Felger Sounds Off on Internet Insanity

Hi Rrhain,You seem to have gone off the rails a bit. You somehow interpreted my questions and comments as unreasonable attacks on OnStar, which I guess you like a whole lot, and then you stopped making much sense. Rather than getting into a detailed back and forth, I'll just remake my main points.Yes, I know how a GPS works, but they don't all work identically. Depending upon the settings, my wife's GPS will stop instructing us to get back on the original route and will automatically reroute after a little bit of travel along a different route. But if you explicitly *tell* it to reroute then it will give you a choice of routes, though you have to stop to do that.I couldn't exactly follow your explanation about what happens when Manning says, "Reroute." My comment was that there has to be more dialog than that, right? Without more dialog, how does OnStar know whether Manning wants to get right back on the highway (perhaps avoiding construction that happens to be limited to just the overpass), or reroute using back roads (possibly needing to override the "freeways" preference if it was set), or travel to the next exchange and get back on the highway?About the OnStar website, we're seeing different things. In my browser it looks like this: There's no "Plans and Pricing" link visible on the page, though I see now it's inside the MENU link. But as I told you, in the end I did find my way to the correct page, and just as I said before, there's no $5/month plan. You must have been referring to the "Plan Add-ons" that include a $5/month *additional* option, a fee added to one of the existing plans that begin at $19.99/month.Excepting the part about rerouting, for which I don't yet have enough information, the OnStar commercial seems accurate, and entertaining, too. Short of buying my own Buick, I don't see how else I could have found out very much without asking skeptical questions, which seemed to bother you. In any case and as I said before, I think the Siri commercials provide a much better example, and there are many examples in the cell phone and tablet space.The main point I've been making in this thread is that the technology industry provides us products of poor design, low quality, and low reliability, and they misrepresent their products in their advertising. And their webpages, though technologically amazing, are often a poorly organized mess. And then we contribute to the problem by buying the products anyway.One can even question the "technologically amazing" aspect. The reason Onstar.com looks different in my browser window than in yours is because of browser width. My browser width is set to 960 pixels (half of 1920, two portrait browser windows side-by-side), and OnStar.com is using a JavaScript library that automatically assumes you're on a mobil platform if your browser width is less than 1000. Brilliant. In mobil mode the website removes the links at the top of the page and buries them inside the MENU link, which is fine, but browser windows should never be set to mobile mode on a PC.Just curious. The GPS in my wife's car doesn't need a monthly fee to operate. I assume the same is true of the GPS in the Buick? That it doesn't need an OnStar subscription to operate?--PercyEdited by Percy, : Typo, grammar.

My bank claims you can deposit checks from home using your scanner. I just tried it. You have to walk a mine field to get it to work, and you have to scan and crop the checks yourself manually (front and back). It's supposed to be easier and automatic, but the easier methods didn't work. Another couple hours of my life I'll never get back. I'll spare everyone the details, except to say it doesn't work with Chrome at all because Chrome turned off support for Java plugins that use the NPAPI interface, for security reasons this past September.This would be wonderful if it worked, saving me either a trip to the bank once or twice a month, or having to pack the checks and a deposit slip into an envelope that I have to address, stamp and mail.Anyone have a bank where this actually works? I have a vague recollection of cell phone cameras being able to deposit checks using the camera. Is that true?Why do I have paper checks that I have to deposit? Because most people's banks charge money for electronic transfers, so they use electronic bill pay. The bank cuts a paper check and mails it to me. Bletch to the whole irrational paper-wasting mess.--PercyEdited by Percy, : thing => messEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

The bank webpage doesn't say anything about working with cell phones or tablets, despite that there are plenty of places where it would have been appropriate to mention, so while that occurred to me, I decided I'd wasted enough time (if you do a search for "ipad" it will find the information).But after seeing your note it seemed like a more likely possibility, so this morning I checked if the bank had an iPad app, and they do. The online check deposit process on the iPad is much better designed than on the website, but it did complain many times that the front and back images were different sizes, and it took a number of image capture attempts. You have to be pretty careful, though I suppose you get the hang of it after a while. I didn't go all the way through the deposit process to the end because I don't have a real check to deposit at the moment, but it seems like it works.Still, I like my workspace, and it does have a scanner. I'd like to be able to open envelopes, pull out checks, set them on the scanner, click buttons on the screen, and have them all deposited, all without getting out of the office chair. I'd prefer not to have to get out of my chair and slog upstairs to fetch the iPad. Come tonight as I tuck myself into bed and reach down for my iPad I'll realize it's downstairs in the study, so right now I'm getting up from my office chair yet again to set the iPad on the stairs so I don't forget it. I have such a rough life! But my point remains. This stuff should all just work. It shouldn't matter that I took the front image from 8 inches away and the back image from 9 inches away (or whatever it was). I shouldn't have to use a PC *and* an iPad (and I probably won't - I'll probably stick with the PC because though I have to manually run the scanner and save away image files, even simple-minded Microsoft Paint easily crops and scales images, solving the image size problem).And maybe someday this stuff *will* all just work, but until it does (and basically just repeating what I've said before to other people) I don't agree that the technology, in the form delivered to consumers, is amazing. It mostly sucks.Oh, geez, my bank's website just auto-logged me out, another of my pet complaints. I appreciate the need for security, but on days when I'm doing financial type stuff I do *not* appreciate having to log in to various bank websites multiple times just because I keep going idle for 10 minutes. I should be able to switch back and forth between various bank websites without having to keep logging in to each one because I was idle too long. It's absurd.The control panel for this website allows you to set the idle period for auto-logging you out - it's a feature I really like. The bank websites should be like that. They can put an "Are You Sure" on it, and include a warning if they feel the idle period you selected is too long - after that any non-authorized use is on you.--Percy

You still haven't answered the question: There has to be more to the dialog, right? If not, why not? The instruction "Reroute" all by itself seems ambiguous, for the reasons I've outlined twice now. If you'd really answered the question then I would be able to explain to someone else why "reroute" all by itself is sufficient, but I can't, so you haven't.About the webpage, I don't know why I clicked on "Learn More" before "Menu", but once I did click on "Learn More" the "Menu" link was gone. The much more significant issue is why is the OnStar website switching to mobil mode on a PC. Changing the browser window size doesn't affect resolution, and OnStar *has* switched to mobil mode on a PC. OnStar isn't alone in this mistake, it's pretty common. Fortunately, what is becoming increasingly common is to have a separate app for mobil platforms, and then there's no need for making a single webpage try to serve both PC's and mobil platforms. Dartmouth-Hitchcock does the same thing, only they switch to mobil mode at 900 pixels instead of 1000. They used to switch at 970, but I had a short email exchange with their software director last year and some months later it changed. I guess it must be very difficult to detect with assurance that your website is being displayed on a mobil platform, else that's what they would do, instead of checking browser width.It seems to bother you when people criticize technology. You might as well relax, because since the technology as delivered to consumers is crap, the criticism isn't going to stop. The criticism is important, too. More and more intelligence that affects safety is being added to cars. Causing driver inattention is just one issue. A few years ago Prius had a software issue that affected anti-lock braking. Volkswagen's in the middle of a dust-up over computer controlled emissions. I think the more we make clear our concern about bad technology the more it will help. This means not buying it when it's something we can know about, like how the control panel works, and encouraging government oversight through regulations and testing for things not easily discovered, like anti-lock brakes and emissions.I'm criticizing technology because I know how good it *could* be. I'm intimately aware of the process that results in delivering crap to customers because I've been part of it. Projects used to have many people per project, now it's more often the case of many projects per person. Once healthy delivery schedules are now anemic. Productivity improvements account for only a little of this change, drops in the quality the rest. Thirty years ago it was feared that as software became more complex that quality issues would overwhelm the industry, but what has instead happened is that we've inured the customer base (primarily people unfamiliar with technology) to poor quality, and they accept it now.--Percy

It'd been at least a year since I last played with Apple Radio, so today after seeing a news item about Apple discontinuing Beats Radio I decided to give Apple Radio another try. I downloaded the latest version of iTunes and got down to business. Bottom line: it's gotten worse. It's so bad the details don't deserve mention. Stay away.What was Apple thinking? Obviously, they weren't. The iTunes team, spread far too thin and probably thinned down as well, probably left the user interface for this feature to a single overloaded and insufficiently experienced individual. The goals were probably ill-defined and incompetently managed. Then it was insufficiently tested by a QA team spread far too thin and probably thinned down as well (sound familiar?). Commonplace in today's high tech industry.This is typical of what happens to software cash cows as they age. Top talent isn't interested in the old and stodgy (that's what it is, no matter how much they try to put a modern face on it), so responsibility for the products bringing in the most cash trickles down to the less and less talented and experienced.I know iTunes is widely disparaged in many circles, but I'll bet no one makes more money on music than Apple. Call it all the names you like, iTunes makes money. All the stuff people think is better? Prove it by making more money than Apple.That said, I think iTunes is ripe for the taking. It's been too bad for too long.I do still use iTunes, for backing up and restoring iPods and iPads, and for transferring audiobooks to my iPod. I don't use it for listening to music anymore, even though I have a ton of my own recorded music there. I switched to Pandora around five or six years ago.--Percy

This just repeats your answer. Obviously I'm skeptical and have asked you to help me understand how that makes any sense, to no avail as yet. Okay, I figured this out. I was only changing my browser width between 1000 and just barely below 1000 to observe the OnStar website's transition in and out of mobil mode. No change in resolution is apparent with such a small change in width. I just tried changing the browser width through a broader range and now I'm observing the change in resolution at the OnStar website that you're observing. Neat. That's done by Javascript in the background. Not being aware that you were referring to specific behavior of the OnStar website that I hadn't yet observed I was of course describing how browser windows actually behave when the size is changed. Javascript adjusting the size of document objects is an after-the-fact reaction to the change in window size.I don't know why you go on the way you do in the rest of your post. You ignored my explanation about "Menu" and went off on an extended rant. There are just a couple simple issues we're discussing that don't merit your degree of agitation:

• What does OnStar really do when you give the "reroute" command, for instance, when there a multiple route choices?
  ​
• Isn't changing to mobil mode on a PC a kind of dumb thing to do?

--Percy

Saying that in the absence of more information (for which I was asking) your answer makes no sense to me is not me thinking you're lying to me. On my end I think there's a misunderstanding somewhere.Your feelings are quite obvious. You think you've shown me wrong and that now I'm just going to the n^th annoying degree to avoid admitting it. Apparently believing your judgment impeccable, you've continued the criticisms, and I'm just becoming further and further remiss by refusing to own up to them. Well, I thought I did read your previous post. Let me go back and read it again...Nope, sorry, the answer is not there that I could see, unless you mean this: This isn't an answer. Maybe the question isn't clear, so let me try stating it again. In almost all circumstances there are multiple route options. How can it be that the sole instruction to "reroute" is sufficient all by itself? Mobil mode means a display mode specifically for cell phones and tablets. I don't think the intent was for mobil mode to include laptops, but I'm not certain.I don't understand why you think sending a webpage displayed on a PC into mobil mode isn't dumb. Particularly for a webpage that scales (changes the resolution) as the webpage width changes. Can you explain? And reacting to a related criticism you made earlier, I don't understand why, when confronted with a webpage for the first time, that you think clicking on the "Learn More" link instead of "Menu" makes one an idiot.You're making this discussion most unpleasant. If it's something in my manner that is causing this just let me know what it is and I'll stop.--Percy

While watching a football game today an ad was run in the score banner at the bottom of the screen that said, "Live in an apartment or current college student? You can stream NFL Sunday Ticket games with no satellite required...To learn more - go to nfl.com/nflsundaytickettv". This sounded like it's possible to receive DirecTV over the Internet without a satellite dish, so I did. All that page has is a "Check Eligibility" link, and it told me I'm not eligible. That's all it told me, nothing more. I figured that score banner ad meant pretty much what it said, that one had to live in an apartment where DirecTV wasn't available or be a college student, but I wanted a little bit more detail.So I went to the DirecTV website. I couldn't find any information about this at all there, but I happened to let the mouse slide across the "Equipment & Features" menu, and I was surprised to see that satellite dishes are not one of the items listed under "Equipment". I not only couldn't find any images of their different satellite dish options, I couldn't find much mention of satellite dishes at all, except under support, in the discussion forums, and in some PDF files. Someone unfamiliar with DirecTV couldn't be blamed for coming away from a visit to their website with no awareness that a satellite dish must be bolted to their house.I find this incredible - a dish company that says almost nothing about satellite dishes. It feels dishonest. I wonder if it ever happens that someone schedules a DirecTV installation expecting only a box to be connected to something, only to have a technician arrive who starts climbing on their roof.This is a marketing of technology issue and so not strictly a technology issue, but the details of how a technology works is something Rrhain and I have been discussing, and this is pretty similar. The OnStar site should have webpages where the kinds of questions I have are addressed, but it doesn't. The DirecTV website should have information about the satellite dishes it sells and installs, but it doesn't. This kind of thing manifests itself in a multitude of ways at a multitude of websites, and we shouldn't have to put up with this.Oh, and if anyone knows any details about DirecTV over the Internet, I'd be interested in hearing about them.--Percy

I will not respond in kind or at all.--Percy

Here's a little more information about the NFL SUNDAY TICKET - 2022 NFL Season - DIRECTV Satellite TV webpage, this time about poor quality.First using Chrome, if when you first visit the webpage you first click on "Check Eligibility", the link works correctly and brings up an overlay where you can fill in your address. But if you instead click on "Help Center" first (which does nothing, no matter the order of clicking) and then click on "Check Eligibility", the "Check Eligibility" link does nothing. The "Sign in" links also do nothing.On Firefox, clicking on "Help Center" blanks most of the screen, but clicking on "Sign in" works, bringing up an overlay in which to enter sign-in info. The "Check Eligibility" link works fine.Internet Explorer is more helpful. When I click on "Help Center" it tells me:

quote:

---

[Info icon] This content cannot be displayed in a frame

​

To help protect the security of information you enter into this website, the publisher of this content does not allow it to be displayed in a frame.

​

What you can try:

​

Open this content in a new window

---

And returning to Chrome and Firefox, holding down the shift key and clicking on "Help Center" brings up the page. Hey, Internet Explorer wins a round.On Safari the page is blank, except for the page header.So evidently the NFL website has run afoul of some recent security concerns. Possibly this webpage would have worked fine a year or two ago.Interesting note about the OnStar website: On Internet Explorer there's no Menu link, no matter the browser width. This is IE version 11.The central issue is more than the poor quality, poor organization, poor behavior and insufficient and unclear information at most websites. The issue is the reason behind it. This continues because we put up with it.Though I should add that reporting issues/problems about websites/webpages is incredibly difficult. If you get any response at all it's usually to misinterpret what you said into an existing problem that they have a boilerplate response for. Companies today use webpages and help centers and call centers staffed with people who follow scripts and don't know anything. This insulates them from their bothersome customers and perpetuates the problem.--Percy

Visit Slate.com and if you're using an ad blocker you'll see this message at the bottom of your browser window: If you join Slate Plus you gain access to a version of Slate with no advertising. Well, at $50/year I'm not going to do that. I like to read Slate content from time to time, but not often enough to pay $50/year. For me this is true for almost all pay sites or sites with a pay alternative. If I joined every website that has occasional content I find interesting the cost would be over $1000 a year. I therefore think advertising is reasonable.So why do I have an ad blocker? It's a relatively recent addition from several months ago. For years I put up with websites that have obnoxious advertising consisting of things like popups that have to be closed or videos that start up without request and have to be stopped. It was annoying but endurable.But finally the ads at one website (Boston Herald Sports) became so obnoxious that the site became unreadable. You literally could not get through an article without being interrupted several times. Once you finished the article if you left the webpage up then videos and ads would start up at random times, so when done you always had to close the webpage. Because I'm interested in the local sports teams, and because the Herald has the best sports page (The Boston Globe's sport page is a very weak sister), I didn't want to stop reading the Herald, so I installed an ad blocker.So when Slate appeals to readers to disable their ad blockers because advertising pays the bills, they should really be appealing to all those obnoxious websites out there that force people to install ad blockers.--Percy

The whole world's gone ADHD. Been to a live sporting event recently?--Percy

At heart this thread is about my love/hate affair with the Internet. On the one hand I love it because I can communicate, fetch and exchange information anywhere and anytime around the world. On the other hand I hate it because it keeps pressuring me to transition to ridiculously small form factors while making myself accessible to anyone and anything at all times, and to interact with the web in unfamiliar ways.I've resisted the transition in any significant way to small form factors, i.e., to cell phones and tablets. I strongly dislike pecking away on a tiny unfeeling keyboard when my fingers, when properly positioned, know where every key is, including the number keys, which are missing on the main keyboard of cell phones and tablets. I tend to do 99% of my typing on my computer's wonderful keyboard, which has great tactile response, the numbers where they belong, and even a numeric keypad.I used to think that ingenuity and creativity were primarily forces for improvement and advancement, but that was before the Internet of the last 10 or 15 years. I have nothing against ingenuity and creativity, but on the recent Internet it seems that many want to start with a blank slate and reinvent even the most basic concepts. It's as if in the days of radio some manufacturers had decided to become creative by putting the higher frequency stations on the left instead of the right and have the volume control make counter-clockwise be louder. One of the great utilities of old radios is that a quick clockwise twist of the volume knob turned the radio on and set the volume. Imagine the incredible annoyance if some radios suddenly worked the opposite. Facing a particular radio for the first time you'd never know if you were turning the volume up or down.I like Pandora for music, which allows you to create stations seeded with songs and artists you like. I've been using it since 2010, it's by far my music app of choice, but it has a tendency to become repetitive. The songs I heard yesterday I will hear again tomorrow and the next day and the next day. So I keep auditioning other apps, like Spotify and Rhapsody and iTunes and others. All have had flaws, but I keep looking.Apple has rebooted their attempt at a music app with what they call Apple Music. On my computer I access it through iTunes (I haven't tried it on my tablet yet). At $9.99/month or $120/year it's more expensive than Pandora (only $48/year) but it offered a 3-month free trial, so I'm giving it a try.I gave Apple Music a try in it's previous incarnation (was it called Beats?), which was free, and the new Apple Music is much the same, but without the numerous bugs. You can define stations in a way similar to Pandora, but there can be only a single seed. You choose a group or song or artist, and that's the seed for that station. It plays music similar to that choice, but you can't broaden or narrow your choice with additional seeds, so you're left trying to find that one precise song that exactly characterizes the music you'd like to hear.In practice this means you're constantly creating new stations. Stations are displayed in the order of most recent play, so ones you stop playing eventually roll off the end of your list. You can't edit or delete stations, and you can't order them or organize them into categories. The reality is that after even just a few hours you can no longer remember what kind of station you were trying to create when you created the "Gennadi Cherkasov Radio" station, or even who Gennadi Cherkasov is, so trying to remember you click the station again, which rolls it right to the front of your list. Could Apple just please let me delete the damn thing?No, of course not. Apple has engaged their ingenuity and creativity to reinvent a great deal and not only do it their way, but in a way no one else has done it. And this is what is wrong with much of today's Internet. In the days of radio I could walk up to any radio and instantly have music or news or sports emerge, but in this day of the Internet walking up to any music/radio website or app requires a period of training and acclimation. It takes a while before music or news or sports you actually want emerges. Brazil is a movie from the 1980's about a future era when technology has overwhelmed our ability to keep it in check, to the point where it's sophistication has become a detriment both in terms of using it and maintaining it. With regard to the Internet we have attained the world of Brazil.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

I've been fighting passwords since before there was an Internet. At first, going back over 40 years, I only needed one password. The instructions were that passwords should be impossible to guess or figure out, they should never be told to anyone, and they should never be written down. I had one of those passwords, and then many years ago my workplace implemented a policy change that forced a change of passwords every 70 days. I argued that the more frequently people changed passwords the more they would be forced to write them down, and the more often people would find themselves locked out of their accounts, but naturally to deaf ears.Then the Internet came along with increasing numbers of websites requiring passwords, and as the password requirements became more stringent and varied, people had too many passwords to remember. Though browsers began offering to save website passwords for you, and though concepts like password vaults were developed, and though you still weren't supposed to write passwords down, that's what many people did.Today I accessed my propane supplier website, and they said it was time to choose a new password. When I was done it said, "Please record your password so you can log in again in the future." Nice to see a website admit the password situation is bad enough that remembering them is impossible.Passwords are a hassle. I hope we eventually come up with a better way.--Percy

I've heard that password hackers and hacking programs are aware of keyboard progression strategies.--Percy