Working Around One of Mountain Lion's Uglier "Improvements"

Whether or not it is yet another product of what Ted Landau has called the “iOS-ification” of Mac OS or just another blunder in the ongoing saga of the descending transition from Snow Leopard to Lion to Mountain Lion, Apple decision to manage updates through the Mac App Store has been an astoundingly stupid decision that is clearly more interested in cross-selling than in users keeping their software up to date. It was therefore a great relief to discover that I could update my software with far fewer needless frills through my Terminal command line. This was the essence of the article “How to apply OS X software updates from the command line,” which Topher Kessler ran today on his MacFixit site in the CNET Reviews department. Kessler always seems to find a no-nonsense approach to dealing with Apple's new proclivity for user-hostile designs on any platform that is not mobile; and I value the extent to which his advice allows me to shift my attention from wasting my time to getting my work done. I highly recommend this particular article as a valuable survival tactic.