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The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

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Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#91

Post by clsec »

fritztastic wrote: post #50
andai wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think that's wild, wait til you hear what they did in meatspace! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Snow_White

Great info. That photo of their building, at first glance my immediate reaction was the assumption that it was a screenshot from Minecraft. Upon closer inspection, it really is a photograph. Kind of a good metaphor for Scientology itself, looks harmless then you really look and it's quite a stark reality- less "wacky" and more "wtf".

Yep, a real photo. Unfortunately, I participated in the making of that sign. It was made at a sign company in Oakland, CA that is owned and operated by Scientologists.

As a matter of fact, it was this sign that started my investigation into the goings on at said company and my discovery that the owner, sales manager, production manager and H.R. person were all full fledged Scientologists. Needless to say, I quit that job. But it wasn't over.. on my exit interview they grilled me on why I was quitting/what I thought of the company. Then they spent the next 2 years trying to serve me for stealing documents that I didn't steal.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#92

Post by anthk »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #68
watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

> Linux in every other pocket Well, for some definition of Linux. Certainly the Linux kernel, only wrapped up in Google's proprietary Play Services. Say what you want about 1990's Microsoft, but at least the privacy story was better than in the 2020's.

Well, there's LineageOS/AOSP, it runs even under x86 PCs and you can use FDroid+Termux just fine.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#93

Post by sbf501 »

AdamH12113 wrote: post #65
watersb wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was CLIPPER the hardware that would allow The Government to snoop on all encrypted traffic, or was it the hardware that would allow a remote kill switch on unlicensed digital "media"? I still get it confused with the previous CLIPPER chip, which was a hardware accelerator for advanced database query tools.

CLIPPER was encryption. I don’t remember anything about remote kill switches for media (sounds too advanced for 1994), but there was also discussion in the 1990s about the V-chip, which was parental controls for broadcast TV. The technology was implemented but never amounted to much. Turns out parents weren’t any better at programming their TVs than they were their VCRs.

Things were symmetrically encrypted, but the government had an additional decrypt key for EVERY chip made.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#94

Post by JeremyNT »

watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

The rise of free software on the Internet indeed pleasantly surprised me as well.

In '94 I was running some then-ancient - but still horrifically expensive - Mac, barely able to connect to a dial-up ISP on my ancient rural phone lines. The entire system was essentially impenetrable to me; I didn't even have any kind of concept of how I might write software for it and had no idea where to learn. The primitive tools I could find, like resedit or applescript, could hardly scratch the surface of what was possible.

Linux existed then, surely, but it wasn't something I could have sussed out myself until later on. The idea that everything running on a computer could have source code that you could read, and then build into a workable system, was completely unfathomable to me until I went off to college.

Now, any would-be programmer can start programming with an immensely powerful IDE after a few minutes, and they can access millions of lines of "in the wild" high quality code in hundreds of programming languages instantly.

As much as some things seem to have failed us along the way, at least in this respect things have indeed worked out better than I could have imagined.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#95

Post by jwilk »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #14

I miss /~username/ urls. Also that HTML! v6n1 January 1995 Best and Worst The Best and Worst of 1994 and Predictions for '95 by Eric Berlin ... No 's to be found :-)

> No

's to be found :-)

Vaguely related:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31694849 ("Write HTML Right", ~2 months ago, 205 comments)

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#96

Post by Tijdreiziger »

anthk wrote: post #92
Tijdreiziger wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux in every other pocket Well, for some definition of Linux. Certainly the Linux kernel, only wrapped up in Google's proprietary Play Services. Say what you want about 1990's Microsoft, but at least the privacy story was better than in the 2020's.

Well, there's LineageOS/AOSP, it runs even under x86 PCs and you can use FDroid+Termux just fine.

Termux was nerfed in Android 12. See https://github.com/termux/termux-app/issues/2366

Either way, the statement I replied to was 'Linux in every other pocket'. Since almost all Android users are running the Google Play Services, my point stands.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#97

Post by nonameiguess »

andrepd wrote: post #54
icelancer wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I'm not sure how much of that was that life was just better in the 90s when there were few real problems in the world What? Life was certainly worse in the 1990s compared to today on almost all axes except for how much people complain about it online.

It is better in some things and worse in others. It was better in some places and it's now worse in others. Why does every comment about how some things are getting worse has to be met with the same "rational optimism" automatic response?

Some of us actually remember the 90s, and not this nostalgia-tinged "hey I was young and had no responsibilities so it was better." It's not like I lived in some third-world hellhole. I lived in Los Angeles. Murder rates were quadruple what they are today. Gang violence was totally out of control. Every single night there'd be some story on the news of a girl getting shot while standing in line at an ice cream truck. Always an ice cream truck. The LA Riots happened, and unlike what people in the US call a "riot" today when a window get smashed and trash cans are lit on fire, 63 people died. The LAPD was in the middle of the Rampart Scandal, planting evidence left and right and brutalizing people. My middle school got shot at in drive-bys three separate times while I was there. A black girl in my neighborhood was tied to a fence and burned alive. We weren't allowed to wear red or blue because the school district was so afraid of us getting shot. Medical care was so great that my best friend died from touching a cat when she was 12. Teachers were still getting fired for being gay. Guys like Matthew Shepard were getting tortured and beaten to death. Freedom of expression so great that 2 Live Crew was getting banned by US district courts and the Satanic Panic was still happening in a lot of places. AIDS was still scary as hell and not easily manageable with known medication. We were getting malathion dumped on us from the sky all the damn time because of Mediterranean fruit fly infestations.

But I'm sure it was a much better time on the Internet I didn't yet know existed because my family couldn't afford a computer until my senior year of high school.

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#98

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

warning26 wrote: post #19
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also the alt.scientology war.

Can you elaborate? This sounds like an interesting bit of early internet drama/history.

Around that time, I was working tech support at an ISP and our NNTP server went down - I got a call from a customer who was worried their posts on alt.scientology had caused a DOS attack. Checked some things, oops, no, we had just run out of disk space. Got the sysadmins to clear up some space and the customer was soon back at their flame war. :-D

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#99

Post by msla »

watersb wrote: post #47

I'm a bit surprised at the nostalgic reactions. For me, the reaction is still that twitching from the stress. Apple had less than 90 days of payroll in the bank and becoming irrelevant. A notebook computer that could do office work cost at least $3000 and came its own custom luggage for the ten pounds of cables, dongles, extra batteries. You could use it with your glorious 15-inch color monitor at work, with another…

Dial-up was still the predominant mode of Internet access, to the point even Free Software was often sold in the form of people selling CD-ROMs because downloading a full Debian or Slackware install over an occasional bits per second connection was too painful to contemplate. Especially if the phone company demonstrated Quality by dropping your long-running connection.

And that was assuming you had a CD-ROM drive. Otherwise, you were looking at stacks of floppies. (I still remember being told not to waste money buying pre-formatted floppies because a stray boombox would erase that formatting. I mean, true or not, that piece of advice is so perfectly of a specific era it deserves to be remembered. Besides, you couldn't get more capacity out of the disk if you went with the formatting The Man recommended.) Even hard disks were hilariously slow and low-capacity back then, especially if your computer was more scuzzy than SCSI.

Also:

> strong cryptography is not yet universally illegal.

Communications Decency Act! Marty Rimm! Clipper Chip! Skipjack!

There. Have I put a sufficient amount of The Fear into you yet?

Re: The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95

#100

Post by jedberg »

> Jeopardy. I'm glad the IRC gaming channels are popular, but the #jeopardy channel is usually so crowded the game becomes a typing race rather than a trivia game.

Oh man, I remember that! I was always pissed that the IRC server I had access to had bad connectivity, and I had bad connectivity to it. Even if I knew the answer right away it was impossible to be first.

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