f you count our genetic programming, we're all prisoners of our
software. And unless Raymond Kurtzweil comes through with that
immortality we've been promised, we're all going to drop dead
sooner or later. But software that's programmed to drop dead
automatically is something we can live without.
I once downloaded a piece of Windows software for drawing molecules. It was wonderful: it was easy to create a molecule, run calculations on it to determine its optimal three-dimensional shape, and save the result. Or you could get a PDB file from somewhere and run the software on it.
There was only one problem: it was drop dead software. Even though it was free, you had to register it from within the program and get a new key every year or it would stop working.
One day the software somehow got screwed up. It wouldn't accept the new key, and of course there was no customer support. Uninstalling it left a hidden file somewhere that prevented it from working. Putting it on a different computer worked until it dropped dead again. By then I was out of email addresses. The server insisted that I already had a license and no way was it going to give me two of them.
That's the new model: Make software licenses too expensive for an individual, then rent it to them. The customer gets to pay for the same software over and over. When the company goes under, the customers are left with nothing to show for it—and typically lose access to their files.
Renting tilts the balance toward giant companies like Microsoft and Adobe, which might be expected to survive the upcoming calamity that awaits humanity. But all companies, from Wolfram (Mathematica) and MathWorks (Matlab) to the small one-person companies, are moving to a rental scheme. It's suicidal for both parties.
Last week I looked for software that could draw equations and add some text. Most software can only do one or the other; if they try to do both, the result is generally bad. Yes, you could use Latex and a text editor, like Notepad++ or Ultraedit, or you could do it in Linux, but the learning curve is steep and in a real office or lab that makes it impractical. Free alternatives like Libre Office are just not good enough: grant proposals will get rejected if your file runs one line over the page limit. If a figure runs off the bottom of a page and disappears, it can cost millions of dollars.*
I found only one program that could create equations easily and also add text. It's called EXP, and it's spectacularly good, though it uses a proprietary binary file format. It's like LyX except everything is done through the menus. It's better than any of the commercial equation editors, and best of all it's not programmed to drop dead, which means it will keep working until Microsoft forces us to abandon Windows altogether.
Why would companies expect customers to pay 150 bucks a year for all eternity? Surely they realize that customers will rush to the bottom, driving their profits down in the process. Customers may even switch to free online software.
That brings us another disturbing trend: software that assumes it has a connection to the Internet and refuses to start if it doesn't find one. One place I worked, access to the Internet was strictly forbidden. Where I am now, we have four seasons: electric being out, water being unsafe to drink, the Internet being out, and the season where everyone who can afford to moves to another state. Sometimes we get all four seasons simultaneously.
When our water purifier stopped working, the company just expected us to buy a new one. We were paralyzed until we fixed it ourselves. When your email and data are on the cloud or hosted by somebody else, you're at their mercy. When they go out of business, so do you. In effect you're gambling that you'll go out of business before Microsoft or Amazon.
Maybe that's a safe bet, given the typical short-term outlook of most companies. But surely people who have cell phones know by now that apps rarely get better. If you let them on the Internet, they'll just download more animated ads, like dogs eating every toxic food item that fits in their mouth.
We old geezers remember when cable TV companies promised us no ads, then reneged on the deal. Who is naive enough to imagine that in ten years, the rental cost will stay the same and it will stay ad-free and you won't get locked out of your files in their proprietary encrypted format when the company goes under? It's almost enough to make you believe in open source. Either way, short term thinking will get you in the end.
* I've seen this time and again. Somebody puts their figures inline in MS-Word, then adds text on page 2, which causes a figure on page 9 to disappear off the bottom of the page. Grant reviewers who look for, say, Figure 12 won't find it. They'll assume that (a) you're too careless about details to deserve funding or (b) it's another trick to hide your lack of data and you're too dishonest to be worth funding.
jun 30 2024, 5:46 am
