It's said that Steve Jobs has a life view that goes, "I'll like you until I don't." And as Adobe knows, it is not good to have Steve fall out of like with you.
Well, sometimes, and they aren't often, I find my like for Apple is not unconditional.
This blog is a mess right now. If you scroll backward you will quickly notice that hundreds of postings are now missing. Why? I subscribed to a .Mac and for my money received a website service. You can find what is left of it by CLICKING HERE!
And you will see that you can page through scores of empty URLs. All of the graphics have been trashed by Apple!
Yes, they warned me that they would no longer allow postings to that site when they arbitrarily notified users that they were ending the service. BUT... they also wrote that posted graphics would remain. And then after about a year of supporting those postings, WUMP! They dumped all of the graphics.
And mostly all of the postings on this blogspot prior to a few months ago were linked from those postings on hompage.mac.com/byrneprintmaker. And without those links, all of those graphics here on ImageFiction, were extinguished.
Do I have backups? Sure. But... to replace the broken links, I shall have to tediously go to each of the previous postings, figure out what the linked graphics were named, Find them among my old files. And then reload them... one at a time. It will take countless hours.
I'll try slowly to replace some of my favorites, but I fear that visitors to this blog will not graze page, after back page, to find the few that I repost. Nope, unless I do them all, or develop some alternative system... all of that work is gone with the Apple.
And so, in spite of the many things that Apple has done to make me like them... I am falling out of like. Sigh.....
And I guess the moral here is, if you can't trust Apple to protect a service that they charge you for... How much faith should you put in any of the "cloud" services which promise to store your valuable backups?
To see what I've fixed look at the ROTTEN APPLE - REPAIRED POSTS FROM THE PAST link on the right hand column. I will try to slowly add my favorites over there.
5 comments:
Sorry to hear that. I do think that is something not contemplated often enough.
Any online service, free or fee, is of limited lifetime subject to its owner's arbitrary decisions. Many times based on sound reasoning which does not align with ours. Any expectation to the contrary is overly optimistic.
If there is any consolation: your story fully illustrates my theory to life - everything we do, including ourselves, is a tedious labor of arranging randomness into a pattern that makes sense. However, through a variety of actions or events, everything is eventually doomed to return to the same randomness in which it started - whether those are bits, links on the internet, or what is left of us one day...
Jan, your insights are profoundly thoughtful. While I've dealt with Apple's decision as one of life's frustrations, you've moved it to become a more interesting part of the many pieces which support our growth from place to life-place. Thank you, a whole bunch for something worth pondering.
Ted, I'm so sorry for you that the wonderful company that Steve Jobs would have us believe that Apple is, did this to you and all its other subscribers.
I guess you might say this is an example of entropy in action/inaction.
Too bad all of you can't sue Apple for bad faith, misrepresentation, lying, and whatever other legalese lawyers can come up with.
I hope Steve Jobs sleeps well at night. His decisions will come back to haunt him sooner or later.
That was a cruel loss, Ted. I had a similar experience with WordPress, when I kept getting locked out because my password never seemed to work. I gave up. Now I just put everything on a separate hard drive. One thing you might be able to do is go to the Internet Archive's Way Back machine. You might find your pages have been screenshot and preserved that way. It's worth a look, anyway. Maybe you already tried that.
This is sad and I'm sorry to hear about it. Unfortunately this is a possible outcome for anyone using any of the many cloud services available today.
What I would have said has been said much better by Jan Klier above so I will simply salute you for taking on the difficult task of restoring your blog. I am sure I would not have the resolve to do so.
All the best Ted.
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