Originally posted by johnb
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I suppose that having boxes to tick is at least an attempt to assure us that we have some control. New users, or users who have "upgraded" their systems are unlikely to discover which things to enable/disable before at least some of their data has migrated. It would be perfectly possible for OS builders to put check boxes in to enable/disable all sorts of features, but basically ignore them anyway. Many of us might not notice, unless we became suspicious, by clues such as our machines running very slow, or files actually turning up elsewhere. This latter eventuality actually happened to me a few weeks ago, when I saw a video appear on my Apple TV which could only have come from one of my video cameras, and the file had only been installed on one machine as far as I could tell. Also AFAIK I had not authorised the file to migrate elsewhere, though maybe the software thought I had!
Re updates, I run MacOS versions from Snow Leopard up to El Capitan. I'm not rushing to install Sierra (partly, but not only) because of the desktop upload to cloud issue, but during the last few months I have noticed that some software either doesn't work, or is not updatable on systems pre Mavericks. This includes Firefox (can't upgrade to the latest versions-so doesn't work on some websites) and Chrome which are now starting to fail on Mountain Lion, and since I don't update all the machines to the latest OS, even Safari doesn't always do what I want or expect on the couple of machines running Snow Leopard and/or Mountain Lion.
So Apple is gradually "forcing" most users to install newer versions of the OS, as much of the software available gradually becomes less functional. Re Firefox, it seems that there is an extended service programme for large scale users (educational, organisation, some commercial) which will give updates for compatible Firefox browsers running on older OSs for another year or so, but the lowly single end user does not have access to such extended updates, and the software developers are declaring end of life on some versions.
Despite that though, Apple (and others) have not been successful so far in killing off Flash, which is a great shame, as there do seem to be problems with Flash, but some web developers continue to rely on Flash - though whether the HTML 5 alternatives are really a lot better seems uncertain. Where they work they seem OK.
To date I have been happier running Apple systems than Windows, but I am becoming increasingly concerned with problems which are more obvious now, and seem to be occurring more frequently. It's not just Apple though - Google and other search tools (and related software companies) are becoming increasingly intrusive, and do have an effect on the way systems appear to the end user. An example of this can be found by looking at this link on Constructivism - http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/hist...tm#development - which was mentioned by JLW in the discussion about Prokofiev symphonies. It took me a good few seconds to realise that the images at the top of the article were in fact references to products I might have had some interest in recently, and not part of the article, and there was yet another ****** (expletive deleted) advert half way down the page. Different users will see different things.
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