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Old man yells at cloud

jonandnic.com

101–110 of 239 posts

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#101
post #35

He had me until he started shitting on MS Office. I would disagree, I think O365 kind of crushes it value-wise. And yeah, they added the ribbon in 2007 . The UI hardly changes year to year, and if you know Excel 2013 you will pick up Excel O365 pretty quickly, and you will actually be pretty psyched about some of the new features.

Subscriptions for MS Office is nothing but a money grab. It is not useful to me. Maybe it’s useful for enterprises. But I use word and excel a couple times per YEAR. I don’t fit the subscription model, but there’s no option to buy once and upgrade again in, say, 3 years. So I’ve mostly moved to Libreoffice and Google Docs.

[deleted]

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#102
post #39

I tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened; - Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked. - Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed. - Try to…

I do remember the past and dealing with driver issues, irq conflicts and broken implementations of opengl or directx that crashed my games all the time. The countless hours trying to get unreal to run in hardware mode without crashing. Hours trying to find the right combo of drivers and IRQs and even moving slots.

That's just games. I don't know how many papers I lost due crashes due to macs not having protected memory so one app could take out the whole system.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#103
post #74

The thing that bugs me about video games these days is that they all seem like a bunch of work instead of the fun of discovery.

For me it has felt like that since the early 2000s. I was born in the seventies. Is it an age thing? I can only get into a couple of games that were made after 2000. But I beat every cave on all 5 levels in Boulder Dash!

I have troubles playing games with younger siblings. My brain never fully adjusted to ultrafast post ps3 games. Something about analog 3d aiming that is just not natural enough for my neurons, while they got fed on it and it's a second skin to them.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#104

More accurate title: some aspects of technology have gotten objectively worse. E.g. for cars, the whole touchscreen thing instead of knobs for things like temperature control is worse, but on the other hand cars are safer than they used to be. Similarly, while yes there are some aspects of video games that have gotten worse, like needing to download a patch for an offline game, there's some stuff that's better: there…

> WAY cheaper than games used to be, when you look at inflation.

I recall $60 NES games in Toys R Us and a quick google shows that to be correct (for the top tier games). That's $130 these days!

And re: cars, they are so much more reliable and safe than previous decades.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#105
post #39

I tried playing Civ 6 the other day with my friend, here's what happened; - Game crashed on startup - after searching online for a bit apparently changing your Steam Download Region can fix it. As in not redownloading the game from another region, just changing the setting. This worked. - Start game, started in Windowed mode and changing resolution caused the mouse to move super slowly. Restart game. Fixed. - Try to…

> Seems like we are at a point in time where the really talented people have left software engineering due to age or being promoted upwards

Crashes, connectivity issues, and desyncing are as old as PC computer gaming, and they were all much worse in the past.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#106
post #35

He had me until he started shitting on MS Office. I would disagree, I think O365 kind of crushes it value-wise. And yeah, they added the ribbon in 2007 . The UI hardly changes year to year, and if you know Excel 2013 you will pick up Excel O365 pretty quickly, and you will actually be pretty psyched about some of the new features.

Subscriptions for MS Office is nothing but a money grab. It is not useful to me. Maybe it’s useful for enterprises. But I use word and excel a couple times per YEAR. I don’t fit the subscription model, but there’s no option to buy once and upgrade again in, say, 3 years. So I’ve mostly moved to Libreoffice and Google Docs.

>But I use word and excel a couple times per YEAR

Isn't a subscription better then?

Assuming the worst case of needing 3 months a year that would be 20.97 a year. Buying the home edition used to be $150. Office 365 will be cheaper until after 7 years and by then a new version of office would have been released.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#107
post #21

These are all examples of tradeoffs that have been made, and just collecting examples of the downsides of those tradeoffs without mentioning the upsides. Touchscreens are objectively worse than dedicated buttons, but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit. additionally, the UI can be less confusing because the button text can change depending on what you're doing, vsm a single physical d-pad and…

> but the ability to have more than 4-5 buttons is a huge benefit I know what you're saying but being constrained by dedicated buttons, I would argue, forces you to think very carefully about the controls/user-interface. That discipline likely often leads to a better "interface". Give a designer a touchscreen and they can add buttons, menus, nuanced features without restraint.

I bought a new Mazda last year and it doesn't have a touch screen. Big selling point for me.

Overall the UI feels much better than touchscreen ones on Toyotas or GMs, etc. Mainly it feels like some thought went into it. I can operate it without looking too. Unfortunately there's areas where it feels unfinished.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#108

In my case, the whole Smartphone ecosystem has been a disappointment. I was an early adopter of PDAs and early smartphones, I used them constantly and wrote apps and games for those. Today I barely touch my old iPhone SE. I find the devices boring and bland, infinite scrolling seems to be the only thing to do. F2P ruined games, and most apps are crappy/cloud based/badly implemented web apps.

> I was an early adopter of PDAs and early smartphones, I used them constantly and wrote apps and games for those.

As background, I was one of the first to have a Kyocera QCP-6035. Now that we've established how cool I am, I confess that I do not understand how one can hold a modern smartphone in their hand and be wistful about those clumsy early years.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subscriptions for MS Office is nothing but a money grab. It is not useful to me. Maybe it’s useful for enterprises. But I use word and excel a couple times per YEAR. I don’t fit the subscription model, but there’s no option to buy once and upgrade again in, say, 3 years. So I’ve mostly moved to Libreoffice and Google Docs.

> " ...there’s no option to buy once and upgrade again in, say, 3 years. " Uh, yes, there is: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/p/office-home-...

Wow, I had no idea about this. Thank you. I wonder if it was buried or I just didn’t invest enough time looking for a non-subscription purchase.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#110
The big problem is that there are so many points of failure that need to be kept up to date and they can fail at any time. That goes from backend systems to frontend systems. It's not too bad if there's a paid system's adim to deal with the failures but the plain everyday consumer deals with the points of failure too. I know as a consumer all I want is to watch a show not try to figure out a Rube Goldberg machine just to watch it. It sucks.
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