Grey Matters

The war in Afghanistan has now been ongoing for ten years. Ten years ago, when President Bush initiated the war, I knew it was a mistake. None of the numerous invaders from Alexander the Great to the Soviet Union have ever been able to conquer Afghanistan. It seemed unlikely to me that the U.S. would succeed where so many others had failed.

Of course, it was with U.S. help that the Mujahideen were finally able to run the Soviets out. From 1979 to 1982, the Afghans had done battle against Soviet troops with only volunteer help from Muslims who joined their cause. But in 1982, President Reagan began U.S. assistance to their efforts. In late 1986, Reagan decided to provide the Mujahideen with man-portable “Stinger” missiles which were used to break the back of Soviet air power. Having lost the ability to control the skies, the Soviets could no longer win on the ground. In early 1989, the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan and the Afghans reverted to civil war, with warlords fighting amongst themselves. The desolate, rugged landscapes and tribal allegiances of Afghanistan have always worked against any sort of central control.

Thus it was that, ignoring history, President Bush thought that the U.S. could succeed where so many others had failed. It was a bad idea from the start and destined to exact too high a cost in both dollars and U.S. servicemen’s lives.

The War On Terror, as it is known, is an unconventional war and cannot be won with conventional warfare. It requires an unconventional approach which, coincidentally, would cost must less to wage.

Bush should have targeted, specifically, terrorist training and recruitment facilities and terrorist leaders. Here’s how:

First, authorize the use and recruitment of large numbers of “humint” (human intelligence) sources whose numbers were drastically curtailed by President Bill Clinton. Clinton’s emphasis for satellite imagery and “sigint” (signals intelligence) are no replacement for boots-on-the-ground, first-hand knowledge of what’s happening. Cultivate local sources in areas of interest.

Second, develop small, elite units of navy SEALs, army Rangers, special forces and such to infiltrate areas supporting terrorist training and recruitment. Teach them Arabic language, history and customs, have them grow beards, blend in with the locals. Give these units autonomy to identify and eliminate terrorists, their leaders and their trainers. Use them to identify sites in need of a Tomahawk cruise missile or two.

In a nutshell, strike at the terrorists surgically. We’d get far more bang for the buck doing this and likely save lots of lives, both of U.S. servicemen and non-combatant Afghans. The conventional war we are currently waging has disrupted and claimed the lives of far too many innocent Afghan citizens.

At the same time, of course, we could be training the Afghans’ police and military, but leave reclaiming their country from the Taliban to the Afghan people.

I had hoped that when President Obama took office, he would get us out of these unwise wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but we continue to pour billions of dollars each month into these no-win situations.

The U.S.A. needs to be protected from terrorists, not from Afghanistan, not from Iraq. We need to concentrate on terrorists. The War On Terror is an unconventional war and requires unconventional tactics. Have ten years in Afghanistan taught us nothing?

I’ve been a Mac user since 1984, which is to say, since the very first Mac (which was then “Macintosh.”) Over the years I’ve used many different Mac models and every new version of the OS that came out.

Until recently, I continued to use OS X 10.5.8 (Leopard), there being nothing compelling for me about Snow Leopard (10.6.x), no reason to upgrade. With the release of Lion (10.7.x) and Leo’s new no-longer-supported status, I made the leap to 10.6.8. That is, I installed 10.6.0 over my 10.5.8 then applied the 10.6.8 combined updater. Overnight I went from the latest Leopard version to the latest Snow Leopard version.

I was mystified, at first, by the vastly increased amount of mouse clicking required to get my work done. I process video files and their associated metadata (text) files. For much of this work, I have droplet AppleScripts to process and clean up the text files. I need only drag the files, mostly single, but sometimes in bulk, to the droplet AppleScripts and let them do their work. Depending on the type of video file, it may take between three and five droplets to process. There is necessarily a lot of clicking and dragging.

After processing, I inspect both the text and video recording files visually — the text in BBEdit and the video files in a video player. Those that pass inspection get copied, by dragging, from the scratch disk to the archive volume. Those that do not are discarded by moving to the trash.

Snow Leo requires a great deal more clicking than Leo did to do the same work. This is mostly because Snow Leo does not pass through a “first click” to a window. That is, if a window is not active, and you click on it, on a particular file, for example, the file is not selected. In Leo it is, but in Snow Leo, it only makes the window active. It requires a subsequent click to select the file.

What’s more, it used to be that a file would become selected on the “mouseDown” event — when clicked. Now it is not selected until the “mouseUp” event — when the mouse is released. It used to be that one had immediate visual feedback when you clicked, now there may be no visual feedback at all unless multiple clicks are employed.

Here’s what happens when clicking in a non-active window and dragging a file elsewhere:

Leo activates the window making it front-most, highlights the clicked-upon file and it is dragged elsewhere.

Sow Leo: The window is activated. Period. It requires a second click to select the file and a third to click and drag it elsewhere. Now, it’s true that once the window is active, I could just click and drag the desired file elsewhere (to one of my Droplets), but if I do that, the dragged file never becomes highlighted to indicate that it has been selected. In fact, if a previous file was selected, it remains selected even though I might drag the clicked-upon file elsewhere to be processed. This is soooo wrong. I should think that clicking a file and dragging it successfully to my Droplet would be sufficient to make it the selection, but it is not. Very un-intuitive.

Some of my droplets act upon a single file, some on multiple files. When dropping onto the former, what used to take one click-drag not takes three clicks and a drag (two clicks and one click drag). The first click activates the window, the second selects the file and then, after a pause so as not to click so quickly as to be a double-click, I can click and drag the now-selected file to my droplet. Using only one click to activate the window, then a click-drag to the droplet prevents the file from being highlighted and it’s up to me to remember which file I dragged or else I can lose my place in the window’s file listing.

If I lose my place, there’s the possibility of inadvertently skipping a file (when dragging a single file) or of processing the same file twice. Worse yet, at the point where I drag each file, singly, to the video player, if the visual inspection should find that the file is incomplete, my next step would be to hit the “Move To The Trash” icon in the recordings’ window’s ToolBar. But, if the wrong file is highlighted (instead of the one I just dragged to the player) then I’m liable to discard the wrong file (which I have done multiple times thus far). Three clicks and a drag where formerly a single click-drag sufficed.

In Leo, I used to be able to drag across a range of files in an inactive window to select them, in Snow Leo, the drag is wasted and only activates the window, so I have to drag again — double the work.

Even choosing a label for one or more files is now more clicks. I used to right-click, drag to the desired label in the hierarchical menu, then release the mouse over the desired label and be done. Now, when I release the mouse button over the desired label, it is not selected, does not get applied. It requires a second click on the desired label — a doubling of the clicks required.

It will doubtless take a long time to un-learn the work habits and muscle memory years of using Leopard. The result of these changes was almost enough for me to revert to Leo and be done with all the unnecessary clicking.

Almost. Why, I asked, did Apple change a perfectly good point and click interface to make it require so many more mouse clicks. For this particular work-flow of mine, the clicks required has more than doubled. Why would Apple require so many more mouse clicks? Then I had an insight.

It is in preparation for a gesture-based touch interface — the end of the mouse input device. Apple is currently making OS X more like IOS. Lion incorporates oodles of gestures lifted from IOS and even scroll bars do not appear, by default, in Lion unless scrolling is in progress — just like IOS.

We know that IOS started as a sub-set of OS X but required changes to utilize a touch interface. Now the touch interface of IOS has merged into OS X. It was a natural evolution as most of the Macs Apple sells are laptops, which come with a built-in trackpad. The non-laptops come standard with a mouse that has a touch pad built in.

Touch is in; clicking is on the way out. A touch input device must necessarily be treated differently than a mouse.

It wouldn’t do, for example, to activate a window and select the tapped file if in fact the user was merely swiping to scroll the screen or the window contents. Certainly a “swiper” would not want the swipe of a finger to select a file and move it elsewhere the way a click-drag would do. .

In IOS, it is the tap that selects a file. It is not selected when the screen is first touched, but when released (mouseDown and mouseUp in the same place, as it were).

So, while I seriously considered reverting back to Leo, in the end I decided I had two choices: like it or lump it. As I am anticipating a new Mac Pro when the Thunderbolt version comes out, and as it will doubtless rum Lion, I’d better decide to start liking it.

Still, it does seem like Apple could have taken into consideration the type of input device when determining whether a click in Snow Leo just activates a window or activates and passes the click through to the clicked upon file to cause it to be selected. I have no problem moving between IOS and OS X. But this OS X masquerading as IOS is driving me nuts. Let the mouse be a mouse and stop treating it like a touch-screen or trackpad.

To tell the truth, the first hint I had of this problem was in an application while I was still running Leo. The app was compiled with the latest XCode tools and exhibited the same “do not select the item” behavior when the clicked upon item was dragged, in this case, from one pane of the app’s window to another pane. Even though the item was in fact acted upon by the app, it was nonetheless not selected in the source pane when the operation was done.

This was a change from earlier versions of the app and I reported it as a bug.

The developer concluded that, if it was a bug, it was Apple’s bug, and then pointed out that “that’s how Finder works.” Of course, they were using a version of OS X later than Leo.

As the developer told me, “But, I’ve confirmed with some friends at Apple that this is the preferred, intentional behavior moving forward.” And: “It also seems odd that option-dragging behaves differently than regular dragging. And that they keep changing this in every iteration of OS X. (10.4 behaved the way 10.7 does now!)”

I get it. The mouse is out, touch is in. It’s clear that Apple believes we cannot distinguish between mouse use and gestures in a touch interface. (In this, they are wrong.) Witness the whole reverse scrolling issue. Seriously, There are people at Apple who think it’s confusing to have a “downward” (contracting finger on a scroll wheel/ball) that scrolls a page upward on the Mac and a downward swipe scrolling downwards on IOS.

At Apple, apparently, they see this as inconsistent. I’ve always thought of the scroll wheel or ball as being a virtual “roller” between my finger and the page; a downward roll of the top of the ball/wheel would therefore result in an upward movement of the virtual paper on the screen. That’s how a real roller would work.

Now, I think that most people have no problem moving between a mouse interface on the Mac and IOS. I see no inconsistency at all. The touch interface is like putting my finger directly upon the virtual paper. Naturally, it will move in the direction of finger movement. The mouse, by contrast, has that virtual ball or wheel between my finger and the “paper” and so the scrolling that results is totally consistent with having that virtual roller there.

I think people are more likely to be confused by “reverse scrolling” (after decades of it working one way and all that muscle memory) than by any difference between a touch interface and a mouse-driven interface. The mouse is not a touch interface device and Apple should not treat it like one.

In ancient times (as personal computers go), some software came with a postcard to be mailed in, agreeing to the brief EULA (End User License Agreement, as they are known today, though it was just called a license, or software license back then) contained thereon. One was required to sign the license postcard and send it in before using the new software. It also served to register the s/w with the particular publisher.

Because I actually read these things, I’d often line through the objectionable parts on the card, initial the line-outs and then sign and send in the card. In one case I recall, there was so much BS on it that I crossed out everything and put it into an envelope with my own EULA stating that I promised not to copy the software for anyone else and nothing more. I said that if that wasn’t good enough, let me know and I’d be happy to return the software for a refund. I sent it off to the address where the postcard would have gone. Never heard from them. I assume they found my terms acceptable.

Someone in the software community had the bright idea that using the software indicated acceptance of the license, whether or not one signed it. This became a common term on software licenses. When I first encountered this, I quipped to one of my friends that it wouldn’t be long before simply reading the license obligated one to abide by it. Sure enough…

It was C compiler. It came in a transparent, sealed envelope that was large enough so that the 8.5 x 11″ license and documentation pages did not have to be folded. I could read the first page of the license in its entirety without even opening the package. I did, but then, to proceed, I had to open the package before I could read the second page of what turned out to be a two-page software license. Sure enough, on page two of the license, it stated that opening the package indicated acceptance of the license conditions! Very clever, eh? I have a photo of it, before opening, somewhere — evidence that I was unable to read the license in its entirety without opening the package. I took the photo because I suspected chicanery.

My prediction had come true. Since reading the license in its entirety had required me to open the package, and, according to the license, opening the package had bound me to the terms of the license, reading the license had indeed bound me to it!

It was the immediate forebear of the “shrink wrap” license. (It was clear but not heat shrunken.)

I don’t remember the context, but I recently remarked that appearance —perception — is more important than reality, especially where government is concerned.

From The American Spectator:

“The ‘Tea Party downgrade’ claim is the sort of desperately superficial explanation one would expect from pols who consider the appearance of solving problems to be more crucial than the reality of solving them. Blaming the Tea Party for America’s lower credit rating is like “blaming firemen for fires,” as Senator Rand Paul puts it. “

It’s always been about perception. In the wake of the Waco Branch Davidian fiasco, the priority for D.C. was “restoring the faith of the American people in federal law enforcement.” Not finding out who was responsible for the mishandling of what should have been a simple service of a search warrant, not ensuring that it can’t happen again. Nope, gotta restore faith in the feds. We can leave the same ham-handed idiots in charge, we just need to change the perceptions. It’s not a matter of bad policy or bad management, it’s just a Public Relations matter.

Post 9-11, it was all about making people believe that it was once again safe to fly — restoring that 9-10 confidence that our government was protecting us.

It’s always been about perception.

If Obama can make people believe that the Tea Party is responsible for the credit downgrade (instead of his own failed policies), that’s as good as them actually being responsible, for purposes of electioneering. It’s all about perceptions.

Repercussions of 9-11 turn up in the darndest places.

I sent email to an on-line vendor as follows:

I was about to buy:

[description of item here]

but then realized that shipping was twice the product cost. 

Is there any reason something like this can’t be shipped by postal mail at a more realistic cost?

the item in question was less than six bucks in cost but shipping, by UPS, was nearly thirteen bucks,)

The reply was this:

“I’ll have to check for you after you suplly an address I can confirm a cost, since 9/11 we were restricted to only items that fit thru the new, reduced size mail slot, fyi.”

Seriously?!? On 9/11, did the terrorists sneak those airliners into the World Trade Center through the mail slot?