8 ms·

On the other hand, I don't know about other people, but I tire of the constant change of things that don't need to be changed. We in society have a large number

On the other hand, I don't know about other people, but I tire of the constant change of things that don't need to be changed. We in society have a large number of issues we need to confront, some that are vital to continued survival of our species. Instead of that, we still find our tools degrading by means that people like Apple claim are not planned obsolescence or software bloat for every update of Android that a once working phone moves to a crawl, etc, etc. There is entropy, then there are social actors whose material interest clash with a life of sustainability adding to the drama we already must face in society.

paulddraper 8y ago
On the other other hand, I like smartphones, I like GPS navigation, I like booking a hotel online, I like playing multiplayer games whenever, I like reading what celebrities are saying.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sbov 8y ago
  And all of those things you like were available, or could have existed, on phones 10 years ago. Except perhaps multiplayer games, depending upon how pretty you require your games to be.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    Go on eBay and buy a Nokia E7 or a Blackberry 9700. It won't cost you much and it'll prove highly educational. Phones from 10 years ago were just terrible. Irredeemably, unremittingly terrible. If you believe otherwise, it's just the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia; five minutes with a working device will change your mind.
    - snazz 8y ago
      We’re coming up very soon on the release of the iPhone 3GS, which will be almost exactly 10 years. It was slower, but I don’t think that the 3GS was “unremittingly terrible”.
      - jdietrich 8y ago
        The iPhone 3G is pretty much the archetype for all modern smartphones, but it's still not a pleasant experience by modern standards. Contra the "firmware bloat is deliberately making old devices useless" argument, a 3GS on the original firmware is miserably sluggish and laggy. With modern eyes, you become painfully aware of how Apple used animated UI transitions to disguise a fundamentally very slow device. The original iOS 3.0 firmware is also strikingly primitive - at launch, the exciting new feature was copy and paste. 3G connectivity is woefully, miserably slow when you're used to 4G. A 480x320 LCD is visibly pixelated, even when it's only 3.5". It feels like peering through a broken telescope. There's no front-facing camera, the main camera is terrible, the battery life is atrocious even with a new battery, the GPS receiver takes an eternity to get a location fix. Try one out for ten minutes, try out the cheapest of contemporary Chinese smartphones and I guarantee that you'd prefer to keep the no-name Android phone.
        icedchai 8y ago
        Yes, this is all true... but at the time, it was still amazing! The comparison was not an Android phone, but a flip phone that could barely connect to the web... It was like night and day.
        perl4ever 8y ago
        I remember years ago running the original MacPaint, ultra-optimized for the 8MHz 68000, on a Macintosh SE/30, and thinking "this is why the 68030 was considered a mainframe on a chip when it came out" even though at the time the 68030 was generally considered old and slow. It all depends on exactly what software you're running on what hardware.
      - sosborn 8y ago
        It was a great phone when it came out. Using it now would be an exercise in frustration.
m463 8y ago
I liked the opening of "The Gods Must Be Crazy", in particular when they say "But he didn't know when to stop." Here's the part of the script comparing the simple lives of the native bushmen of the Kalahari desert to "civilized man": These Bushmen have never seen a stone or a rock in their lives. The hardest things they know are wood and bone. They live in a gentle world, where nothing is as hard as rock, steel or concrete. Only miles to the south, there's a vast city. And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier... ...the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn... ...how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings... ...now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt... ...every hour of the day to his self-created environment.
- projektir 8y ago
  This largely relies on the idea that pre-civilized life was preferable. And, for some groups, it was. All the women enjoying close to 0 sexual freedom and dying in child birth might disagree, though.
  - JulianMorrison 8y ago
    Patriarchy is a farming-age invention.
    - projektir 8y ago
      I am pretty sure menstruation and child birth are not farming age inventions.
      - JulianMorrison 8y ago
        You'd be surprised. Longer breastfeeding suppresses ovulation and menstruation, so fertility is relatively rare. Childbirth works better squatting. Humans evolved to be hunter gatherers, most of our history is pre-settled-agriculture, we do fit that lifestyle better. And patriarchy was never contingent on those things anyhow. It's just a cultural choice that got stuck because it was woven into the form of citified civilization.
lisper 8y ago
Oh so very much this. I have an HP2420dn laser printer. I have had it so long I can't even remember when I bought it, but it has probably been around 20 years. Every 10 years or so it needs maintenance to replace the wear parts. Nowadays I can't find anyone who will do this work because new printers are so ridiculously cheap that the maintenance market has collapsed. So my perfectly serviceable printer is probably going to end up in the landfill. Sometimes I despair at the state of "civilization".
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Pre-Carly Laserjets don't die. You should gift it in your will.
iheartpotatoes 8y ago
You are confusing so many things in your comment, that it is hard to decide where to start. I'll pick one. > planned obsolescence It amazes me that people keep using this term -- which was associated with washing machines in the 1940's -- to rant about buggy software and engineering improvements. Stop perpetuating the myth. There is zero truth to it. (And before you say it: Slowing down older phones to account for battery decay and balance battery life is intentional and it PROLONGS the device ... exactly the opposite of planned obsolecense). Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. I use an Ipod Mini from 2004 when I work out at the gym. It is 15 years old and works FINE. My iPhone 7 crashes weekly. Prior to that I used an iPhone 4 for six years until I kicked it down a storm drain. (Long story.) > software bloat OK. Two. This is due to technoculture determining how technology can be used. New features are added before old features are optimized, and software bloats and breaks. This is a result of pushing the boundaries of tech. Some features will survive the evolution, some will not. But it is not intentional, it is a side effect of insanely rapid development and productization due to customer demand. No one has a gun to your head making you buy they latest tech. As long as people demand the latest and greatest, the industry will rush to provide. This is a consequence of accelerated innovation.
- inflatableDodo 8y ago
  >Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. Running on an upgraded late 2008 MacBook and running Mojave, but only thanks to people keeping it compatable as a hobby. According to Apple, this setup is obsolete and incompatable with Mojave.
  - dymk 8y ago
    How long do you think is a reasonable duration for Apple to promise to keep an operating system backported to old hardware?
    - inflatableDodo 8y ago
      I don't think there is a strict time cutoff, depends entirely on the hardware. In this case, they bothered to make this thing with decent build quality and for that I thank them. It is even easily upgradable and the battery is accessable. However, if I want dev tools to work on it, Apple requires me to use their recent OS, which they claim will not run on this hardware. Now if they had a good point economically and it was a massive ballache requiring a lot of resources, then fair enough. But the patching utility appears to be the work of one person in their spare time, which in the grand scheme of things, especially since Apple is hardly strapped for cash and resources, does look like Apple have decided to economically obsolete this machine for reasons that have very little to do with it being technically obsolete.
Pulcinella 8y ago
As a teacher, I additionally see this from an edtech perspective. The yearly cycle of education means that the next time I do something might not be until a year later. This is plenty of time for link rot or for an edtech start-up to go out of business (or even for a surviving company to break things in incompatible ways). This makes me reluctant to rely of technology in the classroom. Of course, a year is a long time in the tech world so these things are reasonable. In education, though, it feels like “I can’t believe I only used this website twice (I.e. two years) and they already went out of business.”
GuiA 8y ago
The core computing needs of the vast majority of people has not changed in the past 10-15 years or so (perhaps even more). Text processing, image/video editing, web browsing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc are all fundamentally the same. Sure, videos are now 4K instead of VGA, and webpages now weigh tens of megabytes instead of kilobytes; but the fundamental, underlying modes of creating and editing are the same. The worst part is that the experience was often better a decade or two ago! This is why you have professionals like GRR Martin using WordStar to do their deep work. Even for programmers, the fact that many are still living in vim/emacs shows how little the core operations of computing have changed. I would love an OS that focuses on offering stable, well integrated, well designed functionality and interfaces, and does not change every 12 months because the marketing/design people were bored. Releases would instead focus on stability, performance, and bug fixes. Adding support for new data formats as they appear would be required, but not in a way that needs to change anything on the end user side of things (your photo editor can now open/export HEIC, great!). I know that most of my family would be happy with something like this, because I hear them complain all the time about how some software update changed where everything was, or even worse - removes functionality they needed. In a weird way, I think the closest thing to this that exists today is Mathematica - reading interviews with Stephen Wolfram about how he uses it is fascinating. I’d want that, but for everyday users, not geeky mathematicians :)
dplgk 8y ago
Along the same lines, I think humanity's downfall will be its never ending appetite for complexity.
dymk 8y ago
If an article about an Atari 800 claiming to be the end-all-be-all for personal computers makes you think "There's something that didn't need changing!", I have absolutely no clue what to tell you

paulddraper 8y ago

On the other other hand, I like smartphones, I like GPS navigation, I like booking a hotel online, I like playing multiplayer games whenever, I like reading what celebrities are saying.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sbov 8y ago
And all of those things you like were available, or could have existed, on phones 10 years ago. Except perhaps multiplayer games, depending upon how pretty you require your games to be.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Go on eBay and buy a Nokia E7 or a Blackberry 9700. It won't cost you much and it'll prove highly educational. Phones from 10 years ago were just terrible. Irredeemably, unremittingly terrible. If you believe otherwise, it's just the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia; five minutes with a working device will change your mind.
  - snazz 8y ago
    We’re coming up very soon on the release of the iPhone 3GS, which will be almost exactly 10 years. It was slower, but I don’t think that the 3GS was “unremittingly terrible”.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      The iPhone 3G is pretty much the archetype for all modern smartphones, but it's still not a pleasant experience by modern standards. Contra the "firmware bloat is deliberately making old devices useless" argument, a 3GS on the original firmware is miserably sluggish and laggy. With modern eyes, you become painfully aware of how Apple used animated UI transitions to disguise a fundamentally very slow device. The original iOS 3.0 firmware is also strikingly primitive - at launch, the exciting new feature was copy and paste. 3G connectivity is woefully, miserably slow when you're used to 4G. A 480x320 LCD is visibly pixelated, even when it's only 3.5". It feels like peering through a broken telescope. There's no front-facing camera, the main camera is terrible, the battery life is atrocious even with a new battery, the GPS receiver takes an eternity to get a location fix. Try one out for ten minutes, try out the cheapest of contemporary Chinese smartphones and I guarantee that you'd prefer to keep the no-name Android phone.
      - icedchai 8y ago
        Yes, this is all true... but at the time, it was still amazing! The comparison was not an Android phone, but a flip phone that could barely connect to the web... It was like night and day.
      - perl4ever 8y ago
        I remember years ago running the original MacPaint, ultra-optimized for the 8MHz 68000, on a Macintosh SE/30, and thinking "this is why the 68030 was considered a mainframe on a chip when it came out" even though at the time the 68030 was generally considered old and slow. It all depends on exactly what software you're running on what hardware.
    - sosborn 8y ago
      It was a great phone when it came out. Using it now would be an exercise in frustration.

m463 8y ago

I liked the opening of "The Gods Must Be Crazy", in particular when they say "But he didn't know when to stop." Here's the part of the script comparing the simple lives of the native bushmen of the Kalahari desert to "civilized man": These Bushmen have never seen a stone or a rock in their lives. The hardest things they know are wood and bone. They live in a gentle world, where nothing is as hard as rock, steel or concrete. Only miles to the south, there's a vast city. And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier... ...the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn... ...how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings... ...now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt... ...every hour of the day to his self-created environment.

projektir 8y ago
This largely relies on the idea that pre-civilized life was preferable. And, for some groups, it was. All the women enjoying close to 0 sexual freedom and dying in child birth might disagree, though.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  Patriarchy is a farming-age invention.
  - projektir 8y ago
    I am pretty sure menstruation and child birth are not farming age inventions.
    - JulianMorrison 8y ago
      You'd be surprised. Longer breastfeeding suppresses ovulation and menstruation, so fertility is relatively rare. Childbirth works better squatting. Humans evolved to be hunter gatherers, most of our history is pre-settled-agriculture, we do fit that lifestyle better. And patriarchy was never contingent on those things anyhow. It's just a cultural choice that got stuck because it was woven into the form of citified civilization.

lisper 8y ago

Oh so very much this. I have an HP2420dn laser printer. I have had it so long I can't even remember when I bought it, but it has probably been around 20 years. Every 10 years or so it needs maintenance to replace the wear parts. Nowadays I can't find anyone who will do this work because new printers are so ridiculously cheap that the maintenance market has collapsed. So my perfectly serviceable printer is probably going to end up in the landfill. Sometimes I despair at the state of "civilization".

kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Pre-Carly Laserjets don't die. You should gift it in your will.

iheartpotatoes 8y ago

You are confusing so many things in your comment, that it is hard to decide where to start. I'll pick one. > planned obsolescence It amazes me that people keep using this term -- which was associated with washing machines in the 1940's -- to rant about buggy software and engineering improvements. Stop perpetuating the myth. There is zero truth to it. (And before you say it: Slowing down older phones to account for battery decay and balance battery life is intentional and it PROLONGS the device ... exactly the opposite of planned obsolecense). Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. I use an Ipod Mini from 2004 when I work out at the gym. It is 15 years old and works FINE. My iPhone 7 crashes weekly. Prior to that I used an iPhone 4 for six years until I kicked it down a storm drain. (Long story.) > software bloat OK. Two. This is due to technoculture determining how technology can be used. New features are added before old features are optimized, and software bloats and breaks. This is a result of pushing the boundaries of tech. Some features will survive the evolution, some will not. But it is not intentional, it is a side effect of insanely rapid development and productization due to customer demand. No one has a gun to your head making you buy they latest tech. As long as people demand the latest and greatest, the industry will rush to provide. This is a consequence of accelerated innovation.

inflatableDodo 8y ago
>Apple does NOT plan to make your devices obsolete. Running on an upgraded late 2008 MacBook and running Mojave, but only thanks to people keeping it compatable as a hobby. According to Apple, this setup is obsolete and incompatable with Mojave.
- dymk 8y ago
  How long do you think is a reasonable duration for Apple to promise to keep an operating system backported to old hardware?
  - inflatableDodo 8y ago
    I don't think there is a strict time cutoff, depends entirely on the hardware. In this case, they bothered to make this thing with decent build quality and for that I thank them. It is even easily upgradable and the battery is accessable. However, if I want dev tools to work on it, Apple requires me to use their recent OS, which they claim will not run on this hardware. Now if they had a good point economically and it was a massive ballache requiring a lot of resources, then fair enough. But the patching utility appears to be the work of one person in their spare time, which in the grand scheme of things, especially since Apple is hardly strapped for cash and resources, does look like Apple have decided to economically obsolete this machine for reasons that have very little to do with it being technically obsolete.

Pulcinella 8y ago

As a teacher, I additionally see this from an edtech perspective. The yearly cycle of education means that the next time I do something might not be until a year later. This is plenty of time for link rot or for an edtech start-up to go out of business (or even for a surviving company to break things in incompatible ways). This makes me reluctant to rely of technology in the classroom. Of course, a year is a long time in the tech world so these things are reasonable. In education, though, it feels like “I can’t believe I only used this website twice (I.e. two years) and they already went out of business.”

GuiA 8y ago

The core computing needs of the vast majority of people has not changed in the past 10-15 years or so (perhaps even more). Text processing, image/video editing, web browsing, spreadsheets, presentations, etc are all fundamentally the same. Sure, videos are now 4K instead of VGA, and webpages now weigh tens of megabytes instead of kilobytes; but the fundamental, underlying modes of creating and editing are the same. The worst part is that the experience was often better a decade or two ago! This is why you have professionals like GRR Martin using WordStar to do their deep work. Even for programmers, the fact that many are still living in vim/emacs shows how little the core operations of computing have changed. I would love an OS that focuses on offering stable, well integrated, well designed functionality and interfaces, and does not change every 12 months because the marketing/design people were bored. Releases would instead focus on stability, performance, and bug fixes. Adding support for new data formats as they appear would be required, but not in a way that needs to change anything on the end user side of things (your photo editor can now open/export HEIC, great!). I know that most of my family would be happy with something like this, because I hear them complain all the time about how some software update changed where everything was, or even worse - removes functionality they needed. In a weird way, I think the closest thing to this that exists today is Mathematica - reading interviews with Stephen Wolfram about how he uses it is fascinating. I’d want that, but for everyday users, not geeky mathematicians :)

dplgk 8y ago

Along the same lines, I think humanity's downfall will be its never ending appetite for complexity.

dymk 8y ago

If an article about an Atari 800 claiming to be the end-all-be-all for personal computers makes you think "There's something that didn't need changing!", I have absolutely no clue what to tell you