It's sad that a lot of things have been orphaned and obsoleted or were web-based and no longer work... What's something that you used to use that isn't around these days?
Jasc Paint Shop Pro. This tool had the useful half of Illustrator's features and the useful half of Photoshop's, it was blazing fast, and it combined them in a single program so you could mix vector and raster layers. This made it absolutely perfect for web-targeted graphics work. It was the first software I legally bought because it was so good and still affordable (a fraction of the price of Adobe's stuff - something like $200 if i recall correctly).
Corel bought it and turned it into a bloated mess of a photo management tool. IMO they should've just killed Draw and rebranded Paint Shop Pro as the new Draw, it was that much better.
I still use Paint Shop Pro 6.0 every single day. It runs flawlessly in Windows 7 if you set compatability mode on the EXE to "Windows 2000".
Version 6 was the last good version before Corel muddled up the interface and made it bloated. I can still do some things in 2 clicks that my coworker needs 5-15 clicks to get done in Photoshop. It surprises me to know some things are still so "complicated" in photoshop, just by how many clicks/steps are needed. I'm sure PSP 6 is borderline abandonware at this point, released 16 years ago in 2000! I upped the full version here (15mb): http://www.filedropper.com/psp6
Wine! For older programs it works especially well. I've had a legal copy of Photoshop 7.0 for Windows since middle school and I have been running it without any problems since then.
It sounds to me like you're describing Affinity Designer - you might want to check it out if you haven't already. It's relatively very cheap and one of the few pieces of software that I use daily that I am very happy paying the list price for!
I vaguely remember having Jasc installed as a kid and it was indeed great!
Affinity Designer is really great for vector graphics, and exporting to raster. Super fast. Super easy to learn.
Their developers are very active. They have a beta available to owners. I've encountered a few minor bugs in their App Store version, downloaded the beta, and noticed it was fixed.
Second this! I loved PSP and used it daily. When I lost the binary I hunted around for a replacement for ages and finally settled on Paint.NET. It's not as good but works well enough.
Somehow Fireworks is still clinging to life and largely unchanged from the Macromedia days I think. I still find it ridiculously useful for web and mockups.
I still use it on Ubuntu, with Wine. It runs almost flawlessly and it's so much better than all the image editing tools out there (most are crap, Gimp is too bloated).
Google Reader. There are no replacements that a) update fast enough, and b) allow search for free. I know, I tried all of them.
Firefox had an amazing plugin called "Ubiquity", which was basically like command line for your browser and you could write custom scripts for it. It was seriously better than anything that exists today. They stopped developing it for some reason. Tab Groups is another feature that's now abandoned, despite being superior to everything else that exists.
Forte Agent (free version) - great text Usenet reader, now abandonware.
> Firefox had an amazing plugin called "Ubiquity", which was basically like command line for your browser and you could write custom scripts for it.
oh man, i was a core developer for ubiquity (i wasn't the best core developer out there, but i was trying to help)[0]. it was an amazing tool, great devs working on it, mozilla was helping... but all of sudden, everybody just stopped.
i really wish it would come back. it was one of the best developing experiences i had in my life.
It was sort of like a launcher in a browser combined with IFTTT. You could use it to chain together APIs and reduce them to natural language commands.
You could highlight "abogado," translate it, get a map to the nearest one, shorten the url to that map, and email that shortened url to a friend all with one nearly natural language command.
I'm not that great at coding, but even I was able to write a few scripts (verbs?) for it. The simple scripting language for interacting with APIs was one of the most well crafted things about that project.
Ubiquity was ppioneered by Aza Raskin (son of Jess Rasking, designer the original Mac interface). I always had the feeling that uqiquity never was a Mozilla project per say, it was more his personal project that he happened to do inside Mozilla. Perhaps he left or got promoted and the project stopped. I am only guessing.
Apologies, I wasn't trying to imply a connection between the Mac interface and Ubiquity, just wanted to put Aza's love for UX in context by mentioning his father's work. I also didn't know about Archy.
Still works, I use it on a daily basis. It's just an addon now. It will probably continue to work for a few years, they've been wanting to get rid of it since 2013 (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836758) and it's still there.
You could easily name tab groups, and view previews of tabs within a group on one screen. It was also fairly trivial to move tabs between groups, when compared to the "joys" of dragging tabs between windows.
Anything to do with browsers could be boiled down to "replaced by using windows" - but there are some definite benefits to sticking within one window.
The tabs don't load into memory unless you switch to that tab group. Also it's much easier to work with one window. You know how before tabs were invented, you had to open each website in a new window. It was a pain in the ass. Tab groups is just the next step. They are like meta-tabs.
II have a tab group for each topic/task I'm working on. I have about 10 groups/80 tabs total, so if I open them all at once it takes a while. With tab groups non active tabs are not loaded right away, so when I'm working I e.g. don't need to open all the tabs where I'm planning a vacation open. I used to use lots of different sessions before discovering tab groups, but it was slower and I lost track of sessions often. Tab Group makes life just a bit easier.
I have a difficulty with separate windows: They all look the same. I'd use a tabgroup for the doc (MDN, StackOverflow), another for the website I'm building (2-3 tabs because you enter data in the first page, view it in the second), and another group for live websites (gmail & co). Total a dozen tabs, well organized in hierarchical manner.
Personally I agree, especially with Mac's CMD+` to cycle through them.
But I guess it adds another level for grouping things that are in the same window but slightly different, or maybe some people are just prejudiced against multiple browser windows..
The only thing I can think of that isn't just down to "how you use it" would be grouping tabs in the same cookie session, but not persistent - i.e. an incognito window with a bunch of tabs you want to organise, but share cookies. That being important seems like a stretch though.
Well, on Mac CMD+` doesn't cycle through full screen windows.
I tend to open a lot of tabs, so it was convenient to have an easy way to group them by topic or environment without closing up my windows manager with multiple FF windows.
If you think about it, tabs themselves are just an effort to avoid multiple browser windows.
Have you tried theoldreader.com? Not sure if search is free since I'm on their paid account, but the feeds definitely update more reliably than other readers I tried, especially with private one-subscriber feeds.
theoldreader is maybe not as fast as Google Reader but it replaced it for me perfectly. Love the third party integration (greader for Android) and its handling.
Digg reader randomly losses state and shows me days of stuff as unread again. I also frequently have to use "mark all read" to clear out the bolded feed name, even if there are no items shown. I've also seen it stop updating a feed for days and then suddenly showing a half dozen items.
I use Digg reader because it seems better than most alternatives, but it's not as reliable and consistent as Google Reader.
Yeah, when Google announced they'll be shutting down Reader, Feedly was amongst the first to offer an automated migration. I use and love Feedly since then...
I am very happy with Feedbin but I know what you mean – and Feedbin of course cannot be free. I am nevertheless glad that alternatives sprang up, the first weeks after the end of Google Reader were difficult.
Yeah, Newsblur rocks. I also find it a great watching a single committed developer (Samuel Clay[0]), build a small business with an Open Source code-base [1].
AOL Reader was what I settled on as well after Google Reader shutdown. I was never a power user so AOL Reader feels like a perfect replacement for Google Reader's feature set. It can be a bit flaky at times with managing read state, though that seems to be a UI issue that resets itself fairly quickly.
How was Google Reader different than other feed readers such as the one built into Thunderbird? I didn't use it so I can't compare, but Thunderbird works well for me here.
Side note: I also use it to subscribe to YouTube channels without a Google account.
Thunderbird also cannot magically backfill a new subscription. Google Reader could, because pretty much guaranteed, someone else was subscribed already so Google had the history.
I feel like Feedly is okay. Free native apps and sync is nice. I wish it didn't auto mark read after 30 days though. I tend to do my rss processing in huge batches and miss stuff because of that.
I haven't used it in a while, but my recollection is that it would regularly "forget" that I'd already read items, and days of stuff would show as new again. And other times it would show feeds as unread even though it didn't have any items shown unread.
I also recall not liking the interface but cannot recall now exactly what it was. Feedly is the one that provides a chrome extension instead of just a website, right?
The weird thing is their web version / chrome app never has the state problems for me. But the mobile version on iOS screw s up regularly. I'll reach the end of my feed with the "all done" screen and upon refresh all the stuff I just read pops back as unread. Really annoying.
My biggest problem with inoreader is there are feeds I subscribe to that it either doesn't recognize as feeds or won't update them for some reason. That makes it an instant fail for me. Which is a shame; I love the interface.
For me, a) pentadactyl is better than Vimium, b) FF seems faster (I know, subjective), and c) Mozilla is much less likely to have been centrally logging something about me without my explicit permission.
I use it for the history search in the address bar, it seems to remember far more history than Chrome which is really useful when I'm looking for that StackOverflow thread I read the other day.
My was one issue with Chrome: it didn't have the magic history search in the URL bar that Firefox.
UNTIL I discovered that if you disable "Use a prediction service to help complete searches and URLs" option for the Omnibar it works PERFECTLY, just like Firefox. Type in any part of the URL or title of the page and bingo.
As noted in the description, this extension resolves that permanently, although I'm still not quite sure how it impacts history sync or URL bar search.
I also think (totally unsure) that you might need to open the extension occasionally for it to save the history.
Free time. I used to use it to sleep, read books, listen to music, watch movies, play video games, do laundry, exercise, talk to my family, and cook my own food. I can do some of those things on the commute to and from work with apps, but it's not the same as when I had free time. I think google or facebook bought it and quietly obsoleted it in 2006. I'm still looking for a replacement. Someone suggested Activity Blocks or HabitRPG, but they don't work the same.
Someone else suggested Timely and Toggl, but you have to buy a subscription to really get the most out of them. One of the best things about free time was that it was free for the full version.
Pretty easy to get it back. Cancel your home internet, mobile phone, and maybe even cable TV. You'll be back to the 1990s when you had hours of spare time.
Also, get rid of the house (and mortgage), get a divorce and send those pesky kids to an orphanage. And perhaps a way to magic away 25+ years, if you are serious about 1990. (But yeah, mobile internet is a free time black hole)
Everything not being 4:3 screens. I found it better for programming than everything being cinematic screens.
Back when monitor manufacturers were racing to make better / higher resolution monitors, instead of just leaving it at 1080p / 4k / whatever the current standard good enough for movies is.
The GMail interface before it started auto-converting the textarea to HTML when edited externally.
Console gaming when it Just Worked. Nowadays when I pop in a game it's update this and update that, long loading times etc.
E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war.
> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war.
Keep fighting the good fight. I still use Mutt and haven't gotten around to finding a way to handle Office365 meeting invites and such. I'm also the only one in the company that connects to Slack via an IRC client (irssi).
I manage my email in emacs, though it's delivered to the Exchange server at work. I deliver it to a local maildir with fetchmail, and use notmuch to index it. Searching is better and faster than GMail IMO.
There's actually a surprising number of CLI implementations of popular protocols out there. I recently started using Hangups (https://github.com/tdryer/hangups) for Hangouts. And there's one for Play Music too although I can't recall its name at the moment.
Only thing I'm really, really missing now is a CLI for KeePass, but I'm considering writing one myself in Go, since I've been looking for something to do for practice in Go anyway.
Check out Davmail (http://davmail.sourceforge.net/). I use this with offlineimap to run mutt with an Exchange installation; apart from calendar invitations, it works quite well.
You're pretty much the equivalent of the Japanese soldier who got stranded in the Philippines and kept fighting WWII until the 1970s.
HTML mail won. If you work in an office they will use either Exchange or Google Apps; Exchange's default configuration is a fuck you to text-based mail clients.
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p><font size=2 face="Arial"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Arial">Hope you like <i></i><i>all</i> your email looking like this, because the only response you’ll get from your sysadmin should you decide to complain is a snippy remark along the lines of “try using an email client from this century”. Don’t worry, with enough practice you won’t even see the code — just blonde, brunette, redhead₀ <font size=2 face="Wingdings"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: Wingdings">J</span></font></span></font></p>
Perhaps, but why give up if you're not missing any benefit? I still pretty much can rely on something not being readable as plain text also not being worth my time.
Failure to read emails from your boss or coworkers, irrespective of whether they've been turned into HTML hash, might get you disciplined or fired. So there's not no benefit.
So am I... at some point for colleagues that were telling me that my mail looked bad because text (and they weren't using fixed width font), I was sending them text converted to html by a script, so it is contained in a <pre></pre> :->
The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess
That reason probably is good. Some mail clients wrap at 78 chars. Result is that the text doesn't flow. Larger window and text doesn't fill, smaller and you get staggered lines. For most Outlook users, it makes sense to convert this into something more readable.
I think there is an option to change its behaviour.
The main problem In the business world is Outlook. For some reason they decided to ignore line breaks in plain text by default, which makes plain text a broken mess
There's an option in Outlook to turn that "feature" off, but of course, nobody does.
It's a horrible, terrible default feature of Outlook.
A lot of mail clients actually send both HTML and text (as they should), so if you configure your mail client to prefer text, almost all incoming mail will be presented to you as text. Now configure it to only send out plain text, and you are no longer part of the problem. :)
4:3 screens: yes, but on laptops. Given an equally wide laptop 4:3 gives much more space to work on. I wonder if there would be space for large touchpads but the Thinkpad/stick fans won't care. My personal sweetspot on laptops was 16:10.
For standalone monitors, nobody was making screens as wide (in cm) as the ones we have now, at a reasonable price. You could have two 4:3 monitors side by side which is 8:3 or 16:6, worse than 16:9 for the same width.
I add: 15" laptops without numberpads (Macs don't count, I don't like OSX and their keyboards and the buttonless touchpad)
My sweet spot for laptops is 4:3 @ 14in, but 16:10 @ 15.6in is a reasonable choice as well.
16:9 on the other hand has no place in anything but very large desktop monitors (say 27in and above). Whenever I have to use someone's 13in notebook - inevitably 16:9, even expensive ones - it makes me want to scream. It's like peering through a mailbox slot.
I have mostly succumbed to top-posting, but I do generally try to trim the quoted message history to only the one I'm responding to. That way in a long thread I don't end up sending a ten-page message that only include one sentence of new content.
>Everything not being 4:3 screens. I found it better for programming than everything being cinematic screens.
This! I concentrate much better on old laptop with 4:3 screen. I have one single window open, no browser, not documentation, no chat windows, no email. The laptop wouldn't even handle all programs at the same time, 512MB of RAM.
I've found that I actually really like using rotated 9:16 portrait mode monitors for writing code in a dual or triple monitor setup. It's very helpful to be able to see 80+ lines at a time.
But 1080x1920 is stupidly narrow. On 1440x1920 (4:3) you could place two windows side by side without much effort. It barely becomes possible at 1200 (16:10), though not with the font size I'd be long-term comfortable with.
I still use a Dell FP2007 20" 1600x1200 monitor [1] as a second monitor. I remember making sure the serial numbers matched the IPS version too. I've been using it full time for 8 years and it still runs flawlessly.
> Console gaming when it Just Worked. Nowadays when I pop in a game it's update this and update that, long loading times etc.
This might be about to change with Nintendo's upcoming NX system rumoured to use ROM cartridges rather than optical media. The cart-based 3DS has loading times comparable to the Mega Drive or SNES (negligible). And the cartridge distribution model is great for this with sub-par internet connections.
There were still be patches and online services involved. You can also bet that they won't eschew online purchases and digital downloads. I know I won't buy it if I have to go back to physical media.
Oh absolutely, and that's the way it is with the 3DS. But keep in mind that Nintendo home consoles have always been the favoured split-screen multiplayer - they're the consoles you play when your friends come round (and they work equally well for solo gamers). Consequently, forced online patches aren't really as obvious as they are on Xbox or Playstation.
On the 3DS, the only forced patches that affect me are OS patches that I'm required to install in order to access the eShop.
The mixed physical/digital distribution model for the 3DS is my favourite of all models right now. You can buy a cartridge, requiring no installation or online activation (which you can readily loan or sell later on), or you can download games from the eShop which, once activated, doesn't require any online call home. Ever. You can transfer games between consoles (e.g. during an upgrade) by going online and initiating a license transfer.
It's a great balance.
My one gripe is region locking. I hope that goes away (and rumours indicate it might). I waited a year for Fire Emblem Fates to come over from Japan and then it hits the US months before we get it in Europe..
If I remember correctly, a major limiting factor of cartridges is the time it takes to get them manufactured. If I remember right only one company was allowed to make those official cartridges, and you had to reserve a specific timeslot 8 months or more in advance, that you couldn't slip that date, in order to get your cartridges made.
I can't remember if I read this or if I was told this by veterans of the game industry (I used to work with some guys that have been in the industry for a long time). I think I was told this, but there's probably articles that mention this out there somewhere.
Anyway, they said it was a nightmare for scheduling, and sometimes you'd have a game finished but have to sit on it for months because that's the earliest you could get a slot reserved.
I think this is still an issue with the 3DS (I think they were complaining about it for DS at the time, why they didn't really want to work on another DS game).
Not sure if publishers would be as keen on this nowadays, especially compared to the speed and immediacy of the mobile world. Might make them stay with Microsoft and Sony, yet again.
> Consequently, forced online patches aren't really as obvious as they are on Xbox or Playstation.
Actually, one of the first Wii U firmware updates bricked a sizable number of consoles that had to be replaced by Nintendo (sizable meaning there were forum threads discussing the issue). My original console went through that process. Haven't had any such issues with the other two consoles this gen, luckily (and yet).
I strongly suspect the NX will be based on a game streaming service like OnLive. If you look at most of the rumours with that in mind, they make more sense.
I very much doubt it. They'd be cutting off massive markets where internet connectivity isn't consistently good (most of the world). Sure, Nintendo are struggling to find their place in the home console market right now but they're more conservative when it comes to changing the distribution/sales model.
> "They'd be cutting off massive markets where internet connectivity isn't consistently good (most of the world)."
With all due respect, countries without decent Internet infrastructure are unlikely to be places where there are plenty of people with the spare cash to blow on a console.
Furthermore, Nintendo has said that the NX is not designed to be a replacement for the Wii U, meaning that Nintendo may still plan to sell the Wii U, and therefore would have a product to sell in emerging markets (in addition to their handheld devices).
"Following a Nintendo investor briefing, officially translated here, president Satoru Iwata says that although the NX will be "a dedicated video game platform with a brand new concept," he does not "intend it to become a simple "replacement" for Nintendo 3DS or Wii U.""
Carrying on, consider the following points from the GFK Research Group leak:
"Connect with other Nintendo players around the world via the Nintendo Network"
"Gameplay flows between Nintendo NX console and Nintendo NX handheld device"
"Supports 4K/60fps video streaming"
"Gameplay graphics at 900p/60fps"
> "Sure, Nintendo are struggling to find their place in the home console market right now but they're more conservative when it comes to changing the distribution/sales model."
Nintendo have been slow to develop their online offerings, but they're increasingly working in that direction. Nintendo is also keen to get into the mobile gaming market, which a game-streaming platform would help with:
Furthermore, even if such a move to a streaming, subscription-based service would be innovative for Nintendo, the sort of 'Netflix for gaming' approach is nothing new in the market. Aside from OnLive as mentioned before, Sony are already doing it with PlayStation Now. Nintendo can learn from earlier attempts in the market, they don't have to go in blind.
Lastly, if you believe some of the rumoured specs (which I personally think are mostly driven by wishful thinking), the NX is meant to be 3x more powerful than the PS4. That sort of power only makes sense if it's a streaming platform.
"the NX is meant to be 3x more powerful than the PS4. That sort of power only makes sense if it's a streaming platform."
You're confusing me. One minute you seem to be discussing streaming from the console, the next streaming to the console. They may coincidentally use the same English word but technically they have nothing to do with each other.
Streaming from the console may require a bit of extra oomph, but if you're designing it into the console from scratch you can add some custom hardware for it and it shouldn't increase general-purpose computing requirements. Streaming to the console by no stretch of the imagination requires anything to be 3x more powerful than the PS4; if you added 4K output to its graphics card, a XBox 360 would be plenty powerful enough to stream even 4K to the console. Sending video streams to the hardware decoder does not take a lot of power. Either way you don't need a lot more power for "streaming" either in or out.
As for specs, it will be coming out 3 years after the PS4 came out. The PS4/XBone generation is generally considered a bit underpowered compared to what PCs could already do at the time. CPUs haven't been advancing much but GPUs have still be clockin' along in the past 3 years. Being merely 3x more powerful than a PS4 is still Nintendo being conservative and not focusing on producing a graphics powerhouse, as has been their style for the Wii line, not some sort of impossible dream.
I imagine the NX device to be a low cost set top box style affair. The 3x power I'm referring to is the total processing power of the NX platform, with the vast majority of that processing power living in the cloud. Does that help clear up the confusion?
> With all due respect, countries without decent Internet infrastructure are unlikely to be places where there are plenty of people with the spare cash to blow on a console.
I think you underestimate the woeful state of broadband in many developed nations.
Here in the UK, many non-rural areas struggle to get more than 8Mbps down, 1Mbps up. With more devices in the home putting demands on connections and many ISPs capping usage (or offering unlimited but heavily throttled connections), downloading or streaming games isn't always viable.
In my own case, I recently moved house and went from an 80Mbps FTTC connection (the fastest available in my city) to 6Mbps. It doesn't take much more than someone at home streaming Netflix while another browses the internet or downloads a 25GB game on the Xbox to make streaming games completely unworkable.
I know the situation is very similar in Australia, New Zealand, areas in Spain..
We often see this skewed perception from American companies that everyone in a first-world country has consistent and fast connectivity. A lot of US products and concepts just die here for that reason. The original Xbox One concept of being download-only would have been a complete failure here.
It's not just poor people (who "are unlikely to be places where there are plenty of people with the spare cash to blow on a console") who struggle for good connectivity.
>_"Here in the UK, many non-rural areas struggle to get more than 8Mbps down, 1Mbps up."
I live in the UK too, so I know that's baloney. The penentration of BT Infinity and Virgin Broadband in urban areas is pretty high, and average speeds exceed 8mpbs.
The annoyingness of cinematic screens is increased futher if your favourite TV shows are from the 80s and 90s, and your favourite movies from the 30s, 40s and 50s.
> E-Mail before we lost the "text should be text and not goddamn HTML" war.
It didn't work. To this day, if you begin a plain text email message with the word "From", you'll confuse mail programs because there wasn't a proper encoding of the body of the message separate from the headers.
> To this day, if you begin a plain text email message with the word "From", you'll confuse mail programs […]
RFC 5322:
> […] The body is simply a sequence of
> characters that follows the header section and is separated from the
> header section by an empty line (i.e., a line with nothing preceding
> the CRLF).
What brain dead mail program interprets anything after the first empty line as a header?
Various MUAs have failed this over the years. RFC 5322 is dated 2008. Plenty of users moved to HTML payloads inside MIME attachments because of the mangling that would happen otherwise. Many MUAs would prepend a > before the word From at the beginning of a line so that it wouldn't cause problems for recipients.
Some that I used that I remember such problems with include the MUA inside Netscape Navigator and mutt.
Heh, i recall when Apple started shipping everything with 16:9. You could tell when a web dev was using Mac, as invariably the site layout would produce a scroll bar at the bottom of the screen on 4:3 screens.
Actually, Apple has only used 16:10 screens for their laptops (11" Air is an exception) while almost everyone else uses 16:9. The iPad has a 4:3 screen while so many other Android tablets have used 16:9 (thankfully there are more choices now).
The xBase family of languages/development environments. They are still around - Harbour (open-source multi-platform Clipper implementation) and Ashton-Tate dBase which changed many hands and is now dBase LLC.
They were one of the fastest environments to build business software in till the early 90s. Then Client/Server and Windows happened. Visual Basic and Delphi occupied the niche with support for SQL based databases. xBase tried playing catch-up but by the time they caught up clunkily to GUI programming, the effort was wasted and the Web came around.
This is how xBase was loved:
This isn't a question or a bug or a complaint. This is just to say
that using your prg files from Foxapp, modifying the startup,
creating a database, compiling and debugging I created an
beautiful working application in 45 minutes today, including the
time it took for the client to explain what they wanted in the
database. The client was duly impressed, and I marvelled at just
how much 2.0 had made programming fun and had increased my
potential income. I am now taking on programming jobs that would
have been painful in the past, and find that I can afford to do
some pro bono work knowing that with Foxpro 2.0 and my
distribution package I can whip up a quick database for the church
or the school or anybody who just can't afford custom programming.
I've been hacking PCs since I bought an Apple at Homebrew Computer
Club in Palo Alto from a couple of kids who were building them in
a garage. (In those days they were talking about marketing them as
a multilevel, like Amway). I've played with a lot of software,
ranging from user-hostile to stuff that curls up on your lap and
talks dirty in your ear.
But Foxpro 2.0 is something special. What you folks have created
is an elegant solution. When you finaly go public, may you all
cash out as rich as Bill Gates.
Please thank all the Fox folks for me.
Charles
-- "Letter from a FoxPro admirer". FoxTales: Behind the Scenes at Fox Software, Kerry Nietz.
Windows XP and its search feature- Win7 above does not have it.
Yahoo Geocities- simply miss it. and also Yahoo in general. My current yahoo mail is chock a block with spam mails. plus their ads.
Xerox Ventura desktop publishing software- that was cool when book publishing was required.
Motorola T90/91 basic mobile phone. superb and handiest phone used. Current Moto is smart but not unbeatable.
Most importantly old BSNL (India) Landline tariffs- you could talk for hours and still the billing would come per call-wise. Simple unbeatable !!
Non- Microsoft Keyboards- here they are out of market. THe MS keyboards go out of tune/get stuck over time.
Softwares that would never needed to update- These days it is a harassment to see every software on my PC requiring to update. Now its gone to mobile phones. God knows what is it that they do in updates.
Tap water- 2 decades ago we would drink water straight from the tap or just plain filtered. Its impossible now. The water is too contaminated and needs added filtration devices at home/work. or bottled water.
Paper bags at the grocery shop. They've vanished giving place to cheap plastic bags. And many products are now using plastic wrappings that would come with paper ones.
A more silent neighbourhood- these days its high intensity horn blaring.
What's wrong with your tap water? Don't they have the same safety standards to meet?
UK tap water is great (Well, outside of Greater London where it's basically limestone slurry). I've never bought bottled or filtered aside from the brief time I was in London.
At least two brands of UK bottled water were bottling northern tap water and selling it. Business idea I wish I had thought of!
Indeed its India, Calcutta I'm talking about. True 20 years back (1996 and before.. vaguely) that's when we were children the Ganges water was clean. It is too polluted now to drink it straight away. And nobody really drinks it taking it straight from the tap. There were times when NGOs offered large earthen pots of cool water free on the streets. In my home we have a non-electric Ceramic water filter. But the current norm is electric RO +UV filters.
Arsenic is present in ground water in south Calcutta and is a health problem. Municipal water is arsenic free. It is treated with Chlorine.
Much/All of this pollution is self created by polluting the rivers. Individually, industrially and socially.
I believe that using bottled water should be an exception and availability of tap/filtered water at public places should be a norm. But bottled water has become a necessity and a fad today.
I do admire the places mentioned where you enjoy pure water still. I know that in New York the water comes from upstate reservoirs. I also think many places water fountain is available at public places/streets for drinking. If you know the cities you've seen this let me know I'll make a note of it.
Tap water in the UK is heavily chlorinated. If you go to a country which doesn't chlorinate tap water it's like night and day.
(I live in Zurich. The water company here say that comparing Zurich tap water with bottled mineral water is unfair --- their tap water is considerably better.)
Not sure if it's down to how hard the water is in each area, but here (NW England), a fairly soft water area, you never notice the chlorination. You notice the chlorine quite a bit in London, along with the free limestone in every glass.
Tap water in the UK varies greatly around the country. The water in Edinburgh seems pretty good, some other parts of the country taste surprisingly different.
India, Calcutta. But now all over India hardly one will be drinking tap water straight away. Some filter process is always done at point of drinking.
These days its so sad to find every shop ordering a container of filtered drinking water. Earlier it was available through taps. Now no one trusts tap water.
Are your fellow citizens not pissed about this? Is there similar environmental movements as in the US 60 years ago? (And don't be too discouraged; Silent Spring was published in the early 60s and Love Canal occurred in the late 70s I think. The Cuyahoga River caught on fire multiple times, the last spurring the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.)
It still is, We don't drink tap water in Bangalore either.
Very very rare to see folks drinking water straight out of the tap - the water supply isn't potable.
Most urban households have some kind of filtration system in place. The water supply infra is quite bad, with frequent contamination due to leakage.
> What's wrong with your tap water? Don't they have the same safety standards to meet?
Tap water quality varies from place to place. For example, in SV (at least Sunnyvale, Santa Clara) it stinks so badly that I barely care whether it meets safety standards or not. OTOH, in my home city it's pretty fine and at some other place I lived it was halfway between.
Yes! Agent Ransack has become an indispensable tool in my daily work. With SSD and Agent Ransack i can do searches over ludicrous number of gigabytes within a heartbeat and usually find whatever it was. Yes, there are gnu tools for windows but from usability point of view Agent Ransack is way better (if we presume the tragick default cmd.exe as the command line, at least)
Tap water varies greatly even over a small area. New York City, for example, is extremely proud of the quality of its water, which comes from reservoirs upstate. I noticed it was good before I ever found out that it's something they like to boast about.
In DC, however, the chlorine is over the top, especially at times when they're flushing the lines.
I find that most places are somewhere in between these two extremes, even just outside the cities, where different municipalities have their own reservoirs and sources.
As for paper bags, why not just use a reusable bag. In many places in the US, plastic bags are taxed (5¢ or so), with the funds going to clean up rivers. It's led to a major change in behavior.
True in states near the Himalayas like Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh the water is drinkable and pure. Down below at the plains it gets contaminated.
Organized shops charge here an extra for the plastic bag. Majority of grocery shops hand out ultra thin plastic bags which will choke the rivers and environment. But important thing is public attitude. The attitude now is to collect as many of these bags as one can. So there you go. If the municipal corporation enforces a separate charge or ban, things will shape up. I do use a reusable bag. I've stopped using plastic bags.
Per-call billing sounds crazy - there should never have been a time in circuit switched or packet switched networks when that would have correctly captured costs.
I don't know about the OP's situation, but at one time most phone calls were completed by a human operator looking up circuit numbers and physically connecting the two customers using a patch cord.
I suspect that under that model, the operator's time was the dominant cost involved in placing the call.
1) The customer paid a fixed monthly charge for having phone service at all. This covered the capital costs of the wiring to the customer's premises.
2) On top of that, the customer paid a per-call fee. This covered the cost of having a woman (usually) ask what number you wanted, locate the proper jack, and physically plug your circuit in to the circuit of the person you wanted to reach.
It's probably no coincidence that the local service operator was one of the first parts of the phone system to be automated away (nor is it surprising that phone companies continued the per-call charge long after its justification went away :-)).
The Telephone with Dial Tone and associated Busy Signal. A busy signal meant nobody could contact me; Also, by either not answering the phone or by simply taking the receiver off the hook I controlled interruptions. And, nobody became concerned if they did not hear from me in an hour, 1/2 day, day or even week. And I had no concern if I did not hear from others either in that timeframe.
So the "tool" to maintain privacy was very controllable by me and nobody would think otherwise.
Maybe it's just me but I feel that it was also much easier to get to actually speak to someone on the phone back then. We usually knew when we could reach someone and call during those timeframes. If we didn't get a reply we knew they were out and call the next day. Nowadays it's much more rare to get an answer when calling a mobile phone. Either the person has left it in the next room or it's out of battery, it's in silent mode and the person doesn't hear it, etc. So people usually tend to resort to text messages, which is a highly ineffective way to communicate in many situations.
Also old telephones never took the initiative to call someone from their owner's pocket ;)
I know for me I stopped answering the phone altogether about a year or two before the do not call list went into effect. About literally 1/10th of the calls I receive to this day are legit calls I want to take.
I don't get how modern phones not having a busy signal forces you to let people contact you. If I really want to disconnect, I just turn stuff off. The only remaining difference is voicemail, but that's easily ignored. As for the concern, that's not the tool's fault, either, just how we use it. People get worried if you don't call back in a day because they've become accustomed to you doing so. I've got friends who I will miss a call from and not call back for a few days, and it's just fine. Not the phone's fault at all. The tool is still controllable by you - so long as there's a power switch, its in your control.
The telephone was a shared device, and as a child it was not mine. In college, it was shared with 4 other people (and still not mine). Then once married, it was shared with my spouse.
But now there is no more 'shared voice device.' It is not pratical to not own a phone. But all cell phones are not sharable. Hence, by default, either I carry a phone and the contact person knows explicitly I am ignoring them or I answer it. But when the only game in town was a simple telephone, a busy signal or no answer just meant nobody is available. Nothing else. But now, with my phone, I can no longer say I am not available, imo.
The introduction of voice mail at work is what killed the efficiency of telephone communication. It became very easy to let a call go to voice mail, and then claim you never got the message, or your voice mail wasn't working, etc. It was much harder when when a secretary took your calls and kept a log of messages.
Voice mail and then email (esp. auto-responding "I'm out of the office") became great work-avoidance enablers, whereas before the telephone was a great productivity enhancer.
The "more linuxy" Nokia Android competitor that was released late and dead on arrival (in terms of ecosystem), but was still years ahead of Android in many ways and fundamentally better in others.
And seeded the crap fest that is making its way through the larger Linux ecosystem right now.
I had a N800, and i loved it. But come the N900 Nokia had done too many "pivots" too fast, fatally fragmenting the community the 770 to N810 lineage had built up. And once Elop came in and torched the platform, things were sinking fast.
I paid attention at the time, but has since repressed most of it. While torching the platform made me bitter about the tech industry, it was also that very few people even cared. It even gave the iPhone a match [0]. The industrial design was great, had sleek UI and clever UX. And that's not even the more technical features. Yet people mostly went on about how great Android was.
When Ubuntu then went on to argue over desktop icons (or whatever) while there was a huge hole left by the mac pro, I pretty much gave up on user facing Linux (in the broader sense). Switched all my desktop os and development to windows and haven't looked back since.
I still use my Nokia E6 despite its huge software flaws. Small form factor, hardware keyboard, nice specs : it was bound to be good. Alas, Nokia fucked up the software part and the Nokia Belle update made things even worse. And I can see no alternative on the market today. Phones OS's should be free as well :)
A (tiny, but) usable, physical keyboard on a device that lasted _ages_, fit into a suit pocket and was eminently practical. The age of the PDA is long gone (heck, I'm typing this on an iPad mini), but we still haven't caught up with some of its best bits.
I found the next version up, or rather a clone of it: the Ericsson MC218, a rebranded Psion Series 5 (the MC218 came with a little IrDA adapter for compatible Ericsson phones).
Of all places I stumbled on it at an op-shop - in ~2012, I think it was. The box looked a bit sad but the unit itself was literally new.
...and I can tell you that if you've ever read stories about how fragile they were I can confirm all of them. The entire LCD hinge assembly broke on mine after only a few months, and I had to thread wire into and around the (~1mm no. 2 plastic >.<) chassis to recreate the pivot points for the LCD to close right. Thankfully it looks completely unscathed, the battery compartment's just a bit funky.
The hardware was, in short, terrible, but the OS was amazing.
I'm convinced Symbian EPOC was built by a bunch of unbelievably optimistic, unfazeable software developers or something - C++ hadn't even been standardized yet (wow much 1998) so the EPOC SDK is a mix of scary, disastrous and hilarious... but the OS and UI design were still, in spite of this, absolutely awesome.
My favorite feature was the fact that the UI had real windows, with titlebars. And dragging the titlebars would drag the entire window - not an outline, the whole window. It was amazing. ("Look!! I have a desktop in my pocket!!")
And then there was the programming language that came built in. I mean, they crammed a fully-functional physical keyboard into the thing, so I mean, duh, you add a programming language to it cuz that's what you do when you have a real keyboard.
OPL was equal parts confusing and awesome, but, because it was so BASIC-like I started hundreds of tiny projects that I never finished. There are some pretty amazing little applications out there written in OPL, but most things were done in C++.
Probably the coolest thing I did with OPL was discover that the system was fast enough to handle full-screen haptic scrolling - my stylus was starting to get old and scratch the LCD, and using my finger would have felt weird, so I never finished it - but it was pretty awesome to know that this bytecode-interpreted language was fast enough to handle SurfaceFlinger-esque full-screen content scrolling on a 640x240 LCD.
I have a netbook. Sorry, a netBook. You, know, the one that coined the word 'netbook'. It's great! It has the trademark bizarre Psion hinging mechanism which gives it a full-size keyboard and a massive screen, it's got an eight hour battery, the OS is on a CF card (and so is trivially replaceable), and it has state-of-the art IrDA connectivity...
Yeah, that's the problem. Lovely hardware, completely useless in the modern world. It does have a PCMCIA type 1 slot in which you can attach a sufficiently old wifi card but finding such a card that supports WPA is practically impossible, and finding an EPOC driver for it even more so.
I did run Linux on it for a while, but Linux of a 32MB 190MHz ARM is not a happy experience.
(EPOC, while being a terrifying but hilarious disaster on the inside, manages to get an astonishing amount done in very little space. Even the 640x480 screen looks big. UI-wise it's a really nice bit of design.)
I never owned a 5, much to my regret. I switched from a 3a to a PalmPilot (which by itself deserves another entry in this list), but often wished I'd stuck with Psion.
Oh heck, you remind me of my psion 5. It was brilliant, and the tiny keyboard was good enough to touch type on. Battery life in weeks. Someone bung a modern screen on that form-factor please.
I have similarly been looking for a modern Sharp Zaurus replacement. But the Pyra (and the Pandora before it) does not make a good PDA.
For one thing the dimensions: it is a real brick and I don't understand why that is in 2016. All the flip-top Sharp Zaurii SL-Cxxxx were at least 5mm slimmer, and they were made a good ten years ago.
Then there is the keyboard, which is pushed all the way to the bottom edge, which makes it difficult type when handheld. It is clearly optimized for gaming, with prominent space given over to joystick controls. It lacks a bottom row containing a spacebar, which makes for awkward typing.
To put this into context. The Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000 was released in Japan in 2004. It was a Linux computer with a 3.7" touch display, 4GB hard drive, USB port, SD and CF card slots, 3.5mm jack, infra-red port, built-in speaker that fit in a case with dimensions 124x87x25mm.
Even though the Pyra has a 5" display, its dimensions are no less bulkier at 140x84x29mm. I would have expected a lot more progress given the hardware advances made in the last 10+ years.
Heck you could put something like the Intel Compute Stick or the Zotac ZBOX PI220 in a case, add an LCD and battery, and end up with something more compact and powerful than the Pyra.
Looking into it some more, it is indeed mostly the battery.
It is 3x the capacity of the C3000, and runs the full width of the Pyra.
Never mind that they also made use of the thickness to fit 4 shoulder buttons for gaming (or other things), and two full size USB-A ports (one of them claimed to support ESATA as well via an adapter).
There is no doubt the Pyra is much more capable than early 2000's palmtops. It has built-in wifi, bluetooth, HDMI output, sensors, etc.
Nevertheless, I am sure we can all agree that its design does not make efficient use of internal space. There is a lot of room for improvement to make the device more compact. Yet this does not seem to be a priority for the creators or many of the end users.
For comparison take a modern device that is comparable in dimensions like the Sony Xperia Z5 Compact at 127x65x8.9 mm. Sony fit an LCD and 2700mAh battery in just 9mm of thickness.
As for the large battery, it seems gratuitously huge. Do we really need 6000mAh in such a device? This is like 2.5x a typical phone with a comparable processor.
This is a great device for some use cases. But it is not practical as a PDA.
I just discovered more official Pyra dimensions, which show the device 3mm thicker than what I originally cited. According to the technical specifications [1] the dimensions of the Pyra are 139x87x32mm.
The way i see it, the vanishing of the physcial keyboard marks the shift of mobile tech from production to entertainment. This because using all the face of the device for screen allows for better video and photo viewing.
Just tried the "EPOC emulator" which simulates a Psion 5mx. It must have been such a nice device. Many people still speak about the 5mx keyboard. The form factor looked awesome.
I'm gonna echo on Winamp. Now a Linux user, I really miss a real good mp3 player.
Winamp was light, aesthetic and very good on its design. One feature I still miss is the global hotkeys, you could map Ctrl+Shift+Z to go back one song, on any window you were (hence the 'global'). I used to map the Z-X-C-V-B (the default bindings for Previous/Play/Pause/Stop/Next) to the CTRL+Shift+$key binding, and I felt like a wizard. Then there was a search function, with J, that you could also remap to a global hotkey.
Winamp was so good we should have paid for it to prevent a sale to AOL.
I'd recommend taking the full unix dive and ditch your GUI centred apps for MPD. You can any of dozens of GUI clients to interact with the daemon (http://mpd.wikia.com/wiki/Clients).
Keyboard shortcuts can be done via your DE, by shelling out to 'mpc play', and such.
My concern for music is less playing it (that's easy), but more about organizing it, for which MusicBrainz Picard wins.
Deadbeef? It has global hotkeys. It's pretty simple. Not so different from early versions of winamp, really (but better at actually playing music w/o gaps, supporting replay gain and such). I use it ever since I was tired of organizing music collection locally on whatever PC I use (I often attach an external HDD instead, so mpd and Clementine are of no use to me lately).
But I always thought winamp was somewhat a hype, honestly. It might have been great in 1997, but when almost 10 years later, when plenty good music players for Windows were around (AIMP and LightAlloy come to mind) and everybody still "loved" Winamp — it seemed a bit odd to me. It was nothing special anymore at the time of Windows XP and later.
But now all that winamp nostalgy?.. I mean, seriously, pretty much any music player — of which we have hundreds now, from as simple as it gets to all these media library organizers — can all that winamp could.
Audacious has optional WinAmp-style GUI (with skins being WinAmp 2.x compatible AFAIK) and supports global hotkeys, including a "search and jump to file" popup.
Chrome's still fast, but other browsers caught up, and more importantly web developers took advantage of the increase in performance and started getting away with writing more bloated websites, resulting in much of the speed gains being nullified.
Just try to use Chrome or Firefox to browse relatively lightweight websites (e.g. GNU.org), they're amazingly fast compared to what browsers used to be like before Chrome came out.
Just try to interview as a front end engineer these days. Someone at Airbnb laughed at me because I used a for loop instead of lodash on an array. He said "wow, you write it old school."
Why write fast code when you can write triple transpiled bloats bullshit vis a vis Babel, flow and jsx.
Yes, exactly. I suppose if you registered the callback as a named function expression, a good js engine might be able to optimize on it and inline it, but I also don't like leaning on compilers so much.
I don't think that's the whole story. Yes, websites are increasingly obese and JS-happy, but Chrome has also gone downhill.
Safari feels significantly snappier, and has better RAM usage than Chrome at this point, and it used to be the exact reverse. Chrome is hell on a laptop battery, too.
The web went off the rails, not Firefox! Or better, webdevelopers went off the rails. Or even better, their managers. No no no, probably their CEOs! Or... ehm...
"Firefox is simply smaller, faster, and better -- especially better not because it has every conflicting feature wanted by each segment of the Mozilla community, but because it has a strong "add-on" extension mechanism"
"Take Back the Web" came a year or two later as I recall.
It is still quite stable for me, I can run a single chrome session for months on my desktop.
But, thank god that desktop has 32GB ram and a fast, QC i7 because damn is it bloated and slow!
I remember switching to chrome years ago because it was so much faster than Safari, and, yes, while I'm 100% sure Chrome is just a bloated slow mess now, I can't really pinpoint any time when it happened.
It's harder than it should be to find the latest code, I don't know what the main developer is playing at, would seemingly rather comment on clone repositories than fix the project homepage:
I've found http://www.aseprite.org/ to be a reasonable alternative to DPaint. The UI is quite different, but on the other hand it has lots of more "modern" features, like layers. Source code available under GPLv2, but you can also buy binaries.
Evilpixie (http://evilpixie.scumways.com/) is supposed to be a sort of modern update of Deluxe Paint. It's a one-man free project, so it probably doesn't have a lot of ultra-modern features, but it might suit you.
Macromedia Freehand, in particular deleting bezier points but keeping the shape intact (ie simplifying).
Illustrator still hasn't quite caught up. For any illustration, it's useful to have as few control points as possible. This is particularly useful when making SVGs for the web; it renders faster, and an ability to hand edit the SVG is useful for animation etc. Every font design package has this feature; Illustrator, even now, has nothing that does anything close to the same degree of accuracy. Occasionally they'll roll out an improvement in 'simplify', but I find it staggering that they can't just implement what is a fairly simple feature.
I've played around with it; problem is, I've used Adobe products for ~18 years, and use almost every piece of Creative Suite. I don't think the context shifting is worth it, unfortunately. I'm using SVG on every new project now, so that might change
Crossties. It was a relational desktop for Windows 3.1 which could replace progman and allow you to set up associations with projects, contacts, etc -- for example, opening up someone's contact info would pull up the documents you were working on for them, etc. 20 years later, we still really don't have anything that can provide that sort of context on the desktop, or even worse, we don't have those kinds of relationships available for our phones.
I googled it and found a PC Mag review from 1994 with a funny passage: "We did a direct import of a 1000 record database from both ACT! And Organizer, and the operation took only a minute on a 486 system" :-)
Graffiti on Palm handhelds. I owned the original PalmPilot and a couple of other models up to the Vx, and can still write Graffiti faster than I can type on a touch screen.
Discounting the Newton (which I tested but didn't own), there still isn't anything else that even came close in terms of practical "handwriting", and even though there's an Android keyboard that does Graffiti, ACCESS is sitting on the IP and has done nothing with it.
I'd forego a non-critical bit of my anatomy to have Graffiti on iOS with a decent stylus. Not even the MyScript keyboards come close.
The smaller iPad Pro + the Apple Pencil should fit the bill. You could try it out at a store, it's surprisingly good. YouTube demos will give you an idea but they can't do it enough justice.
Some websites (author died, they faded away/are not the bleeding edge any more etc.). A good example would be the old Searchlores website (http://search.lores.eu/indexo.htm)...apparently the original domain is now owned by some marketing company. Yikes.
I loved the DiskEditor which enabled me to recover lost files by manipulating the FAT table, hack byte codes to bypass copy protection in the days when copy protection was done by reading in bad sectors in floppy disks.
Norton Commander for the ease of use to navigate file system in DOS days. I use TotalCommander now which is the best $40 I ever spent.
SMS+Messages or SMS+Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, WeChat, Viber, LINE, BBM, Telegram, Signal, Sicher, and I'm sure I'm missing some. Used to just install a multi-protocol chat client and be done with it, but now everything's a fancy service with special clients to sync state across devices and whatever else they do.
A phone with a proper SSH client and a real keyboard; I have owned and loved (in this order) the Nokia E71 and N900, HTC Desire Z, Motorola Droid 4 and Photon Q. But now I am out of options, as there are no worthy successors to any of these devices. Modern phones and tablets are not about production, but only about consuming. A lot of thought goes into the output devices, but the only input device - the touchscreen - is not enough to get real work done.
I still find typing on a touchscreen cumbersome, especially entry of special characters is a hassle. This makes managing remote systems or programming very hard to do.
Android devices with bluetooth can connect to hardware keyboards ranging from tiny things to full-size desktop keyboards. They aren't good for use on the bus or while walking, but if you can take the time to sit down and pull out your keyboard, it can work quite well.
Which defeats the whole point: I'd still use my Xperia Pro with a built-in slide-out keyboard, except app bloat makes it useless (Google Play now clocks in at 190 MB? And this is representative of the other apps.) It was perfect for touch-typing "on the bus", as you say: if you have to fiddle with accessories and perhaps get a coffee table to put them on, you might as well lug a desktop computer with you ;)
Oh yes, I absolutely loved the Desire Z (the other ones didn't quite make it to the European market). Haptic feedback is really important, and the little bonus features like the OK button/trackpad/notification LED were a great design.
PC Outline. It's a DOS-based outliner. In 1986, my manager said "Here, you're organised. You'll like this" and he was right - I did. So much so that I bought my own copy. I still use it every day in a DOSBox DOS emulator on Windows 7 and Linux. I use it for passwords, todo and done lists, keeping track of work done for clients, functional decomposition, shopping lists and the steps for configuring and compiling the Linux kernel.
Personally, I haven't ever used PC Outline, so I don't know its features, but from many free outliners I tried I liked the Noteliner. Unfortunately I couldn't find a replacement on Linux (and I don't have time to learn Emacs + org-mode)
Also, there's not much learning to do for just emacs + org mode. By default there are context menus to help which also inform you what keyboard shortcuts are available. You might need to get used to some "odd" keyboard shortcuts, or turn on cua-mode to make it behave like you're used to, but otherwise, you don't need any advanced knowledge to get started.
Best ergonomic mouse ever made. Fitted my hand perfectly. The extreme slant looks terrible but works far better than every handed mouse I've used in the 20 years since. There was a matching trackball if you preferred that.
Unlike every modern Logitech mouse made it did not break after a short life. It was thrown away because it was old school marble instead of laser. Lasted years in great condition.
Use that design with modern sensor, sell me one for £150, I'd buy it.
My best mouse has to be the Microsoft Explorer. Smooth as ice. Sadly, the quality of optical sensors seems to be regressing.
I've recently been using the Razer Naga - the optical sensor comes close and it fits perfectly in my hand - I barely notice that it's there. It's worth a try if ergonomics is important to you. YMMV, my ergonometrics aren't the same as yours.
I haven't. That looks quite close, but still fairly flat.
The mouseman had the left mouse button perhaps an inch higher than the right. Net effect is your hand, wrist and forearm settled at a 30-45 degree angle, pretty close to the natural rest position. That;s the bit I miss - it was really comfortable for long use.
I use the MX500. Had it for 12 years. Took it apart two years ago and washed the plastic parts in dishwashing liquid, still good as new - only the black background of the logo is worn.
I actually see blogs as remnants of what the Internet used to be. Especially in an age where click bait headlines, copy-paste and memes seems to be what drives most "media" outside of big dogs like the NYT.
Some of the most interesting sites I visit these days are blogs, written by people with a passion for what they do.
The way I look at it, that internet still exists. The stuff worth reading is still found on blogs. The rest - twitter, facebook, reddit, et al - is mostly noise. The biggest change is finding the good blogs is even easier these days, thanks to the many many link aggregators. I was surprised how quickly the signal to noise tightened up when I filtered out any link from social networks and "professional" news sites.
Lopster, a GTK+ file sharing client using the OpenNap protocol (which was built after the original Napster (which has nothing to do with today's Napster) protocol)
You could download songs in 320kbps mp3 quality, you actually owned the tracks.
You could discover home-made remixes of completely unknown artists, which could happen to be truly amazing, and which then got lost forever after the downfall of the OpenNap servers.
You had an insta-search feature where you typed something in a search box, and the track list actually filtered immediately.
I miss all of this and I would pay so much money (even monthly) if something like that came up again.
Yes, it was illegal, and you have streaming services like Deezer and Spotify today, but try searching for Adele. There's no point if you have to have 2-3 sources to listen to your favourite music. The movie industry is repeating the same fragmentation faults of the music industry. There's still no legal way to stream or download your favourite music and movies.
You have music communities like Soundcloud, but artists need to pay money to make their work public (laughably unaffordable if you're, say, in Romania) and the sheer amount of work went forever extinct, just like what happened to Grooveshark.
You could search your library, and the library would filter your results instantly by the letter you've just typed. This is impossible with today's SPA platforms. Not a single competitor does sub strig filtering, and by the time your AJAX request hits the server, you're already 20ms over the time the results would have been shown in Lopster.
There was a golden time when those Napszter clones were alive, anyone remembering WinMX? I'm delighted Soulseek survived until today, i'll see what's left from the legacy.
> nobody is still using Pascal
While certainly Pascal is not a cool language anymore, I beg to differ about nobody using pascal. I use it to maintain a 1MM LoC for several medical devices. Some state agencies still use it for their software.
Every now and then I have to use a curses-based UI (the Linux kernel configurator, and Debian's package management stuff pops up dialogs, for example) and it always reminds me of how much better TurboVision was.
enjoyed gnome 3? either you waited several months with an outdated distro, or you never had to do basic things like shutdown/restart your computer, change volume, etc, etc... I know I waited months for those luxury. with the added insult of having contributed lots of accessibility code to gnome 2 settings that just got under the rug
Ubuntu 16.04 with Gnome Flashback Compiz can be made to look almost indistinguishable from Ubuntu Gnome 10.04, desktop cube included. Very few tweaks are needed. The only missing parts are the File, Edit menus on some applications, most notably Nautilus (they're working on it) but I don't really use the Gnome applications, except Nautilus and the menus are not that useful (I setup my preferences in Unity and it remembers them). The Gnome default apps look like the vanilla featureless versions of what one actually needs. Only the general DE is good.
I used it to typeset nearly all of my academic work until I was forced to switch to Word by peer pressure. Adobe made a complete hash of it, and none of those files are readable anymore.
I used PageMaker before, and QuarkXPress after that. InDesign's fairly good these days. I don't know why Adobe couldn't have retained the PageMaker name for their layout program though.
Internet free from government officials and old people. And all other bad things (like facebook) that did happen to it later.
From more recent times — there was some nice hardware 5-10 years ago. All netbooks and such. Nokia N900. Simple portable music players, with sole purpose of playing music stored locally on it.
Technically, it still exists. But, it's been abandoned for years, so it no longer "exists" than any more than the bytes of any other defunct program.
Sketch is far superior to Fireworks, so it no longer matters, but the abandonment of Fireworks actually caused me to completely stop designing websites, for years. It was too painful to use anything else, so I just gave up on it and started using Bootstrap to "design" sites.
"A/UX includes a utility called Commando (similar to a tool of the same name included with Macintosh Programmer's Workshop) to assist users with entering Unix commands. Opening a Unix executable file from the Finder opens a dialog box that allows the user to choose command-line options for the program using standard controls such as radio buttons and check boxes, and display the resulting command line argument for the user before executing the command or program."
That description doesn't do it justice. You didn't have to open an executable from the Finder; you could call it from the command line, as in
>commando ls
That popped up a dialog box with checkboxes for -l, -R, etc., with a text field for file names, a button that allowed you to pick files, etc.
There were two ways to exit the dialog. One executed the command, the other entered it in your shell for further editing, copy-pasting in a script (in MPW shell, that copy-pasting wasn't even needed, as every shell window was a file), etc.
And even better: the shell (at least in MPW) knew about commando, so typing
>ls…
or just typing ls and hitting command-option-return (or some other magic incantation) opened the dialog, too.
I may misremembered it, but IIRC, commando even parsed partial inputs to populate the dialog box when you opened it.
Thinking of MPW and the early Mac, I also miss the consistent distinction between return (the key to the right of the letter 'l' that starts a new line) and command-return or enter (on the numeric keypad, starts a command) that made it possible to enter multi-line text in input dialogs without living in the constant fear of dismissing the dialog early.
Your comment reminds me of the show-command verb in powershell, which automatically infers all the options available and maps them to a gui, and then has a run or copy option(though it does need a paste.)
Its really nice when you are exploring new stuff or just forgot which flag it was again and dont feel like reading the get-help.
Film cameras, they certainly still exist, but very few people use them anymore. And the ones still manufactured are either marketed as jewellery, or are crazy expensive.
My 100-50 year old family photos are sharper and better than pictures taken today with phones and cheap cameras. And expensive cameras are expensive and heavy.
At first I was very happy when the so called mirrorless camera appeared, but I was just too optimistic; the good ones are more expensive than an average DSLR, and lenses are still too big. Not to mention that they are full of bullshit software that will stop working in the future and batteries last a day or less. My DSLR battery lasts weeks/months and my film cameras (the ones that need a battery, most don't) last for many years.
Laptops with 4:3 (or 5:4) screens. For large screens (over 27''), I don't care as much about the aspect ratio, but for small screens is matters a lot. I'm looking forward to the ThinkPad Retro, but it will probably be a non-interesting heavy brick. We'll see.
Yahoo Pipes. Meticulously remixed, filtered, etc RSS feeds rendered useless with no viable alternative to date. Curses to Yahoo, especially whoever made the decision to kill it.
If you consider kazaa a tool, then kazaa. It was like limewire but a little older. This was one of the best programs ive ever used. It allowed for p2p transfers also. RIP Kazaa
For something completely different... a brace and bit hand drill for woodworking. It's almost impossible to find new drill bits that would fit the two jaw chuck, which doesn't have enough force to clamp on to a round bit with friction only.
A cordless drill is nice but not very accurate, useful for holes and screws, not for removing waste in joinery.
Whoa, thanks! The only ones I've found have been new old stock. Although these are rather expensive and in inch sizes only (I can't get inch-sized dowels without making them myself).
I never do it anymore, but it worked great until I got a PC, a Psion 5, and especially after my first Macbook. Since then I barely write with a pen, and if I do it's cramped.
This will sound silly and non-sequetor, but bear with me: Get a fountain pen. A $2 Pilot Varsity will get you started.
A fountain pen is a joy to write with. It requires virtually no pressure, especially when compared with cheap ball point pens. The ink flow is regular and heavy, resulting in even crappy writing looking interesting. It makes it fun to write, which makes (me at least) more likely to write whenever I can.
Just be sure to also use heavier paper - the Varsity ink will bleed through the cheap stuff 2-3 pages deep.
The Varsity was definitely my gateway drug into fountain pens. I burned through too many of them in grad school. Fantastic little things. I've since upgraded, but if I'm in a bind I'll grab a few of them at Staples.
I do this too. The lack of interrupts and constraints were also my driver back to blank pages for project planning/outlines/tricky bits to work through. My coworkers do think it's strange that I write so much and then throw it away nearly immediately once whatever I was doing is transferred back to the hivemind.
Pretty much all CS programs have exams where you must write code with pen and paper. It's a bit of a challenge to try and come up with an alternative way of having individual assessment of coding skill (with no help from the Internet or ways to cheat).
Lots of people complain about it but I never had an issue with it. Two reasons why: 1) typically the amount of code is really small and the exercises are very easy anyway 2) I've been writing (pseudo) code on pen and paper since I was a kid (and I still do!) and I find that to be a valuable tool.
Ditto for whiteboard coding in interviews, as long as we're talking about small toy problems, I have no problems doing it on the board.
I swear by wooden pencils and 5x5mm graph paper. I have a nice flipboard with a notepad, a pencil, a sharpener and an eraser attached with velcro.
Measured in straight up typing speed, a keyboard is faster but when you're talking note taking mixed with thinking or something that involved equations or diagrams, I can't get anywhere close with a computer. And there are no distractions on paper.
And why wooden pencils instead of a mechanical one? The smell. The smell of fresh shavings from the pencil sets my brain in the right gear.
It's $150 per 50 users per month. You can use our hosting or get it installed on your server (Debian) for the same price. We have around a hundred paying customers in Poland of various size, one in USA. The biggest implementation is 10k users every day, around 200 tables. So it scales well. If interested drop me a line, agsamek at Gmail.
And BTW - the system works in English and has some documantation inlined in Schema Editor. We will also do English docs. In the meantime we will provide you with good human support :)
I completely agree. I lost my HP 48 during a move and still mourn it. I bought an HP 41C on eBay to comfort me, because I yearned for the 41 I saw advertised in Scientific American as I was growing up. I loved writing programs in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPL_(programming_language), a Lispy dialect of Forth.
HP still makes RPN financial calculators. I recently switched to using an HP 12C at work, after holding out for a long time. It's amazing how quick it is once you get used to RPN, and I love the solid feel of the hardware. You can pick one up for around $50.
I still don't understand how "algebraic" input won ... it requires so many more keystrokes. Perhaps it makes sense for students in lower grade levels, but once you get proficient, RPN is a no-brainer.
I have a 128kbyte HP 48G in my closet and I will never part with it. It's a fine bit of hardware hackery from ages long, long gone by: four RAM ICs stacked on top of each other and a friend of mine did the wizardry soldering where most of the legs are just kinda ran together like so many tiny waterfalls and the control legs are soldered separately.
Swissmicros makes replicas of the 15 and 41 (among others). I need to get one to replace my 35s (keys starting to break after a couple years) some day.
fwiw i switched from Google Reader to https://bazqux.com/ - The UX is very similar, has no problem dealing with a lot of feeds and is fast enough to keep up with my ~1000 item/day habit.
https://www.inoreader.com/ - I might be mentioning it too often, but it's a great replacement that mirrors the Google Reader UI closely while adding a lot of enhancements. It also doesn't throw away old cached posts.
I second this. I tried an awefull lot of feed readers when Google announced the end of Reader, and Newsblur is by far the most usable one, and it is actually pretty good. I would stay on Newsblur rather than returning to Google Reader would it come back to life.
I miss Delphi as well even though I never got to use it for anything professional as I was very young at the time.
However I do remember very fondly how I came to know about Delphi 2 (or 3?).
Somehow I met this guy in ICQ and started talking about programming and about these (back then) very popular programs for "hacking" your friends: Back Orifice, Netbus, Sub7, etc. when he then says that he's actually developing his very own trojan tool called "Hacker's Paradise".
Long story short, at some point he sends me the source code and starts to explain to me how it works.
Some time later time he realizes that there's much more future in actually developing a tool for sysadmins so he renames the tool "Master's Paradise"[1] and starts trying to sell it.
Sadly, I never knew or heard from him again, but I love that story because I was around 10 or 12 at the time and it seemed like magic to me be able to open the Delphi editor, drag and drop some buttons and have a fully functional Windows program at my fingertips. Just beautiful.
Also, the fact that I was getting source code from a stranger over the internet for a tool that would do such "magical" things as opening and closing the cd-rom tray of whoever you had the chance to infect, made me feel like part of the super elite hacker world (ha!).
Have you ever used Lazarus? I'm curious how it compares to Delphi specifically for GUI development. From a rapid GUI development standpoint, they seem to be the only game in town aside from VisualBasic.
I used it for a small project where I needed a quick way to plot some lab data. I chose Lazarus because these data needed to be displayed on all the computers in our lab, including a few Windows machines.
I was amazed when the program I developed on Linux compiled and ran flawlessly on Windows at the first attempt!
Probably more about its dwindling presence, and even when it's still used in some industries it's nowhere near the spotlight levels it had before I think.
There is an awesome FreePascal [1]. Along with TurboPascal-like console IDE called FPIDE, it has Delphi-like GUI IDE - Lazarus. And it very actively developed, cross-platform and supports modern technologies.
and my ability to stay up late at night and work. I pass out no matter what. This is what family and responsibilities do to you. I don't regret having a family but it did impact my ability to work substantially.
Reveal Codes from WordPerfect. I am just typing text now, thanks god, but if I needed to format it, just a few years ago I needed to, I am so, so lost.
I miss all those old school RTS games like Total Annihilation, Command and Conquer series, Age of Empires etc. No one really makes decent RTS games now.
There are several so-called 'spiritual successors' on Steam; just spend some time reading the reviews of the official successors to find the negative reviews suggesting alternatives. One potential qualifier: http://store.steampowered.com/app/335940
I've received Grey Goo with a recent Humble Bundle, it feels very much like an old school RTS with three different factions (Starcraft-like) with a focus on base-building and resources
I miss my 19" 4:3 CRT monitor that did 1600x1200 @ 85Hz.
I want to play doom with it again. No matter what you do, upscaling a low resolution game to high resolution flat display just doesn't look good. Whereas a CRT, even a high end one, could switch to a low resolution mode and look crisp without turning the pixels into huge squares.
I see that "crt shaders" are popular today, but to me they all look like they're trying to replicate the look of a NES hooked up to a shitty old television. It's completely different from a high resolution computer display.
Every time I miss big CRTs I remember how fat their asses were and how much fun they were to lug up stairs. No thanks.
Having said that, I rescued my wife's grandfather's early 80s Toshiba TV when we were cleaning up his house after he died. It is awesome for playing games, and TV works on it (TV > balun > digital tuner > antenna). Too bad there's nothing to watch.
A lot of people think that CRTs all worked like the flickery, jittery displays from Fallout games. Compare also the default settings on cool-retro-term, and then track down a working-order VT220; odds are the picture on the actual terminal will still be rock-steady and razor-sharp.
Wow, I had completely forgotten about list.com,but as soon as you mentioned it, I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia. It was an absolutely versatile and powerful utility without equal in its day.
I don't know what the newer versions are like, since I still use 4NT 8.something. It's got some missing or inconvenient functionality, such as no equivalent to `...`, and I've had its DEL commands delete too many files a couple of times (!!!). But I still rate it above any of the POSIX-style ones for interactive use, on account of its popups for browsing command history, working folder history and selecting files.
I am careful to only delete files with `rm' these days though...
It would surprise me greatly if HyperCard didn't influence the early web. HyperCard Cards and the way that buttons transition to different cards in the stack is not that different at a high level from the way pages work and hyperlinks transition to a new page on the site.
Yeah, I'd love to see an OS/2 comeback on one level. Although since my old OS/2 days, I've become such an F/OSS ideologue, that I probably wouldn't use a modern OS/2 unless it were F/OSS.
At this point, I'd settle for a really good implementation of the WPS on Linux. I don't care that much about the OS/2 API or SOM or any of that stuff. But the UI experience hit a sweet spot for me.
It would even backup my SMSes and let me search through them in an online interface. But then MS decided to shut it down within few months of me buying a phone because of this particular feature.
I loved my old Treo. We were one of the first companies in this country to set up ActiveSync to get 'real time' emails on those devices. We would get all smug showing off to our clients how 'Dick Tracy' we were, getting and responding to emails while out and about! :)
I was intrigued back then to see in the PalmPilot ActiveSync settings, that you could specify what times of the day and week you wanted to 'go quiet' and disable real time syncing. I snorted in derision as I questioned why anyone would want to stop this glorious flow of emails at any time.
Nowadays, I am staggered that most modern devices do not allow you to turn off the deluge. I know that there is now a movement among some web service companies to allow users to specify 'no work time', and I really really hope that trend catches on and it becomes ubiquitous in all internet connected devices.
Similarly, the Vizor Handspring. I always popped Pimlico's Datebook onto it for better calendaring. My modern android smartphone is more capable and more fun to tinker with but is a worse phone than my old Nokia soapbar and a worse PDA than the Palm and Handspring.
- ASUS MyPal (which I have and it still works) had much better battery life than any of the smartphones I ever owned.
- It had a consistent interface that wasn't a confusing clusterfuck of random shapes and expectations.
- The hardware was durable and extensible through compact flash slot.
- I could install software on it without going to a centralize store or going through some elaborate jailbreak. And while there wasn't a million free apps for it, there were good free apps, and finding them was actually easier than finding something on Google Play.
Fellow Grooveshark refugee here. Spotify doesn't quite come close: small library (only 'real' artists, and sometimes not even those), no way to put custom stuff in there and sync it at least with your own devices, Grooveshark not only had customer support but damn good customer service, and then there are broadcasts with the chat feature and song voting... Yeah, all the good bits are gone.
I had a paid subscription and now pay Spotify as the closest thing to it, but I feel as much a customer of Spotify as I feel a customer of Twitter: neither listen to me when something is shitty.
If you're on windows try foobar2000 [0]
On linux try moc.[1] The latter might be too restricted for your needs but personally I absolutely love its simple interface.
foobar2000 and Winamp are completely different types of programs. The former was more or less just a simple music player while the latter is highly configurable.
No, not that Winamp, the pre-AOL one. It got worse after AOL bought Nullsoft, I grant, but it wasn't anything special before; it might've been the best of a bad lot, but nostalgia aside, that doesn't make it good.
Visual Studio's debugger still smokes anything I've used since. You could literally drag the program counter to the point you wanted, rewrite your code, and start stepping through it again.
That, and the ability to double click on a damned button and see what it did... What a golden era.
Only the dotNet based VB.Net is available in Visual Studio since 2002, with the Visual Studio .Net which was completely rewritten since the 1998's Visual Studio 6.
Interleaf, an electronic document application that did (nearly) everything Word does but better. Repaginate a 2000 page document, according to rules that you know will not place graphics hanging halfway off the page? Create a table of contents in seconds across several books? Lisp extension language? It was very good. All before Windows 2, and on UNIX workstations. The current document creation tools just make me want to cry.
Borland Turbo C++ was my first "real" programming language after GW-BASIC. Had some extremely heavy Tandy laptop ('portable computer' might be a better moniker) with a CGA monitor. Those were the days.
Also, if you broke something the runtime error messages were useful, not like the stack trace we have today. There is beauty in having just a single line runtime error.
I loved my Pre. Wireless charging. WebOS. Swipe gestures. Optional hardware keyboard. Their notification system is still unsurpassed by iOS/Android today.
+1 for Eudora. How is it that no other email client can get folders right? I don't know what I'm going to do when my Snow Leopard box dies… maybe run SheepShaver.
I constantly miss SoftICE. Rasta Ring 0 Debugger was looking like a promising replacement for a while, but it just seemed to fizzle out and never got where it should've been. WinDbg isn't awful these days, but that's about the most praise I can give it.
I really want to build a decent wrapper around the WinDbg protocol and run it on a Raspberry Pi+display that sits on top of my desktop case. That way I can just grab that and break in any time I need to debug something.
You can easily do that with radare2 already. As I mentioned already it does have WinDbg protocol support and is very portable by itself. Along with WinDbg it has support for GDB protocol. So you can run r2 on your Raspberry Pi and connect to WinDbg on your desktop and perform debugging from Raspberry Pi.
Syser claimed to be that replacement. But in fact it's too old, unstable and nobody using it. Now everyone is using WinDbg for kernel/drivers debugging. It has terrible command syntax, but with PyKD extension and some customisation it's usable. See those slides[1] on how to do that. Also, there is another way to work with WinDbg protocol - using radare2[2]. Beware this support is in early development and may be unstable. But, unlike original WinDbg, it is cross-platform tool without external dependencies and completely free and open source.
The Thunderbolt adapter is $30. USB adapters are even cheaper. Given how rarely I find myself actually using Ethernet on my MBP, I'm perfectly happy to trade off the need for a dongle for a laptop half as thick as it would have to be to fit an internal Ethernet port.
So what's the distinction between a "Pro" model and the normal model then? I thought that was the point of having a "pro" lineup, was so serious work could be done and normal consumers would be steered towards the Air or MacBook line....
The Pro line offers considerably beefier processors and graphics chipsets, and more memory, than the Air or just-plain-MacBook lines do.
I don't know what kind of very serious work you're talking about that can't be done at all with less than 150Mbps symmetric, not even for a minute - but in a decade and a half in this industry, I have yet to meet anyone who does it. So I'm willing to surmise that it's a very serious niche specialty, whatever it is.
You'll probably have to sink considerable money into whatever laptop you want to do this kind of very serious work on, but you'll be happy to know that Thunderbolt 2 can handily support 10Gbps, and such interfaces are readily available. Of course, they come at a premium price, but you're getting paid well enough for your very serious work that that doesn't pose you a major problem, I'm sure.
Right, at home on a 30mpbs/5uo internet connection? Or in an office with a business class symmetric fiber at 150mbps with no busting or shaping? There isn't enough wireless spectrum available in USA for more than 5-10 people in a 50yd radius to get full bandwidth. And the backhaul to wireless APs is 1gig, so not only are you splitting airtime, you're splitting wiretime.
Javelin comes to mind, but I used it in the 1980's [1]. There must be some better example; it seems strange to me that I can't think of anything else more recent.
ReplayTV. I was able to record TV, and easily transfer shows to my networked computer for later consumption. I still have all the Good Eats episodes from 15 years ago.
It was a very nice CSS and Javascript framework that was much easier to use for complex UIs than the competition. It had lots of good UI components with an integrated event and data source system.
One example is the data table. I haven't found anything better since, and most are not even comparable
Apportable. Amazing tool that compiled Obj-C to Android targets, and had stubs to bridge iOS frameworks to Android. Sounds impossible but it actually worked, really well. They had limited support for UIKit, and it worked flawlessly with Cocos2d so was great for porting games. They were starting to integrate with SpriteBuilder, a nice open source scene editor for Cocos2d but once Apportable pulled their support that community disappeared overnight.
Pretty sure they got acquired by Google, who are taking engineering in a new direction with a new project named Flutter that uses Dart as the source language, which is totally useless for porting over existing Obj-C code bases. Too bad, so sad.
But Java is still as free as it was when SUNW was still a ticker symbol. Oracle hasn't done anything to kill OpenJDK and start charging for new versions or anything like that.
I feel that this demonization of Oracle and the concomitant sanctification of Google in this fight between two profit driven corporations is somewhat misguided.
A little more nuance: it's not only that Oracle is bad, but that Sun was good.
Oracle's business model is about extracting value; whereas Sun was about building platforms (which they did several times). Oracle has a history of squeezing open projects and alienating developers. You're right, they've taken care not to completely chew up the tremendous business value of Java, only test-nibbling at the edges: projects like Hudson (now Jenkins), changes to JCP, cutting evangelists.
Many key people left Sun before or soon after the acquisition. Oracle is a different place to work, being sales-focused. It's not entirely due to Oracle though; the game had changed and Sun was no longer leading.
It's not specific changes to java, but changes to the philosophy of the java custodian. These determine its future.
BTW: I can't speak for the other upvoters, but I think Google was clearly in the wrong. They knew it, Sun knew it - but let them get away with it because a new platform was good for java (NB cf. Sun litigated MS for fragmenting java). In contrast, Oracle is suing Google for revenue, not for any platform.
So... although Google is the bad guy, it illustrates the different philosophies of Sun vs
Oracle.
In this sense the old java - its philosophy and its future - "doesn't exist anymore". :(
What pisses me off about this whole saga is that now we are left with a legal precedent that broadly validates all copyrights on APIs.
And my feeling is that it may not have come to this if Google hadn't violated not just the law but also the spirit of the social contract around APIs in such a brazen fashion.
Here comes a hugely profitable company with a business model based on advertising and clones a struggling innovator's entire platform for use on the up-and-coming class of devices without paying the creator a single cent.
Google didn't just implement an API to make two different pieces of software compatible so they would work better together. They didn't fight for everyone's freedom to implement APIs either. The only thing they did was fight to keep every last cent of their profits to themselves in the most short sighted, unimaginative and harmful way possible.
I don't have great sympathy for Oracle's business culture. But as I see it, here are two big corporations, each of them ruthlessly pursuing their own self interest, neither of them giving a shit about everyone elses freedoms or any legal precendent they are setting. And neither of them is showing the slightest hint of creativity in their approach.
Freedoms ultimately cannot be based on the benevolence or charity of corporations. Sometimes we share common interests with one or other corporation. And sometimes, as in this case, we don't, and things go to shit without being in anyone's interest at all. Everyone loses, including Google and Oracle. Pure stupidity all the way down.
I'm not sure I'll ever understand how Oracle was able to acquire Sun. For the little money involved it seems even Microsoft should have wanted to own it.
ICQ and all it's features and add-ons made IM'ing so much fun. I remember the feature where you could type and your keypresses (incl. backspace) were immediately transmitted to the other side. You could also talk to random strangers and not be scared of frontal male nudity. Of course my IRL friends (I live in the NL) only discovered IM with MSN Messenger.
Funny how ICQ was, what, 20 years early to the IM revolution?
Slack nowadays is a mixture of IRC and ICQ. It was wonderful to be able to talk for free (well, paying dialup minutes) with the 3 friends you might had online, plus that guy on the other side of the world who you met through an ICQ number on a website :_)
Going way back, the easy answer for me is the Paradox desktop database from Borland. I used it in DOS in 1990; Windows kind of killed it. It was amazingly easy to build apps in it.
I suppose it still "exists" in that you can download it from the Chrome store, but all traces of its development have been wiped and it'll eventually die away.
Total Commander (yes it's still available and still great but I'm not using Windows anymore, now OS X). I even miss Windows Explorer... I will never get in love with Finder on OS X.. most horrible File Manager ever. Finder is like a punishment for everybody switching to OS X (I want copy&paste and folders first everywhere, gosh). Thunar on XFCE was also ok. At least ForkLift nowadays helps me not to be angry at my Mac ;)
I totally agree, I changed all the settings on my mac to try to see if I could get a good experience but I just can't, typing the path with auto complete in Windows Explorer and "F2" to rename a folder name are the features I miss the most.
In my experience most people who hate Finder aren't using it to its full potential. Are you making use of Spring Loaded Folders and have you enabled the path bar?
Norton Guides. A similar TSR that also included a compiler for building your own guides. I remember one popular one was the Ralph Brown Interrupt List. I think about this tool a lot, but I think IDE's with auto completion and showing parameters has largely replaced the need. But using NG, still seems faster than having to launch an IDE help system or doing a google search.
So much this! I use a lot of audio programs, and this was the single most stable and solid version of MacOS X for my purposes.
I should have just stayed there. Now I'm contemplating whether I want to migrate my 8-year-old Mac Pro to El Capitan and wondering if it will break Aperture completely.
I'm still using it on my mac. I don't really do any work it anymore because of software requiring >10.9, but it's still amazing for day to day computing.
Used it during my time as a typesetter to mass-calculate values based on a scaling factor. Soo much faster than an electronic calculator!
Disc calculators have not completely vanished, they are still being made for specific purposes like aviation. But all-purpose disc calculators need to have a huge diameter and smooth mechanics to work nicely and I only seem to find them as antiquities on ebay.
And just be glad you don't have to use these anymore.
Loading programs from cassette was a pain. A game from tape could take 15-30 mins! Fast-loaders that could speed up loading by a factor of 10 were a godsend in those days.
Oh my god, yes. It was a fantastic, snappy tool for sound editing. Then Adobe acquired it, rebranded to "Audition", changed all hot keys and UI, killed lots of features, and finally added so much bloat (including a slow-as-hell UI bitmap theme) that it wasn't usable anymore.
What does everyone use for sound editing these days?
reaper is popular. it's cheap (or free). i also like tracktion. v4 is free and it's a powerful, simple, single screen daw. there's always audacity too, but it's pretty limited. i've also heard good things about wavosaur (free). dumb name, but simple for quick audio editing.
Have you tried any alternative windows shells yet? (as in full desktop replacements) I remember being quite happy running bluebox around the win2k era, but it seems there's still a few that work with recent versions.
Projects like http://litestep.info/ for example (it can be reskinned so it doesn't look like early 2000s unix)
According to this poor version the file I tried to view in DOSBox was created in the year ";6". (The 9.x versions show "04/15/2016".)
Also, here's what was indexed as "ASM for early V Buerg LIST file viewer", but it's very rudimentary, at only ~1000 SLOC of ASM. No compiled copy provided so I can't test it, looks like MASM syntax: http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/msdos/coast/textutil/lst60asm.zip
Sygate Personal Firewall. It had a simple interface, nothing flashy. It was possible to simply define custom firewall rules. It was a Windows program, yet it felt like it had so much control as what a Linux firewall would. It just worked and was quick. Then it got bought up by Symantec and was killed off.
WordPerfect. A wordprocessor that used the user interface metaphor of a typewriter, and therefore behaved consistent with what people expect when they perform text formatting operations. Unlike modern word processors that use some strange object metaphor that never formats things the way I expect.
Fuji Neopan 1600. Fuji Fortia. Kodak Aerochrome. Hasselblad V system (OK, they do exist but are discontinued and becoming increasingly more expensive to maintain).
TMON - Terminal Monitor for early Macintoshes. It was like you were touching the hardware of the machine. I'm probably one of the few that wrote a set of plugins for TMON for doing all kinds of crazy stuff to make debugging awesome. Loved it so much, named my dog after it.
Oh my goodness yes. So much to love about !Zap. My first ARM assembly programs were written using the Zap disassembler/assembler extension. I also really miss the way it displayed search results, not seen another editor that does it quite like that.
Also on RISC OS "The Hacker" was one _the_ best ARM disassembler / OS inspection / debugging tools. It was sold as a game cheating tool, but was particularly great for pulling apart copy protection :) Learned so much with it. Again, still available, for an irrelevant OS.
I miss MacDraw, and don't see it here. Visio or Gliffy.com is the closest I know of. Just an object level graphics tool, where items placed on the page are forever re-editable, groupable, and very easy to make flow charts, and application diagrams.
I prefer a trackball to a mouse, and the one I liked best was the Microsoft Trackball Explorer. I liked that I could control the trackball with my fingers and use my thumb for the wheel and buttons. Pointing is much more precise that way.
+1 for the Kensington Expert Mouse, I have 3. The quality of the scroll ring is up for debate but the device overall is much better than anything else I've used.
I also miss the Logitech Trackman Wheel optical. It was cheap, light, and worked very well. I still have one for occasional use.
Kensington Slimblade. Scrolls by turning the ball around the Z axis; it sounds strange and error-prone but actually works perfectly. I now keep a spare in a box on a shelf beside my spare Kinesis keyboard.
Computer Concepts Impression Publisher. Basically a desktop publishing application comparable to FrameMaker, in handwritten ARM assembly language and running in 4Mb of RAM. Word still doesn't approach it's ease of use.
Artworks was also pretty wonderful. This post has reminded me of so many awesome RiscOS applications. There were so many neat little applications. Most things seemed quite solid too. I guess in part because if they crashed the whole system would go down, so applications were written not to crash. :)
Springnote was like evernote but automatically categorized things in a smarter way from the browser. I could add a page with an isbn and it would let me add it as a book with all the details looked up, not as a webpage.
I also used Springboard, not as an Evernote replacement but I would use to do inventory of my physical belongings, movie and book queue, recipes, and wish list, because it recognized almost any type of product you threw at it.
Sadly, haven't found any other app as smart as this.
File servers. Everywhere I've worked for the past 5 years makes you use a cloud "solution" like DropBox or Google Drive. Those things are find for individual use, but a nightmare to work with in a team. "I'll share that doc with you." "I can't access it - can you give me permissions?" "OK what's your email address..." etc. I sure do miss the days when a) there was a common root directory that everyone could see and b) the issue of permissions wasn't crowd sourced to people who don't understand permissions systems.
HP Deskjet 690c Printer - I think the last ink jet printer of the "old" age, before printers started to be manufactured using really cheap materials in order to make the real profit from ink.
Made by a company called ThinkFlood that unfortunately has since gone out of business, it was a rack mount box (I had/have the pro) that operates as a centralized, multi-room, IR+Serial+Relay controller. Really simple to get started with, but, amazingly powerful with a built-in Lua scripting engine and an API to remotely control things. Apps on iOS/Android and a fully-featured web interface.
It has been about 2 years and I've still not found anything that I like more than this box to automate my home theatre (I'm still using it).
The tool is still around, but I long ago knuckled under to rich email, and I really like imap, at home and at my provider.
But I so loved the MH environment of separate commands that ran in the terminal, and that you could easily use all the existing unix utilities because your messages were just text files.
I wish something better than yahoo pipes existed in the first place. I mean, I love the idea, but every time I tried to use it for something more than a toy, I ran into the same issue - I need to unpack one item into several items and switch to processing those. I never found a good solution for that and ended up writing own python/requests/lxml processor instead.
Sabre C aka Centerline C and later Centreline ObjectCenter (C++). Best C debugging environment I've ever used. I ported the X11R3 server to some custom h/w using it.
This[1].It was one of the best chrome store extensions which would directly take you to the relevant text while using Google Search.But it was shut down because of the drain in advertising revenue.
Thank you Google!
This extension now makes no mention of the old functionality you're referring to. How did it work, in detail, for anybody who might want to reimplement the behavior?
Thankfully, the image carousel preserved enough info that I can understand exactly what this did. And because the image hosting framework the Chrome Web Store uses is exceptionally user-friendly, it was very easy to grab a full-res screenshot of the most important image: http://imgur.com/L7oWUXH
Thanks for mentioning that this once existed. I'm not sure if my tragic dev skills will be up to figuring out how to reimplement tit, but I'll certainly let you know if I make any progress!
Q-BASIC. Just basic programming without any bloat or garbage. I feel sorry for kids now. Foisted on to Python or Java right away even the modern basics are bloated.
PC Outline (PCO) was very good in its day. I was using it under DOS in 1985 and some people are still using it today in a Windows DOS box. It gave me the opportunity to move over from a long-form prose approach to 'writing things down' to something far more concise and well-structured. Nowadays the Outliner functionality space is very full of product but it seems that PCO itself led nowhere.
I must have adopted Directory Opus after version 5, so maybe I don't know what I'm missing. DO is at version 11 now, and I absolutely adore it. It's the first thing I put on a new Windows system.
I keep meaning to buy it to give it another go, I lost touch after 5 but kept revisiting their website for some reason. Like going back to an ex's facebook page to see what they've been up to.
Windows explorer, the Finder, Gnome/KDE/etc. are all appalling. Maybe I'm gonna go back and look at that website again... sigh
Writely. Worked very well to write together. Then Google bought and integrated into its ecology and changed its name to Google Docs. If you do not like the Google monopoly, like me, and do not like their collaboration with the NSA and the US foreign policy, Google Docs is no option. Writely should have stayed independent. Shame on their founders and the VCs.
Ecco Pro outliner. Technically it still runs on w10, but the various glitches forced me to onenote.
I also really miss my nt4 system: office 95, delphi 3, coreldraw 5, photoshop 5, netscape 4. Despite having only a 233 mhz cpu and 128 megs of RAM that system seemed more responsive and easier to use than my current pc's, and it did everything i needed it to.
Maybe Treeline[0] (a favorite of mine) or BasKet[1] (not sure if a windows version exists) suit your needs. They're both open source and more responsive than onenote.
There was a music "tracker" called Jeskola Buzz tracker. I used it to write music for 8 years. It was the perfect mix between DAW and experimental tool. It technically still exists, but the source had been lost for ages before I even started using it. It was buggy, and PC-only.
There used to be a disk cloning tool called Ghost which was written by an independent developer (I think named Ghostsoft) and amazingly useful in the late 90's. They were bought by Symantec who turned it into more of a backup tool - useful, but not the same thing.
The GoogleCL command line tools I used to upload large YT videos from my RPi overnight. With a change in Google's authentication mechanism they stopped working and were abandoned.
Now that I look for them, apparently there exists a fork. Might test that out.
Old DOS OrCAD- it's a full screen schematic capture program with best mouse usage. To scroll large schematics you just move past the screen edge. Also the macro system was excellent. I've not found a more productive capture program.
Didn't expect to see this one here. I worked for Nokia at the time that they bought some of the CodeWarrior assets from Metroworks. Coming from Visual Studio, CodeWarrior felt like a big step down. What do you miss about it?
I wrote a lot of code with CodeWarrior. One of the things I miss most is the PowerPlant framework. Such a nice "forest" design with mix-ins. (Yes, you can download it, but it isn't the same). I learned a lot about designing usable class libraries by reading PowerPlant.
I learned a lot about designing usable class libraries by reading Microsoft Foundation Class libraries, too, but in the sense of "whatever you do, don't design !@#$% like this..."
Some of it is nostalgia. Some things it genuinely did better -- CodeWarrior's inline ASM syntax kicked the shit out of the GCC equivalent we're stuck with today.
And some of it is highly subjective: there was a simplicity to the old CodeWarrior UI in pre-OS X MacOS. You had a separate project window and a text editor window for every file you were editing. It was clean. It was uncluttered. It wasn't 300 tabs, sidebars, and top bars jammed into one God Window to Rule Them All.
Quicksilver also has a "shelf" area that acts as a temporary holding place for files. It's not as simple and friendly as Unclutter, but there's a pretty open-ended shortcut system with a mouse-gestures plugin available.
Kedit. The 'all' command is unbeatable for looking at large log files and quickly moving around a file. Many editors have a similar feature but none do it better or nearly as fast as Kedit.
ARRL Radio Designer ... it was great for designing complex wideband and narrowband filters. And it would run Monte-Carlo simulations that let you estimate yields based on the component tolerances.
For anyone who ever used BBSs (which is something else I miss), Terminate would ring a bell. That was one spectacularly awesome terminal program. Oh, and requiring 3 HD floppies to install it :p
Livejournal. Now completely unusable, servers being down for days, political propaganda ads covering half of screen, and almost no real people using it (only spammers and political scam).
CFStudio (big brother of HomeSite). Probably used it for 10+ years without an update until switching to OS X and having to find an alternative. Eventually settled on Sublime.
This! HomeSite's ability to to multi-line find & replace across multiple files (all open files or all files in specific folder) was a really helpful feature for many tasks. I have yet to find something that can repliciate that. Can Sublime?
WinAmp - still around, but basically abandonware. Still haven't found anything on the Linux side that comes close to it for managing huge media libraries.
iTunes. It's become a mess. In the old days it was so simple to manage an MP3 archive. It would even properly export ID3 tags.
These days what I want is an MP3 archive in the cloud.
Hold my mp3s, not your pre-licensed copies with different
metadata. Stream my mp3s to any app, with an API. I don't want your mp3 store. I don't want your crappy Spotify clone. I just want my mp3s in the cloud.
Oh yes - I really miss IWantSandy - Worked via Twitter as well as email. The precursor to Siri and a lot of other modern clunky virtual PAs. I loved its elegant simplicity.
Sad when Twitter hired Rael (the developer) and then killed the project.
Developer Tools (and the skin-of-developer-tools that is Firebug 2) are markedly inferior. From breakpoint- and file-management to the functional limitations and missing features around dom management... I miss the Firebug that died in FireFox 29.
...
Here's what I'd like DevTools to do:
* Make a breakpoints view, not one embedded into a massive list of unsorted (or sorted-by-load-date I guess?!) files that changes over time. If that can't be done (or is against the design philosophy of DevTools), letting me choose the sort order would be nice (e.g. recently-viewed files first, or files with breakpoints, etc ..... and uh, remembering those files and/or settings through refreshes would be fantastic... I miss it from Firebug 2). It's nice because after/during refreshes the breakpoint view lets you pull up the file the second it's loaded, instead of scrolling around in the file list until you find it.
* Make it a LOT more obvious when DevTools is stopped at a breakpoint.
* DevTools doesn't handle initial focus the way Firebug does. As in, when you pull up Firebug via the selection icon--oh, DevTools needs that selection icon for the toolbar--it goes straight to the dom node you selected.
* Make DevTools stop crashing. It stops working. Constantly. The console will just stop printing output, and the DOM view just stops displaying HTML, requiring a browser restart. (When this happens, if you, say, pull up the console and type "1" and hit enter, usually the console echos "1" back to you. When you're in this state, it's not echoed back, though, oddly, some script messages still pop in.)
* Make "debugger" start working again. There are some places where--for who knows what reason--both Firebug and DevTools have ignored breakpoints I've put in, and I've been able to get around it in Firebug by explicitly putting in "debugger;" into my code. You definitely know you're in deep kimchi when you need "debugger;".
Also, for one of my websites, it can't load the source. It just shows "eval" as the filenames over and over with nothing in them. Firebug 2 loads it just fine.
If I use the browser too long, the Inspector and Console tabs go blank.
Oh, and DevTools often doesn't honor my breakpoints. They "slide" down to the next line DevTools thinks it can actually stop on. Sometimes, once I restart my browser they'll work again.
For another, as a time-saver I put breakpoints on lines that /will/ be valid when I refresh (saves me from having to refresh the file twice), so it'd be grand if it simply honored the line i clicked rather than "sliding" down to the next valid one.
True, the v1 used internal API directly. They ported it to a newer API that is also used by Developer Tools.
Though even today, I prefer Firebug as I really like the good UI and it has several features that are nowhere to be found in neither Developer Tools in Firefox nor DevTools in Chrome nor F12 in IE11.
E.g. the "DOM" tab that let's one to view the DOM state - it's like working with Smalltalk/Squeak and its object browser window.
i'm missing kde3.5 and dcop. kde3.5 was so fast and snappy and apps there were so feature rich. and dbus is no match to dcop - you can discover dcop features straight in console and use right away. but you cant do use dbus without reading a ton of scattered docs.
I've moved to Digg Reader which has been a good replacement.
I'm sure by Google standards that reader usage was tiny but I'm guessing the value of the usage was pretty high. I check reader first thing, last thing and several times in between.
I had one of these. Everything using HTML/JS was a poor idea on hardware of the time (six+ years ago?) and probably still a bad idea today. The hardware keyboard was pretty crummy. Maybe better than a touchscreen keyboard.
pentadactyl add-on for firefox. Allows you to browse like you were using vim and allows you to script anything you do on the web.
Vimperator isn't nearly as powerful and all the chrome options aren't even worth mentioning.
Okay I kind of miss DRDOS 6.0 and doing my autoexec.bat by hand trying to break the 640kb limits that Bill decided would be more than enough for any use. That's when I installed Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swap (EMACS) to prove the superiority of Linux
Preview.app, the default image editor on Mac OS X, is just as convenient. I think it has fewer clicks; the selection tool is always the default, so you just drag and Cmd+K. Save-on-quit is the default as well so you just close the window.
Please read it from a consumer perspective about consumer topics: (of course B2B is very different, where other things matter)
* products/software without DRM, always-online, analytics, tracking and spy "features" - bad for consumer personal privacy, and prevents second hand market, products cannot be owned anymore, try buying Windows 10, John Deer tractor, Tesla S without that crap
* Cash money: those Davos attendees started a war against consumers - electronic money transfer is useful, yes, but without cash money everything in daily life can be tracked and you can loose everything over night it's just a digital number after all, state wants negative interest rates ... just a matter of a mouse click, a normal consumer would get a kind of a slave, as we learned from cases like "1984" or various real cases like former state East Germany, while wealthy folks have numerous companies in various countries. Some states already started to limit the amount of cash money one is allowed to carry and eliminated entire cash notes like the 500 EURO note. Some probably fall for the propaganda that it's a way to limit criminals - as if those wouldn't use shell companies and electronic money transfer.
* Erosion of the idea of ownership: some like renting things and consume services, fine, but others prefer owning things like a house, a car, a computer device. And with ownership I mean also the possibility to sell the stuff to someone else and using it without an artificial time limit.
Like, you miss when you could configure a Cisco router without using the cloud sysadmin console? I miss when I owned my Mac OS X. I'd use Linux just for the sake of having a non-cloud system.
Concerning money, I don't understand why we wouldn't track criminals when using banknotes. There are only 15bn Euro banknotes, all numbered. You could track them easily in Postgres. 90% banknotes change hands only once before going through a bank again. It is certainly easy to watch the banknotes' travel patterns, and they'd be stupid not to do it: If a dealer cashes in banknotes which were withdrawn from your account, it's a big arrow pointing towards you. It's even worse in bulk: If a few dozen banknotes are withdrawn together, go unused for a few months, then all get exchanged in Moscow, it's a smoking trail. Cash management for mafias is certainly a a job, and banknotes don't always have the same value, depending on how clean they are (e.g. the 500EUR is worth 520€ on the legal second-hand market in Paris).
Cash was never a good store of value. You could easily lose everything to fire or theft over night. And governments can create inflation to erode the value of cash pretty quickly if they really want to.
There is no erosion of the idea of ownership. As someone who is renting in London I can assure you that quarterly inspections and thick, dirty carpets are an effective reminder of the fact that you are either an owner or something between a child and a criminal.
You missed the point. Sure, there is a risk of inflation, but you can act immediately for your own good if there a slight warnings on the horizon. You can't do anything if it's out of reach like in recent history as the banks closed all ATMs like they did in Cyprus and Greece. But I wrote about daily usage of money, and not be limited or tracked in any way, like you are with non-cash money.
About ownership, you missed the point, London is a bad example, as it's very expensive own a house there - we know that. But outside of that bubble, a house on the country side is still affordable but new regulations and taxes may get a burden. As well as several products come with licenses and software which limits its usage making it virtually more like renting a service instead of owing the product and being able to do what you want with it - like the mentioned Windows 10 with its tracking/spying/hardware-dongle, John Deer tractors and Tesla S with its user account dongle which prevents third party service, after market and selling your own stuff, etc. Or electric cars where the car manufacturer owns the battery, and you can only rent it. Or autonomous cars that you may only lease and not be able to buy and own yourself in near future, as some CEOs mentioned.
>You missed the point. Sure, there is a risk of inflation, but you can act immediately for your own good if there a slight warnings on the horizon. [...] About ownership, you missed the point, London is a bad example, as it's very expensive own a house there
I think you are missing the point, because you're not seeing the connection between these symptoms.
Property in London is so expensive because our culture values ownership more than ever and because property is used as a store of value by those who already see the warning signs on the horizon (in various countries around the world).
I do agree to some extent with your tracking concerns when it comes to electronic payments. But we have to realize that tracking is not an inherent flaw/feature of electronic payments. It is the result of laws and regulations created by the governments we elected.
The point you are making about software licenses has very little to do with a shift away from ownership in my view. We never owned software, even when it was distributed on floppy disks. We never owned music even when it was distributed on vinyl. Tracking and onerous usage restrictions are a feature of the networked nature of modern software and of the distribution channels we use. Ownership rights that make these things possible have always been in place.
You wrote about the housing bubble, I wrote about cash money. You wrote about theoretical licenses, I wrote about that you practically own something.
Example: I buy a DVD, I can play the DVD as many times I want until it physically breaks. I some states it's also allowed by law to create a backup copy in case it breaks. And while you are allowed by law to do things, it's not possible with new paradigm like used in Win10, John Deer traktor or Tesla S car - so even if you are by law allowed to do things like sell your own stuff, you simply can't do that with such dongled stuff that also tracks you all the time as extra bonus.
And it's not about electronic cash per se, it's about centralized systems. I am unsure about Bitcoin but it sounds at least better than a system controlled by the state. Anyway cash money is still the way to go. It's like electronic voting, at the moment there is no realistic way to build a system that is secure and also don't record who voted what and making it easier to mass-manipulate votings - that's why still many states disallow electronic voting or reverted back to voting on paper. Of course many lobbyists from voting machine manufacturers would say the opposite.
I'm not sure it's not allowed. I can make a bit of paper saying "I, Tim will pay the bearer on demand US$1 * the current CPI / 238" and sell it to you for a dollar.
Some reasons why inflation free currencies don't work very well in practice are if there is a lot of debt in society and the economy turns down it can be useful to inflate the debt away a bit. Otherwise you get Greece. If they were still on the Drachma with debts in that they could just print a bunch more and have the economy back to normal. Instead they owe Euros which have about zero inflation and are basically bankrupt.
It's not really about benefits to the government - they can grab what they want as taxes. It's about bailing out the over indebted. Sure you could let them go bust and let the banks that lent to them go bust etc. like they used to in the gold standard days but the majority of people don't want to go back to that.
I'm not sure Germany is a good example. I am now living in west Germany, people simply prefer using cash. Unlike in Sweden, where I also lived, where they want to get rid of it soon. Many services are simply not available without a credit card (eg.: at T-Mobile store).
But I second you on the cloud computing and SaaS - I want the programs to run on my machine. And off-line.
In most countries there is a legal rule that establishes cash, which says something along the lines of :
Currency notes must be accepted as payment for all debts, public and private.
This means not accepting cash is actually illegal. This has been relaxed a bit, in that refusing to take a 500 euro note for a .5 euro purchase is permitted, but either refusing to sell to someone who wants to pay cash or not accepting cash after the sale is not legal.
Explain me more. You fall for the propaganda without background knowledge. The statistics says otherwise. Fake money is mostly smaller notes (like 20, 50, 100 notes). Higher value notes like 1000 francs note won't get eliminated anytime soon. Criminals already use electronic money, real estate, fake companies, etc.
500 € Notes are a gift to criminals because they allow large amounts of money to be smuggled easily - e.g. to a country where no questions are asked when you deposit large amounts of money with your fake company.
That's exactly how it should be. Money "laundering" never was a real crime. It's just a privacy invading control mechanism and a way for law enforcement to ignore actual crime.
Your rhetoric is off, "smuggle" is the term for illegal stuff. Don't use it for legal stuff. And don't make cash money look like it's bad - that's just the propaganda that started after the Davos conference to bad mouth cash money in the interest of a small elite. We all know better: You transfer legal stuff. Cash money is valid money form, you just carry money around in your wallet. While it's already true, some state limited the amount of cash one is allowed to cross the border, another artificial limitation imposed.
I live in Italy. Nobody ever used €500 bills for anything else than crossing the Swiss border with as much cash (cash unknown to tax authorities, of course) as possible. I have never ever seen a €500 bill, and if someone has to give you, say, €1000, it will be 10 * €100 or more likely 20 * €50.
It fine and common to buy a new car from a certificated car dealer or build officially a house with cash money - it's a major legal payment option after-all.
Your experience is different, as you live in Italy which was hit especially hard by the 2008 crisis has high dept, is fighting against corruption, etc. You would need a truck for your €50 notes which makes it unreasonable.
"Smuggling", in the primary sense, is moving anything across a boundary without notifying the relevant authorities. It doesn't matter whether the stuff is generally legal or illegal; you're smuggling if you move it secretly when you weren't supposed to.
For example, it's relatively common in the US to smuggle cigarettes from an area with low cigarette taxes to an area with high cigarette taxes. The legality of conceptual cigarettes isn't at issue; what's at issue is whether the relevant taxes were paid.
I'm pretty sure that this is at least the part of what he is talking about. I'm not sure if it's fair to refer to it as a "technology", but he is basically talking about laws being even more fucked up than they were some 30 years ago, and people (say, you) accepting it as it was OK. But for him, or for me it's not OK — for us it "seems" like money (cash included) is just a handy way to exchange goods and services without carrying a cow (or a witness of me working for someone for a day) around the city. The whole purpose of money for us, as we learned while growing up, is a confirmation of us being useful to someone, a "neutral goods" so to say. So we don't feel obliged to "notify" any fucking "relevant authorities" when we move somewhere while keeping these tokens of us being useful, which are accepted somewhere else as well. We don't want to have to rely on banks and lawyers to exchange something we make by our hands to a loaf of bread.
So it's understandable that he doesn't like somebody comparing of moving something you stole to moving something you earned. For him this is nothing but one more pair of shackles people suddenly have to wear — and are putting it on happily, because it surely helps them to live more secure and blissful life, yeah.
Implies "illegal" of what? The argument was that you can't smuggle cash because cash is a legal commodity. That's nonsense; you can smuggle anything. The prototype for smuggling is smuggling legal goods so you don't have to pay import taxes. Drugs have to be smuggled because they are illegal, but the goods being illegal has nothing to do with what makes smuggling smuggling.
You are most definitely not free to just trade gold holdings for anything without disclosing it to the authorities in the US, or any other nation I know of.
That it can be done illegally, I may agree with. At that point, it's not just criminals who will steal your gold (in the sense of taking it away without compensation), but the state as well.
500 eur note is most value in the least volume and mass of any (?) bank note in the world. That's why it's preferred by international crime. They say an honest man never saw a 500 eur bill. I sure never have.
I don't think I would classify the problems with "licensing" of digital property as an erosion of the idea of ownership necessarily, though I can see how you got there. Personally I think that the destruction of consumer protections when it comes to digital property is a temporary situation. EVERY industry has tried this. Out of sheer stupidity, producers think that if they can destroy aftermarket and secondhand market dealings, they will somehow improve their business. They're dead wrong, and history backs me up on that.
History also shows that they will fail. Along with every single industry previously trying to destroy or severely restrict the property rights of consumers, every single one of them has failed. The automobile industry tried to make aftermarket car parts illegal and the courts said no. The movie industry tried to make secondhand markets for DVDs illegal and the courts said no. We do have a slightly dicey situation with digital content in the US (which like it or not sets the standards for more than its own shores) due to the DMCA. It is used in many areas to facilitate all of the things that courts forbade in other industries. It should have been overturned back when Streambox VCR was on the chopping block... if only they hadn't run out of money fighting their court case. They won every single case, and every appeal, up until the point where they had to give up as they couldn't afford to keep fighting against RealNetworks. The only good bit of that situation was the fact that RealNetworks themselves got nailed by the EXACT same law a few years later for permitting users to create backup copies of their DVDs (which involved circumventing DeCSS).
Right now, if you read a "license agreement" for digital property, software moreso than music, books, video, etc, and games especially, it's pretty ludicrous what they try to get away with. Many of the licenses I read would have to get rejected by any court if ever challenged. They exempt the seller from ALL responsibilities, and do nothing but outline a litany of rights which are DENIED to the purchaser. Nowhere do they mention obligations on the part of the licensor to the licensee. When people buy much software, and basically any videogame, legally speaking, all they are doing is throwing money in the publishers direction and hoping they'll get access to the content. The license doesn't actually guarantee them access to it. It doesn't guarantee anything at all, in fact, except that the purchaser will not be allowed to do X, Y, or Z. A license agreement is supposed to actually place obligations upon the party granting it, and provide guarantees to the licensee. That has been abandoned when it comes to software licenses.
But like I said, this is old ground. We've been here before. When someone pushes it too far, and they will, and it goes to the courts and gets heard properly, the world will change for all of these companies who think they can continue to have complete control over things they sell even after a customer makes a purchase. And the stupidly frustrating thing is that it will be the best thing that could possibly happen for their business. The emergence of robust secondhand markets (as will happen when licenses to digital property are legally required to be transferrable and re-saleable) will, as it has countless times in the past, provide an explosion of business. Things which are now-and-then luxury purchases will transform into habitual purchases, and the overall number of sales of new products will grow even faster than the sale of secondhand licenses. Look at the home movie market, for example. It wasn't until DVDs came around, with their ability to survive without any quality degradation for years and through thousands of uses, and their secondhand market, that it became normal and expected that people would own a large number of movies, and regularly purchase new ones for a personal collection. That never happened with VHS. The secondhand market was handicapped by tapes which degraded on each play.
One day, millions of people will wake up and find themselves locked out of access to a large amount of digital content that they "bought" with the original licensor demanding some additional money to re-unlock access to that material. And those people will quickly discover that they do not have a legal leg to stand on in terms of complaint. The license agreement they "agreed" to provides them no guarantee of continued access to the content, and explicitly reserves the right to revoke access at any time for any, or no, reason at all. Their only option will be to pony up more money or kiss that media goodbye. It will probably happen to gamers first, and though they will whine about it online, they'll just open their wallets and pay. So it'll work for awhile. But then someone will try it in an industry with customers who have a spine and actually expect property rights. There'll be a class action lawsuit, courts will re-evaluate the condition of digital property and realize that it bears no remarkable dissimilarities to audio CDs, video DVDs, etc, and will extend the First Sale Doctine and other consumer protection laws to cover all digital property. The publishers will wail and gnash their teeth. Gamers will come to their defense. But it will rapidly be revealed that sales spiked, and remained high, the day after, and the publishers will quiet down.
"One day, millions of people will wake up and find themselves locked out of access to a large amount of digital content that they "bought" with the original licensor demanding some additional money to re-unlock access to that material."
Well, we now live in a world of yearly and monthly software subscriptions, so I don't see how the secondary market has any fighting chance even if the license terms we see these days were too onerous for the courts one day as you predict.
Take software that used to be sold in an oversized cardboard box with glossy print (how I miss that smell of a fresh software package), sell it via a created account on a Web site that signs you up to marketing spam, put the word Cloud in the name, make it hella more expensive in a short term contract versus a lump sum yearly payment, maybe throw in an obnoxious tsr that reminds you of updates every two days and pops up ... ta da, Adobe Cloud.
The onerous license terms may change one day, but our wallets will still suffer along with our pride as we pay the Adobes of the world for their killer apps. So, they have to hold up their end of the bargain finally. It'll still be hard or impossible to subvert the loading of the software so you don't need to log in online to use it. I just don't see this secondary market.
BTW, fantastic write-up, thanks! I almost wish I could link to a specific HN comment.
Could a forward-thinking software publisher unilaterally offer license terms and technological protection measures that increase "ownership" and permit resale?
Lenovo T410/X210 where still somewhat fine. But these newer ultrabooks nowadays have less powerful specs than 5 year old notebooks. The Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon isn't bad, but a far cry given it's ultrabook less powerful specs than an 5 year old high end notebook. And these shitty keyboard nowadays, give me back the old keyboard layout like grouped F1-F12 key, better placed Home/PgUp/PgDn/End keys, etc. And an 9 cell battery that stand out on the back side - I want back my 15 hour battery life.
Those newer EliteBook 820 have cheap plastic and a very crappy hinge with such a small angle. And the very thick edge around the display looks like the designer has gone completely mad. And the specs are lower than a 5 year old notebook. Bring back the older quality in a smaller form factor, or just offer the older device with up-to-date high end hardware.
* Microsoft IntelliMouse and Comfort Mouse 6000
Very good computer mice. (yes I am aware the later had a hardware bug with the middle mouse click but who cares). Their newer keyboard and mouses are all wireless and all with crappy design - designer gone mad. Very sad story. It get's harder and harder to find a suitable good traditional standard quality mouse and keyboard these days, that were so common 15 years ago (and cheap as well). Not everyone needs a gaming device (expensive and last only like 2 years) nor would like to use ultra cheaply made crap for small hands only. The normal products aren't available anymore as it seems.
I hope it doesn't sound too negative, sadly some devices aren't available in a quality we used to have available in mainstream. On the other side, a lot of other things I haven't mentioned got a lot better than what was available some years ago - but it isn't the topic in this discussion.
I gave up on them a few years ago when they dropped the 7 row keyboard. The 7 row keyboard was leagues ahead of any other laptop keyboard, ever. The replacement keyboard is awful. I hate the loss of web forward/back keys too. I hate chicklet keys. I hate pgup/dn placed as though I'll almost never use them. I still prefer the trackpoint over any touchpad.
I'd buy a retro Thinkpad, like you link, in a second. I'd Hackintosh or Linux it. Barring miracles, my next laptop will be a Mac.
A friend has a W540. It's horrible. Worst sound output of any machine I came across, horrible chicklet keyboard, and cracks in the keyboard surround that's design fault but Lenovo won't fix. All the once handy TP utilities are Adobe Air bloatware that take 5s+ to even open.
Very true. Lenovo destroyed thinkpad legacy and it's on its way to destroying Motorola's legacy. The leaked renders of moto g4 and x4 look mighty awful.
I believe the BIOS option to change them was introduced in the xy10 series, I actually loaded a hacked BIOS on a W500 I was given to "recycle" to do the same swap.
I'm desperately hanging on to my T500 daily work machine. It was the last generation with 16:10 screens and the second-to-last with the good keyboard layout.
With an SSD and maxed RAM it's still viable, but the C2D processor is a real bottleneck. Trouble is, any machine I could replace it with would be a processor upgrade and an everything else downgrade.
Edit: actually the Macbooks have great 16:10 screens, so there's at least that option. Unfortunately they come with a long list of downsides of their own.
I don't want to get your hopes up too high, but there are positive signs that Lenovo is listening to what ThinkPad users want. There were a number of surveys started last year (and that may still be open) for feedback on a retro ThinkPad.
It's too bad Lenovo ripped before I ever bought one, I often see nostalgious people.
Have you tried system76 laptops? A bit expensive but no real flaw so far for me.
I believe System76 uses rebranded Clevos. I own a Sager which is also a rebranded Clevo and it has the worst build quality of any computer I have ever owned.
Whoa, I never tried any of the old Thinkpad. I think the keyboard in Lenovo's Thinkpad is already better than other cheap laptops, and the old one is even better?
It's a bit like the vi/emacs debate, it'll run and run :)
I prefer mechanical keyboards - my old IBM Model M that is wearing better than I am, or on new keyboards, Cherry MX Blues. I've no doubt that colours my laptop preferences. TP keyboards tried to duplicate that feel. Lenovo have slowly backed down the IBM "clicky" feel of the keyboard so a t22 or t43p feels quite a bit more clicky than a W520.
@masseyset says the new keyboard has better spacing. What he means is the key spacing is precisely identical (I saw many reviews claimed larger spacing, or that the keyboard was bigger, it's objectively untrue) but the key tops, being flat rather than sculpted, are larger so feel like a different spacing.
Being chicklet, the key travel is a fraction 1/2, 1/3? of the old TP keyboard. This is the bit I hate with chicklet keyboards along with their actuation point. 6 or 8 years of Macbook as main machine and I never got past that dislike. Devoid of feel and travel. I ended up with a Matias Tactile Pro for any time I wanted to do anything significant, so only needed to use the dead calculator keyboard when travelling.
The Thinkpad chicklet keyboard is way ahead of a Mac or anyone else's chicklet keyboard, and they brought back a fair bit of the clicky feel they'd slowly been losing (at least on my friend's W540). As chicklets go, it's very good. It'll never have the travel of the old 7 row TP keyboard, so I will never like it.
I could probably live with the new TP chicklet as the weighting is back to good. The lack of travel and scattering the pgup/home block randomly around the whole keyboard to save 50c and the extra 1/2 row is unforgivable.
I think that covers my biases. Oh, I lean towards vi. :)
Opinions differ on this. For a couple of years I had Thinkpads with both the old and new keyboards and I strongly preferred the new one. Each key is slightly larger, the spacing is better, and the keyboard springs are just right. However, if you use a lot of function keys, I can see why you'd like the old one better. The keyboard heavy things I do involve old school text editors (I use Vim awhile, get mad at it, switch to Emacs, then reverse) and these don't
use function keys much.
>> some devices aren't available in a quality we used to have available in mainstream
This unfortunate reality extends to pretty much all products. Manufacturing is nothing like it was 20 years ago; quality is down across the board. Products used to be well made, but are now mass produced using the cheapest materials possible.
Go buy a Scrabble board. The unfolded board won't lay perfectly flat on the table because the two halves are not heavy enough to fully bend down the crease in the middle. The tiles are made of flimsy particle board instead of real wood. The letters wear off too because they are printed on rather than etched. Compare it to a board made in the 70s or 80s. The difference between them isn't just large, it's disgustingly atrocious. Same for a Cribbage board (cheap wood, plastic sliding door that falls out instead of metal that grinds into the board), a Battleship set (the one I bought for my nephew, the panels that hold the pegs don't snap in properly and fall off). Things used to be quality made; now they're done at the lowest possible quality because people will buy it regardless.
With many games the copyright comes to an end and, when that happens, one company no longer has the entire market for that game. Consequently anyone else can make the game, to undercut the original price competitively. This happened about a decade ago with 'Connect 4', originally a premium product by MB games, nowadays anyone can make it but they have to call it 'Four in a Row' or something like that. Needless to say the clones and the updated 'Connect 4' are rubbish compared to the 1980's vintage version.
I don't know what the copyright situation is with Scrabble, however, there's bound to be some reasons like what has gone on with 'Connect 4' meaning the product is degraded.
Please let me pay $40, or $100, for something that will last a lifetime. That 70s-80s board my mother has is still in near pristine condition, and it has been used a hell of lot over 30 years. My friend owns one that is a couple of years old, rarely gets used, and yet some of the letters are nearly illegible; more than a few of the point values have rubbed away. The board is cheap, the tiles are junk, and the racks move every time you touch them (rather than sitting firmly on the table from the weight of real wood).
Throwing quality out the window for the sake of racing to rock bottom pricing? No thanks.
Not only have they hosed the reputation of the brands they've bought, but they're diminishing their own as well. I know it's nowhere as popular as the ThinkPad, but I have been a ThinkStation fan for years. I bought my first one in 2005. I bought another in 2014 and the new one was an identical case with different components inside and a few different labels outside. I was blown away by this because it's exactly what I've always wanted -- I don't care at all about the gimmicky chassis updates -- and I told everyone about it, probably resulting in a couple other people getting one. Unfortunately, I won't have a chance to reproduce this experience as they discontinued the model and no longer seem to have a comparable machine.
I started out building my own machines because that was how you did it to save money and get good components, then vendors eventually became good enough where that wasn't necessary or desirable, and now we've come full circle and it seems likely I'll build my next machine, whenever this one finally gives up the ghost.
You can get refurb T60/T61 systems. Buy them now, stick them in a box, pull one out every 18 months when your old one dies. There are some on EBAY for < $100. In most cases you can clone your existing drive and put the new one in the "new" laptop.
You can easily find these and other discontinued mice from China (eBay/aliexpress/etc...). Quality may differ, but MS IME looks (and feels) like original.
I remember when the office "upgraded" our workstations with shiny new Dells (KB, mouse, monitor included). So there I was down at the street rummaging through the bin trying to get my favourite, well worn keyboard and mouse back. It was that serious.
I've had good luck finding old hardware in second stores in small towns. Like an entire Apple II (with drive, floppies, monitor) in Puerto Rico. I wished I had the space in my luggage. I have some programs on old floppies I wrote at my sons age that if live to show him.
Microsoft Comfort Mouse 1000 fan here. Simple, higher quality, well fitting. Hard to believe they were released so long ago (2003). Like someone else said, designers have went a bit nuts. I've got a Apple Magic Mouse and for all of its nifty features, it is not comfortable to use. I've went through a few of the Comforts but luckily I still have a couple functional and a spare in the box.
I haven't encountered a single laptop keyboard that isn't bad to type on but the old Lenovo keyboards were better than the usual stuff. But these days we can get laptops with full Cherry MX keys and that's a proper keyboard experience. It's not something you'd carry in your backpack, but for going on trips where you sit at a table, it's fine to bring with you.
I had 2 T41p laptops. They were great while they worked but they had a problem with the Nvidia chips which caused the chip to die at some point. You could reflow the board in the oven (did that twice) and it would give it a few more months of life but then would die again taking the laptop with it. Otherwise it was a great machine.
It's strange that Lenovo's laptop IPS panels are not as good as desktop IPS or VA panels, but they're okay to code on. Are there real IPS or VA panels that look great from any angle like a display on your desk?
I had a 600E and 600X. Everything after felt inferior to me. Since, I have bought MacBook Pro. I miss the old Thinkpads. The build quality, the keyboards, the mouse nub.
Seconded. Flash's vector engine was also superior to the Canvas 2D API. You can export to HTML/JS from Flash these days but you get artifacts and gaps at the edges because Canvas simply doesn't support things like shapes sharing an edge.
Flash was "killed" before there was a viable replacement and Flash devs are still feeling the pain.
But there were too many downsides with it when it combined coding and it was a constant battle, so overall I'm actually very much OK since I've stopped developing with it since 2007.
It's just another reason with I don't like Adobe and I'll do my best to avoid paying for their products.
I'll third or fourth or n'th Turbo Pascal and Turbo C (and a few other Borland products over time). (I know about their corporate issues and pivots, yes.)
TP 3.x: Under 40 KB .COM size (not MB, not .EXE). Blazingly fast WordStar compatible editor and true compiler (created .COM files) in that size.
Had a lot of fun working on it, and created one of my first freelance projects using it (started, somewhat unusually, as a freelancer, and then went on to jobs).
Corel bought it and turned it into a bloated mess of a photo management tool. IMO they should've just killed Draw and rebranded Paint Shop Pro as the new Draw, it was that much better.