Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Is Computing As Cool and Fun As It Once Was?
dryriver writes: I got together with old computer nerd friends the other day. All of us have been at it since the 8-bit/1980s days of Amstrad, Atari, Commodore 64-type home computers. Everybody at the meeting agreed on one thing -- computing is just not as cool and as much fun as it once was. One person lamented that computer games nowadays are tied to internet DRM like Steam, that some crucial DCC software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop) and that many "basic freedoms" of the old-school computer nerd are increasingly disappearing. Another said that Windows 10's spyware aspects made him give up on his beloved PC platform and that he will use Linux and Android devices only from now on, using consoles to game on instead of a PC because of this. A third complained about zero privacy online, internet advertising, viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware. I lamented that the hardware industry still hasn't given us anything resembling photorealistic realtime 3D graphics, and that the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have. A point of general agreement was that big tech companies in particular don't treat computer users with enough respect anymore. What do Slashdotters think? Is computing still as cool and fun as it once was, or has something "become irreversibly lost" as computing evolved into a multi-billion dollar global business?
" Live like that for a month and then tell me which is better"
OK but do I also get my 20-year-old body back, union jobs, single-income families that can afford a house, and a future in electrical engineering?
I'll tell you right away what is better.
~35 years ago, I got a Vic-20 for Christmas. It took me an hour to write my first program, including the custom character design. Today, if you got a new Dell laptop for Christmas, you'd be lucky if Windows Update finally allowed you to even *do* anything within the first hour or two. Fuck, even a brand new Xbox One or Wii-U (and probably a PS4) will make you wait at least 30-60 minutes for mandatory updates before it'll allow you to play your first game.
640x480?! That's just a bigger version of 320x280, and I started out with a lot less than 320x280, I can tell you. Bloody kids, next thing they'll be wanting more than 4 bits of colour information in each pixel.
As for VRML, I often use it as an example of why 'open standards' are far from a panacea. It's a truly dreadful standard, created in academia before there were either competing implementations of the problem, or even much of a problem, that actively held back VR and web 3d stuff generally for years. Also a useful example of "worse is better".
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