Computerized Confusion

Townhall.com ^ | December 25, 2007 | Thomas Sowell

[Kaslin]

When I bought one of these small, cheap, old-fashioned cathode-ray TV sets on sale to watch while on my exercise machine, I had no idea how high-tech and computerized even these obsolete sets had become.

Nor was this a blessing. I could not even turn the set on and get a channel without reading a 60-page instruction book. If the truth be known, I could not do it even after trying to make some sense out of the instructions.

The next time my computer guru came over to help me with my computer problems, I asked him to set up the TV set so that I could turn it on.

After he went through the instruction book and waded through all the high-tech options -- none of which interested me in the slightest -- he set up the TV so that I could do something as elementary as turn on the set and choose a channel to watch.

Unfortunately, this was not an unusual experience. All kinds of computerized products -- cameras, cell phones, even car radios -- have had the same problem.

There must be some blind spot that computer engineers have which prevents them from seeing that (1) most people are not computer engineers, (2) there is no point making simple things complicated, and (3) not everyone is looking for a zillion features to have to wade through to do simple things.

Let's start at square one. What is the first thing you want to do with any computerized product? Turn it on.

Why should that be a problem when people were turning things off and on for generations before there were personal computers?Yet computer engineers seem determined to avoid the very words "off" and "on."

Apparently they feel a need to coin new terms for everything, no matter how simple or well-known those things may be. For computers, the word is "start," which you have to go to for either turning the computer off or on.

With our microwave oven, the word is "power." For my car radio and cell phone, there is no word at all.

For other things, there is the same coining of new words for things people already understand by old words. Printers can be set for "landscape" or "portrait," as if people had never heard of horizontal and vertical.

When I had to have a new radio put into my old car, I told the man who installed it, "I didn't go to M.I.T" and wanted the simplest radio to use that he had.

Yet even the simplest radio he had in stock came with over 100 pages of instructions -- and nothing on the radio that said "on" or "off." In fact, none of the buttons on the front of the radio had anything to indicate what they were for.

The man who installed the radio turned it on for me. But this was an old car that I did not use very often, and I did not always want the radio on when I was driving.

Since he had not told me how to turn it off, I just turned the volume down as low as possible, rather than go into the 100 pages of instructions.

I would probably never have learned how to turn that radio off and on if the car's battery had not gone dead one day. While I was waiting on the roof of a parking garage for the Triple-A truck to get there, I had nothing to read except the radio instruction book.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I read the instruction book. You might think that telling you how to turn the radio off and on would be on page 1. But you would be wrong.

That would be too obvious, and computer engineers avoid the obvious like the plague.

Eventually, I came to the place where the instruction book said to turn the radio on by pressing the "source" button.

There was of course nothing on the radio itself that said "source." By leafing through the instructions, however, I eventually found a diagram where one of the buttons was identified as the "source" button. Eureka!

My new cell phone also has nothing to give you a clue as to how to turn it off or on, much less do anything so complicated as phone somebody. The next time the car battery goes dead, I will read the thick instruction book, so that I can call Triple A.

[Huck]

I like txt msging. Asynchronous communication is where it’s at.

[Kaslin]

OIC. Maybe they want you to upgrade?

[Kaslin]

Oh I was not talking about using my cell phone in my car. I use that as little as I can in my car.

[VOA]

As one fellow graduate student said about a lab instrument with a lot
of needless “bell and whistles” and an ANTI-intuitive control panel:

“So useful, it’s almost useless!”

[MediaMole]

Unless you have problems getting to photobucket when you type photobucket.com in the address bar, that won’t solve any problems. That command clears your local domain name service cache on your computer.

DNS stands for Domain Name Service, which is the internet protocol for resolving a website’s name to the numeric i.p. address that your computer can use.

It would fix a problem where they numeric address for photobucket had changed, but your computer was still looking at the old address. A big site like Photobucket has many different servers at different ip addresses.

The command they gave you shouldn’t hurt anything, but I’m not sure it will solve the problem. You can get a terminal in the applications/utilities/ folder. That’s where you learn that OSX is just a pretty graphical shell for BSD unix.

[discostu]

First he should learn to read manuals, I’ve had that kind of TV and it’s easy, the thing just wants to scan your broadcast and figure out where you have channels so then Channel Up will go to the next channel receiving signal, nice in smallish towns where the lower 12 are mostly empty.

Second, it’s not the computer engineers, it’s the marketing guys. The engineers are just doing what they’re told, the marketing guys decided it needed all these features.

[ChildOfThe60s]

I have always built my own computers. So I don’t consider myself a techno-phobe. Yet, one of the reasons I do is so that I can pare down the unnecessary software that the pre-built jobs come with. My machines boot (uh, turn on) much faster and run better without all the garbage running in the background.

I agree with Dr. Sowell’s point. Very often I want *fewer* features, not more. It’s a shame I can’t get that much of the time.

[Lancey Howard]

This column expresses my sentiments exactly. Whenever I go to buy something electronic, the first thing I say to the dude is, “Pure vanilla - - I DO NOT WANT any flashers, buzzers, or gimmicks.” They can never find anything like that, for example, a fax machine that just sends faxes and receives them.

[Lancey Howard]

I once got a new cell phone and asked one of my kids, “How do you dial this thing?” Blank stare.
“Dial?”

[Menehune56]

A Mac is the perfect solution for people who want a computer that comes out the box and just works. Over Thanksgiving, my father in law was amazed watching my wife’s new iMac go online less than 15 minutes after I cut the tape on the carton. And best of all, no crashes or problems since. Apple understands technophobia.

[FrogMom]

It will probably take me two years to explain to her how to work the remote control.

I NEVER watch the large-screen-with-surround-sound TV that inhabits our family room. It's Hubby's toy, I read or cruise the internet. And then one day, our granddaughter came over and wasn't feeling well, so only wanted to lay on the couch and watch a movie.

I approached it with trepidation, but couldn't turn the damned thing on until I figured out that the large decoration-thing in the bottom center (where there are NO other controls) was the on/off button. I got a DVD into the DVD player and got it on and playing, I could hear the soundtrack coming from all those speakers all over the room. However. The TV was showing Cops. Hmmmm.

I opened the beautiful box that I bought Hubby to hold his remote controls. Let's see, this one is for either the surround sound or DVD, it's labeled Sony. This one is for the satellite, it's labeled DirectTV. This one is labeled TVGuide, what the HELL is THAT? This one is labeled Sony also, oh, it's the DVD player - which makes the other on for the sound. And this one is labeled...with nothing. Again, hmmmm.

Through process of elimination, I put the sound one back in the box (I could HEAR the thing fine). I put the DirecTV one back (I didn't want to use the satellite). I put the DVD one back (I had it going, I could hear the soundtrack). Which left me the one that was unlabeled and the one that said TVGuide.

By now I'm alternating reassuring the granddaughter that we were getting there and muttering (under my breath since THOSE are words that my granddaughter won't hear from ME). I started pressing buttons.

I turned the picture to snow. I put it back. I pressed every button on the damned things. I finally gave up and told the granddaughter I'd read her a story. When she didn't answer, I noticed that she was sound asleep.

When Hubby came home I asked for a lesson on the operation of !$#%~#% multitudinous remotes. He obliged and showed me how to do everything I needed using ONLY those remotes - he requested that I don't actually TOUCH the equipment except to move DVDs in and out. After a half hour of patient instruction, I could turn it on and show a DVD. YARRRR.

The next time the gdaughter wanted to watch a movie was almost 3 months later. I never did get the picture changed, I read her a story.

Be patient with your mother!

[Blue Highway]

Here's the Jitterbug

Great idea for a basic phone, but it is a scam for how much you have to pay for so little minutes. Plus they charge you per minute calls...

Here are the monthly plans

You pay for the phone ($147), Activation fees ($35), cheapest monthly plan is $10 for SOS calls only, $.35 per minute! They even charge you an additional $3.00 a month for voicemail!!!! And you know you will use that if the grandkids want to call Grandma every week. The other modest plan is $30 for 150 minutes... What a joke. I pay $30 a month on the Sprint SERO plan and get 500 + 100 bonus minutes plus free web access free voicemail, unlimited text messages.

[pyx]

On Mac OS X:

Type lookupd -flushcache in your terminal to flush the DNS resolver cache. (ex: bash-2.05a$ lookupd -flushcache) Once you run the command your DNS cache (in Mac OS X) will flush.
Once the above suggestions have been tried, please try logging into and using your Photobucket account again.

If the problems persist, please click the contact us link below and provide a detailed description of the problem you are experiencing. Please be sure to include details for any steps you have already attempted to resolve the problem.

I don’t even understand WHERE in my “terminal” I’m supposed to start typing.

I do not own an Apple Mac and never have and I have never even had the chance to even try. But I plan to ! ;9 None-the-less, I have used Linux since the very early 1990's. Before that, I used Unix.

I recognize the instructions you mentioned above. The "terminal" on your Mac is a DOS like text window where you type. You issue commands directly to the operating system or run text based programs within the terminal window. There are even windows types programs that can be started from the command line in the terminal window.

My guess is you LAUNCH the terminal window from a program LAUNCHER in your Utilities Folder, which you should already know how to access.

After you launch the terminal, you will see a flashing cursor called a command prompt. The name of the command line environment shell or just shell, is BASH (Bourne Again SHell after the author, J.(?) Bourne) Other shells exist, such as the Korn shell, the C shell and small ones such as Ash, etc. Commands can be written as scripts in text files and the commands are executed sequentially.

The bash-2.05a$ is likely the version of the BASH shell you are using. The $ character tells me its very likely the command prompt.

So, type exactly 'lookupd -flushcache' without the quotation marks on the same line as the '$' appears and press the [Enter] key.

Like your web browser, the cache will be flushed (cleaned out) and you will be able to access photobucket again.

When the command prompt returns, type 'exit' without the quotes and the press [Enter] to close the terminal window and return the Mac OSX windows environment.

You can read more about the bash shell and other shells by typing 'bash shell' in Google.

The reason you have these utilities and features on your computer is to GIVE YOU OWNERSHIP of the computer. You have the choice of using or not using a feature. ;9

Incidentally, this spring I have budgeted and planned to purchase an iMac Pro (the big 'un :) ) for use as my everyday computer. I've heard very positive things about Mac OSX and particularly the iMac Pro hardware running the Mac OSX.

[Blue Highway]

And free minutes anytime after 7pm and all weekends are free.

[umgud]

I am ONE with my computers. It’s all those other smaller digital gadgets I struggle with. Remotes, cell phones, gps devices, etc. All those things with too few buttons that each perform too many funtions. Don’t ever ask me to respond to a text message on my cell phone. It ain’t gonna happen.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

What is the first thing you want to do with any computerized product? Turn it on.

Au contriare.
One does not simply 'turn on' a computerized product.

One must "initialize" a computerized product.

[pyx]

More about lookupd -flushcache

lookupd is likely a utility program that you have on your system and the -flushcache is an option that you are providing to the lookupd utility.

[the invisib1e hand]

Besides, there are so many time-keeping devices in sight all day long...

Yes, they can be very helpful. For example, on this timepiece, nothing but the numeral "8" was lit at 4:24 pm yesterday.

[jazusamo]

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL!!

Thanks for the ping, Kaslin.

*PING*
Thomas Sowell

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[Bernard]

So it must be right twice a day.