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How so? The article is based on an assertion that directly counteracts my memories. I remember using computerized library card catalogs in the 80s. I remembe

How so? The article is based on an assertion that directly counteracts my memories. I remember using computerized library card catalogs in the 80s. I remember using AltaVista in the 90s. I remember using the Up/Down/Left/Right navigation (and full-screen re-renders) in Mapquest pre-google maps. I remember using the cgi-bin version of imdb.com. I can see how promptly things work now. I can see the additional benefits I get now. If the author makes an assertion that contradicts my experiences, they better provide SOME evidence, or be dismissed (which is presumably NOT their intent).

gridlockd 7y ago
> How so? The article is based on an assertion that directly counteracts my memories. Human experience is subjective and one account is not invalidated by another. > If the author makes an assertion that contradicts my experiences, they better provide SOME evidence, or be dismissed (which is presumably NOT their intent). This is inconsequential.
- ergothus 7y ago
  > This is inconsequential. Well....yeah, sure. If the author of the piece has no interest in actually supporting their point, and if readers on HN (the audience of my comment) have no interest in finding out that the article is just an opinion restating the title at length, then yeah, it's all inconsequential.
drbawb 7y ago
>I remember using the Up/Down/Left/Right navigation (and full-screen re-renders) in Mapquest pre-google maps. Web apps sucked then, and they still suck today. The only difference between then and now is the decades of development effort that has been wasted trying to make JavaScript fast enough to mimic old applications. I used MS Streets & Trips[1] in the same era, and it was awesome. It worked offline (something Google maps only got recently, and it sucks pretty bad at it), the search for POIs along a route was wicked fast, and it supports the author's purported use-case of mapping out a whole trip. This shit ran blisteringly fast on a Windows 2000 laptop w/ no internet connection & 256MB of RAM. Now I'm expected to have an always on connection & I need gigabytes of RAM just to accomplish the same thing inside a web browser. -- I've missed many a turn because "navigation apps" assume LTE coverage is perfect; which is just not the case for many parts of the midwest. So I'm resigned to using a dedicated GPS unit. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YO_KGdsUm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YO_KGdsUm4 --- On the topic of library catalogs: You'll click through results in these catalog apps and there's sometimes seconds of delay because they're doing completely unnecessary shit like querying inventory at peering libraries. It wastes cycles and network round trips trying to answer a question I didn't even ask. (Inventory levels of a given title.) -- Browsing a digital card catalog is literally the perfectly indexed dataset computers dream about, and somehow people have gone and managed to make that excruciatingly slow. It's gotten so bad I usually just go talk to the librarian if they're not busy, since their interface to the library's inventory typically looks more like the one's referenced in the article.

gridlockd 7y ago

> How so? The article is based on an assertion that directly counteracts my memories. Human experience is subjective and one account is not invalidated by another. > If the author makes an assertion that contradicts my experiences, they better provide SOME evidence, or be dismissed (which is presumably NOT their intent). This is inconsequential.

ergothus 7y ago
> This is inconsequential. Well....yeah, sure. If the author of the piece has no interest in actually supporting their point, and if readers on HN (the audience of my comment) have no interest in finding out that the article is just an opinion restating the title at length, then yeah, it's all inconsequential.

drbawb 7y ago

>I remember using the Up/Down/Left/Right navigation (and full-screen re-renders) in Mapquest pre-google maps. Web apps sucked then, and they still suck today. The only difference between then and now is the decades of development effort that has been wasted trying to make JavaScript fast enough to mimic old applications. I used MS Streets & Trips[1] in the same era, and it was awesome. It worked offline (something Google maps only got recently, and it sucks pretty bad at it), the search for POIs along a route was wicked fast, and it supports the author's purported use-case of mapping out a whole trip. This shit ran blisteringly fast on a Windows 2000 laptop w/ no internet connection & 256MB of RAM. Now I'm expected to have an always on connection & I need gigabytes of RAM just to accomplish the same thing inside a web browser. -- I've missed many a turn because "navigation apps" assume LTE coverage is perfect; which is just not the case for many parts of the midwest. So I'm resigned to using a dedicated GPS unit. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YO_KGdsUm4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YO_KGdsUm4 --- On the topic of library catalogs: You'll click through results in these catalog apps and there's sometimes seconds of delay because they're doing completely unnecessary shit like querying inventory at peering libraries. It wastes cycles and network round trips trying to answer a question I didn't even ask. (Inventory levels of a given title.) -- Browsing a digital card catalog is literally the perfectly indexed dataset computers dream about, and somehow people have gone and managed to make that excruciatingly slow. It's gotten so bad I usually just go talk to the librarian if they're not busy, since their interface to the library's inventory typically looks more like the one's referenced in the article.