191–200 of 818 posts
It's a simple concept and implementation, but you can plug it in all kinds of things and quickly compose complex tools in a simple manner. You can use it to search (and navigate to) logs, files, git history, external APIs (e.g. AWS). It's amazing.
Here are a few that I did not see listed by others: 1. Automatic device discovery and driver installation (e.g., with USB devices (also USB device categories, etc.)). Instead of trying to find a driver, things just worked. 2. Automatic updates. Keeping everything updated, largely, fell into the background. 3. Graphical integrated development environments (IDEs) for software development. I realize editors can be conte…
I remember well when installing Windows went from "make sure you have all the driver CDs before you start" to "just make sure you have the network card driver and the disk driver (if needed)" and then it went to "as long as you can connect to the internet Windows Update will get everything".
Before you had to get on the internet and find all the driver files yourself. The last hold out was graphics card drivers IIRC.
Steam for PC Gaming. At first, it was just annoying DRM. But it was convenient. - Before that, you had to manually update your games in order to play the latest version - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive - with the addition of steam workshops, installing mods for certain games became easier. You didn't have to manually copy paste files. - you have one central friend list, and…
Speaking of which, prior to Steam, I'd definitely consider "Making an ISO of your favorite game and mounting it as a virtual drive using DaemonTools" to be a 10x innovation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Too bad it seems that email's best days are over now, as email nowadays is mostly for notifications.
"Notifications" is being generous here. The average user's email inbox is 90% marketing spam.
SSDs. Virtualization. Git. I've used CVS and SourceSafe before. LVM. The old MBR way of partitioning is just awful. systemd and journald, just to be a bit controversial. I really don't miss my days of screwing around with init scripts, or having to parse logs by hand. Arduino. It makes lots of cool stuff very accessible. sshfs, it's amazingly convenient. pulseaudio. Sound on Linux finally works. I spent an unbelievab…
Gmail. Using web-based email clients was a nightmare before Gmail. They had limited storage space, and the UX was pretty bad, they were hard to search, etc. You spent all your time figuring out what you wanted to delete, or seeing your emails bounce when people had full inboxes. If you didn't log in for a while, your account would disappear. And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. An…
>And then suddenly, you got a GB of storage. For free. No questions asked. And its UI was simple and easy-to-use. And you could search it. Also don't forget that Gmail at the time had the most intelligent spam blocking algorithm compared to AOL/Yahoo/Hotmail/etc. It was a big enough deal that some observers that switched to Gmail considered the email spam problem as "solved" because Gmail seemed so good at it. (On th…
I was frankly shocked at some of the things mentioned here. Instagram? Wix.com? Uber? Discord? Seriously? BUT that got me thinking: Could it be that a large portion of the 10x improvement could be in marketing, i.e. you'll have to be able to market your product as "10 times as good", regardless of whether or not it actually is? AND secondly, could it be that many if not most products that are marketed as 10x as good…
+ 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…
Google Maps was amazing. Back when I showed it to my dad for the first time, he expected it to be a live satellite view of his house.
Apologies for the shameless plug--we're on IG @notasatellite if you're interested in seeing some examples :^)
Steam for PC Gaming. At first, it was just annoying DRM. But it was convenient. - Before that, you had to manually update your games in order to play the latest version - Without no-cd cracks, you were required to leave a CD / DVD in your drive - with the addition of steam workshops, installing mods for certain games became easier. You didn't have to manually copy paste files. - you have one central friend list, and…