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truly the power of innovation
(lemmygrad.ml)
who needs free software or getting rid of planned obsolescence?
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this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
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Does newer tech just kinda suck?
I'm the millennial version of a tech illiterate, I have very basic coding skills in Java and that's it, but I've noticed that everything just gets worse as time goes on, and I want a second opinion:
Everything new just seems more laggy and more prone to random catastrophic failure.
When I was young I actually didn't know what the BSOD was because I literally never experienced it. My first BSOD was in 2017 on Windows 8, even though I've been computing since 1998
The golden age for "normie" consumer computing definitely feels like it took place in the 2000s, and ended somewhere around 2014
Modern webpages are less like a page and more like a full blown application. If you're not careful you'll get an unoptimized mess, which is exacerbated when you put a bunch of ads on top.
That being said I don't have memories of everything being snappy 20 years ago - there were messy scripts and gigantic images that made Geocities and Angelfire sites near unusable back then as well.
Pages with dozens of embedded JPEG files that are larger than your monitor's resolution and are compressed at highest quality. Easily a quarter to half of a megabyte each and take several minutes to load on dialup, then the webserver times out the connection because you're taking too long to download all these giant files at once.
I don't miss those days. Not to say things are better now, but they necessarily weren't back then either.
Oh, and RealPlayer. Fuck RealPlayer.
Sure but wasn't there a sweet spot in the late 2000s where this wasn't much of an issue
Also that's basically the thing that's happening with discord now too. Thousands of embedded JPGs, GIFs, WEBMs instead of just displaying the link that you click on to view it. The end result is a laggy piece of software
Only used it a few times, what was so bad about it? Also what are your thoughts on Quicktime?
Not GP, but: Realplayer compressed everything to hell, the quality was absolutely atrocious. I believe it was buggy as well.
Quicktime was a behemoth that took ages to launch. To speed things up, it liked to auto-load and be active in the system tray, slowing system start down even further and taking up precious ram on the off chance that you might want to watch a quicktime video. It also liked to register itself as the video player of choice for other formats, because why would you use a decent player if you can use a shitty one that was made by Apple? Fuck quicktime.