS equipment and software!

'

Peter -

That's all very well but not everyone has high IT skills.

Many, perhaps most, of we "poor darlings" are computer and Internet users-only, first and foremost. Not specialists in manipulating operating-systems.

I doubt Microsoft will go bankrupt in my remaining decades but its products and the computers needed for them may well become too expensive - and difficult to use - for even more people than already.

Also, having accumulated over the decades hundreds of all sorts of files made in MS and MS-compatible programmes, and having installed MS-compatible third-party programmes, we may not wish, or may not be able technically, to risk transferring them to a rival, potentially incompatible, OS.

'

Overall I fear the Internet will only become steadily more enforced, but also more expensive and exclusive.

Nigel,

I do not have high IT skills. I am completely self-taught. (as I am in lots of other things - Jack of all trades, master of none). Having said that, I have had an interest dating back about 40 years so maybe that helps.

The whole point of my comment was that it is possible to achieve a transfer to Linux without losing any data simply because it is possible to start using the alternative programs whilst still running Windows. I do agree with you that we are indeed being steadily required more & more to use the internet. My own view is that if it makes my life easier, then fair enough. If it makes life cheaper then fair enough. But if it doesn't, then sod off, I'll stick with the original method, eg on a different thread, I've commented very adversely about the software the doctors use for repeat prescriptions which I will not now use.

Cheers,

Peter G. Shaw