3 ms·
But our devices aren't less powerful when offline than they used to be. It's just that networks are better and more ubiquitous, so of course our devices spend m
by baddox 9y ago
But our devices aren't less powerful when offline than they used to be. It's just that networks are better and more ubiquitous, so of course our devices spend more time on networked things like social networking, messaging, browsing memes, etc.
I don't understand this conflation between "we can now almost always be connected to a worldwide computer network" and "now our devices are useless without a network and are now just dumb terminals." To me, the one valid part of this analogy is when applications are artificially reliant on a network connection, like single player games that use the network for DRM, or a web-based image editor whose developers didn't bother supporting offline capabilities. That definitely happens, but it's probably a tiny portion of modern device usage.
- khedoros1 9y agoIn an absolute sense, our devices are more powerful offline than they used to be. But so much of what many people use their devices to do, and so much of the time that spend doing it, are internet-dependent. So in a relative sense, being offline is more crippling in 2017 than it was in 1997. > That definitely happens, but it's probably a tiny portion of modern device usage. 2/3 of my games are through Steam, and offline play has some complicated restrictions that I've never been bothered to remember. So much software documentation is only available online (especially considering corpora of example code, like StackOverflow). Acquiring new software is often only possible through the Internet. These are things that would've been handled by a visit to the store, or by reading the included documentation. The culture around those things has passed those methods by, for the most part.