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The disappointingly ongoing success of WvDial (2009)
- asgerhb 3y agoThere is also the question of inertia. People are used to certain software, and recommend this to others. In many cases I'd rather have a CLI that I know how to use, than a finnicky GUI that I don't.
- ajsnigrutin 3y agoYep, also it works, and if it works, why change it? Also the documentation exists.. find a 10 year old manual how to connect? Still works? Great! A rarity with modern software (and programming languages). Also, since it's not really "exposed", lack of maintenance doesn't matter a long as it just works.
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoEspecially when the GUI is just a hastily thrown together wrapper for some other command line tool that’s worse than the original.
- _ache_ 3y agoIn 30 years, the GUI could have been deprecated about 7 times.
- Pannoniae 3y agoThere's an astonishing amount of things in the world which are not too hard to do, would be really useful and/or popular, yet no one really thought of making them. This also applies to software, BTW.
- sam_lowry_ 3y agoCare to elaborate? Because nowadays anything can be a startup idea.
- Pannoniae 3y agoFor example, a universal internet annotator/commenter tool. Dissenter has tried but it quickly got shut down. The point would be that you could comment on and discuss any site without the site operators' interference.
- iSnow 3y agoSo, Reddit as a stand-alone app?
- Pannoniae 3y agoBasically, and it would work on a URL basis.
- xingped 3y agoGoogle tried that too with SideWiki, but it only lasted 2yrs I think. There must be somethin to it that makes it not as easy as you think.
- Pannoniae 3y agoThat was just Google being Google, and its history of abandoning products. I wouldn't give it too much meaning, tbh.
- ilyt 3y agoModeration. It's always moderation. "Anyone can write there" also means "anyone can write bollocks there". From ye-olde name-calling and flaming to SEO/ad spam.
- DropInIn 3y agoA little considered aspect of current "moderation" is that the mere need to create an account limits the total content volume And percentage of posted content which one would need to moderate. It's almost like a variant of security through obscurity which actually has a meaningful impact.
- munchler 3y agoRelevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/ https://xkcd.com/2347/
- imchillyb 3y agoThat one always gives me existential dread.
- anthk 3y agoThere was wvdialconf I can recall it right. On using old software because of inertia or better features: - MPlayer/MPV. Simple keys, click on the file and it just plays it. That's it. - Pidgin with plugins. - Mutt+lynx (for HTML email) with mbsync and msmtp. Batched email for important stuff when you must preserve your data against inferior solutions such as Discord. - Lynx on gopher/http heavy sites calling external video and audio viewers. Good when bw is scarce, and gopher://gopherddit.com, gopher://hngopher.com and gopher://magical.fish have tons of services to use. - wpa_passphrase+wpa_supplicant daemon+wpa_gui if you are in love with mice. - find/xargs/rsync/moreutils/vidir/rclone: editing zillions of filenames in place with an editor and vidir, sync them, rename them... hell in Explorer, a piece of cake under Unix where you can use your favourite editor in a folder tree mounted with rclone and then batch-replace your whole remote directory subtree as if it was a text file. Old concept, science fiction for today's youngsters: rclone mount yourcloudremoteshare: ./here EDITOR=gedit vidir ./here/foo/bar/ And that's the simplest method. With find you don't even need to spawn an editor, with a command after exec you can run for instance find ./here -type f -iname "*.pdf" -exec evince {} \; to open the evince PDF viewer on all the PDF filenames you find in your remote.
- zokier 3y agompv isn't particularly old or crufty, and especially this thing doesn't really apply to it > And perhaps most oddly of all, none of the problems WvDial originally set out to solve are problems today. mpv still addresses the same problems and needs that sparked it's inception
- tylerag 3y ago> WvDial is a modem dialer and nobody uses modems anymore. I was using dial up until probably 2007 or 2008, and I was certainly using wvdial with it. The reason I was using wvdial is because it was the only option that actually worked. I think I tried to get Gnome's GUI to work, but was never able to. I think I still have the non-winmodem PCI card too, spent a lot of money (for a teenager) on it.
- supriyo-biswas 3y agoI remember my excitement for a Ubuntu Shipit CD quickly dissipating once I realized I couldn't use a USB-A cellular modem dongle, which was the only way for me to get internet connectivity at the time. This was even after having compiled a custom driver, and so on and so forth. As a Linux newbie, this experience gave me an immense sense of revulsion towards the Linux desktop. However, one fine afternoon, I tried to boot up the Ubuntu partition, and try running the wvdial command instead of using Gnome PPP. Imagine my surprise when it just worked...
- NotYourLawyer 3y agoI remember my first paycheck from my first real job, I went out and bought a new modem. Don’t remember exactly what, but it was a big upgrade from the 2400 baud that came with my computer
- mikrotikker 3y agoYea I've still got my hardware modem too. External, connects via serial. I don't even have copper phone line service.
- anthk 3y agoNowadays, well, on BT, bluez solved all of these problems, and blueman works once at for all. But BT it's insecure as hell, OpenBSD and distros like Hyperbola GNU/Linux (which will be obsd based soon) ditched BT because of these reasons.
- guerrilla 3y ago> We originally created wvdial back in the late 1990's because setting up pppd 'chat' scripts was too annoying. Yes, wvdial saved my ass back then. I remember pppd being incredibly confusing (not sure if it was, but I was only a teenager at the time.) Weird flashback to hear about this; I would have forgotten about it completely otherwise and yes, that is a sad state of things...
- _ache_ 3y agoI use it every week, sometimes every day. Like, just start the dam thing and it works.
- makomk 3y agoHuh. I'm pretty sure that was largely obsoleted a while back (like, over a decade probably, not too long after this was written) by NetworkManager and ModemManager adding better handling for all the weird quirks that did actually matter with mobile broadband. It might still be possible to use it with the right manual configuration and additional software, but it'd mean dealing with badly documented quirks that are just handled for you by ModemManager.
- asveikau 3y agoLoved wvdial in the late 90s and early 2000s. Circa 2009-2010 I was surprised to see instructions to use it for tethering on the Nokia N900. I guess the cellular data was still using the old AT command set.
- imchillyb 3y agoI love that blog, and I wish he'd post more often.