Tag: Musings

There’s an article from Nikkei Asia saying that Microsoft will be investing 17.5 billion in Indian data centers. 

Fine, meanwhile back home Microsoft is laying off 9000 American workers while bringing in 6000 H1B workers.

Windows 11 and the recent “improvements” to Office have made both annoyingly complex to work with. There are a lot of companies that rely on Google’s cloud based office type products instead of paying the fees for Office.

If that’s the direction, then your desktop computer is becoming nothing much more than a terminal to the cloud. 

I’m old enough to remember a time when terminals to IBM 360s or DEC systems were the norm and desktop computers were the rarity.

In those days the terminals had zero computing power and the Mainframe or Mini computer was housed in the corporate data center in the basement.

We’re slowly coming full circle.

In the early days, desktop computers were a “Threat” because each computer could have data on it that was not backed up and that the corporate data center had no control over. The advent of networking, servers, and distributed corporate systems ended the days of the Mainframe operators holding department data hostage until they got around to processing it.

Now the “Cloud” is replacing corporate servers and in many ways it makes sense.

Cloud based computing means that the data is once again all in one “Thing”. Desktop and laptop computers don’t have to be as powerful, they don’t need as much memory, or hard drive storage. Corporations don’t necessarily have to have servers on site and overall it means the cost of operation is cheaper.

It makes sense. In fact, I’d imagine that a corporation can get away with a smaller IT staff too. There’s also the matter of data security. 

Most of the data breaches that I’ve been involved with were caused by someone carrying data on a laptop that got stolen.

The data shouldn’t have been on the laptop in the first place. These breaches were usually caused by an HR moron who thought they needed the entire unencrypted employee database with them at all times.

Although there was one breach that originated in a freakin StarBucks. That too was an HR moron, drinking her latte who clicked “Accept” to enable communication from an unknown person via a messaging application. In that case she dumped the entirety of  corporate emails, the employee database and her own financial data to a “BlackHat” who then sold the data to fraudsters.

She lost her job, after trying all the usual excuses, “I didn’t know, I didn’t understand, Well having the data on my computer was easier, blah, blah, blah…”

The company lost it’s edge since all of the projects and hiring needs associated with them were public knowledge. The company employees were poached by competitors and shortly thereafter the company itself went out of business.

Turns out, “Loose Lips sink ships”. Who could have known that?

From a security and maintenance standpoint I can see the allure of putting everything in a secure cloud. If indeed the cloud is secure. 

I question that security with data centers, wherever they are located. Physical access to even a Cloud server allows for the data to be stolen. So the data center itself presents an access point for thieves. Security is about minimizing risk, but nothing is ever totally secure.

I suppose blockchain encryption would make the data simply too hard to crack but if the data is at any point unencrypted, it’s game over.

Which brings me to Microsoft and its Indian data center.

The problem with cloud storage is that you don’t know where your cloud storage physically is. I personally don’t like having my personal data floating around in India. The vast majority of scammers happen to be located in India. The possibility of my data being stored in a cloud, located in India worries me. 

How long until some scammer goes to work at the data center and plugs in some device that creates a breach? It would be a gold mine!

No more stupid phone calls to elderly people getting their bank account numbers. No more silly screens popping up on computer screens claiming, “Your computer has been infected”. 

The data just flows out of the Cloud data center un-noticed, and boom a million people suddenly have all their personal data exposed and being used for criminal purposes.

But there’s another aspect to Microsoft firing American workers and replacing them with H1B workers, in addition to having potentially criminal people with common interest at both ends of the data pipeline.

It’s their programming style. 

Windows 11 and Office do not use typical American thinking.

Americans tend to think and act directly. We generally don’t have the patience to dig through misnamed or misleading menu items.

If we’re looking to highlight a block of data then transform it, we expect the transformation options to be at the top of the menu we open. Indian programming is much more florid.

If we ask what time is it, we’re not interested in specifying what time zone we’re in, nor are we interested in the history of horology. Just tell us what time it is.

Windows and Office have become far too florid providing endless options and nuance when we want to do something simple. Their copilot AI is always prodding and suggesting instead of getting out of the way to allow us to change a damn font, or paragraph style. I don’t want to review the paragraph, or re-contextualize, summarize, or re-write it. I wanted to justify it left and right.

Word for example had become too “Busy”. In my case it got to the point that I’d write something in a text editor then open it in Word and apply formatting. The reason was that all the little highlights, and suggestions actually distracted me from what I was trying to put on paper.

Even WordPress has gotten too annoying to use in live mode. Most of my blog posts, I’m writing with an older style program because WordPress “Blocks” are a pain in the ass if you want to insert graphics. It’s easier and more direct for me to write and insert graphics in the older style than play around with inserting a graphic as a block then resize it, then flip through 3 menus to place it.

This is coming from a guy that knows at least half a dozen desktop publishing programs, and has published periodicals, manuals, and books.

When I want a desktop publishing application, I’ll choose to use a desktop publishing application and access all the power of that application. For a normal letter, email, or blog. Just let me put my thoughts on paper. If I want additional input, I’ll ask for it.

Apple is heading in the same direction and at some point I can see myself eschewing Microsoft and Apple OS in favor of something like Unix or Linux.

I’m not saying that Indian programmers are bad, (I don’t particularly like working with them, because its sometimes annoying and difficult to communicate simple issues,) I’m saying that their thought process is overly complex and that translates to a level of complexity in their programs that I don’t like.

Trite as it sounds, I prefer an America First method of programming. 

Simple, direct, straight forward, minimalist, and functional.

In many ways, I miss the old days of a Terminal interface.

I deleted Windows 11 from my emulation program on my Mac. I don’t recall how long ago that was, but I’ve not missed it or had need to use Windows 11.

Similarly, I didn’t renew the subscription I’d had for Office sometime last year. Again, to my surprise, I found that I didn’t miss Word, Excel, Powerpoint, or Microsoft Mail. All of them had become too weird, too complicated, and frustrating.

I realized that I’d actually stopped using the Office applications because more often than not, I just wanted to do something quick and knew that whatever I wanted to do was gong to take far longer than necessary if I used Office.

In many cases, using the built in Apple TextEdit program gave me formatting and font selection that was more than sufficient for a quick letter. I didn’t even fire up Apple Pages. So when Office renewal came due, I thought, “Why am I paying $99 a year to be annoyed and frustrated when writing a simple letter? Moreover why am I paying for applications that are bloated, (typically 1GB or more) that are not my ‘Go-To’ applications?”

That was the end.

As an aside, Windows 11 also contains a decent text editing program, baked in.

Microsoft, firing Americans, then hiring H1Bs is simply the icing on the cake. I know there are those who’ll say, “But dude, you’ve got to know Office applications.”

Really? Considering that I’ve used every version of Office, since before they were bundled and started with word processors going back to old IBM MTSC systems. Plus I’ve done typesetting and publishing, I think I’ll be able to catch up if, in the unlikely event I get a job that required me to use the Microsoft Office suite. Unless they start writing the menus in Hindi.

Thinking about it Microsoft hasn’t done much in terms of really new or interesting things is a while. I guess that’s why typically I don’t think about them unless I see an article about them, or I run into comments in computer journals complaining about Teams, or Copilot.

Apple should probably take note. 

It’s actually possible to program yourself into irrelevance. OS27 had better be a clean up of bugs, and a simplification of operation across the OS and all the Apple features & Apps.

Otherwise, Mac hardware will be of little value if everyone can buy an Intel PC for $100 then put Linux on it & have a simple, functional and powerful OS without all the bullshit.

Just a thought.