ClassicConnect

[claraberry]

I don't know if it's something with how I hyperfixate on things, but I have a tendency to want to try to use an old(er) computer as my main computer every now and then.

It seems to be a fun thing to do somethings; you get a clean slate and a different view on how computing was (and still sort of is, if you take away all of the convenient systems in place to make less work for us but in return expect *more* from the machine)

But alas, every time after a few hours I just can't take the limitations and I swap back to my main computer.

Though it is still fun to see how much work goes into the most "baseline" features one would expect from a modern PC and yet, YET, people take them for granted. Like your web browser is not on the level of trying to code an OS yourself but instead of syscalls and API functions that apps rely on, or edge cases of some HTML function/property or JS engine madness. Instead, it's "the browser" or just "Windows" or the "taskbar".
Even when there's so much code in there, recently changed or not.
It was at some point someone's job.

The mere fact that we have bloat should've been a sign that we have too much performance on our hands that most people could actually ever use efficiently for basic tasks. Sure. In this current day and state it is very different...

but.. the mere fact the norm for cookie cutter teams still leans towards software churn and quick release cycles instead of structured but modestly slower release cycles to optimize native code for stuff that never needed 10 layers of abstraction..

Is kind of bullshit. The system didn't make you lazy. You chose to become lazy because the system didn't complain like before. Didn't slow down as much. Didn't start swapping memory to disk because now suddenly the average PC can have more RAM than disk space of machines decades ago.



Anywho, rant over lol
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All operating systems suck equally, it is up to you to decide which you get along with the most

[europa]

I agree with all of this. I suppose, to expand on what you're saying, there is a view that unused system resources are wasted system resources and, while I do agree with that to some extent, that in particular is what has made the collective "us" lazy - as you say, computers now are able to do much more before they start to take any manner of performance hit, either from beginning to swap to disk, or needing to budget processor time, or what have you.

This, in itself, is great, as it puts compute power previously housed in mainframes and high-end workstations in the hands of the masses. However, this revelation also begs the question - how much have things truly changed in ten or twenty years? And, further, how much has the way in which we perform such tasks changed in that time frame? I would contend that, truthfully, very little. Many people still perform the exact same tasks as they did before and, while the advancements in compute power and the like could be placed in the hands of the end user and utilized to do more things faster and more efficiently, or utilized by the developers to streamline existing workflows and applications, quite truthfully it seems that instead it has been stolen away by developers, who enforce the status quo and feed it to the end user such that they expect nothing more from machines that are, in all reality, marvels of miniaturization.

I suppose a good allegory for all of this is something my mom would tell me when she talked about her work with Arc/INFO - she worked with the application at a time when most, if not all, input was command-line driven. This was good, and it worked, and it was efficient. Since then, the program has switched to a graphical interface that, while not bad per se, is different, and not necessarily in a good way, in the sense that it requires less knowledge from the end user. This may not sound like a problem, except for the fact that when working with a highly specialized program such as Arc, or something CAD-related, the less restrictive, and dare I say arcane, the program is, the more likely it is you can Fuck Shit Up by principle of GIGO. Quite amusingly, she gave an example of how she knew some people who tried to make an INFO database for a conservation project they were working on, but didn't understand even the basics of relational databases, and messed up their entire data set.

This is all to say that I agree wholeheartedly with what you say, and that I wish it were more feasible to daily drive older machines because, on the principle of POSIWID, computers have truly not changed in any measurable way for quite some time, and it's absurd that we are using much more powerful computers to do the same exact things as we always have done.
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Your System ate a SPARC! Gah!

[nick99nack]

Agreed with all of the above. I've used this same example many times in the past, but take spreadsheets for instance. The basics of what people do with spreadsheets has not changed at all in 40+ years at this point, but if you compare Excel 97 to Excel 365 using period correct hardware for both, you'll find that the latest 365 version uses far more resources and isn't any faster or really more useful than the version from almost 30 years ago. It takes 10 times the amount of computing resources to perform the same tasks in the same amount of time. Most people don't even use the newer features offered by the latest versions of Office.

Also, I think there does come a point where things are *too easy* for users. I fully believe that people who use computers should have at least a basic understanding of how they work. What I see a lot of now, especially in schools, is younger kids are as bad or worse with computers than my 91 year old grandmother. They don't even have an understanding of how disks and folders work, because they're used to Chromebooks which just save everything to Google Drive. Even my grandmother understands the concepts of files and folders. This makes it very difficult sometimes for me to help people.

Of course there are always exceptions to my experiences, so if you are a member of a younger generation and know how computers work, this doesn't apply to you. (You probably wouldn't be on this forum if you didn't at least have a basic understanding of computers)
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If you like browsing without an ad blocker, you might also like getting rid of your virus scanner, and running around with your pants down. --SomeGuy, 2016

[europa]

[cadrega]

[xX_D4rkW1ng_Xx]

[europa]

Wow, you managed to add nothing of value to the conversation while also poorly restating previous talking points and bringing in unnecessary tribalism for no reason at all. Good job!
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Your System ate a SPARC! Gah!

[xX_D4rkW1ng_Xx]

[nick99nack]

What does the iPhone have to do with anything? iPhones aren't the cause. Computer literacy just isn't being taught. Most people do not know how computers work unless they were taught how they work. There are comparatively very few computer nerds who try to figure them out just because they want to. Schools used to teach it, and many people learned how they work for work purposes. Now we just assume everyone knows how they work, when in reality nobody does.
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If you like browsing without an ad blocker, you might also like getting rid of your virus scanner, and running around with your pants down. --SomeGuy, 2016

[europa]