141–150 of 818 posts
Every developer from around 2006-2008 knows what I'm talking about. Debugging JS in IE6 was like trying to build a house blindfolded with both arms tied behind your back. Firebug is when JS went from just a web augmentation toy that could silently fail and your web page would still mostly function to becoming a critical function for a web page (many will see this as all a big mistake).
Slashdot back in the day.
Digg back in the day.
Hackernews, back .. ... ... .
Java in 1997.
Python and Ruby starting around 2004ish.
When I started as a developer the internet wasn't there. If you wanted a new library or tool you had to go to a shop and buy the floppy disks (or mailorder). If you wanted docs you used the man pages or had to buy the book, probably the bookstore would order it for you. Its hard to imagine now.
I’m a millennial, and that is hard to imagine. Though, some of my favorite coding exercises have been writing something for which there already exists a library, so I’d probably have learned a lot more of nitty gritty details if I had grown up in that kind of environment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very likely a smart business decision, but I wish Steam had a re-sell market. Even just having only a single possible sale, I think would help sort the crap from the gold. There'd be one more opportunity for profit AND people could buy games for cheap. Sure, there's an opportunity to copy games before you sell them, but I think there's ways to fix that. Sell for steam-credit only maybe? and there's plenty of opp…
This is one of the more interesting use cases I've seen posed for NFTs. Use an NFT when a user buys the game and then they can resell the game later.
Java vs. the 90s C/C++ standards. Not having to deal with memory management made it so much easier to write applications. I'm guessing SQL was a 10x innovation at least when it came out, too.
Java vs. the 90s C/C++ standards. Not having to deal with memory management made it so much easier to write applications. I'm guessing SQL was a 10x innovation at least when it came out, too.
+1 for this. Java gets shade from the hipsters these days, but it's almost impossible to overstate what a revolution it was for software engineering.
Java vs. the 90s C/C++ standards. Not having to deal with memory management made it so much easier to write applications. I'm guessing SQL was a 10x innovation at least when it came out, too.
Tivo - pretty cool when it came out - you didn't have to run to the bathroom/kitchen during commercial breaks and hope you made it back in time. Of course it's obsolete now but a significant improvement over the standard at the time
Streaming music services - i spent an embarrassing amount of time as a kid/early teenager collecting cds and ripping them to my hard drive - if only I could have all that time back
The selfie camera on smartphones - pretty self explanatory
MagSafe connector - why they ever removed this is beyond me. I don't know if it made my life 10x better but if extended the life of a laptop a year or two it's worth it's weight in gold
+ using Google for search in 2000 and being amazed at how much better the results were than AltaVista and Yahoo Search. + Google Maps in 2004 and dragging the map interactively around. This was a quantum leap beyond Mapquest's page reload and reset with cumbersome arrow buttons. This was a paradigm shift that let me explore a geography better than any book atlas. I gave away all my atlases + MS Window Media Player's…
1) Tabbed browsing in Opera/Mozilla in early 2000s. You'd have to open new window each time before that.
2) Moving from Windows Phone 8 (Nokia Lumia) to Android 4.4:
IE Mobile was okayish and pretty standards compliant browser, but could only handle 6 tabs, and switching between tabs would reload the page. Chrome Mobile would open infinite no. of tabs, and easily keep 10-20 of them in memory, allowing to switch around.
3) Two features of Sublime Text compared to old generation editors/IDEs:
- multiple cursors (ctrl-d) make editing very different
- keeping new unnamed files as drafts when closing editor (instead of asking "do you want to save the newfile1? newfile2? ...")
One fundamental change:
4) Firebug. Debugging websites before that was slapping random CSS `border`-s/`background-color`-s and `alert()` calls.