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Ask Slashdot: What Happened To the Prank Apps That Used To Be Popular?
OpenSourceAllTheWay writes: Back when PCs were more boxy looking than today and people used floppy disks to store stuff, there were a bunch of prank apps around that one could put on a DOS or Windows computer to annoy the hell out of siblings, classmates, coworkers and others. (Here is a listing of some older prank apps and some more recent Android prank apps.) Some prank apps would flip the Windows desktop upside down. Some would make the mouse pointer move in strange ways or make it give you the middle finger. Some would cause you to hit the right keyboard key and still mistype a word. Some would play an audio file in the background every now and then that gave the impression of your computer making strange noises for unknown reasons, even turning the OS volume up before the sound, and then down again, making it impossible to make the sounds stop. There are many more computer users today than there were back then, yet there doesn't seem to be much new in the way of prank apps -- at least for Windows. Why is that? Did Windows 8 cause PC users to lose their humor?
There's no way to know if that prank app is only a prank app and doesn't have more code to do... interesting things.
Even back in the day some of those apps had viruses in them. There are limits to the amount of trust you have in some guy who wrote a cute little application that inverts your desktop or whatever.
You would probably get arrested for hacking today. You have to be careful with cops and prosecutors today. They are vicious and heartless.
things used to be much more open and innocent. it was possible to talk to any user via "talk" (a unix program) that had been installed by default on any work station. You could telnet into any other workstation (and even printers) and run jobs or have the computer talk like echo "You work too hard today"|festival --tts; fortune|festival --tts Things are less innocent today. I guess, technology has just grown up and things which were funny are no more funny. Part of the humor was also surprise like "I did not know that one can do that" and the target of the joke was known to appreciate it. Very few today would think the BOFH is funny (it contains a few pranks). It used to be different as there were times, when using a computer would already mean by definition that a user had basic sysadmin skills (like being able uuencode an attachment and submit without an attachment protocol) or even developer skills (as it required to write a program like a printer driver if it did not exist). There was a good chance that if somebody had access to mail or a workstation , the person was appreciative for a joke or prank. Today, that slice has become thinner as the technology is used by everybody.
Considering all the race violence in america today, including the recent alt right murders. Do you think that you managed to make the 201Xs better than the 198Xs? This is not trolling, i trily wonder about it, because at times I feel like in the last 50 years, the west stopped progressing and is just slacking around.
That's a good question. To define "better" you have to essentially assign a scalar to a multidimensional space, in other words, you have to find which things are better and which are worse and assign some sort of weighting to them and add the result.
so in some sense whether it's better depends on how you value the various things that have changed.
It's also important to discount perception: the 24hr news cycle has made it feel like we're in a massice crime wave the likes of whic hhas never been seen before but on average it looks like crime and voilence has actually been decreasing slowly but steadily.
Speaking of perception, people generally are used to their current situation and adapt if things change slowly. The 80s seemed fine (though I was a kid). The 90s seemed fine (I was a teenager). So did the 2000 and th 2010s. But the world has changed a fair bit from them.
An interesting thing to do is to find some old TV series you liked that has more or less vanished (no real cult following, go for something big and popular at the time) from say the mid 90s or 80s and watch some of it on youtube. The popular stuff of no particular merit tends to very much reflct the zeitgeist. It can be surprising. One show I remember loving in the 90s turned out to be unwatchable. It had things like a recurring funny side character: the joke was he is gay. That was it. The sole joke abut him. Repeated again and again.
But yes things are not uniformly getting better. The worsening of the gini coefficients and destruction of the middle class and similar things is stacking up problems. I think that's orthogonal to the reactions against bigorty etc. I'd like to take the latter, not the former if I could.
Naturally and reasonably people who are feeling the pinch of the middle class being destroyed are going to think things were better back then. Problems arise because humans are great at spotting patterns. So some people lump a whole lot of these things together and want to regress everything back because the things feel related (like cargo cults).
Fun fact: in the early middle ages there was a reaction against buttons. Turns out that the tight fitting, form revealing clothes enabled by the invention of buttons came aronud at the same time as the black death. Many people believed that buttons via the more revealing clothes were the problem and cause.
SJW n. One who posts facts.