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Old man yells at cloud

jonandnic.com

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Re: Old man yells at cloud

#211

Post by acdha »

root_axis wrote: post #151
acdha wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article disproves its own thesis. I wouldn’t be so quick to be defensive here. While it’s true that networks and drives are faster, it’s also true that the metric affecting the user experience in question is time to load rather than bits per second and many modern games are much worse on that front compared to a Nintendo which was playable in about the same time it took a CRT monitor to boot up. A more thought…

> it’s also true that the metric affecting the user experience in question is time to load rather than bits per second That's the metric the author has cherry-picked, and I acknowledged their legitimate frustration, but my point is that this frustration is one isolated facet of massive technological progress. I will emphatically agree that companies have leveraged improvements in technology to encroach on their custo…

I don’t think defining “time to play” is an unfair metric to judge a gaming system on, and it’s certainly not isolated.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#212

Post by dusted »

This article is absolutely fantastic, and a must-read!

I disagree with the premise "every generation has a level of tech they're comfortable with and anything new becomes foreign".

To be honest, I'm not even sure I think the safety-tradeoff of power-windows is worth the convenience of "pushing the button" instead of "turning the crank", and I hate touchscrees in cars, they're a symbol of poor, cheap and thoughtless design.

The "new" tech we're seeing, with very few exceptions, is not new, it's not more advanced, it's not cooler or faster or better.. It's a step backwards, from ignorance and the realization that as more users come, the average user-skill lowers, and so we dumb down everything.. We hide everything behind icons with stupid names and make sure that you have to make an effort AND know the secret sequences, to open up the "super user" tools.

Modern software is a joke, not because it's "so advanced" but because it's built on layer upon layer of hipster-won't-deal-with-reality technology stacks, by people who think "don't optimize too early" means "never even think about optimizing before it's provably too late" and to whom it sounds entirely reasonable that a desktop environment should use more than 100 Megabytes of memory.

We need to stop dumbing things down, and show the kind of polite mindful behaviours that the older generation showed, making SURE that _YOU_ the user was in charge, that new users could probably learn to figure it out, and that power-users never had to click too much to get at the stuff.

How sad is it not that the UI of Windows 2000 is _STILL_ the most elegant, beautiful and functional operation system UI that ever was?

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#213

Post by NickC25 »

asciimov wrote: post #124
krony wrote: post #76

GoldenEye on Nintendo 64 was peak “play video games with a group of friends”. Now, it seems like every game is single player per console. So if my son has buddies over, they all haul their own Xbox’s and monitors (or scrounge my old ones from the basement closet). It’s considerably more difficult. Even though the TV screens now are so much larger! Craziness. I solidly agree.

For me playing at home with a group of friends peaked with Halo on Xbox and Smash on GameCube. Halo let you get 8 friends together on 2 tvs and 2 Xboxes with just an Ethernet cable, you could double those numbers with with a switch. Games still loaded relatively fast, and you didn’t have to spend hours waiting for downloads.

There's something that sitting side-by-side with your teammate or opponent that modern online gaming completely misses. It's way more fun, and way more social.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#214

Post by dx034 »

lumb63 wrote: post #160
wilsynet wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people responsible for Civ 6 are advertising multiplayer online play in an effort to take your money, while investing the least amount of money to say they delivered the feature. They are just milking the Civ franchise for all they can. Compare this to Amazon AWS, YouTube, the iPhone, Microsoft Excel. These products make a ton of money and the companies that own them invest heavily.

With the exception of AWS, do you believe that any of the examples you cited are not “just milking the franchise for all they can”? When was the last time YouTube, the iPhone, or Microsoft Excel added a meaningful (i.e. users wanted it) feature?

Excel brings out new features all the time while keeping 100% backwards compatability. The difference in features between old and new versions is staggering. They knew parts of their usage would get replaced by other software if they don't innovate, and so they did.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan to use Excel for all the use cases it's being used for, but it's probably by far the most versatile software out there and powers more businesses than any other software.

EDIT: And if you need an example for a new feature that users wanted, I heard a lot of people being really happy about the introduction of XLOOKUP, introduced very recently.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#215

Post by dx034 »

theferalrobot wrote: post #70

> Playing together now a means an hour of downloading content from an online service before the game even starts — and this particular game is an entirely offline one! Did nobody else spent the first 8 hours of 00s LAN parties trying to get the equipment set up, the networking to cooperate, the games shared? Then finally after a reformat of windows xp or two around 2am finally getting to the gaming? That was my only…

And Steam is really a great piece of software when it comes to utilizing your connection. They can saturate even high capacity connections much better than any other software I know and you can play basically immediately after the download has finished.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#216

Post by paulryanrogers »

pjmlp wrote: post #196
warent wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Agree that is a factor, but a small one. > It feels like as a collective software engineers have lost their culture and everything is too complex to grasp so we build complexity on top of a misunderstood base, and everything falls apart. Respectfully disagree here. Systems have…

4. Some countries allow the misuse of "engineering" titles even when people lack the background for having them

Indeed. If one hasn't built and maintained siege works for at least two seasons, or one crusade, then one hasn't earned the title of engineer.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#217

Post by apocalyptic0n3 »

throw8383833jj wrote: post #56

It's so true: * I can't even install Netflix on my Iphone 7+ anymore (the phone practically brand new, it is less than 6 six years old!) * Screens in cars replacing usable buttons, are a disaster. give me buttons and knobs. * the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a s…

> the TV takes 15 seconds to start up??? and takes 10+ seconds to select a youtube video to watch. back when I was a kid, tvs turned on right away and you could change the channel in less than a second.

I'm not old (mid-30s) so maybe TVs that predate me were quicker, but I remember the old Zenith[1] in the living room would take 10-15s to warm up and sometimes we had to turn it off and on again a few times to get the picture to work. The DLP Sony that replaced it was even worse; upwards of 30s before the picture was more than a dim outline moving on the screen.

TVs are objectively better in terms of speed (my Samsung Q70 takes about 5s to boot; quicker than my Apple TV) and picture quality today. You can make an argument that the smart TV aspect of a TV is worse, but you can also just not connect it to the internet and use a Roku or Chromecast or Apple TV.

1: https://image.invaluable.com/housePhotos/Aether/24/683824/H2...

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#218

Post by bitexploder »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #182
bitexploder wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fuel economy is miserable. Especially if you mod it (heavier). Otherwise they have few flaws for what they are. Toyota has other SUVs if you don’t want body on frame and all that implies. Not to mention 4WD is all controlled physically in some models still, which is nice. It still has a tech package for off roading, but they are simple beasts.

I have one of the physical 4WD knobs, it’s wonderfully analog and sort of shakes with the engine in a way nothing else in the cabin does. Even the base model has A-Trak. I highly recommend trying it off road if you get the chance. It behaves like an ABS powered diff lock and makes your brake pump sound like a machine gun and can make your 4Runner climb interesting bumpy hills.

4WD selector is a physical mechanical control like a gear shift in a manual car. I have off roaded ours a lot. A-trac is almost as good as a locking front diff. It is an incredibly capable vehicle off road for sure, ours is modded extensively as well :)

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#219

Post by root_axis »

acdha wrote: post #211
root_axis wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it’s also true that the metric affecting the user experience in question is time to load rather than bits per second That's the metric the author has cherry-picked, and I acknowledged their legitimate frustration, but my point is that this frustration is one isolated facet of massive technological progress. I will emphatically agree that companies have leveraged improvements in technology to encroach on their custo…

I don’t think defining “time to play” is an unfair metric to judge a gaming system on, and it’s certainly not isolated.

Again, it's not "unfair", it's myopic cherry-picking. It's also wrong to label the time it takes to download a 20gig patch "time to play", an honest accounting would recognize that "time to play" is typically a couple seconds.

Re: Old man yells at cloud

#220

Post by thomastjeffery »

greedo wrote: post #121
adrr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 memo…

I remember playing WoW on my brand new Mac Pro (circa 2005) and a month later the GPU was burned out. Replaced the GPU under warranty, a month later it burned out again. Replaced it a third time (with a lot of side eye from the Genius Bar), and decided to stop playing WoW. Never had any more issues with the GPU. Was it WoW's fault? I would think that a GPU would prevent any application from damaging it, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯…

Macs in that era were notorious for overheating under any real load.

I had a 2011 MacBook Pro for a while that I later found was keeping a constant 100c without even spinning the fan at 100%! After a while, its cd drive failed, and I learned how to install Linux from a partition made in OSX... Eventually the whole thing became a brick.

I also worked with an iMac that would get strange video errors and freeze until I found an app to turn up the fan. With a little bit of air flow, it would run just fine.

I guess Apple proved one thing: hopes and dreams are not enough to cool a Core 2 Duo.

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