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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?
There's no variety of systems, operating systems, one API set trying to prove that it is better at one task than another. Now it's basically 2.5 platforms and that's it.
Sadly, I don't think the best or even more interesting platforms won.
Definitely no.. much more boring now than 30 years ago.
Because of Windows spying?
LMAO.
That is all.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Back in the day, someone dedicated could learn everything he had about a system, from the CPU, registers, RAM, I/O, video, etc. It was relatively simple.
The only way to get that same "cool and fun" feeling is to dive into the 8-bit microcontrollers such as the ATmega328P. Even the latest Arduinos have become too complex with their ARM SoC.
Look on hackaday.com, there's often fun projects based on those basic, entry-level, sub-100MHz 8-bit uC.
Cool is about pushing the boundary and enjoying experiences which are decades away from mass production. A desktop is not going to be super cool in 2016. Arduino controllers to operate hand wired power windows in your home might be.
You can get very open and hackable Linux / Chromebook+chrouton desktops and laptops, but you may be hard pressed to get them to do anything which is not already widely available.
Switch to Linux and the cool factor becomes very much alive.
It never was that great.
If you're a gamer, you are going to be forever at the mercy of the game companies, who are going to exploit their customers to some extent to maximize profit.
If you are a hacker, you have your own hacker-produced computing platforms and tools and a wide-open vista of hardware and physical objects that can now be designed and manufactured by the individual.
If you depend on some company to make everything you use, you've set yourself up to be their "client". Don't do that.
Bruce Perens.
Obligatory PC master race cartoon.
yes its fun - Arduinos, Rpi, fpga with fricken Arms embedded .. ... ,..
thinks we only dreamed of 30 years ago
don't like an 'app' build it
don't like a platform move
-- get off my lawn sonny --
> many "basic freedoms" of the old-school computer nerd are increasingly disappearing
There is an organization devoted to computer freedom called the Free Software Foundation, closely allied with GNU. GNU makes most of the operating system we call Linux.
> Software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop)
There are several alternatives to Photoshop which use free licenses, meaning licensees that respect freedom. None of them do everything Photoshop does in the exact same way Photoshop does it, but for any *particular* Photoshop user, there's probably a free software package that fits their particular needs well.
> Windows 10's spyware aspects made him give up on his beloved PC platform and that he will use Linux
Linux is certainly one way to avoid Windows built-in spyware.
> viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware
That's 99% Windows too, Linux desktop users see viruses and malware very, very rarely - maybe once every 15 years.
Linux isn't perfect. It does however address most of the concerns mentioned.
computing, music, whatever was better back in the day.
I have this conversation periodically, except it is usually addressed to music, art, tv, sports, or any of a number of topics. It's like those guys who see a high school girl now and say "Man, they did not look like that back in my day".. yes, they did. It's just that when you saw them then, you didn't see a cute blond, you saw the B***h from social studies.
There are many exciting things going on now. I am looking at how quickly and massively raspberry pi's have been moving into area where their creators never thought they would be used. I see arduinos and the maker movement and think "Wow". Just a look at adafruit or any of a hundred other sites and the amount of very affordable tech is staggering. We could stop all tech development now and it would be centuries before we explore all the possibilities of what is sitting on the desk in front of us.
I met someone at a coffee shop awhile back and there was a bunch of teenagers acting like teenagers. My friend is now in their mid-30's. I am in my 50's. I had first met them when they were a teenager at a coffee shop. My friend commented that they were not like that back then and I pointed out that I was their current age when we first met and yes.. my friend was just as dumb and teenagery back then.
Excitement is never external. You can look at any family pic taken at Disneyland and see the scowling goth kid who is totally not having fun. OK. You have given up windows as the programming platform and gone to Linux and Android.. So? You did not start programming on Windows. You started on other platforms and moved with the times.
But, that is not what you are complaining about..
What catches my attention is that *none* of your computing complaints are really computing complaints. They are consumer complaints. You should not be doing this comparison back to their early 80's equivalents.. televisions with 3 channels. Radio. Vinyl records. Newspapers. Magazines. Computing is more than fine right now. It completely rocks. Consumer products are far greater than what they were.
And yet the PC guys basically need Windows for most of their games. So who are the real dummies here?
I have thought the same thing.
Of course there are a few fundamental differences between then and now from my point of view:
1. I was a young teen and had tons of time (and energy) on my hands to play with these things.
2. Everything you learned you figured out on your own or as a group share with close friends, supplemented with a few manuals and magazines.
3. The hardware was finite enough you could basically learn everything from the low level access to the hardware to all the software features (basic or machine language). You could literally learn what every location in IO or memory did (53281 anyone??).
4. With a few days or at most weeks time with even modest skill levels you could put together something that could "wow" your friends and perhaps even non-computer family members.
5. Atari / TI / Commodore computer overnight parties where a bunch of us get together to compete to show off the best games etc. in an attempt to prove we had the best platform.
Today we have a lot more learning resources out there, and the hardware is much more powerful but in my mind it just isn't as fun. There is certainly no way to whip up something that would "wow" anyone. It's more a tool now than a fun hobby.
"and that the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have"
No, VR can die in hell with Betamax, MiniDisc, and 3D TV.
This weekend I spent some time improving my personal installation of SOGo groupware, so that my wife and I can better share email, calendars, and contacts on a system that we personally own.
Certainly, big companies don't respect users, but it's still possible to provide all of the services that I need using only Free Software, so I do. Pretty much the only exception is navigation, for which I use Google Maps. Everything else we do with Free Software and the more I move my wife to our own services, the happier she is. Personally, I find that immensely gratifying. As long as that continues, I'll find computing as cool and fun as ever.
When I started in computing, you needed a soldering iron, a particular skill-set, and if you were good, some programming skills, to supplement very minimalistic disk operating systems. It was also kind of fun to witness the reactions of people seeing and hearing a 14-inch hard drive powering up, or in some cases the look of recognition on their faces when they realize that the IMSAI 8080 they saw in the movie War Games was a real thing, not just some Hollywood prop. I even built a speech synthesizer, and got to see my friends' eyes go wide when I made it say "Shall we play a game?" I even designed and built some of my own IEEE696 cards to plug into the backplane that did things you couldn't get kits or pre-made boards for. Before the IMSAI, and the Morrow Designs stuff, I had an 8-bit CDP1802-based computer built on perfboard, complete with an integer BASIC interpreter. Fun, fun, fun. Also great experience for later in life; all the skills and experience I gained from all that has kept me employed all this time.
These days? You might, if you wanted to take the time, effot, and expense to do it, design and build PCIe cards for special functions, but largely there's no point; almost anything you'd want the hardware to do, you can just go out and buy. 'Building a computer' now takes a screwdriver, not a soldering iron, and just about any teenage kid with half a brain can get the parts and cobble a box together. Sure, there's microcontroller stuff of all kinds out there, but there's little to do between those and full-blown desktop systems anymore. Likewise, writing software yourself is almost pointless, you can download just about anything you want, too. Even general electronics as a hobby isn't very accessible or fun anymore, because so much is surface-mount only, not too much is through-hole, so the really interesting devices mean you're more or less required to spin a PCB for whatever it is, which makes it so much more expensive and so much less accessible.
I guess if you're into computer gaming (I lost interest years ago) or just using a computer as an appliance (which they more or less are anymore) then I guess it's 'fun' for you, but from the background I'm coming from, it really isn't so much anymore.
Dealing with crap like systemd.
Learning a new language, you don't just learn the language. you learn the build system, sopme complicated IDE plugins, some decent libraries, but most are hack together messes etc.
One example illustrates it all: Javascript.
Tell you what, you go ahead and toss out your Internet connection, your modern web browsers, your Photoshop, your massive hard drive, your multi-tasking operating system. Go back to your 8-bit games, floppy disks you need to swap out and your touch-pad telephone. Live like that for a month and then tell me which is better - a modern Linux distro and Android phone, or your 1980s computing experience.
I've done it both ways and I'm not blinded by nostalgia. I'll keep my modern systems.
And bothering to post this question is almost as bad.
Is computing as cool? No of course not to the self-described nerds who helped build it to where it is now. It's a lot more accessible and exponentially more powerful.
So instead of lamenting the past, appreciate what's been built and work to making the experience as pleasant as you found it back when you were younger.
The only platform that you can still get the hood open now is Linux. I personally prefer Arch Linux or OpenWRT depending on the hardware and expected use for a project.
But even with Linux you need to choose carefully as vendors work to close even the many products built upon Linux. Just buying hardware with Linux doesn't mean it's open enough to be useful for example: Android as generally sold. AOSP is the exception.
If you want to intro someone to "old skool" look at the Raspberry Pi platform or OpenWRT. NOTE: even those have proprietary components and BLOBs of proprietary binary only code in almost ALL circumstances.
General consumer computers like Windows PCs and Macs are becoming like current cars with less and less access with each new generation. You can work on them yourself less and less. This is driven by both manufacturers wanting more control particularly as advances in CPU power have slowed and government regulations that lock down what were previously tweak-able components like WiFi router hardware.
Right now the most interesting stuff is in "do it yourself" IoT devices. But you better "do it yourself" rather than simply buy it. Otherwise it is likely "ownable" by someone other than you straight out of the box or ALREADY owned by the manufacturer who is spying on you using it. And given that there are no monetary or legal penalties for the complete lack of security this is unlikely to change regardless of various government solicited reports.
Facebook is billions of individual "Skinner Boxes." And if you use it you are the pigeon!
While all true, people seem to forget how hard it was to get software before the internet, especially if you were a kid with no money. These days you can download vast amounts of high quality software, and its source code to tinker with. In some respects we are a lot better off now, and when you had to rely on friends, clubs and magazine cover disks/tapes.
On the other hand, we are definitely a lot further removed form the inner workings of computers now. There is a massive amount of abstraction, which is kind of good for a lot of purposes but also very much encourages people not to look too far beyond really high level library functions. The lack of hacking friendly ports on the hardware side is a big issue too.
But then again you can get a pretty good oscilloscope for peanuts now, so in some ways hardware hacking is a lot easier than it used to be to get into. We don't have those great kits you could buy from magazines any more though, and while people like Adafruit do offer some interesting stuff it's more Arduino level plugging modules together than figuring out why your transistor biasing isn't working.
Personally I like the older stuff. Emulators are great for it actually - back in the day I used to reboot my computer about 900 times a day as I was trying to debug assembler (didn't have a single step debugger and of course no memory protection) and figure out what the hardware was doing, and emulators make it much easier.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I was just talking about this the other day with some co-workers. It used to be that you could manage your work network, even a decently large network, and know everything about it in your head. Reading a manual and being a smart guy (or gal) was enough to have a working environment.
No more. People expect remote access and that everything should be working 24x7, the added complexity of building out those environments, and the merging of multiple technologies means that every change becomes a much more complex endeavor. Encryption requirements makes everything more difficult to implement and troubleshoot. There are caveats with virtually everything, and I just don't have the time to be an expert on everything around me.
Example from this year - my IP phone system, which integrates with Exchange using custom nonesense for playback in outlook, using the LLDP enabled voice VLAN on my switches, with servers running on my vmware hosts, each of which have multiple redundant connections, with handsets connected to a switch using 802.1x authentication, that's complex enough as it is, but then buried deep in the release notes was a bullet point that exchange 2013 wasn't supported, 18 months after exchange 2013 was released. That's a lot of stuff to be an expert in; a far cry from 10/100 hubs with a single management IP address and a stand alone server that send voicemail over encrypted SMTP.
Developing GUIs for databases on Windows 10 is not going to be fun and cool. But that existed back in the 80s, it was COBOL on mainframes.
If you want it to be fun then you have to pick something fun, which usually involves one of the small boards like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, adding some motor control... This is what I do. These small systems are all quite digestible and have stuff built in we would have killed for, and you can make actual things which do things, be they useful or just playful.
Or you could develop games for a classic system - there are still people doing homebrew games for all the old systems like Megadrive, Speccy, Apple ][, C/64, Lynx, etc etc. Or there's RPGMaker.
There is so much awesome stuff going on right now from Arduino-like Maker stuff to drones to GPU power to deep learning to VR - I just got excited about a cheap tiny little camera component (neeeerd).
So when you say 'computing isn't as fun and cool as it used to be' you mean YOU aren't as fun and cool as you used to be - and who is, besides Betty White? Not me. But that's what really happened, don't blame it on computing. You let your skills decay, didn't keep up to date, don't get excited by new stuff, and are too lazy to even keep up with what you knew how to do. The C64 is still thriving if you thought it was more interesting than watching sports or, oh hey, Westworld is on, I'll start tomorrow.
If all you want to do is dick around, then no, possibly not.
But if you ever thought, man, I wish I had a supercomputer instead of this useless candy-ass piece of silicon shit, then yes, because by all standards from the last millennium we have them sitting at every desk.
I oscillate between both opinions, myself.
in reality, it's precision engineering all the way down.
So, I read this on my Windows 10 Surface Pro 3 (running the latest fast ring build) while having my TRS-80 model one, my Apple IIe, and my Mac SE/30 on my side table.
Yes, the mainstream of computing is different. I no longer have to worry about dip switches or whether I can address memory above 4 MB of RAM.
However, my teenage son is now designing 3D printed objects on his homebrew PC (dual-boot Win10 and Mint) which he then sends to his MonoPrice 3D printer, which he built from a kit then - not liking the print head - grafted one from an XYZ model. Let's not forget the IoT devices he's been hacking together using his Raspberry Pi.
Yes, things are different.
My son will say the same in 30 years.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
I used to type in program from magazines into my VIC-20. Then spend hours debugging them. Or get a book for another basic computer and figure out how to convert it.
All I had was basic on the VIC-20, it was great. Now I have 100s of languages, frameworks, dbs, and on and on. But you say freedom is going away?
I think you are nuts. The problem is with other people are doing, just being able to draw a line on screen using poke statements is not really impressive. I think that is the problem. The bar to do anything someone else would think "cool" is so high, most don't even bother trying anymore.
You don't need to use Steam. You don't need to use Photoshop. What's that? You like the features or the convenience of the walled garden? Oh well in that case I guess computing really does suck.
You seem to suggest that a walled garden is necessary to enjoy those features. The fact is, Photoshop, and other software in the Creative Suite used to be available for purchase. Now, it's rent only. I think that's what he was complaining about. I, too, am irritated by this. I still use CS6, the last version of Creative Suite you could buy. I refuse to use rented software.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
This is the sort of complaining that has no place on a 'news for nerds' site - if you want it, build it. If you can't build it, don't bitch that others haven't done it as quickly as you wanted. I don't think OP submitter was the one working on the VR judder problem or the high density screen refresh problem or any of that. This sounds like a bunch of dipshit 'enthusiast' friends from the 80s that only ever dipped a toe in the industry and didn't actually end up building anything they wanted over the thirty years of their careers
Remember when space was the coolest?. For a significant portion of Slashdot's demographic, the answer is "no" because they're not young any more. Younger people are probably dabbling in Maker stuff and might be wondering why this question is being asked.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Yes, Linux distributions suck less than Windows. However, there becomes increasingly less one can do in *nix. Besides I use bash on Windows 10 pretty much daily.
If I were a kernel dev or even just a website admin I might be able to get by. However, people just like to use commercial software. People laugh at me when they see me use GIMP. Could I use Photoshop? Sure. However, there's zero alternative to Acrobat. Yes, I could cobble together Evince, CUPS, and Inkscape, but they just don't do the trick well. Even when running on Ubuntu, I would prefer to fire up a VM of Windows 7 and run Acrobat.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
I started coding back on a 386 with Windows 3.1. I miss it, like if I wanted to access a variable I just did it, there wasn't the dozen hoops and 300 line refactoring to navigate the permissions hierarchy to properly modify it. Or there were just pointers, not smart/shared/scoped/unique/weak/etc.. along with very opinionated people that have mutual exclusive ideas of which ones should be used where.
Building software without the technical bureaucracy was a lot of fun.
And it's so abstract these days. Even on Apple ][ Plus Integer Basic, you had the peeks and pokes to hit metal. And back then, regardless of what you programmed on, you had to roll your own - anything. data structures, searches, graphics, ... and you had to know how the OS worked.
And if you wanted performance, you REALLY had to know the ins and outs of the OS: disk and other I/O. I don't anyone really used MS DOS' I/O apis - especially graphics - well, maybe the disk I/O. Calling an API was an INT and loading a register with a hex value.
I don't think kids these days even know what a register is or how to program in the snow and uphill.
Sounds like someone is in for a rude awakening about Android. (I think Win10 is worse than stock Android re:data collection, but if your primary concern is privacy...)
As to the question itself: It absolutely is, for varying definitions of "cool" and "fun". I'm a 90s kid (so many things I have to remember) so I didn't cut my teeth on a C64, but as a youngling I got sucked in by the potential of PCs and what I could do with them after discovering epic tools like "dir" at 12. (Oh, and playing Zork.) There's still a tremendous amount of potential, but a lot of us have turned what were once hobbies into jobs and started specializing in a sub-aspect of computing. The former can easily deprive the "cool" of the hobby if your job is a negative aspect of your life (and thus whatever "computing" you do is associated with that negativity), and the latter limits the "fun" because the simple problems are mostly rote at this point and discovery means chasing the long-tail, if at all.
In my case, a major lure for general computing—that made it "cool" or "fun"—was that discovery. While I've lost my own wonder and interest (for varying reasons), there seems to be as much uncharted territory now as there was in the 80s/90s: augmented/virtual reality, Internet-of-Things, alternative inputs (particularly in motion controls and applied to VR), biomedical, brain interface (both direct and indirect, such as simple headgear that react to brain waves). Computers are far cheaper and more powerful than they were, with software that can allow Joe American to start basic 3D modelling with something he picks up at Best Buy.
Computing itself isn't necessarily static: I think we're going to see computers in general converge, where either your phone/tablet is also your main PC, which, when docked, has more processing power (Nintendo's upcoming Switch is reported to work this way, in fact) or "always-on"+"cloud" means your various devices are just UI for data on the internet. Regardless of which direction you prefer, either will be enough of a shift to provide tons of creation/discovery potential driven by demand.
A bunch of assholes deciding against consumer interests (and then consumers rewarding them for such) doesn't deprive computing of being "cool" or "fun"; it just means you may have to seek alternative platforms depending on the aspects of computing that drive you and how you want to enjoy that.
Declining SAT scores were a big topic of discussion in the 80s and 90s, but what most people never really took into account was that in the 50s most jobs only required a high school diploma; by the 80s more people felt they needed to have a college degree. The decline in scores didn't reflect a decline in ability of graduating high schoolers, it reflected more of the lower-performing graduates taking the test.
I've been in the computing field for a long time. When I went into it back in the early 80s most people had never seen a computer. There were a very small number of people who worked with computers, and I'd say about half of them were doing at least moderately interesting stuff. Today there are many many more people doing interesting stuff, it's just that the growth in interesting work has been swamped by a rising ocean of mindless, bureaucratic IT drone work.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I started playing with computers in the early 1990s. IMO the novelty factor might have been part of the coolness and yeah that is gone, but otherwise what you can do now is 10000000x more interesting. AI, computer vision, speech recognition systems. There is a lot more to know and low level details like programming assembly become not as useful or productive. So what! Now you can do some really cool stuff on a higher level. You can get a laptop nowadays with an NVIDIA GPU, terabytes of storage, lightning fast SSD, 32 gigabytes of RAM and run artificial intelligence algorithms that will learn to play those 8 bit atari games at super human levels through raw experience. You could start building the real skynet from 1980s terminator... If you think things arent cool now youre stuck in a very small box.
I kinda/sorta know what the poster is getting at. I think the magic of computers back in the 80/90's is the promise of what they will one day deliver. That was the true excitement. In the 2010's now, much of what computers aspired to has now been realized. It's easy to forget where you've been and how far we've come. Fresh young minds today likely feel the same way we did in the 80's about todays computers. I recently built a beautiful 486 computer from "new, old stock" parts. Was a lot of fun, brought back memories. I tried stuff I didn't try in the 90's. I've just started but I've got this puppy on the internet, in DOS! (does about 3-4 megabits via FTP) Sure, others here probably did this back then, I never did, was all about BBSes......, what ever floats your boat. It's fun trying new things on old platforms.
> I ran Linux in a corporate environment for 10 years. It certainly worked, and I found ways to get what I needed done.
It does work, my corporation ran Linux exclusively for 15 years. It was a network security company, so for most of those years Windows was not allowed on the corporate network.
> I think Linux is fine for the home, fine web browsing, but it becomes a major problem for people in corporations, simply because they're addicted to Windows
Working in a Windows-centric company, there is a compromise I've been using for four years. OS X is certified Unix. When you want to, you can ignore the shiny Mac GUI and run all your favorite GPL software that you've used on Linux. Also when you want to, you can run Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, Microsoft Office 2016, 2016, etc. It integrates pretty well with a Windows-based company. Of course there are small issues here and there, but there are also small issues here and there when using Windows.
Agree with that - Linux isn't perfect but it would always have advantages to Windows
Take application development. Pioneering has been replaced by engineering. Great for making complicated and reliable products, not so great for empowerment of the individual. Software engineering tends to be teamwork. Depending on how "standard" the required end product is you can parcel out the interface design, the overall apllication design, the datastructures, the core algorithms, data management, and housekeeping. Could be 3-50 software engineers in a team. Used to be 1 programmer doing all of that.
Take high-performance programming. It used to be an art. Found e.g. in DOD stuff, scientific software, and games. Often in assembler, for speed. Nowadays that's mostly out. Certainly for scientific software. You use compilers of even scripting languages that call libraries to do the heavy lifting. You're quite unlikely to do better than the library builders. If you're writing some really new algorithm, you'll code it in C/C++. If absolutely necessary, you can make that code tunable (array stride, blocksize, etc.) and write an algorithm to optimise those parameters for your specific hardware (like e.g. BLAS). If it's too slow, buy better hardware. If it's still too slow, get access to a Hadoop cluster and parallelise your algorithm.
Take datacommunication. In the early days datacommunication meant controlling some UART and sending squiggles down a wire. Now it's calling a packaged protocol stack and talking to the appropriate protocol layers. More often than not that's the connection or session layer or higher ... unless you are a specialised networking engineer.
As for computer users as clients: the nerdy types are dying out. What today's consumer wants is things like smartphones and tablets. And what do they want it for? To surf the web (shopping, news, amusement (e.g. video torrents, Youtube)), and to waste time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and various chats. If they somehow want a desktop computer, they'll only know it for the OS it runs. That would be "Windows" or "Apple" (meaning macOs, but Apple users typically don't know that). And that's what the industry is giving them. Want "Basic Freddoms" ? Bugger off and run Linux, you freak.
So, yes. Computing as a product has become commoditised and geared towards the mass market. It's not easy to turn a buck by catering for nerds: the real money is in serving customers. And it shows. Consumer-grade users get a consumer-grade experience plus consumer-grade treatment (read: DRM, spyware, bloatware).
Those who want to play around with a computer however never had it better. For less than 50$ you can get a complete Raspberry Pi system (or a lookalike) that's more powerful than a clunky old PC. For 500$ you can get performance you used to have only on workstations, and for 1500$ you can get the same power you used to need a supercomputer for.
The only thing stopping you is know-how, time and interest. But that's not the industry's fault,
computer games nowadays are tied to internet DRM like Steam
So? Steam in particular is incredibly unintrusive unless you're actually trying to pirate the game, in which case it depends entirely on your definition of "fun" -- if you include the challenge of breaking DRM as "fun," then Steam and friends are far more interesting than "draw a black line on your CD."
some crucial DCC software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop)
Again, so? Admittedly its annoying having to keep re-paying for something, but that doesn't intrinsically lower the functionality of the software. That's like saying your house is crap because you had to mortgage it instead of dropping $300+k on it in one shot. Not to mention there are free alternatives such as GIMP that are plenty sufficient for anybody who doesn't need 100% top end professional software (and it gets better all the time as well.)
many "basic freedoms" of the old-school computer nerd
Which basic freedoms are those? Programming languages, documentation for those languages and support forums are all many many many times more available now than they ever used to be. The only "freedom" you seem to think you're lacking is the freedom to pirate software. Even if you want to rant about walled garden distribution platforms, your old-school comparison is "no distribution platform at all." At best, you could get yourself included in a monthly magazine like the old Big Blue Disk things.
Another said that Windows 10's spyware aspects made him give up on his beloved PC platform
Again, a bit annoying but it doesn't really detract from "fun" in any significant manner. Heck if he wants to go old school, he can just unplug his internet connection and then he knows for sure that Windows isn't "spying" on him.
he will use Linux and Android
Linux sure, but Android? Does he seriously think Google doesn't "spy" on him? Google's entire business model is based on collecting your information, and at a lot more personal level than anything Win10 sends back to Microsoft.
using consoles to game on instead of a PC because of this
Sony and Nintendo both definitely collect as much information as they think they can get away with regarding your gaming habits and other console usage, not to mention all of the "social" features included in both systems, payment card retention, etc. And of course Microsoft is Microsoft. If the 360 doesn't already have Win10-like "features," I'm sure they won't be far behind, in addition to doing basically all the same things the other major consoles do.
A third complained about zero privacy online, internet advertising, viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware
Again, if you want to go old-school go ahead and unplug your computer from the internet. Problem solved. Oh and while ransomware is relatively new, viruses, crapware and other nasties have been around basically as long as floppy disks (with their pirated software) have been getting traded. Norton, McAfee and several other antivirus makers got their start under DOS, years before Windows was really a thing and many years before the Internet was publicly available.
I lamented that the hardware industry still hasn't given us anything resembling photorealistic realtime 3D graphics
So, its not as fun as the old days because it hasn't moved into the "new" days as fast as you'd personally like? That seems a bit of a contradiction.
the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have
By who's standard? Virtual boy is over 20 years old and it didn't become a "trend" because the hardware wasn't sufficiently powerful for anybody to care enough back then. Even today, there's still some question about whether VR is going to be a continuing trend or a
I think tech and computing have changed for the worse across the board and often focuses on trivial "look at me!* products and services. For a long time now, it has been the case that a computer wasn't much without network capability, but I'll confess that I am so tired of what has come along (think DDoS, breaches, invasion of privacy, tracking, Ransomware) that I am about to just hang up my computer and spend time with paper books from the library.
20 years ago I would have said it was cool and fun,
... customizing muscle cars in the late 50s.
The bad news is that cars are boring now.
The good news is that cars no longer require tinkering to get them to go.
I've changed out clutches, installed a/c, gapped plugs and points.
For modern cars, I don't know bullshit from wild honey about fixing them.
I'm a retired IT guy and cut my teeth on a TRS-80 I bought in Feb, 1978.
I helped bring in the first network for Mobil Oil.
I programmed Access, Lotus 123 (and later Excel) macros, and crap like that.
I do not miss those days of old cars or old computers.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I am assuming you really meant "computing". Not just desktop programming and gaming like the examples implied.
When I was just a lad, the adults had programming careers that were very fun. They solved complex puzzles, and problems. It was very frustrating but very rewarding. Even growing up, I enjoyed programming which was very much a "figuring things out" topic minus the grease and back pain of former generations.
But today, with more than a decade into adulthood, that topic has become mostly a commodity. Windows, Linux, embedded, or otherwise. Lots of people "program" and most problems have already been solved. It's more a test of google-fu than puzzle solving. As a career it is very boring, trivial, and narrow in the results. There are still positions like before but they are outnumbered 1000 to 1.
So computing in that aspect is no longer fun. Same with hardware, it's all the same. It's all commodity. The gains in the permutations are so minor that cost easily overrides the performance benefits in most cases. This is primarily because hardware has outclassed software. I think software is probably a decade behind hardware now.
But if we switch to micro computers, sensors, and networks beyond just wifi: The glory days of the past still exist. Smart homes, smart gardens, etc are just a few tinkering days away. The common geek has access to fabricate their own custom hardware solutions. Writing the software is still mostly trivial due to the internet, but the ideas and solutions custom to a geeks unique physical world or situation is well with in reach. In this space we are still only limited by our imaginations in defining the problems to solve.
It is still very much FUN!
They continue to make up most of the OS User Space tools, except with embedded Linux where BusyBox typically replaces them. You are confusing the OS with applications in the repository.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Since there is no headline it would be a pretty good trick if it applied here.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Is computing cool and fun as it once was? Hell yes.
Does "cool and fun" have anything to do with your friend's privacy, social justice, or borderline tin-foil hat related opinions of their OS and their license agreements? No.
Maybe you need some actual cool and fun friends, or you need to change the question. Computing is more cool and fun than it's ever been. Some mythical issue with your software vendors does not change that. *
*Posted on a Windows 10 computer using a browser that sends scrapes my personal data and sends it to a third party which in no way has changed or impacted in any way my use of a computer over the past 15 years.
None of those complaints have anything to do with either "cool" or "fun". Most of those complaints are something that the common user doesn't give a shit about and thus has no impact on "cool" or "fun".
However, there's zero alternative to Acrobat.
I take it, then, that you've never looked at Scribus a cross-platform, FOSS page layout program that's being used by professionals to create newsletters, periodicals and books. And, if you're having trouble with it, there's an active and helpful mailing list full of people ready to advise you. Check it out; you might just be surprised by how good it is.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
BSD?
Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it.
Replying here partly in agreement but mostly in wonder about the OP's AC status. If your ideas or opinions are so bad that you don't want to associate your name (or even a handle) with them, then why bother to post at all? I'd make an exception for cases where you are saying something with possible repercussions, but I'm not seeing it in the OP of this thread. (In a sense, it's moot, since my settings render the ACs nearly invisible. It was the quote in the visible reply that exposed this AC.) Incidentally, it doesn't matter in terms of protecting privacy. Slashdot knows who you are, and surely you can't trust the sanctity of your personal information as stored on Slashdot.
Now what's the agreeing part? In the days of yore computers were within the scope of understanding of a single person. The systems were still small enough that it was at least theoretically possible to understand all of how they worked. I thought that was really fun and cool, even if I never got there I enjoyed the chase. I caught just the tail end of that period.
Not sure when the transition happened, but at this time there is clearly no hope of understanding everything about any "normal" machine. Both the hardware and software have passed the human scope of understanding or control. No one has time to look at billions and billions of transistors or millions and millions of lines of code. We have to abstract, and picking your level of abstraction is not the same as understanding the entire thing.
There's also a level of threat and paranoia that cuts into the fun. Maybe part of that is a result of getting old, but I think it is mostly just a matter of experience and understanding my own limitations. I really don't want to be pwned, but all it would take is one juicy vulnerability, and I'm sure the serious black-hat hackers can find one if'n they want to. If a serious hacker is coming for me, I might as well save both of us the trouble and just turn over my passwords now, eh? The best defense is having nothing worth hacking for?
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
I had tried it several times. Too much work.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
If you're a gamer, you are going to be forever at the mercy of the game companies, who are going to exploit their customers to some extent to maximize profit.
What about all the Open Source and even Free Software video games out there? Sure, they are grossly outnumbered by their commercial counterparts, but some of them are actually very high-quality. There's enough of them to where one could reasonably waste all their time never playing anything else.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Microsoft made a deliberate decision back in the XP days to get rid of the command prompt. And the world is poorer for it.
What deliberate decision? NT Command prompt continues to exist as it always has. More advanced (and overly powerful) PowerShell exists too, so even Microsoft hasn't abandoned CLI.
They did get rid of direct* COMMAND.COM access as they built their consumer OS (XP) on the stable NT kernel, and not the soggy cardboard DOSshell known as "Win9x". The world is better for them abandoning Win9x.
*16 bit DOS emulation exists on 32 bit versions of Windows, but doesn't allow direct access to hardware as COMMAND.COM allowed in Win9x.
FreeBSD, NetBSD. FPGA, Arm, x86. Rasperi Pi, Tablets, Laptops (with USB 3.0 dedicated graphics enclosures). VMs, Cloud, WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet. Want me to start listing programming Languages? How about toolkits for each language?
There's an F-Bomb of variety out there. You don't even have to look that hard.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Computing is a lot more fun now than it was even ten years ago, let alone twenty, let alone longer. You can still do all the same stuff people did back then if you want; people are still wire wrapping their own computers from scratch, for example. And you can still play the games of yesteryear, through emulation. But now there's a whole bunch of things to do which didn't even exist back then, and furthermore, it's vastly easier to get access to a leg up so that you don't have to do a whole job yourself. For example, it's been reasonably possible to build quadcopters since about the 1990s, when cheap MEMS accelerometers began sampling from Analog Devices, and before they appeared in the Wiimote and people began to reappropriate them. But today you can buy a flight controller or build one out of components or you can buy a MCU board and an IMU board. You can write your own flight control software or you can just download code and write the binary or you can download and compile and optionally customize. You can buy the ESCs off the shelf or you can build your own or you can buy cheap ones and reflash them with superior open-source firmware which you can customize. And this is computing, obviously, since each of these things is a little flying computing cluster. And that's before even getting into making them autonomous. We didn't used to have multi-core computers with multiple GB of RAM and an onboard multi-core vector processor which would fit into a ~5W power envelope to do stuff like that with.
Computing is also a lot more cool than it used to be, which ought to be painfully obvious. It's cool to carry a fancy, needlessly expensive computer around in your pocket! We used to get laughed at just for owning a computer, let alone one you could keep in your pocket. Now you get laughed at if your pocket computer is too old!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
and I've got a 2TB hard drive and writeable Blue-Ray. So I'm at nobody's mercy. Now, if you're into Multi-Player games exclusively you might have a point. Especially the ones that connect to servers. Then again, you can still play Phantasy Star Universe on private servers if you're so inclined.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If you don't need a scientific calculator to help troubleshoot logic and/or circuitry, it ain't "cool".
How could you find computing anything but more fun than ever? If there is something you liked a lot more "back in the day" there is nothing stopping you from running things the way they did back in the day.
Games? Emulation, VPNs, old hardware for dirt cheap, etc. It's all there. How is Steam worse than the stupid copy protection of old? You really miss having to thumb through manuals for access codes? Use GoG. Buy the physical media. There are plenty of options.
BBSes or the thrill of war dialing? People still run BBSes if that's your gig. You can do war-walking or war-driving if you want to discover things.
Hardware hacking? Not even close. There are are so many more cheap open source tools and platforms it's ridiculous. and electronics to break and repurpose are produced by the truck load.
It's like complaining that reading is so much worse because your iPad has games on it. Just do things the old way or find the modern hardware and software that meets your needs.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Depends on who your audience is.
Kids and most adults think that game and sfx dev is still cool.
Biz applications and 98% of web sites? No
Yes. The web? No, not at all. I'm 26, and I'm willing to accept that my introduction to both subjects has influenced my opinion, but I think many more people will agree that the web has lost much of its luster for many reasons--while I still find the majority of computer technology interesting, available, and evolving.
The computing environment certainly has changed. The powers that be are busily taking a lot of the fun out of it in their efforts to create 'walled gardens' where THEY (not YOU) control everything. While I am glad that I don't have to get out a soldering iron just to save a few bytes to permanent storage; I get enraged every time some program or system tries to hide my data from me or make it nearly impossible to do what I want with it. I get ticked off when all your settings change because your system decided it was going to 'upgrade' whether you wanted to or not and the company that wrote the software wants to make you view some new ads. I pull my hair out when I can't even find where my app decided to store that file I just created. I certainly miss the days when the 'install program' was copy *.* and the 'uninstall program' was del *.* and you didn't have to worry about a dozen registry settings or DLLs left behind to play havoc on your system. I am currently working on a new system that will bring a lot of that control back where it belongs...with the user.
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I suppose "most" or not very much depends how how big your system is and what you use it for. In a small CLI-based system, most of what the user interacts with is gnu tools. On a Gnome desktop - not so much. Perhaps I should instead say:
Most of the OS we call "Linux" is governed by the freedom-focused licensing created by GNU.
The older cool point is about simplicity, in my opinion. Computers where more simple (I refer to the device itself, not its usability), and it was much easier to hack cool stuff on it.
people seem to forget how hard it was to get software before the internet, especially if you were a kid with no money
I agree, and this goes double for hardware. I grew up with minimal access to computers at home or school. When I stayed with relatives over holidays, I'd spend every possible minute on their computer, but then most of the year I had no access to any computer, let alone any manuals or software. I contented myself with books from the local library, but in 1984 (when I was 13) there wasn't much available. I learned 8080 architecture and machine language, and ANSI C, by reading about them in books, but I didn't have any hardware to try them out on. I would have gotten a lot further, faster, if I'd had the kind of ubiquitous computing hardware, software and documentation that kids have today!
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of the Commodore VIC-20, C-64 and the all awesome Amiga!
The days of the Amiga were the days of real hardware hacking, building your own SCSI controllers, your own cables. Hacking the Amiga hardware - cutting solder traces and soldering wires to the motherboard to add a toggle switch to toggle between 1MEG chip ram and 1/2 meg chip and 1/2 meg fast ram. Soldering wires to jumpers to switch to NTSC and PAL video mode. Multi-boot rom boards. Burning the whole Amiga 2.1 OS into EPROM and having and Amiga 2000 boot instantly! And good old PowerPacker! Compress ANYTHING and save room on the hard drive and leave it runable. Gone are the days of a fully pre-emptive multiatasking OS with a GUI that fit on 4 880K floppy disks! And be able to run more on a 7/14/20 MHZ CPU in 1 meg of ram than a 386/486/pentium of the day....
The Truth is a Virus!!!
Slashdot - News for nerds. I take it Mr. Garbz isn't a computer nerd. What type of nerd are you, anyway?
Also it occurs to me that some of the hacking "cool" flavor that the OP mentions may now be found around the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and other hobbyist platforms.
... Yep, not fun and no time and energy like the old days like from the 1980s to early 2000s. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The Atari, Commodore 64, Apple 2... were hobbyist machines generally designed to interest children in computers. Windows 10 machines are generally work machines generally designed for adults who have some objective not related to entertainment that requires computer assistance to accomplish it. The systems you are describing are the ones that killed the DIY kits from the 1970s, they were part of migration away from hobbyist culture in that they allowed kids (and middle class families) and not adult hobbyists to have a personal computer.
That being said though there are plenty of hobbyist / enthusiast aspects of computing. There are fun simulators for just about everything. There are DIY kits that are far more educational (and stepped) than the ones from the 1970s since the parts are now so cheap. There are tons of educational programming languages. It may feel a little more empty because computers are a profession not a hobby for millions of people. But objectively hobbyists have it much better today than in the golden age.
We have amazing systems and networks today.
Home 24x7 broadband Internet connections with bandwidth 100x of the LANs I grew up hacking together. Computers thousands of times more capable in every way.
Even Grandma's now ancient desktop has an operating system with memory protection, preemptive scheduling, multi-processing and a capable IP stack.
Pocket sized computers now sport capabilities I wouldn't believe myself had someone from the future came back and handed me.
There have been amazing advances in nifty 3-D graphics, web browsers, search, multi-player games like mindcraft and all manner of MMO, global video sharing services, Wikipedia, stack*...
Until relatively recently tech companies I cared about who built hardware and software were focused on getting shit done... providing value for their customers and pushing technology. Today it seems all of the innovation has shifted to production of hardware and software for purposes of facilitating ads and malware. The market seems to have turned to complete shit driven by a death spiral toward everything must be "FREE". I routinely find myself disgusted with what I see talking place around me as "legitimate" companies emulate the playbooks of malware outfits of the past.
The core point of interest to me with regards to computing has always been the structure and utility of the Internet for people to actually effectively communicate.
Internet E-mail is still as insanely dangerous as the first time I entered my SMTP settings and asked how it knew "who" I was only to find out it didn't actually care. It didn't take a rocket scientist to see the incredible damage to countless millions that would arise from this.
The killer feature of the Internet .. the fact it's a network of *peers* remains largely untapped and ignored. There is no market based incentive to care.
Finding information today online is not appreciably different than it was two decades ago with the same players (search engines and ad networks) funding both good (useful content) and evil (spam farms) to similar degrees... They don't really care...never have..
Rate at which the Internet is being converted into something resembling CompuServe/ Prodigy is depressing. Rate of participation of normal people wanting to get involved and host something vs signing up for a Facebook account and "cloud" worshiping is equally depressing.
Market pressures are reinforcing broken shit and actively impeding efforts to address problems because Band-Aids have become billion dollar industries onto themselves. Status Quo way more profitable than actual solutions.
Sheer contempt tech companies now have for people I find breathtaking. Google reads everyones email's. Consumer router/device vendors intentionally produce dangerously broken products and step away Scott free from the carnage left in their wake. Facebook collects histories of every site everyone visits regardless of whether you even use their service. Operating system vendors distribute software containing active remote access trojans by default, denies users the ability to prevent information about what they do and how they use their own computer to be transmitted to others without their consent. Crowd sources beta testing and deny users the ability to opt out. Force reboots whether you want them to occur or would be adversely affected or not. They just assume without even giving it a second thought their perceived needs in any trump respecting their customers.. the user...oh right... users are not customers anymore.
Really hard to think computing is "COOL" when the industry is chalk full of scum.
It's not as roll-your-own as it used to be, but I still enjoy working with computers. The big trend I see causing long term issues is consumerization -- everyone is demanding services that work 100% of the time on their phones, so everything is geared towards that. My big thing is scripting and automation -- making something idiot proof so I can send it out to idiots. ;-) I don't have much time for gaming anymore as I have 2 little kids, but when they get old enough I'm sure I'll get back into it.
One thing I miss of late is physical hardware. I'm a data center nerd at heart and love getting the odd project to do equipment installs, etc. These days it's kind of a treat to do that because all our on-premises stuff runs in VMs and other stuff runs in some cloud data center...I can't remember the last time I worked directly with some of our VM host servers. But, it's a change just like any other in our field. So many people I know are upset about change, and yes, the environment has gotten a lot less "fun" in that a lot of problems are solved. But like I keep explaining over and over to bosses and anyone who will listen, the problems don't disappear -- they just move around, some get smaller while others get larger. Even with the downward salary pressure and rampant ageism, I don't think I'd go back and do something different even if I could -- if you keep learning and pick your projects carefully things stay interesting.
There's a couple of basic problems the submitter and his circle of friends have here that makes it appear that it's not as cool or fun anymore. The first is that they're old enough to start seeing things that are different from how they were in their childhoods as not as good. The second is that they're looking at the designed to be idiot-proof mass market and expecting to see DIY where you can get your hands dirty messing with the inner workings of things.
Games being tied to DRM is an issue, but it can be avoided. It does mean giving up certain games, but that's the reality. If you're a vegetarian, it means living with not eating that steak you'd really like. Otherwise, most of the "basic freedoms" are still there. Use Linux (or BSD, if you prefer) and you can tinker with your software setup to your heart's content. Sure, you don't get these specific de facto standard software suites, but there's by and large a way to do what they do.
The problem that does exist is that everything's more complex, but that doesn't necessarily make things less fun. There's a ton of cool shit that you can do that was simply not possible back then, because you don't have to re-invent the wheel at the lower levels to do anything. If you do want to screw around at that kind of lower level, there are things you can get to do that with, but it's unrealistic to still expect to be able to do that with the same kind of personal computer that everyone else uses to do other stuff with.
True. I felt terribly robbed when I was a child that analogue computers using vacuum tubes and only running a single small program weren't available anymore and I was stuck with digital computers that could run arbitrary code. Amazing I survived this deprivation.
No. Mainstream computing is dull and boring and often frustrating.
Yes. Old time computing still exists, it just isn't mainstream anymore, it is fringe. My first computer required being soldered together from a kit. All personal computers required being soldered together from a kit. I think of the C64 as the third or fourth generation of hobby computers. But guess what: I'm still soldering together my own computers. And it's still fun, and it's still cool. It's just that now, what I do is so far from the mainstream that most people don't realize it is even possible.
They continue to make up most of the OS User Space tools, except with embedded Linux where BusyBox typically replaces them. You are confusing the OS with applications in the repository.
Is the GUI platform part of the applications? The desktop environment? How about the init system? Audio system? Networking stack?
GNU provides a compiler (though much of the world has moved to LLVM), libc, one of the common shells (though not even the most common any more... that is dash, a somewhat stripped-down bash replacement), and a bunch of command-line tools. While the GNU components are important they hardly constitute "most" of the operating system. On systems that have moved away from the SYSV init script system and for users who don't use the command line, I'll bet you could rip out many of those command-line tools without causing any problems.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Oh I think there is a real group of hipster tech folks that not only take pride in open source and innovation, but there is serious coolness to it too.
If I could, I'd go full Wyoming and dump my computers, and smartphone and other such wastes of time and sanity and just run a small farm. Unfortunately for me it's contrary to how I make a living and the pay is too good to make a change.
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It was difficult because my family didn't have any money and they looked down upon me playing with toys. I never played games because I didn't have enough money to buy any and couldn't afford a hard drive, but I became decent at programming and understood chips and how they worked which was an advantage when I hit engineering college. It was all a lot of fun, the challenge being trying to make something that did something that no one had done before - make a computer 'play' a fourier series generated wave form. That was fun.
One of the reasons it is (was, I kinda got out) is that every level of human sensory input could be read or created by a computer. I'm not a very creative person and couldn't think of anything beyond my level of understanding of the universe. Probably by the year 2000, everything had been done. Computers could generate any object that I could see (eg, morphing in Terminator 2; "retina resolution") or hear. 44khz 308kbs audio. Sure, there was the challenge of bigger, better, faster, but after a while even that seems like a treadmill - OK, time for the next incremental crank of the wheel even though nobody will notice.
Every toy that I'd dreamed about having as a kid (FPV drone racing) is now practically given away for a small fraction of what my first computer cost me. There was nothing like the thrill of a ten year old seeing a 4 color monitor at a computer show. I'm now living the future that my fifth grade self imagined.There are a lot of other fun things to do an work on, but computers, not much else is going to happen other than they'll keep getting slightly better at 2% a year.
The programmer's toolbox is better now, with more languages, code can have longer, clearer and more complex lines, safer calls, better garbage collection and modularity, a more uniform common user interface, and sophisticated database interactions.
What's missing is that great unknown, limitless potential, the clubs, Dr. Dobbs, and the clueless millions wanting, needing and willing to believe whatever you told them. And they were willing to pay too.
Programming isn't as cool anymore. I know people in IT who look down on programmers, ridicule what they do. They beg their bosses for classes on how to be an administrator and run Windows, Servers, SharePoint, 365, Azure, Exchange, SMS,...
There is big money in programming, but rarely for programmers. Corporate programming jobs are often outsourced with short short term contracts, or just part time, which negatively affects the software product. The corporations don't care, as long as it doesn't affect the bottom line. Further hampering good programming, the sales departments have become dominant, turning software products into advertising platforms - even the operating system. Surveillance has become an indispensable revenue stream, as businesses have learned from Google and FaceBook how to monetize user information.
The game industry rakes in over $20 billion annually. As they've gotten richer, they've gotten more paranoid over DRM. 3rd tier business software is everywhere, with customers paying more every year. Accountants', auditors' and governments' standards demand that certain financial information be packaged according to the rule books. If anything goes wrong, until otherwise proved, it's the local programmer's fault. The one exception: if the programmer is in 'the club', they find somebody/something else to blame.
Yeah, programming can still be fun, but cool - eh.
[FSF] continue to make up most of the OS User Space tools
Not even close to true. Just list the packages on a typical Linux system and do some statistical sampling. FSF provides a disproportionately large share of key projects, certainly, like libc, gcc and bash. Thousands of other packages are from all over the map. None of the popular desktop environments are FSF projects, for example.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
there becomes increasingly less one can do in *nix
You live on a different planet than I do.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
IT landscape is pain in the ass if you are seeking for a motivating programming job. Usually, large companies buy products to do almost everything. What is left is customization to your particular business or enterprise. In this arena, the software vendors are making huge efforts to make the interface as boring as they can since "easy to customize" is a major selling point. They want to tell your boss your work can be done by a monkey, so they make it that way. Some are having graphical interfaces which at the end of the day happen to be more time consuming than an standard API in any language a good programmer can take advantage of.
A fool with a tool is still a fool. So, they hire monkeys to play with the graphical programming interface and they produce shitty code because it is so easy to add layers and layers of shit over shit. Then they wonder why that beast they paid many hundred thousand dollars is working so slow and so bad.
All the fun is at home.
Achille Talon
Hop!
With QB64 it is just as easy to write just about any program you could have written under Microsoft's QuickBASIC as it has always been, including "Hello, World!", and it extends the language so you can write much more. The library of amature programs written for QuickBASIC/QBASIC is still around to learn from and extend.
...If you depend on some company to make everything you use, you've set yourself up to be their "client". Don't do that.
Don't do that? Oh you mean break all the new laws designed to prevent you from standing on your own?
Shit like DRM has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with forcibly locking in a customer base.
Nonsense. I've been able to use a directory navigation program with every Android device I've had. There are several in the Play store.
Or you can, you know, actually have something valuable enough to say that your e-reputation won't suffer. I have never had to worry about my e-reputation.
You hopped over the buy the computer and download updates step. Computers are a lot more expensive.
Dollar for dollar, computers (the device itself) haven't gotten more expensive come to think of it, but there are extenuating circumstances that makes it seem like it is, like the "need" for internet access. I also don't know what the C64 and the pre-IBM compatibles cost. I bought my computers either used or from a no-name shop when I first got into things. Used computers seem to be harder to come by at the steep discount you could originally get them at.
IT landscape is pain in the ass... A fool with a tool is still a fool...
All the fun is at home.
Word.
Yes. I'd like to hear more from gamers who mostly play Open Source games.
Bruce Perens.
I thougt their slogan was to ask, "Where do you want to go today?"
So how does needing Windows make anyone particularly dumb... except that I keep running into some sort of resource pool limitation on Windows that makes it have "out of memory" type problems, when there is plenty.
I grew up with the Apple II, hacked its ROM and made my own, hacked a CASIO thermal transfer printer and made it work as a printer to the Apple II and printed my University thesis with it using Wordstar. I love computing but I hate doing things that I believe the software, system, SDK, API, etc. shall do it for me automatically because I want to focus on the core, creativity part but not spending hours and days trying to get a damn button on the screen that says hello world. Thanks to the industry, one can now get a cool, breathing 3D button and view through the VR headset in less than a minute, and slightly little more work to show your own fingers so that you can actually click on the button, which is soooo cool.
I love the Internet, the first time I was told about ransomware, and I thought, Awesome! You can actually make money out of it? But then it was just a few lines of python script and I've quickly got bored. The vulnerabilities are headaches but they saved me a few times in the past when I forgot the password to a certain web sites and there was no way to retrieve it, it's really useful sometimes to be able to gain some free admin level access. The cloud is a great tool, now I can have access to big NNs where I can develop intelligent algorithms for various applications and uses, quickly and affordably, together with micro services and containers, lots of cool things can be done.
The thing is, one just need to look around and it is not difficult to discover something new and fun to work with, and many times, inspiring and awesome. I am glad that the industry has grown so much and into such wide diversity. //Ed
Oh yeah? Then tell me exactly how much silicon and other atoms were in each and every transistor of those computers. How much carbon was in the plastic surrounding said chips. Give to the last digit how much resistance every part had. How much could you overclock those parts? Cooling?
With QB64, Steam Workshop, and Source Filmmaker I've got more I can do than I can shake a stick at. And that's not even including all the game making bundles that can be gotten on the cheap that Humble Bundle keeps having. And that doesn't include the Open Source tools. Free assets? They're out there.
Back when I was a kid there was a time where even having a phone in the house was something we couldn't afford. Times did get better for us, but meh.
I used to be against DRM until Steam showed that I could move all my games from PC to PC and there's also plenty of Steam games that are free and bundle sites with tons of games that are cheap.
> 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.
DRM did already exist in the 80s. In the form of cartridges (MSX, C64, Vic-20, Atari 800XL, TI-99/4A), bad sectors and weak bits on floppy disks, non-standard loaders for cassette tapes, dongles on the parallel port for pro software, etc.
> 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
What's the problem then, he has a choice. Nobody is forced to use Windows 10. In the 80s you didn't have much choice for the OS, now you can chose between a multitude of OS, often for free.
> A third complained about zero privacy online, internet advertising, viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware.
Zero privacy is a user choice, you can easily browse anonymously, disable cookies, use ad-blockers and anti-virus and chose to not use social networks that you think invade your privacy. Also computer viruses and hacking already existed in the 80s.
> I lamented that the hardware industry still hasn't given us anything resembling photorealistic realtime 3D graphics
Look at this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
> and that the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have.
Suitable displays didn't exist a decade ago, several HMDs were released at this period like the eMagin Z800 in 2005, Headplay Visor in 2007 and Vuzix VR920 in 2008. But it was nowhere enough in terms of FOV, resolution and latency to succeed, same thing for the Sony HMZ-T1, SMD ST1080 and Vuzix VR1200 headsets released in 2011/2012.
> A point of general agreement was that big tech companies in particular don't treat computer users with enough respect anymore.
They've always been after your money and have always used all the possible legal tactics to get it, that's just the means that have changed since the apparition of Internet. The laws and the people simply need to adapt and do what is necessary to prevent abuses.
Also it depends on how you look at it. If you're a developer/hacker, big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Facebook, Google, IBM, Epic, Valve, etc. have greatly lowered the access to computing tools and information (free programming languages, game engines, SDKs, IDEs, databases, Web frameworks, forums, documentation, free tutorials, etc.) and have mostly embraced the open source movement.
> 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?
For me it's as cool and even cooler than in the 80s when I started programming. Today you can experiment with a lot of computing technologies basically for free : AR, VR, 3D, computer vision, game creation, Web programming, 3D printing, drones, Raspberry, Arduino, etc. Information is also much easier to find today thanks to Internet.
But if you're only a end-user who doesn't know anything besides Windows 10 and doesn't want to learn anything else, then yes, I guess I can understand why you would see computing as less cool and fun than in the 80s.
A year ago I was at a garage sale when three boys came running up. They were SO excited about one of the items -a REAL bow & arrow! Not a compound bow, just a simple, cheap thing. But a REAL BOW AND ARROW! Oh how the boys wished they could buy it.
I remember being a boy, making a bow with a stick from the yard and a shoe string. Today I could so easily spend the $10 or $20 for that garage sale bow. I didn't, because there wasn't any excitement there for me.
Wouldn't it be great if we DID still get exuberant over a $10 garage sale item? We could give ourselves an awesome Christmas present every day!
I use the command line all the time. I think Microsoft may have swapped PowerShell for CMD behind my back, but it still seems to behave the same. I just got done using wget -r. I still need to do git svn fetch of gcc, keeps getting interrupted.
Forget compiled languages. That's not fun.
We want command based (imperative) languages that can be run in a REPL for fun. BASIC basically fits this.
Take Python as a contemporary example. Now look at how many basic features of interactivity are NOT enabled in an easy way in Python by default: LOCATE, INKEY, SOUND, PLAY, SCREEN, PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, PGET.
Just these. You can't do ANY of these things in Python with a basic install. "Yes," if you have tkinter in your install, you kind of can. But it's hairy and complex. It's not anywhere near as simple or accessible as BASIC. Pygmy makes some of these things possible, but those are further steps of installation away, and the interactivity feels further away.
Line numbers are incredibly simple (read: understandable) as a flow control model. "Why Johnny Can't Code" outlined the problem with mandatory complex abstract control structures.
I think there are basic fundamental missing pieces in the contemporary programming environment, and that the industry is worse for it.
You do have a point. Also, a counterpoint:
> but I don't see how someone claiming to have a PhD in nuclear physics is somehow more credible just because
If you read here often, you start to recognize some of the names. Actually even if you DON'T read here often, you may recognize somw names, like Bruce Perens. Bruce doesn't "claim" to have a PhD, Bruce is a *recognized* expert. When Bruce writes about security and such, you can bet that he has good reason to say whatever he says, he knows what he's talking about. When I disagree with Bruce, I know that I should take a moment to really think about what he says - if it sounds dumb at first, I might be missing something.
I've read enough posts by TacoCowboy to know that he's insightful, and to know a bit of his life story. When he says something, a) I want to read it and b) I know where he's coming from, so I can understand his comment *in the context of who he is and where he's coming from*. Reading a paragraph, I can understand better if I know which story that paragraph is part of.
Some other commenters, I know where their coming from too, they are here to advance an agenda and don't mind making up completely fictional "facts" to try to advance their propaganda. I know that if I bother to read a post by MdSolar, and "facts" he claims likely came from his ass. Having his name in those posts is helpful.
A few people probably read hear enough that raymorris is a veteran IT security professional, writing security software and detection/export code. They've seen enough of raymorris's posts to realize that he knows this topic, so when he gives analysis or advice, they read it with that in mind. Other people may have noticed that raymorris also likes to troll the most Koolaid drinking the liberals here, the guys who blindly follow and parrot anything they hear about "evil corporations" and "investors", but don't know anything at all about the topics they flame about. So those who have noticed this don't take raymorris's posts seriously when they see him trolling the most clueless of liberals.
It's useful to have the names on the posts. You might see a ridiculous political post and if it's by raymorris you know he's parodying liberals, if the exact same words are posted by MdSolar you know he's being completely serious - he actually believes a parody of liberalism.
Besides, my former boss used to read and occasionally post here. When arguing with some idiot on the internet, it's good to know if that idiot happens to be your boss.:) He can certainly know when it's me replying to him!
Computing *itself* is less fun... but now we have infinite free porn available instantly. I'd say that's a fair trade. :D
In all seriousness, you could say the same thing about cars now vs. the 80s... or you could have said it in the 80s vs the 50s. And I feel the same about computers as I do about cars: I can still tinker if I *want* to, but at the same time I like that I don't *have* to.
Strictly speaking, you can still go buy a C64 or Atari 800 or whatever you want on eBay and it'll be the same computer that it was back then... and if you want to solder or write a crappy text adventure game in BASIC, you still can. Give it a shot, see how fun it is.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
In the past the quality of programmer was better. Hardware and software was really understood by a select few.
The Renaissance Man, polymath who could code, create and follow software design from start to support phases.
Quality education and merit advancement saw the very best with varied talents in code, music, arts able to offer complete amazing projects.
On time, on budget and within hardware limits with nice visuals, music and good stories.
Graphics, CPU, RAM limits, music, software design and game flow had to be tight.
Now the average system has enough RAM, network bandwidth, a powerful CPU, a great GPU. Everything is ready for really great designers and brands.
What is lacking a smaller teams of really great, creative people with the creative and artistic US/EU freedom of the 1980's, 1990's.
A really good plot, using the gpu, cpu to its best. Not play testing a release on paying customers.
The problems seemed to add up with OS teams split between desktop and console projects.
GPU brands not racing each other to be 4K ready well before 4K displays and games.
Other creative OS developers not keeping up with the music and art game design apps teams needed.
The meddling in brands by outside SJW wanting ever more control over plot and demands for ever more cultural enrichment in the branding and game visual.
SJW demands take away from testing, design and creativity.
OS makers need to support their tools and document their code tools so more developers can be ready for any changes.
Don't let a great game get stuck in some SJW committee, spend that time and funding on getting the game ready.
Stop hiring useless, average staff to work on complex projects based on submitted "paperwork".
Start hiring the very best and ensure they have some musical or artistic talent along with the best coding skills for their generation.
Ask applicants about their computer usage, computer systems they had over years.
The bandwidth they had at home, the early computer systems, the fun games and consoles. The OS's and code they worked with over the years. The hours they put into music, sport and art. The english, arts, languages their teachers supported.
See how they recall the fun of good games and recalling past music, game art. Make sure the person got a long exposure to game art, music, OS's, reading, fiction. Did their education allow for lots of different extra curricular reading, art, provide access to a few very different computer systems?
Average at code is not good enough on some paper resume from a university. Not having a lot of background in early computer games makes the person useless. Thats a decade of insight a much better qualified person will bring as they enjoyed the game culture on desktops, the net, consoles.
Conduct much better interviews and only hire the best who can talk about their access to hardware, software, music, arts and games.
Good education and access to a lot of expensive hardware, software, past games brings a creativity that can really make future projects great.
Stay away from the average, mediocre and set up a corporate structure of small teams that can avoid big gov hiring regulations or SJW pressure.
A company kept very small with a few of the best consultants might be better than a vast team of really below average staff.
Only hire the best staff. If gov hiring regulations or SJW pressure is great in a city or state, move your brand. Don't get stuck with very average full time workers.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ok so my take on it is this: Apple without Jobs is stale/boring/useless. They were going in a bad direction when they axed the professional lines, and now that they've completely ditched the professional market there's nothing interesting there. They used to be a media powerhouse, now it's a glorified browser machine. Yuck. Windows is still doing it's boring old thing of plodding along as an annoying mess with an interface you're stuck with and no access to the guts. Linux has become more useful as an entertainment system, but still pretty horrid for media creation. Recent bright spots include Krita, and the video editing stack which seems to finally be getting somewhere. We still need an equivalent to the video compositing features of Quartz on the Mac.Now to the wider tech space. VR is exciting but this insane focus on performance over content is slowly killing it. What's needed is something like X-Wing Alliance or Freespace 2 to gain VR support so that the VR platform has something compelling which isn't over in 30 seconds going for it. On the Open source gaming front it's better than ever with Unity/Unreal 4/Cryengine all being open source but more can be done. Tools Tools Tools is the name of the game, we need more modellers, more editors etc.Microsoft/Mac are the problem but Linux seems to be holding its own and improving compared to those two platforms.
When I was a young kid (early- to mid-1980's), computing filled me with a sense of wonder and awe. It seemed like a wide-open frontier, with infinite delights to discover. The field has become so brazenly commercial and profit-driven, with few if any genuine life-changing applications (as opposed to a trivial and frivolous kabuki theatre of bread-and-circuses 'apps') that I now look upon it as a way to pay the bills and not much more. I keep waiting for something to reignite the fire in my belly, so far in vain. I am coming more and more to the conclusion that my choosing computers as a hobby was merely arbitrary, and that the sense of wonder and awe is unique to childhood and something that can never be recaptured for the rest of my life. :(
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I grew a big-assed tornado on a supercomputer. How fucking cool is that? Can't do that on an Apple ][.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
I started on Apple II, TRS-80, Atari 800, C64 and I certainly remember those days fondly. But today's kids have Scratch, Python, PICO-8, Unity, Unreal, HTML5, Processing, digital cameras, digital video, the internet, github and all kind of other stuff to go crazy on. You can **start** learning how to make a website on HTML or a **start** learning to make a game in Unity in 30-60 minutes and have thousands of tutorials and videos all over the web to help you progress. That's sooooooooooo much better than it was back in the 8bit days when the best you could hope for was some BASIC games books, Softdisk / Compute Magazine and or whatever you could find at the local bookstore.
Maybe it's not so fun any more to write a cheesy game. But there are plenty of fun things to do if you're a hacker.
- 3D printing
- Arduino and other compute sticks
- Lego Mindstorms
- Drones
- Google Cardboard
If you just look around a little, there are lots of fun things you can do as a programmer, and many can be done with not much expense.
The landscape has changed, but the fun stuff is still out there.
The complainers did not want to eliminate the old priesthood, they wanted to become the new priesthood. They are mad that their lessers can buy complete working products without blessings or incantations.
What hassle? You log in once when you buy a computer and Slashdot will remember it forever. Chrome or Firefox, dunno about Microsoft's offerings, will remember your log in details. On phones it's a little bit different, but two clicks in Chrome after making a post and you're logged back in. Don't you have to enter a captcha to post anonymously? No such thing when you're logged in.
My first computer was a 33MHz 386SX with 1MB of RAM and a 110MB HDD. In today's dollars it cost $2,835. Today you can get a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition for $950 and still have enough money left over to bathe in BeagleBone Blacks, or a lifetime subscription to Linode if you want. There are a bunch of crappy products on the market, but I would never choose to go back to expensive slow computers.
It once was col and fun? Tell me when this magical time was.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I have been saying that for Years. 1.Its called APIs .2. Sloppy coding . Not realistic true as it is look at it its 8bit coding .you see it yourself .Most admit they dont know jack about the architecture ,. Then they claim that its 64bit or unix or true real-time ,but its not .The Amiga had all these things ,and more. Much much more.Not to mention tight coding. Yes, it is a dumbing down of society wither you like to believe it or not .i do believe some in here with the inane remarks are shrills ,and part of the problem really look at win 10. How many times before did they try ,and dumb down society with the stupid flat look clip artish 1970s ..4 times at least ,but guess what Amiga was there to stop them .congrats people u have just vga source and windows so now they accomplished it , and shoved the pos down ur throats ,and u have fallen for it, It kept it there .Then they passed it off as something new rofl
You believe apple is the thing .. you believe in the 8bit world of unrealism you are stuck with what you have, A pos unrealistic 8bit graphics 8bit cpu time sharing graphics cards and cpu that is linux wither it be open bsd or mac os x or if its win 10 sand boxing ubuntu ..then they will kill linux soon. Congrats .. So you better make a new linux ..hum go back to the original linux on the Amiga in 1987.i wrned you all .I did No one would listen .. Oh it parallels with this as its a deep deep rabbit hole they do it in all parts of life open your eyes .
oh what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive.. the rabbit hole is very very deep
oh yeah maybe about 23 secs in:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Till All shall See ..Again
John 3:17
Hacking electric nerd.
I started out programming Apple II+ and while it was fun learning assembly and peeks and pokes and breaking apart everything, you just could not do what you can today. (I consider that generation of kids in the 1980's to be the first digital generation.) Yes I know trying to stuff all that code into 64K was something you just can't do today, but the programs are more complex and the hardware is more complex. Its like saying well Black and White TV was great and the shows were great.. yes, but HD TV in color is much crisper and nicer, people don't remember what analog TV is anymore and how bad the picture was. Put yourself in this position, as I do on several occasions. If you had to go back to your younger years, what device would you take with you to make programming more fun then? Yes everything was new and that generation has lived through one of those periods in human kind where things where a first. Like when they first discovered how to fly, do you think it was more fun then to fly then now? Today there is so much available, books and code and game engines, graphics cards, mico-controllers, Linux, that one person can use to do almost anything, and do it quite fast... It is so easy to get a good education without going to school with so much online. I wish I had all this when I was a kid, There is so much fun stuff to do today, so many new ideas, games, apps and ways to go about doing it that I can't write systems fast enough to do all those ideas I want to do. Try building and running a Neural Network in 1982 and tell me that was fun compared to what you can do today. Give me today and the future over living in nostalgia and only remember the good fun new things. The only constant is change.
It doesn't matter if you are talking about computers or your old grandma's food, nostalgia just sucks. The feeling that you had fun, were younger and felt brighter than most of your colleagues is messing with your judgement. Computer can be fun if you don't try to mimic what you used to do 30 years ago, it's a brave new world, dude.
I'd agree except that there are a LOT of independent game companies who care more than just profit. If you are a gamer you do have choices.
Aw hell yeah. OK (I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but for the benefit of everyone else) have you seen the stuff you can buy these days?? And the price?
In terms of tools, ebay specials (or even maplin for some of it) will get you a pretty servicable electronics lab for low end PRO work for a few hundred quid (minus scope). If you're not doing fine pitch SMD (that few hundred quid is fine for that) you can do it somewhat cheaper.
And then there's the components. You can get a tube of 100 TS358 dual op-amps (which are comparable/better than the venerable 741 across the board) for 6p each, on free next day delivery from a reputable vendor. OK so they don't have the offset null, but honestly who would use that on a 741 these days? 6p is far less than they cost when I was a lad, and that's not even taking inflation into account. If you want to splash out on fancy op-amps you can get ones better by a remarkable degree in every single spec than the 741 for less money now.
And have you seen the MOSFETs? [can't remember off hand, so heads over to favourite reputable vendor and searches for the cheapest] crikey, looks like you can get a logic level mosfet capable of switching 55A continuous with respectably small delay and gate capacitance for 25p for 50 or a quid in unit quantities. Bloody hell that's REALLY good actually. Oh and that's still on free next day from reputable vendor.
If you're really on a budget, there's still the ebay and aliexpress specials for less if you're prepared to wait and take the risk.
Even the passives are awesome now.
The lack of hacking friendly ports on the hardware side is a big issue too.
True: the parallel port was actually a pretty respectable I/O port, though on the RPi now, you get more I/O than that.
Personally I like the older stuff. Emulators are great for it actually - back in the day I used to reboot my computer about 900 times a day as I was trying to debug assembler (didn't have a single step debugger and of course no memory protection) and figure out what the hardware was doing, and emulators make it much easier.
What did you used to hack on? I was a BBC boy. I've done a bit of retrohacking since and it's a lot easier with a proper editor, and etc too!
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Even not requiring FOSS specifically, there's a lot of indie games which are made for the love of the art, not to screw over customers to maximise profit.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The problem is that if you enjoy playing computer games it doesn't matter how many free and open source games there are, they still can't fully replace commercial offerings.
In three years at university I spent six months (actual time) playing one open source game (to which I contributed code), completed Angband (back when you couldn't save scum), played several dozen other open source games (and contributed code to several) and still found time to play Geoff Crammond games, Elite: Frontier and Micropose Golf.
These days I still play Angband, I regularly download free or open source games and play them but I also have 590 games in my Steam library.
Mostly play Open Source games? Almost nobody; anybody that enjoys computer gaming will go beyond open source. Commercial games continue to offer experiences the open source options can't match.
First, why do you care if people laugh at you for using the GIMP? Perhaps if you're operating in the rarified top .5% like the cover of Vogue the full power of photoshop is what you need. But if you look around, you can see the shoddy quality with which most stuff is produced with. Some of it would be an embarrassment to paintbrush. But I'm not a pro artist, and GIMP is more than satisfactory for my needs.
And Acrobat? Alternative? what? Fewer and fewer people have advanced PDF readers any more. More and more are reading them via google's viewer, Windows's viewer or the web browser built in ones. Those have none of the advanced features that Acrobat is needed to activate. Hell they can barely do the semi-basic ones like forms and annotations in a reliable manner any more. Time was you could rely on almost everyone having acroread installed. That time has long gone.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
We don't have those great kits you could buy from magazines any more though, and while people like Adafruit do offer some interesting stuff it's more Arduino level plugging modules together than figuring out why your transistor biasing isn't working.
I see all of the above. Quite a few people actually take their Arduino-based designs to the next level, and design their own PCBs. Then they get to have all the same kinds of fun as everyone else. Quite a lot of those module boards have schematics or even the actual designs for the PCBs available, so you can trivially include them in your own designs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In a small CLI-based system, most of what the user interacts with is gnu tools.
You can have a Linux system without any GNU in it at all by using busybox and an alternative libc, but without certain components you'll have a very hard time compiling software. A lot of it expects bison and GNU m4.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only platform that you can still get the hood open now is Linux.
no
Just buying hardware with Linux doesn't mean it's open enough to be useful for example: Android as generally sold. AOSP is the exception.
AOSP coming with the device or not is totally orthogonal to the real issue in Android, which is driver code. The only GPU commonly used with Android for which open source drivers are available is Mali400, and the drivers are still only at proof of concept stage. And then there's all the other hardware in the system. On the other hand, lots of devices never meant to be freed are now running AOSP, or some other distribution of Android specially crafted for them (See: xda-developers Android Development forums.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's as fun as you want to make it. Seriously, i thought computing was going to hell in the mid 90s, then i discovered Linux and it was fun again and this platform keeps it fun for me even to this day because it advances all the time and you can tinker away as much as you want.
Even if you miss the old 8bit home computers days of past, it is still a great time. Look at the vibrant and alive C64/Amiga scene and marvel at all the things you can do with them NOW that you could never have imagined back in the day (or would have cost millions to make). If you don't care about retro computers, the tech is here now that people make their own cheap 8bit computers or even CPU's.
We only had basic back in the day and our own programs wouldn't reach much father then family and friends. These days kids have so many ways to start coding with so many good and easy powerful languages and with the internet and app shops the whole world can discover your program. Learning is easier than ever, online documentation and coder dojo's in every city!
I had to laugh with this:
"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" - worried about spyware and moving to ANDROID?!
It's amazing time for computing, the only limit is your imagination!
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
You are just getting old. You have forgotten the crap we had to put up with then. Trying to get software home with a bunch of fucken floppy disks where one out of ten would fuck out and you would have to wait to go back to where you got it from (a friend or whatever). Want to code in assembly, buy the manual, can't afford it? Tough. Now you can just download what you need. Just because you have lost interest in the art is no reason to say that it has lost it's allure to others. Go into management like most old people do and leave the coding to the people who enjoy it. I started my working career on an AS/400 mainframe, things have only gotten better since. I am now dabbling in hacking memory sticks. Did you know that each memory stick has a 8 bit cpu in it? The one I am currently messing with runs at 250mhz and has a 1 mb of RAM, that is more processing power and memory than my first PC (by a LARGE margin), how the fuck can you be bored? I own two Wii consoles because you can hack the crap out of them and make them dance. I've literally lost count of how many RPI's I have, I'm messing with microchips because I want to get into the IOT when I retire in a couple years and make some money on the side by automating shit. If you are bored you have lost the interest in learning new things and should just move into management, or become a business analyst.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
In the same way that Glenn Close looks as good as she did when she was 21.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Parts cost less
There are more parts to choose from
More stores selling parts
More resources to learn about how to install parts
Parts are easier to install than before (no jumpers, easier connectors, locking connectors, etc...)
The price of Microsoft's Operating Systems have gone down
Linux is ready for the desktop
Mac OS X went x86 making Hackintoshes a reality
Internet is faster and more reliable than the dial-up days
Games are available DRM-free from sites like GoG.com
Multiplayer has gone from 2 computers connected with a Null Modem Serial Cable in the same room to 64+ players anywhere in the world on a single server
Various lighting options abound for customizing systems and accessories
Watercooling is a thing
There has never been a better time to learn to code and make your own games, with easy paths to release games for profit
Multiple monitors on a single system are a thing
3D monitors are a thing
VR headsets are a thing
Rasbperry Pi
MAME
The list goes on... it has never been a greater time to be a nerd. The 2 things people struggle with when they get older are time and money, when you're young you don't care about either, you use them with reckless abandon. Albeit, money is scarce as a kid, but when you get it you tend to spend it on things that fun.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
A hobby is something you work on out of passion.
Whoredom is a job or something you do to otherwise prove your value to others.
We ejected the geniuses, and replaced them with Silicon Valley nitwits. All the big tasks are conquered, and now we're shuffling the chairs on the deck of the Titanic, hoping to invent the next Twitter (which seems to be going bankrupt anyway).
The internet is boring since it became basically six big sites with all the traffic, and the small blogs got squeezed out.
Even worse is that no one in authority noticed this happening and complained about it.
So no, computing is not very cool anymore. Prepping and home fabrication might be.
Alternative Right.
A few years ago, I was set up with a girl who a mutual friend described as being "into computers." 30 years ago, that would be something special. Today, it just means that they surf the web a whole lot.
if you think "computing is not as cool and as much fun today", you are doing it wrong: there's no internet on the 80's...
But machine learning, artificial intelligence and data science! Enough said?
At work I recently bought in a Picoscope 2204A. Two channel scope, only 10MHz but fine for a lot of uses, and an arbitrary waveform generator going up to a few hundred kilohertz. £90, delivered.
The kit you can get these days is quite fantastic for the money.
I recently had some four later PCBs made in China too. $40 delivered for 10.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I call BS, cost is not a barrier at all. I paid $2200 for my first computer in 1990. It was a 386DX-33, with 2MB of memory and an 80MB hard drive. Can you spend that on a computer today? Absolutely. Do you have to? Absolutely not.
If you watch Craigslist, you can get free computers. If you have friends/family that upgrade, you can get free computers.
If you buy used computers on CL you can get them cheap or very cheap, either from people who upgrade or people who buy them in bulk or clear out businesses.
Brand new 23"+ monitors go on sale all the time for less than $100. Storage is cheap. Memory isn't that bad, although still reasonable. Broadband might be a barrier for some, but when I bought my first computer it did not even have a modem!
What is a barrier is the mentality that you have to buy the newest and the best of everything.
I have three kids, and all of them have computers. They are all hand-me-downs, and even the previous versions of hand-me-downs I have either sold very cheaply or given away. They are all Core2 Duos, and I even have a Core2Quad system sitting unused that I got free from work because it was "ancient". I just bought my son a brand new video card for Xmas (Nvidia GT710) for $25 because some of the games he plays weren't working well on his integrated video.
Not to mention things like Raspberry Pi and building / assembling your own components. I understand that isn't for everyone, but it's an option as well.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It's not the barrier of entry that is the problem. There practically isn't one anymore. The problem is maintaining interest when you are continually bombarded with new technologies that change on an almost monthly basis, and each knew think someone pulls out of their ass is it's own complete and unique snowflake, so anything you learned from a previous technology may as well be thrown away cause the knowledge won't apply to the new thing.
Hell, just look at a subset like the javascript ecosystem. People invent and throw away entire APIs and frameworks almost as often as they go to the bathroom, and the knowledge you gain from one is virtually useless when you have to switch to another.
And lets not get into the way everyone insists on destroying backward compatibility with every major version. Angular 2 is completely incompatible with 1. Python 3 is incompatible with 2. It just goes on and on.
In the older days, a competent developer would pointedly learn multiple languages and system becauses it gave you a breadth of experience. This wasn't a requirement. This is just what you did if you were serious about programming. You'd install the appropriate IDE for your chosen language, and off you went.
Now? There are countless tools available to do anything you could ever want. But if you want to be a serious programmer you need to learn multiple languages, multiple descriptor formats, and god knows how many random "frameworks" just to get *started*. And after a year, you are basically guaranteed to have to either switch to a different framework, or live with an abandoned one because suddenly the stuff you're using isn't "popular" anymore. Java was difficult but good when it first came out. Now it's a joke, especially JEE. I could write a massive post that was nothing more than a list of all the TLAs and FLAs for all the Java things that are officially part of the spec.
Why? Cause it's written by some smartass cowboy that thinks everything that came before is garbage, and that they can solve all the worlds problems with their shiny new One True Framework. Meanwhile, on top of re-inventing the wheel, they repeat all the mistakes that were made before. MongoDB and the other NoSQL databases are a perfect example of this. There was a *reason* SQL was invented, and I just sit and laugh when people complain about how hard it is to do reporting on NoSQL databases.
There is a reason why languages like C/C++ have so much staying power. They're *stable*. They've withstood the test of time. They're a little harder to get off the ground with, but at least you can be assured that you don't have to throw away all that hard won knowledge 6 months from now. Java *almost* fits this criteria, but there are just too many add-ons, and Oracle appears to be doing their level best at pissing everyone off and pushing them away from the platform.
And in the end programming ends up just not being fun anymore.
I don't care if people laugh. Never have. I actually prefer GIMP to Photoshop. (I have both.) Thought I'm still annoyed at GIMP for removing the "save as" feature and making "export" the same option.
As for Acrobat, there is no alternative. I do much of my work - performance evaluations, my evaluations, time off requests, overtime requests, purchase requests - in Adobe Experience Manager. Not only do I need to be on Windows (7, 8, 10) but I need to have IE. I used to hack this stuff together using WINE (http://perfectreign.com/stuff/2009/20090614_wine_excel_2007.jpg) but gave up around 2011, with it becoming increasingly impossible.
That said - we have several hundred servers running RHEL, and several dozen of our web servers run on various zLinux servers. I believe many of our Cisco servers are Linux also (though I'm not sure).
Keep in mind, I used Linux since the late '90s - http://www.perfectreign.com/2014/08/15-years-of-linux/ - so am somewhat proficient. I still use BASH on my Windows OSX machine - https://twitter.com/PerfectReign/status/724771094566072320
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Back in 1986 in high school computer class we were programming BASIC on the Tandy TRS-80 Model IIIs. Our computer teacher comes in one day with a box full of floppies (5.25") that she had picked up somewhere. The contents were unknown. So our assignment was to go through them and try to figure out what was on them, if anything, and keep notes.
You can only imagine the thrill of finding some discs that contained ascii nudes!
It caused quite a stir and they were eventually confiscated, but that is burned into my brain for sure.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Answer: No.
And (IMNSHO) we can blame M$ and the PC for that; where is the diversity in computing today? Back in the day you had all kinds of hw options but now you have x86 and perhaps a bit of ARM (on something you don't put on your desktop). ...does nothing for me.
I rooted for the PS2 with its oddball hw, I rooted for the PS3 with its oddball hw, and then the PS4
(But hey! I am keenly watching Mill Computing...)
Are you kidding. Things are way cooler now!!!!!!!!!
Programming Languages: Way faster-to-code languages like C#, Java.
Programming Frameworks: So much more boilerplate code is already written for you so you can build bigger stuff.
Art: Photoshop, etc. Paint.Net, Gimp can create photorealistic images and they are free.
3d and Animation: Unity3d, Daz3d, Poser, Maya, etc.
Virtual Reality: Samsung Gear VR, Microsoft Hololens, Oculus Rift, etc.
The internet: Web, Cloud
Voice Assistants: Alexa, Google, Siri, Cortana
Virtual Machines/Environments: VMWare, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, Docker
Operating Systems: Windows/Linux (10,000 distros)/Mac&BSD
Mobile Market: Smart Phones/Tablets/Hybrids
Small computing: Rasberry PI and competitors.
Medical: Internal Medical Devices
Wearable: Phones as watches, finally! Glasses, which still need serious work and smaller physical footprint. So much more to come.
IoT: Smart Homes, and so much more.
Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, Gaming Systems, blogs, forums, etc.
Need I go on.
The world of computing is so much more awesome than it was when my family got our first Adam computer in 1980-something that ran on casset tapes.
When I was a kid, I could go buy a book, hit control-reset on my Apple IIe, and start writing code. Later I got a disk with an OS on it so that I could actually save my programs. The first thing I ever wrote beyond hello world was a half-assed Zork type game.
Then I got a modem, and could get on some BBS. The internet blew up, and I could get information from AltaVista about everything that I happened to look up. All of a sudden I could write programs to do far more than I could have ever imagined on my Apple IIe.
Is it fun today? Kids now can 3d print pretty much anything. They can make games easily with tooling that didn't exist when I was younger. They have access to the sum of mankind's knowledge. They don't have to write sorting routines anymore, since every major language has a built in function to do just that - better than whatever you throw together would do.
Sure, it's different, but the tools just got better and better. There are annoyances, like ads on every damn thing on the internet, but looking past that the sky truly is the limit.
How old is Second Life? Like 12 years or so? That's an amazing thing to think about. An immersive world that you could customize to your heart's content, and it's basically dead. When I was a kid, the best we could have hoped for would have been better referred to as "third world."
Is it the same as it used to be? Certainly not. Is it no longer fun? Only if you want to do exactly what you used to with those same limitations.
"VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have"
Why SHOULD it have? Just because you want it true does not make it so. The technology was not there (and, to be honest, still ain't).
"the hardware industry still hasn't given us anything resembling photorealistic realtime 3D graphics"
Do you even have any idea what you are talking about? I started with a TRS-80 with 128x48 graphics in '79, have written a ray tracer in my day, on a 386, am a fair expert in the field and I am stunned by what the hardware industry have given us. The problem with Photorealistic Realtime is that you have to do global illumination to make it realistic, which, with today's tech, is not realistic. This is a HARD problem. Again, just because your fantasy demands that it be true does not make it so.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Same here, although I have to say the work once rented Indesign for a specific job that lasted a month for about 40 Dollars. That was a bargain, it would have been much, much, harder to do the job properly if we could not use it, and buying it for a use-once scenario was not realistic budget-wise. 40 Dollars is less than one hour of my time, so it is a bargain.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Computing used to be more fun because there was more variety in the computers out there. Each one had its own personality, even if many were based on the same chips (6502/Z80/Motorola chips, etc). Computing on the PC platform used to be more fun because with DOS, you had control of your own computer, and because DOS involved the command line, which made everything more interesting and fun. Early versions of Windows were basically DOS programs that ran on top of DOS. Windows/PC computing became less fun when Windows 95 came out. I remember this was the first time I saw an operating system start doing all kinds of crazy stuff "for me" - often in the background.. and without telling me what it was doing. Today, Windows has a user interface, and a reverse-facing Microsoft interface that as busy doing all kinds of crazy things with other people's hardware and internet connections. Computing on PCs became fun again when Linux became available - especially as it progressed and became more usable and reliable. Today, I love running Linux at home and we are going to start running it at work too, now that Microsoft has made their operating systems completely onerous. One more trend that is making computing less fun today - the trend toward web apps and "cloud"-based apps. Developers are abandoning good old-fashioned software that runs natively on a desktop or other computer. But those are the best applications in my opinion.
Those systems where the computer equivalent of hotrodding [automotive].
While there remain the same (or even larger) population of people who are willing to figure out how each part of the device works, the vast majority of users are simply satisfied to drive.
This does not necessarily indicate that computer tinkering is any less of a draw. One needs to also consider that the percentage of people who now have computers, in one form or another, has gone from 5 percent of the population to nearly 100 percent of the population.
The 'fun' is lost in the statistical noise rather than being in the center of the distribution.
Another factor is demographics. When I see people pine for the Atari, Commodore, TI99A, Spectrum, etc., it needs to be noted that those where part of the lives of a specific generation(s) of user. As those users matured they lost the desire (not the ability) to continue the adventure. Once inside knowledge and skills have declined older users tend to lean toward nostalgia and the good old days that never really existed.
The manuals for your hardware and chips are available from manufacturers. There is no reason why one couldn't continue your explorations.
A.I. is the new 'hotrod'.
If you read a recent report by Google exploring why women are not interested in participating in computing you see that the top two adjectives describing their perception are "hard" and "boring." However, there is good news: with the right kind of tools (Computational Thinking Tools instead of cumbersome coding tools) and the right kind of domain orientation one can transform “Hard and Boring” into “Accessible and Exciting" https://sgd.cs.colorado.edu/wi...
Agreed. No fun no more. Not even no, but hell no, as AC said..The sound of an 8 bit modem connecting to a mysterious BBS that had programs and even the occasional mod and screamtracker files section.. no mp3s, just yet.. they were just too large for a BBS.. but all sorts of files to mod out your WfW insrtall, or even , if you were lucky enough to get a fully functional Nt3.1 install going (I was), some files to increase it's capabilities, or even getting NT 3.1 on the net... which was NOT a simple matter..We had ethernet here already in '92, but dns addrressing was a different matter entirely, and something NT didn't recognize. ;-) Novel idea). :sigh:
Another thing was the thrift shops. They were absolute goldmines of old computers to fool around with. Mac Se/30s, powermacs, even found a next cube once. I'll never forget the time some business dumped a whole bunch of Sllicon Graphics machines.. with the RAM still intact! And, of course, lots of 386s and pentiums, every so often a bunch of servers would ahow up. Eventually I had 2 rooms chock full of computers and almost nowhere to sit (and yeah, I saw that armchair made from PCs on the web
But now? Can't find a SINGLE thriftshop that will carry any computer. Period. "Can't, because the hard drive has personal information" is the line I get. They always used to pull out all the RAM, so how hard is it to yank a HDD? Of course then they can't prove it works, so they have to sell it "as is" and so then they can't bleed the customers dry. I really don't know who they are there in business for, anyways.
That's the nature of the beast though..The 60s ended sometime around '75.. Macs stopped being "friendly" after OSX came into being.. and windows changed enough to prompt Nathan to create his timeless "IE is EVIL" website. and if you want a quick nostalgia run he's got his "gui gallery" to peruse.
Still, it's a sea change in how it's got no coolness factor anymore, and how the "fun" has left, because it really has. Won't come back, either...
I've always been a bit suspicious of picoscope. I used one in 2002 or so, as a scope/data logger. The hardware was nice, but the software hooo boy. It was Windows 95 only, and flaky as all hell, as in crash the computer and you have to reboot and reenter all your settings flaky. And that was just, IIRC, if you set the axes wrong and by wrong I mean hit enter at the wrong time.
Are they better now?
Though these days I've got a Hameg HMO7?? of some sort which is sweeeet.
What waveform generator do you use? I've been kind of looking for one recently, but not committed yet. And if you load waveforms from a PC, is that software half way OK?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The software is a bit meh, but they do provide an SDK so you can write your own. That's why I got it, I can integrate it into our test software.
We already had an older Picolog. The software was crap. The newer stuff does seem better.
Before the Picoscope we were using TG1010 function generators. They are old but reliable. I don't actually have one at home yet.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The Arduino, Parallax propeller, and Raspberry Pi are all more powerful than the Commodore 64. The can only take away the things they can see.
Too much work to get anything done, too much of a learning curve, too many habits to change, or what? I've been using it for years for newsletters and flyers, and if there are problems with it, I'd be glad to pass them on to the devs. After all, it's still a work in progress, and they can always use constructive feedback.
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...better
They always do. The olden days were not. Stop pining for something and some-time that never was.
My first computer and foray into programming was on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, but I do not suffer from the hallucinogenic notion that those days were oh-so-good. To "your" friend who pines for the days when he could buy Photoshop outright, tell him to put a sock in it. When it was for sale, he could not afford it. "Nobody" could. Also, until Turbo Pascal came around, a development environment cost more than we kids could afford even if selling a sibling.
I agree, in that it was more fun (don't know if it was more cool).
At university, I never saw the machine we programmed. Back then it was coding sheets handed through a hatch and because the university leased much of its computing out to local companies, a 24 hour debug cycle. The fun in this was in getting your code correct the first time.
When I got a computer of my own (kit ZX80) I pretty much used machine code exclusively. The fun there was in coding directly to the 'machine' if you will, and in learning and using the cpu's primitives, and to some degree, what was going on at the logic level inside the chip.
The only fun I get out of contemporary computing these days is in teaching it as an academic. The fun is when you see students 'get' some subtle concept and their eyes light up.
@peetm
ZZ
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Part of your obsession with having to ID the messenger. The message means nothing to the poor frustrated troll that you are.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Soon will be changed into "Do you want to go to prison?" :)
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
I have a Chromebook. It is a fast and spookily reliable internet appliance. I have fun from it sometimes when I get it to stream a cool fun show. (Really enjoyed "The Expanse" looking forward to seeing season two.) But, sadly, I never have fun getting it to do something it is supposed to do, but won't. No fun at all. Damn thing just works. But I recall so many funfilled hours spent trying to get a sound card to work on my trusty 386. I just love the $#!+ out of com ports and interrupts. Some people find Sudoku fun. Me it's finding the right sound driver on a Taiwanese website. But sadly my Chromebook and my wife's Windows 10 Zen Ultrabook just work. Any little bit of fun I have is with the stuff I do with them. (I long ago got bored with Apple's appliance-like reliability and so do not own that hardware. The thrill was gone.)
But Linux is a different story. Good old Linux. I load it onto older hardware in anticipation of the hours of pure joy it will bring. I distro hop until the stuff like the wifi and sound works (mostly). Then I spend endless fun hours searching forums for the commands I need to get the non-working stuff to work. The days of modifying a config file on Windows are gone (mostly) because, well, one does not have to do so in order to get critical functionality. Not so with Linux. Linux offers endless opportunities for computing fun. I am not being sarcastic. Some like a crossword puzzle. Me? Give me an unsupported-on-Linux video card for which I can have fun finding and installing a driver with NDISWrapper. I had a lot of fun installing Gentoo once. Took nearly a dayand a night, but I got it done. Satisfying fun that. One can still squeeze a lot of computing fun out of Linux. My phone's Android system is a blast, too. Just imagine the barrel of fun I had resetting my little palm sized supercomputer (by 1980's standards) to factory settings after the WIFI refused to work. And take it from me: there is a ton of fun to be had in downloading and installing one's apps after they get erased by a reset. If you are looking for computing fun then it is open source all the way.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
Simply saying "too much work" over and over doesn't answer my question. However, having to share files with 900 other users who don't use Scribus is a good reason on its own.
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There's lamer rootkits takin over my puters. Computer culture has become lame and anything exciting has gone back underground. The EFF was once godly now its just another sad barely-operating non-profit.
Happy new year!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Z^4
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.