Slashdot Mirror
Computer De-Evolution: Awesome Features We've Lost
jfruhlinger writes "If you listened to tech marketing departments, you'd believe that advances in computers have been a nonstop march upwards. But is that really true? What about all the great features early hackers had in the '70s and '80s that are now hard to find or lost forever, like clicky keyboards and customizable screen height? This article looks at much beloved features that lost the evolutionary war."
Devolution doesn't have a meaning, because evolution doesn't mean changes for the better.
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
The reset switch/button!
A real, mechanical 'off' switch, on the front of the machine, gets an honorable mention.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Not only are they still working fine, typing this on a Model M, but Unicomp still makes them. You can buy a brand new one if you want right now.
You miss Turbo Pascal? Commodore 64's flat, unprotected memory model? Clicky keyboards with the CTRL key where tab is now, because it's somehow impossible to hit one handed CTRL keystroke combinations with it in the lower left corner?
Was this written by Andy Rooney's sysadmin?
The original Amiga had a keyboard garage: the machine itself was raise a little off the desk, just enough for the keyboard to slide underneath it.
I loved every single thing about that computer. The Amiga 1200 was fine too. The Amiga 500 was great, but Commodore made their first big design snafu there - they put the Zorro expansion slot on the wrong side of the computer and upside down, so you couldn't use Amiga 1000 peripherals without also flipping them upside down.
(Still not as bad as the "PCMCIA" slot on the A600.)
Other things I miss: TUIs like Project Oberon and Symbolics Lisp. Hell, Lisp in general is now such a niche it's sad. "Real" Unix - lots of little programs that do one thing and do them well. cat -n considered harmful and all that.
Sorry Dimwit - please don't DCMA me bro...
Nullius in verba
Readable websites that don't have inline ads in them, unlike the article linked.
My box has a power switch on the back (on the power supply). Works. Yes, you have to reach an entire 18 to 24 inches back, but it's not that difficult. :) And I'd rather have it there than have it on the front where I'd accidentally turn it off...
Look at the mobile space, being touted (rightly, IMO) as the next great growth space in computing. The fundamental advantage we've had in computing up to this point is actively being attacked with walled gardens.
the greatest work station epiphany i recently had involved turning my 9:16 monitor 90 degrees
great for reading code and long articles
unless the article is stretched out in little snippets over a number of pages, like the article this story links to. i hate that. and apparently its for advertising purposes. how are advertising purposes served by chasing me away from finishing the article?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
On Windows, you can just ignore the maximize button because double clicking any window's title bar maximizes the window or restores it from maximized state. This handily separates the [X] close button from the [_] minimize button (called "iconify" in the article). Mac OS X, on the other hand, puts the yellow minimize button next to the red close button.
Bring back the Turbo button!
"I really miss the 'clicky' IBM Model M keyboards from the mid and late '80"
You can still get these
"which could kill an accidentally triggered program, along with the Unix Control-C and kill -9 for command line Unix. I'm not sure if anything exists that can do that as quickly at the GUI level. "
Right-click & "force quit" using OSX' dock, or CMD-q
"XEDIT had the ability to restrict the file to a part, and have all editing commands, such as 'go to top/search and replace/select to bottom,' only work on that part of the file."
Use Jedit.
"This let me write macros that were globally available."
Services in OSX.
"Almost 30 years ago, there was a "see" program for the IBM PC -- I don't recall whether it was a .com or .exe file -- that allowed users to view, search and subsequently edit the bytes comprising executable images."
It's called a hex editor, there thousands of 'em.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
From TFA:
"What I miss most are keyboards that have some 'omph' to them, and software that makes use of keyboard shortcuts. I really miss the 'clicky' IBM Model M keyboards from the mid and late '80s, for instance. I can type 150+ words per minute and I can move my fingers across a keyboard faster than I can move my hand to a mouse, move the cursor, click, and put my fingers back on the keyboard. I really really really miss customizable keyboard shortcuts."
WHAT???? You have keyboard shortcuts now, windows has the Windows button and the alt key! For both Windows and Mac you have a ton of shortcut apps that give you access to keyboard shortcuts. Apps that take shortened text you type frequently and expands it to a long word. They are all there, they just moved to third party apps. This Eric Loyd is a dipshit if he misses keyboard shortcuts... go buy a $2 app that gives them back to you you idiot!
More:
""The main feature I miss on today's keyboards is having FUNCTION keys (F1, F2, etc) on the left of the main key area, and a CONTROL key in the middle of the left-side column of keys (so it goes from top to bottom: ~/TAB/CTRL/SHIFT/ALT). There are a number of CTRL+F-key and ALT+F-key combinations that can quickly and easily done with one hand in this configuration without looking"
I agree the layout of the keyboard in this instance is good, but if you have fully customizable shortcuts at your command thru any number of apps, design something that makes sense to you. Don't assign your shortcut to Alt-F12 if you need two hands and want one hand. Undo/cut/copy/paste were brilliantly designed, take a lesson from that and design the same keyboard shortcut for yourself.
More:
"There is a programmable keyboard available -- the CVT Avant Stellar,"
Ah fuck me it's a slashvertisement.
More:
"what he misses is the convenience of DOS's CONTROL-C and CONTROL-Q which could kill an accidentally triggered program, along with the Unix Control-C and kill -9 for command line Unix. I'm not sure if anything exists that can do that as quickly at the GUI level."
I can agree with this, a keyboard in general is the fastest input device we have, but this is a clever deception, trying to say that just because a GUI is slower it's not evolving. Not true. Once you know what you are doing, and have to perform a repetitive task, a keyboard is always faster. A GUI, however, is always easier if you don't necessarily know what you are looking for or know what you are doing. Remember images and motions towards and area of the screen is easier for a lot of people, rather than trying to remember to put a -9 after the kill, or remembering what grep, awk, and cron do. If you have to look up a command every few minutes, it's not faster, and if you can remember the action faster to do what you want, for you it's faster. GUIs opened up the world of computing to many more people, and that's a fact, because it was easier to remember and perform the tasks they wanted to perform.
More:
"The CMU Andrew Toolkit had very complex scrollbars that took a while to master,"
Stop right there, everything in this paragraph is invalidated by the fact that thos was "complex" and "took a while to master." A GUI is supposed to make things simpler, because not everyone has time to master complex scroll bars. If it takes me a half hour to figure out scrolling in a GUI, it's not necessarily faster when all I have to do is scan down a page looking for a simple paragraph. Complex is not necessarily evolution, and making something simplified is not necessary a regression. Simplicity could speed everyone up as a whole.
The article then degenerates into a bunch of technobabble about a bunch of features developers use to have, but just about every one of them has a modern equivalent they could get by just finding and downloading third party software, most which is probably free. Sure, notepad sucks, notepad is not meant to be an advanced text editor! How long did it take you to figure that
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
It's nothing more than a bunch of old farts complaining about how the old days were better, when in fact most of that they want is still available or entirely unnecessary. Keyboards for example. I for one prefer new keyboards. I hated the old clicky style, but as others have shown, they are available for those who want them. Complaining about the scroll bar and not being able to click in the window to recenter? That might have been nice... in the days before the mouse wheel.
Look at the mobile space [...] The fundamental advantage we've had in computing up to this point is actively being attacked with walled gardens.
What walled garden? If you have an Android-powered device, and you didn't buy it from the AT&T store, you can turn on "Unknown sources" and install any program you want, just like every other PDA since the PalmPilot.
Not to insult those who like old-school tech, but this article really sounds like it was written by the views of a bunch of dinosaurs. On p3 someone laments the death of xedit, a non-GUI text editor with search/replace, go to top/bottom, and so on. I mean, has he never heard of Vim? I'd be intrigued to hear of any features xedit had that Vim doesn't, or you couldn't write a keybinding for in emacs (not that I delve in such magic). There's also this gem of a quote: "Whenever I read an article online, be it in Adobe Reader, a text editor, or a web browser, I try to get an uninterrupted paragraph on the screen, fail, curse, and move on, knowing that online reading used to be a far less turbulent and far more graceful experience before popular and simple displaced complex and useful." Adobe Reader (along with MS Word and others) supports full-screen mode, allowing an uninterrupted view. And with monitors being so huge now it's not exactly hard to ignore 100 vertical pixels of menu bars. And clacky keyboards have been sidelined for a reason - it's generally much nicer to type on a soft keyboard, and in a crowded office your eardrums will thank you if everyone's using laptop-style keyboards. Of course, if you really prefer the old style, it's not hard to get a hold of one, they're just not as mass-produced now because the demand isn't there. Nothing to lament, really.
The Amiga had a RAM drive that was always the size of whatever was in it and no bigger. If you copied items to the ram drive, the drive size expanded (until you ran out of RAM), when you deleted items, the RAM drive size decreased.
I used to run a BBS and I would initially load all the executables to the RAM disk, with the message boards saving to floppies. As long as I was only warm-booting the machine (i.e., without turning off the power), the RAM disk would stay intact, and I could boot from RAM, which made everything run lighting fast.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
The author of this article should try Vim - I believe you can split the screen all you want. Speaking of editors, I feel nostalgic about Speedscript, the word processor on the C64. But I sure don't miss editing in 40 columns!
I dislike the lack of configurability of some things today, yet for those things that are configurable they're still using an Advanced options paradigm from over a decade ago so things are hard to find (Windows is actually improving in that respect). I love how far Linux has come over the years.
proper on/off switches on PSU's not the stupid rocker switches (or even worse no switch at all)
I can understand not liking a complete lack of a switch, but what are you looking for in a power supply if not a simple rocker switch? What, do you want an oversized knife switch with electricity arcing all around it so you can shout "IT'S ALIVE! ALIVE!!! AAAAH HA HA HA!" whenever you need to flip it? Because... well, okay, I want that, too, come to think of it...
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.
Either Vim or Emacs support hex editing.
This is more a list of reasons not to buy cheap crap and not to use window, rather than features we have lost.
One feature I miss is a true low level format of a HDD. Now just for overwriting sectors, but for allowing the drive to rebuild its sector relocation table.
Older SCSI drives would mark blocks as bad and relocate the data. When they got low level formatted, the bad blocks would remain bad, but the area reserved for bad blocks would be clear (since the remapped blocks would be flagged as bad and not used.) This would allow the drive to continue to be used, as when the remapped block area fills up, the drive can't do anything except report soft/hard errors.
A true low level format also brought peace of mind -- any data on the disk before that was blanked out, and every usable sector has been tested to make sure it was readable/writable.
We sacrificed creativity, and some unknown possibility for the security fit for dumb majority.
On every single device, mobile and PC, actual power buttons are disappearing. My cellphone has a mutant mute/power, but the power only actually brings up a "What would you like to do, mute, airplane, or actually power off?" So, on a crash, take off case, pull battery. Things just aren't designed to turn off anymore. I miss that.
I8-D
Or "back in the day" when Firefox had a URL bar... just sayin'
The Commodore 1084 and 1084S monitors work fine.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
Macintoshes have the same functionality.
The old PSU off switch is mostly gone now because killing power that way was hell on hard disks.
Not currently able to view more than just the first page
Yes, let's add a couple to the list:
- Articles on the web that are entirely within one page
- Websites that reflow to fit your window/font size, instead of forcing you to adopt theirs.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
this is exactly what i want
The keyboards offer a better tactile feel because the keys are progressively weighted. They take progressively more force as you push, then release and click into place; and the keys under weaker fingers take less force than those under stronger fingers (hence progressive weighting). As such, they are ergonomically superior, providing your brain with more control data. You know exactly when you've punched the key fully, and you eventually start taking heavy notice if your fingers slip and hit the wrong key (it feels different enough to disrupt your brain).
Basically, it makes typing immersive. You never need to look, because you can hear and feel what's going on, you can see it on your screen, and when you typo your brain doesn't go "wait that looks wrong, what happened, that's not what I expected to happen, I punched the right thing, did I punch the right thing? Look down at the keyboard, where are my hands, is that right?" Instead you sense it by feel just before you see the mistake, and your brain has already figured everything out. This keeps typos from being disruptive, and also keeps your hands an integrated part of your typing rather than seeming to disconnect and leave the typing to your brain dictating what your eyes see.
It's really like playing a $60,000 grand piano versus a $1000 Yahoo upright. If you've never touched a $60,000 grand, you need to. Also, if you're in the market, I recommend a $4000 Kawai CA series digital piano unless you are obscenely rich (a $15000 Kawai K-9 I could still argue with but I can understand that). The keyboard is basically the same as a $180,000 9 foot concert grand, plugged into sensors instead of hammers, with a computer using all kinds of complex algorithms and tons of samples and statistical data to emulate the $180,000 9 foot Kawai EX concert grand piano. They don't have the power or presence, of course, because there's no 9 foot sound board to resonate with the booming base; but the keys feel dead on, even better than the $67,000 Kawai RX-6 I used to practice on--which is a fantastic 7 foot acoustic grand piano.
Go find one in a piano store and mess with it and you'll get it. To someone who cares about their keyboard, the bucket keys are the same way. To someone who doesn't ... it's still an improvement, just one they largely ignore until they use it for a while and then swap back.
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I wouldn't mind installing a turbo button on the office clock.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Sure, lots of software still has them. But Microsoft/Google/Mozilla are trying really hard to make us forget that menu bars ever existed, by replacing them with those stupid "ribbons" or with minimalist interfaces. Sure, with menus you have to sometimes hunt to find the thing you want. But with the ribbons, you still have to hunt...AND you have to try to figure out what all those little icons mean!
Seriously, this is a really ignorant article. Almost all the complaints are bullshit.
PC-Write, the old DOS text processor I used to write my freelance articles with, and also PEN, a Unix screen-oriented text editor that was at BBN when I worked there, which I used for writing computer documentation and other projects -- could split the screen window as many times as I wanted (e.g., I could have five or six slices of a file showing). For editing long, complex documents, this was a great convenience. By contrast, Microsoft Word can only split the screen in two.
VI anyone?
I really miss the 'clicky' IBM Model M keyboards from the mid and late '80s, for instance.
This is mass hysteria. For every fanboy that raves about their model M, there are 20 people that can't stand 5 minutes typing on these things. I tried it. Your significant other can't sleep at night, and your fingers get tired. They are old outdated pieces of shit.
This keyboard isn't cheap, Hedtke concedes: "They were nearly $200 when CVT was making them directly, and the current Avant Stellar keyboard is around $325. But for many of us, it's more than worth it."
You are a fucking moron if you pay $325 for this $20 dollar contraption. Don't believe the hype. The thing has a PS/2 connector for fuck sake!
CONTROL-C and CONTROL-Q "which could kill an accidentally triggered program, along with the Unix Control-C and kill -9 for command line Unix. I'm not sure if anything exists that can do that as quickly at the GUI level.
ctrl-c and kill -9 STILL work in *nix. You can even kill GUI apps using the command line, duh. Adding a GUI doesn't prevent you from using a terminal.
"One, moving 'Destroy Window' -- usually indicated by a square icon with an 'X' in it -- from the opposite end of the title bar where I'd only click on it when I MEANT it, to right next to 'Iconify' and 'Maximize.'" This window control problem is now universal, according to Cattey: "It's on Windows, Linux and MacOS, as well as Solaris."
What??? It is NOT universal. It depends on what window decorator you use. There is no "standard" for linux. Every distribution is different, and it's always configurable.
Before there were scrollbars, command-line interfaces to Unix and DOS would paginate output and pause when the screen was full, until you requested the next screenful with the "more" command
"more" is still there, but remember, "less" is "more".
"As a developer, I found it very useful for when I ran scripts that produced a surprisingly large amount of output or a lot of error messages," says Franklin. "I did not need to run the command [more] over again in order to see it all. This feature has never been in another version of UNIX or Linux since."
Umm, this actually sounds annoying as hell. There is a reason more and less are separate commands. If you REALLY wanted to have an automatic "more" command, you could write a shell wrapper. But in the end, some programs require a TTY, and having this automatic "more" functionality will break them.
"XEDIT had the ability to restrict the file to a part, and have all editing commands, such as 'go to top/search and replace/select to bottom,' only work on that part of the file."
Once again, VI. While not exactly the same, you can do analogous functionality in VI. And much more.
"It could overlay hardware, firmware and regular memory as needed, and had no reserved memory sections. This let me write macros that were globally available."
This is the dumbest comment of all. Can you imagine if modern computers were implemented this way? You'd be rebooting 10 times a day.
When he switched to PCs, he used DOS's TSR (Terminate and Stay-Resident) feature. "Now, I'm
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
But are we really going backwards?
I mean, reading that list made me think of some old geezers complaining about how cars in their time had a big ol' crank in front, unlike these wussy cars that kids use these days.
I mean, complex and hard to master scrollbars? Really? That's a thing to miss? Exactly what usability advantage does that have? Exactly how many new users are complaining that scrolling up and down isn't complex enough?
Besides, what's described as totally awesome functionality lost, isn't lost at all. You can still get an outline view in Word or OpenOffice Write or whatever. Even programming IDEs have that. So exactly how the fuck is that a lost feature? The only thing "lost" is that it's no longer done by learning arcane ways to use a scrollbar.
I mean, even the person missing them in TFA starts by basically saying that it was a pain in the butt to learn to use them. So exactly what's lost there, by doing the same thing in an easier way? The whole argument boils down to "it's bad because it's not the exact clicks I learned to use waaay back". Or in other words, "stop the world, I don't want to learn anything new ever again."
Other arguments get fucking stupid.
E.g., on page 3, "Steve Silberberg, software contractor and owner of Fatpacking" misses having a program called "see", which was... a hex editor. I mean, really? He's a software contractor and he doesn't know how to get a hex editor on the Internet? That is a lost feature for him?
Just to make it clear, I'm pretty damned sure that hex editors still exist, since I even made mods for Fallout 3 with a hex editor and made a tutorial for how to do that, waay back in the days before there was an official toolkit and before even NifSkope got updated to open the new mesh files. Finding one didn't even register as something hard, much less as a feature lost forever.
Really, what the hell is that guy even doing as a contractor, if he can't even find a hex editor? Seriously.
Another guy on the same page is bemoaning the loss of some obscure old text-mode editor, misses TurboPascal (Delphi apparently isn't the same for him), and has been programming in NotePad until he found a port of his old favourite text-mode editor. Even the feature he mentions as missing in newer editors is actually trivial to simulate in any IDE (if nothing else, you can just copy and paste that part into another window and work there)... not to mention that if you need to specifically mark from where to where you want to edit in a source file so you don't get into other parts, you probably should have made that part a separate file in the first place. And not to mention that by using NotePad he's actually having even less features anyway.
I'm sorry, but that's not loss of features to "devolution", that's just the kind of guy who illustrates the kind of attitude that fuels the rampant age-ism in the industry. The only "devolution" there is that he doesn't want to learn anything newer than the good old days of his using XEdit.
Other personal whines mis-represented as features lost to "devolution" include:
- doing the same things with different key combinations nowadays (sorry, key combinations never went away. Just the ones that guy used changed)
- having the control key in a different position than in some guy's youth (so what? It's not like he didn't have decades already to learn the new position)
- how in the good old days you could set some obscure variable to read program output in pages at a time (unlike, I guess, these days using "less" to read program output one page at a time, and being also able to search and go forward and back)
Etc.
Sorry, I actually went there to learn about some awesome features that we've been missing, but I don't see any. I'm just treated to a gallery of people who somehow never learned how to use new keystrokes or a new program to do the same things. Which is actually even more freaking sad than "lost features."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
They're slightly more stoned than a punk switch, and less reliable than a blues switch.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost
Many early operating systems could keep several versions of a file. This was in UNIVAC EXEC-8 (now OS-2200 and still in use) in 1967. Creating a new empty file and then writing it did not make the file visible to other processes until the file was closed and committed. The new file then became the latest version, the old file became the previous version, and if a retention limit was specified and had been reached, the oldest version was deleted. UNIX/Linux/DOS/Windows pathname-based systems don't do that, and so atomic file replacement tends to be difficult, non-portable, and often not done.
MULTICS had better security than anything currently mainstream. The hardware supported protection rings and the OS used them usefully. Things we think of today as "middleware" and "DLLs" ran in inner security rings, not high enough to penetrate the core OS but protected from tampering by applications. Hardware support for calls to a inner ring made this fast. Most OSs today still don't do "big objects" well, things which are used by multiple processes and have state of their own, like databases and printer queues. "Big objects" tend to either have too many privileges or too few.
There's a mind-set today that a language can be either fast or safe, but not both. This is a legacy of some bad design decisions in C that were carried forward into C++. We used to have variants of Pascal suitable for systems programming. Most original Macintosh software was written in Pascal. Modula, by the time of Modula III, was powerful enough to write a whole OS. But it died when Compaq brought DEC and closed down research there.
Another casualty of the UNIX/Linux vanilla approach to hardware. The IBM System/38 had security features which allowed fine-grained security within programs. But it was too different from everything else to become mainstream.
Speaking of Address/URL bars... I hate that I can't re-arrange Windows Vista/7's address bar in Explorer and remove the favorites completely from IE8. Granted, I don't use Windows except for work where I need to have IE open for at least part of my day... but it's enough to bug the shit out of me.
In case you don't understand why I'd want to move the address bar (and remove the search box):
http://i.imgur.com/b2WD9.png
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
The old IBM XTs had a big red toggle switch. It was a beefy mofo in a recessed housing. Check it out! You couldn't accidentally toggle that thing off.
Rocker switches, on the other hand, can much more easily get bumped between "on" and "off" while futzing around with cabling, especially under a cramped desk.
Program Intellivision!
The boot process used to go a lot faster. There are many background programs launched at start up now and they each take a while to get warmed up.
And shutdown used to mean flipping a switch. That was nice.
That is "soft-off". ie you are asking politely for some IC some where to allow you to turn the device off. If the device has locked up this probably won't work*.
And with the amount of devices that don't really turn off** when you "turn them off" these days soft-off only gets really annoying.
* PC style architecture where the OS handles single press and the independent PSU handles press-and-hold is sadly a rarity these days.
** Hand held radio with soft-off, battery drained after two weeks "off". Hand held oscilloscope, battery fine after a month off.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Meh...1920x1200 on my 5+ year old computer monitor is better resolution (albeit, just barely) than even a 1080p HDTV (source). Sure, you can get a six foot wide HDTV, but that only makes the image look more pixelated. Drop to a 720p and the difference is even more marked. I'd rather watch TV or movies on my PC than use my PC on a TV. YMMV, of course.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
As you say, you can get clickey keyboards. Das Keyboard is an example. Most people just don't want them. Light press keyboards are not only quieter, but they are more ergonomic.
Along those lines, you want a keyboard with programmability or function keys on the left? Logitech. Most of their G series keyboards have that and range from $100-200 and are extremely high quality.
The scroll bar crap? Sounds like the "In my day shit was hard and we LIKED IT!" If they were "very complex scrollbars that took a while to master" they were not good because it shouldn't take a fucking post graduate education to use a computer. Also I can't see anything he's describing that matters for it in the slightest. Scrolling text is real easy on today's computers, particularly with scroll wheels.
And paging through? Spacebar dipshit. Firefox, Acrobat, will page when you press it. Also there are these little keys called "page up" and "page down". Wonder what THEY do?
The flat memory model is perhaps the stupidest of all. "Oh I miss when computers just let me write to whatever memory I wanted!" I don't, because they were easy as hell to bring down. If you are a programmer and you don't appreciate the reason and function of a protected memory model, I really don't want you writing software for me. Flat memory was a major problem, it was done because it is simple to implement, not because it is a good way of doing things.
The see thing is also hilarious. As you note, it is called a hex editor. More hilarious is that most text editors more powerful than notepad have one built in. If you open a binary file they just automatically go to hex mode. Even more hilarious is that there's better tools now for that kind of thing. Because of the greater structure to executables in modern OSes, you can get tools that can better view and edit the resources separate from the code.
Like you said, just old people whining. "Things are different than they used to be!" Yes, yes they are. Deal with it.
You are a fucking moron if you pay $325 for this $20 dollar contraption. Don't believe the hype. The thing has a PS/2 connector for fuck sake!
I agree with your premise but the jab at the PS/2 connector is misplaced. You're going to want that if you want to use one of the typical legacy adapters to connect it to some other kind of system. PS/2 to USB is cheap enough, but USB to PS/2 is all but nonexistent.
If you REALLY wanted to have an automatic "more" command, you could write a shell wrapper. But in the end, some programs require a TTY, and having this automatic "more" functionality will break them.
this is actually something I've been expecting to see in a shell for a long time. I'm kind of amazed it isn't readily available. It does seem like you could write an easy wrapper to pipe everything to more, though; if output is less than screen size it won't have any visible effect.
I think the Slashdot editors are just trying to wind us up here...
Amen.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I miss the days when you could create a persistent RAM disk in MacOS that would survive between soft reboots. You could copy your whole OS to the RAM disk, reboot with the ram disk as the startup drive and boot in seconds. It still puts modern SSD's to shame.
There was very little in his list that is gone in unix/linux. Yes, you can do alot of stuff via gui now, but most is still available from CLI. Even his key re-assignments can be done in X. Granted the key will still say caps lock, but it will do a ctrl if you remap it. I think the only thing I ever "lost" was the old rand (sometimes called ned) text editor. So I wrote a replacement so I would have it on linux. It was not that difficult to write. I think with the improvement in tools, compilers, machine speed etc, its not that hard to re-invent the old stuff fairly quickly.
So most editors let you do CTRL+DOWN to move to the next paragraph and CTRL+UP to move to the previous. Which, for the last and first paragraph on the screen cause just that: scrolling by one paragraph.
I don't have Word on this computer to check (what with it being a Linux computer), but in OpenOffice Writer I just tried it with their article and it works like a charm.
Other programs have similar ways to do that, and/or support outline views for reading by paragraph.
Granted, it's not a universal feature, but, honestly, it just shows how much it's missed by the rest of the world.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Use a mechanical Unicomp keyboard for 6 months, and you'll despise the cheap, flexible feeling of every soft, $7 rubber-dome you touch. A quality tool for every day use in a professional's trade. It's expensive for a keyboard, but cheap compared to many of the other things which people might heft over the extra cash in exchange for a premium product.
I think the Slashdot editors are just trying to wind us up here...
You're right! Let's not give them the satisf...oh, nevermind.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
It was amazing what you could tell from the pattern of lights, and they were aesthetically pleasing as well...
Fast-forward to around 2000, and the potentiometer was replaced with 3 buttons on the side, volume up, down, and mute. These buttons where sluggish in responding, especially if the computer was busy. I kept forgetting which was the mute when I was panicked by an obnoxious site at work. Trying all 3 wasn't useful since it took a couple of seconds to see if they worked, and looking for the low-contrast mute icon embossed in the plastic required lifting the laptop so I could see it in the light. More than once, my panicked solution was to hold down the power button for several seconds to force power-down. But those several seconds could be embarrassing. There was one point where I planned to add a physical switch to the actual speaker wires, although I never got around to that.
Now, of course, even the volume side buttons are gone. The mute function key does work and responds quickly, but there's still that slight extra delay finding it - it's not something I use so often that it comes naturally. Usually, I just leave the computer always in mute unless there is something specific I want to listen to.
You're not trying hard enough... I've locked them both up plenty of times. And I'm not just talking about the applications.. Complete lockup.. frozen solid...
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
> File revisions
Dropbox, subversion, time machine, snapshots - it is just that we have more solutions now than back in the days, and you have to pick one.
Not the same thing. Version control systems are manual. They only kick in when you deliberately access the version control system.
File versions are automatic. You get a new version every time you save a file, not the next time you commit, not at the next backup but now. And it applies system wide, not just to those key structures that have in a version control repository.
There are some down sides:
Directories get a bit noisy with all the revisions around. It also eats disk space, although that isn't nearly the issue that it used to be.
Having at least 1200px vertically as standard and 1536px for less than $500. Nowdays you often have to pay over $1000 to get more than 1200px.
To me it seems widescreen simply meant, to most manufacturers, removing rows of pixels.
Rotatable monitors are nice, but 1080px horizontally is also quite annoying.
You agree with me.
In the 1990s dpi was going up, refresh rates were going up, there was actually a reason to upgrade. Now we're all stuck with the "HD" fad, probably forever. If you want a bright, high dpi screen it's limited to 5 inches or smaller. TVs get advertised as "120Hz" or "600Hz" or some marketing bullshit where the input is only capable of 60 and they just strobe the pixels 10 times per frame. Desktop screens are being sold, in the 21st century, incapable of actually displaying 24-bit colour. Dithering on a TN panel is very visible and it looks like shit.