Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers


Usenet got eaten up by spam by around 2002, it's death had little to do with social media. Internet messages boards probably did the most damage to usenet before that though. Twitter itself was created to kill off blogging, maybe one of the last good new internet technologies.

I've debated with myself what the ideal internet period was, maybe just a bit before social media cancer spread, though I think the internet was still usable until around 2014 or so, which is when Google started to gimp their search engine.
 
THIS FUCKING FAGGOT DIDN'T EVEN MENTION FTP OR GOPHER

KILL YOURSELF JACK
Someone mentioned those to him

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Also,

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Ex-plebbit CEO said this

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Two-Step Authentification is a pain in the ass and just about every website has it nowadays. Wouldn't be too bad if I only had to do it when the log-in seemed suspicious but they force me to do it every fucking time. I just wanna be able to access my shit without having to have my goddamn phone on me at all times.
 
I miss the click wheel on MP3 players. Fuck phones for getting rid of buttons.
Tbh, worst part of the smartphone market is that it's homogenised and usually for the worse. Foldables are probably the biggest innovation we've had in years.

I'm mostly salty that the 3.5mm jack has died considering it was far from obsolete.

I've actually found that wired buds can be more convenient than true wireless earbuds. I've got some Sennheiser buds and it seems like audio can cut very briefly when I'm walking about, it's not easy to tell the charge as it's literally just an LED on the back of the case, and I get this weird bug where sometimes I'll have all my audio slowed down by like 50% and I'll need to put the right bud back in the case and take it out again to fix it. Not to mention that because it has a battery, it's got a limited lifespan.

In comparison, my KZs are way more convenient. I plug in a cable, and music goes through it. No software updates, no batteries, no random cutouts or buggy audio, and the KZs costed me a fifth of what the Sennheiser earbuds cost me.
 
I miss exchangeable batteries. My first notebooks had batteries you could just take out. Just like that. If you wanted to use the notebook stationary and wanted to save the battery from death (the first two ones didn't even have a lithium-based batteries yet) you'd just plug the AC in, and pulled the battery out so it doesn't get constantly charged/exposed to the notebooks heat. Easy as that. If the battery went flat over the years you could then replace the battery wholesale or crack the battery compartment open and replace the cells themselves. (usually easier since the batteries as a whole would be harder to get) Same for mobile phones, of course.

Now your devices' lifetime is directly connected to how long it's battery will live. Opening them goes from "difficult" to "downright impossible without damaging the case". Often there's hot glue or tiny plastic hinges that'll break off. (Notebooks aren't as bad yet, and some manufacturers even have official videos up on youtube how to replace parts) Some devices can be told to stop charging past a certain threshold so you can leave them plugged in without jeopardizing the devices' batteries lifetime (constantly sitting at highest voltage is bad for lithium-based batteries) but that is sold as a premium feature now and not all devices have it, and from these that have (usually all USB C devices) it's locked away from the user by a stack of proprietary BS.

Thing is, in the early devices you'd probably never need that second battery because the device would be so outdated at that point that you probably already had a new one. Now that devices are actually viable for that long to make replacement of the battery a worthwhile investment, manufacturers sabotage this.

The EU pushes a law that makes it mandatory for devices to be designed in a way that batteries are replaceable without destroying the device. I haven't looked into the details but I expect that law to have some huge asterisk and be completely ineffective/hollowed out from the inside by lobbyists from the affected industries. Yes, I haven't even bothered reading about it. That's how much trust I have in politicians solving this. The joke is, we already had such devices 30+ years ago. Engineering-wise, it isn't a problem. It's abundantly clear the industries want you to throw the old devices away and buy new ones. None of them should even pretend to give a shit about the environment as long as such devices are made and they should be constantly called out on it if they even as much as put a sticker of a green leaf on anything. It's a bold faced lie.

(This rant came to pass because I got a notebook again. Since I don't want to constantly plug/unplug the AC connector I finagled a solution with an USB relay and it's power supply. It feels like such a huge step back from what we already had and what's technologically possible today, I just had to vent)
 
They still exist. The higher end ones have batteries that last weeks, the sony walkman (yes that's it's name) for example. Dunno about the low end ones but you can basically buy ready-made chips that do decoding and playback from a FAT/NTFS formatted SD card and it wouldn't be hard to build your very own mp3 player without any linux or higher level computing involved.

I tried this I had a Sony NW-A45 and it was a fucking nightmare I had to use this proprietary software to upload music, and if i tried to load it from a SD card it had to do some weird shit that made the card unreadable in a PC after without formatting it and most importantly to me it wouldnt play Audibible audio books despite being supposedly able to play them back.

copyright fanatacism + excessive consumerism = BS like "microtransactions" and "planned obsolescence"?

The problem is the teach is there, but the business isn't, they still work off a distribution model made in the 70's - this is why people are going back to piracy they don't want to pay for 10 different streaming services that have regional variations where seasons 1,24,5 are available in the UK but season 3 isnt because a song was used that some company that hasnt traded in 10 years owns the rights to that song for TV broadcast.


I'm mostly salty that the 3.5mm jack has died considering it was far from obsolete.

I've actually found that wired buds can be more convenient than true wireless earbuds. I've got some Sennheiser buds and it seems like audio can cut very briefly when I'm walking about, it's not easy to tell the charge as it's literally just an LED on the back of the case, and I get this weird bug where sometimes I'll have all my audio slowed down by like 50% and I'll need to put the right bud back in the case and take it out again to fix it. Not to mention that because it has a battery, it's got a limited lifespan.

I like hardwired connections as I hate having yet another device to charge, but for me I like that there are now decent wireless options for headphones I listen to audiobooks while I am working and a wire dangling down my chest can prove to be a safety hazard. I know thats a bit of a nice use case but honestly the more I use them the more I like them, I just wish as you said there was some way of maintaining the batteries.

I miss exchangeable batteries. My first notebooks had batteries you could just take out. Just like that. If you wanted to use the notebook stationary and wanted to save the battery from death (the first two ones didn't even have a lithium-based batteries yet) you'd just plug the AC in, and pulled the battery out so it doesn't get constantly charged/exposed to the notebooks heat. Easy as that. If the battery went flat over the years you could then replace the battery wholesale or crack the battery compartment open and replace the cells themselves. (usually easier since the batteries as a whole would be harder to get) Same for mobile phones, of course.

Now your devices' lifetime is directly connected to how long it's battery will live. Opening them goes from "difficult" to "downright impossible without damaging the case". Often there's hot glue or tiny plastic hinges that'll break off. (Notebooks aren't as bad yet, and some manufacturers even have official videos up on youtube how to replace parts) Some devices can be told to stop charging past a certain threshold so you can leave them plugged in without jeopardizing the devices' batteries lifetime (constantly sitting at highest voltage is bad for lithium-based batteries) but that is sold as a premium feature now and not all devices have it, and from these that have (usually all USB C devices) it's locked away from the user by a stack of proprietary BS.

Back in the 90's we had a Laptop that had replaceable batteries, that you could also replace the individual batteries in the pack, and it had a bit of software that monitored each battery and told you if it needed replacing. It had a dock that was about half the size of a normal desktop tower you had to slide out a tray put the laptop in and slide it into the tower and it had a CD ROM, 3.5 and 5in bay on it and a single USB port that was coverd with a screw down plate.

I'm a Mac user so replaceable battiers haven't been a thing for me for a while (well they are but it's not simple) but in the last 10 years I've not had any real issues with my battery longevity and the usefulness of the device, what was a issue was the funky chargin ports so I always had to make sure I had a cable on me for my phone, but that was pretty much everyone's experience until Android became a thing.
 
I brought this up on this very thread nearly two years ago. I find it funny that even cases that cost above $100 or more only have 2 3.5 inch hard drive caddies and 2 2.5 inch ssd caddies.
I recently got one of those Cougar "gaming cases" with a glass door for only $50 and it had a single 5.25 inch slot. It takes snapping off a bit of sheet metal actually to use it, which I haven't done, but I could if I wanted to.
 
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I fucking hate how ubiquitous javascript and its ilk are.
a shitty use of JS I've seen lately is on this old site: http://birdfotos.com/bird-funnys/bf3.htm

("Photographs of pacific loon and the birds on the Arizona desert and other parts of the state")

The site displays a dialog box with "ERROR! Attempting to take Unauthorized Data! This will Lock up your Browser!" if one tries to right-click once, and then repeatedly displays Yep, BYE :) if one tries right-clicking again. Clearly the one who wrote that code doesn't know, doesn't care, or has the wrong idea about "Fair Use".

(disabling JavaScript or using a current browser can allow one to bypass that lol)
 
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People buying smart home things with no context for security, privacy, or network stability. Everyone is so used to plug n play that they don't consider security or redundancy measures until something goes wrong. I offer networking services locally and I don't know how many homes and businesses I've gone into where I've had to fix messes that wouldn't happen if they thought about keeping their home network safe and all of their devices not having one singular point of failure.

A good friend of mine has 40 individual "smart" devices in and around his home, and after he did something to his router I had to reset everything from scratch. That took two hours because he's just added on continually and never saved his passwords anywhere for each device's portal so I had to reset them as well. I feel like anyone selling smart home things should be responsible enough to recommend a place where they can learn to set everything up securely (like I did when I used to sell them).

As far as privacy, I want to set up my own open source smart home network with internet connectivity only when required. I used to have three Alexa Echo Dots some years ago and then I did some reading... Decided I didn't want that shit in my house and I'd just design my own voice assistants with transparent software and hardware.

Tech consumers are retarded.
 
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