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Modern technology sucks. Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. That hypertext document requires more RAM

Modern technology sucks. Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. That hypertext document requires more RAM to run than I used to have total in hard drive space (for operating systems that also had hypertext document viewers, that rendered the same visual result as today). All new protocols have to run over port 443; I doubt there's been a new protocol port registered with IANA in 5 years. Smart devices have no keyboards and rely on swiping on glass. Everything runs off an internet connection so you can't really leave your house or a major city and keep things working, to say nothing of vendor service outages. Android could run regular old Linux and apps and give you a desktop, but it doesn't, because we are not holy enough to receive a useful user interface. Samsung had DeX in their phones like 10 years ago but apparently that's done for, and good luck finding any modern devices that support the standards needed to do things like output video, audio, ethernet, etc via USB-C. Bluetooth is still total garbage. We still have no audible user interfaces other than shitty cloud-vendor-specific "assistants" (even though I made my own audible user interface 15 years ago for a Car PC with nothing but open source tools). We still pay the same amount for a computer today that I paid for one 20 years ago (although adjusted for inflation I guess those older ones were more expensive). Computers today do exactly the same thing they did 20 years ago: save a document or image or video over a network, display it, print it. The only difference is they now do it in a much slower, more wasteful way. And programming is still a thing. To make a new program, a bunch of humans have to sit around typing out lines of text into a screen, and going through a laborious process to compile and test it all, and it's still full of bugs. We could have much better technology. The proof is right there in the article, from 24 years ago. We don't have anything better because we just suck at making technology. We have resigned ourselves to wasting time and making crap.

sophacles 3y ago
I have a 20 year old laptop. Literally, I bought it for $1700 in 2003. It doesn't run any software better than the $20 raspberri pi I also have. It certainly doesn't run software better than the $1200 desktop I built recently - that one can play games on one monitor while web browsing on another (sometimes I'll kick of a compile on that machine between matches and neither seems to be hurt too bad by both things running, if I tried that on the old laptop I'd probably have to call the fire department). Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor) - it just shows me windows and pops up a pretty menu to choose apps when I press a button. It has 32GB of ram, and even when running games and lots of browser windows and tabs I rarely use more than 16GB of them -- including the fs caches. When the old laptop was current, I would use it for dev, and send compiles off to a distcc cluster. Using that cluster I could get a linux kernel built in a couple hours from scratch - I can do the same on my single desktop machine today, but in way less time (and there's a lot more code). Similarly, I would rip CDs and queue up the wav for each track so the cluster could pick them up and encode them as flacc and mp3. I'd rip a stack of CDs until my drive was mostly full, and go to bed. In the morning the encoding was almost finished. Last time I had a device that could read CDs a few years ago, the bottleneck was reading the CD, and a whole stack of CDs would finish in less time than just ripping would 20 years ago. I have "slow" internet at home, so saving them to some internet drive might make the whole process take the same amount of time as the ripping process in the past. I'm sorry you're disappointed we don't have flying cars yet, but it's a bit absurdist to claim tech has gotten strictly worse and that the old days were better - because the tech today is literally orders of magnitude better than it was 20 years ago.
- memefrog 3y ago
  >Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor) A desktop full of icons was great. It was actually very convenient to have your most-used programs and most-accessed directories easily accessible in a grid on your desktop. Menus are worse. They're linear. To access something from a menu you need to move your mouse to the corner of your screen, click, wait for the menu to load (this often takes literally 20s on Windows for some reason), then move your mouse to click on a quite-small area of the screen in the menu. Or you could search in the menu, but for some reason that escapes me this also takes multiple seconds to process on Windows and even when it has processed half the time its search just doesn't find what I'm looking for, and wants to open my search query in a web browser instead. On a desktop, you have things arrayed out on a grid. If your mouse is in the middle of the screen, then it's in a sense O(sqrt(n)) time to get to something on a grid. Each icon can be larger (easier to click on) because they're not constrained to all be in a linear menu. And because you can choose the order they appear in, it's easy muscle memory to just click the same icon in the same spot every time. Desktops were great. I really hate this current trend of denigrating "files" and "folders" and "desktops" because their names are skeuomorphic. I blame Apple for this. They made such a big thing about removing the skeuomorphism from their notes app and replacing everything with bland samey flat design. People seem to have latched onto that and decided that anything remotely skeuomorphic must automatically be bad. Nobody is actually thinking about the top of their desk when they see a computer desktop. Maybe they did in the 1990s but not today. It's just a convenient grid of shortcuts to applications, files, and folders.
  - sophacles 3y ago
    Why would i use a mouse to open apps and navigate a menu? I press a button and get a new terminal. I press a different button and launch a chrome window. Another one brings up a curated menu of common apps navigable by keyboard (either iterate through or search by typing the name). It all happens in under a second (except launching chrome, but that's mostly chrome not my system). Im not denigrating files and folders. Im not upset that desktop is the name, its fitting for the metaphor they were going for, its just a silly use of my screen - most of the time the "desktop" should be under actually useful windows that are doing actual useful work. Hell if i wanted a grid of clickable things I'd install something like EWW and have a button that poped up that grid instead - the problem with the desktop (besides being a bad metaphor) is that it's functionality should be overlay not underlay.
jodrellblank 3y ago
[flagged]
- dang 3y ago
  Please make your substantive points without name-calling. Your comment would be fine without that first bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
RichardCA 3y ago
> Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. During the Dot-Com / Web 1.0 era, Javascript was an afterthought, and the naming after Java was a careless mistake. In the 2000's decade, Google in its wisdom decided to make Javascript in the browser a first-priority effort, and they threw money at the best optimizing compiler engineers they could get their hands on. This settled a long-running debate in the industry over how client/server computing would work, that is, do you keep the UI logic on the server or push it to the client (this goes all the way back to the async vs. "intelligent" terminal debate in the 80's). The Web 2.0 / Cloud Computing era would not be what it is, except for Google deciding to make Chrome a first-class client platform, not just a trivial hypertext document viewer. The first thing people noticed was Google Maps, but that was just the tip of a much deeper iceberg. Most of what you are complaining about came later. Web 2.0 begat social media, which turned into a new form of television (i.e., scrolling your IG feed to look at mindless T&A). For a while I was optimistic about the gaming explosion fueling the development of GPU technology, but then that turned into Crypto and so-called "Web 3.0" so now we're back to cynical again. But I do like that the average affordable laptop these days will still have a strong onboard GPU, even if I only use it to play retro 80's video games using emulation. That still makes me happy.

sophacles 3y ago

I have a 20 year old laptop. Literally, I bought it for $1700 in 2003. It doesn't run any software better than the $20 raspberri pi I also have. It certainly doesn't run software better than the $1200 desktop I built recently - that one can play games on one monitor while web browsing on another (sometimes I'll kick of a compile on that machine between matches and neither seems to be hurt too bad by both things running, if I tried that on the old laptop I'd probably have to call the fire department). Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor) - it just shows me windows and pops up a pretty menu to choose apps when I press a button. It has 32GB of ram, and even when running games and lots of browser windows and tabs I rarely use more than 16GB of them -- including the fs caches. When the old laptop was current, I would use it for dev, and send compiles off to a distcc cluster. Using that cluster I could get a linux kernel built in a couple hours from scratch - I can do the same on my single desktop machine today, but in way less time (and there's a lot more code). Similarly, I would rip CDs and queue up the wav for each track so the cluster could pick them up and encode them as flacc and mp3. I'd rip a stack of CDs until my drive was mostly full, and go to bed. In the morning the encoding was almost finished. Last time I had a device that could read CDs a few years ago, the bottleneck was reading the CD, and a whole stack of CDs would finish in less time than just ripping would 20 years ago. I have "slow" internet at home, so saving them to some internet drive might make the whole process take the same amount of time as the ripping process in the past. I'm sorry you're disappointed we don't have flying cars yet, but it's a bit absurdist to claim tech has gotten strictly worse and that the old days were better - because the tech today is literally orders of magnitude better than it was 20 years ago.

memefrog 3y ago
>Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor) A desktop full of icons was great. It was actually very convenient to have your most-used programs and most-accessed directories easily accessible in a grid on your desktop. Menus are worse. They're linear. To access something from a menu you need to move your mouse to the corner of your screen, click, wait for the menu to load (this often takes literally 20s on Windows for some reason), then move your mouse to click on a quite-small area of the screen in the menu. Or you could search in the menu, but for some reason that escapes me this also takes multiple seconds to process on Windows and even when it has processed half the time its search just doesn't find what I'm looking for, and wants to open my search query in a web browser instead. On a desktop, you have things arrayed out on a grid. If your mouse is in the middle of the screen, then it's in a sense O(sqrt(n)) time to get to something on a grid. Each icon can be larger (easier to click on) because they're not constrained to all be in a linear menu. And because you can choose the order they appear in, it's easy muscle memory to just click the same icon in the same spot every time. Desktops were great. I really hate this current trend of denigrating "files" and "folders" and "desktops" because their names are skeuomorphic. I blame Apple for this. They made such a big thing about removing the skeuomorphism from their notes app and replacing everything with bland samey flat design. People seem to have latched onto that and decided that anything remotely skeuomorphic must automatically be bad. Nobody is actually thinking about the top of their desk when they see a computer desktop. Maybe they did in the 1990s but not today. It's just a convenient grid of shortcuts to applications, files, and folders.
- sophacles 3y ago
  Why would i use a mouse to open apps and navigate a menu? I press a button and get a new terminal. I press a different button and launch a chrome window. Another one brings up a curated menu of common apps navigable by keyboard (either iterate through or search by typing the name). It all happens in under a second (except launching chrome, but that's mostly chrome not my system). Im not denigrating files and folders. Im not upset that desktop is the name, its fitting for the metaphor they were going for, its just a silly use of my screen - most of the time the "desktop" should be under actually useful windows that are doing actual useful work. Hell if i wanted a grid of clickable things I'd install something like EWW and have a button that poped up that grid instead - the problem with the desktop (besides being a bad metaphor) is that it's functionality should be overlay not underlay.

jodrellblank 3y ago

[flagged]

dang 3y ago
Please make your substantive points without name-calling. Your comment would be fine without that first bit. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

RichardCA 3y ago

> Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. During the Dot-Com / Web 1.0 era, Javascript was an afterthought, and the naming after Java was a careless mistake. In the 2000's decade, Google in its wisdom decided to make Javascript in the browser a first-priority effort, and they threw money at the best optimizing compiler engineers they could get their hands on. This settled a long-running debate in the industry over how client/server computing would work, that is, do you keep the UI logic on the server or push it to the client (this goes all the way back to the async vs. "intelligent" terminal debate in the 80's). The Web 2.0 / Cloud Computing era would not be what it is, except for Google deciding to make Chrome a first-class client platform, not just a trivial hypertext document viewer. The first thing people noticed was Google Maps, but that was just the tip of a much deeper iceberg. Most of what you are complaining about came later. Web 2.0 begat social media, which turned into a new form of television (i.e., scrolling your IG feed to look at mindless T&A). For a while I was optimistic about the gaming explosion fueling the development of GPU technology, but then that turned into Crypto and so-called "Web 3.0" so now we're back to cynical again. But I do like that the average affordable laptop these days will still have a strong onboard GPU, even if I only use it to play retro 80's video games using emulation. That still makes me happy.