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

[TaimuRadiu]

Shortwave radio when there was still worthwhile content in English to listen to and not just lunatics that aren't even as entertaining as lunatics that are a dime a dozen on Youtube. Most national broadcasters moved to the Internet.

learn spanish dood

On topic to show how much of a true Boomer I am, I hate anything computer controlled in a car, I hate LCDs (they can't reproduce dat eyefeel of a good CRT, and I never liked TVs above 19 inches or so anyway), I think home computing peaked with the C64, and I think nothing sounds better than something from a good audio source recorded onto REEL TO REEL tape. How much of this is genuine and how much of this is just me wanting to go back to being a little kid again is easily debateable.

 

[mindlessobserver]

learn spanish dood

On topic to show how much of a true Boomer I am, I hate anything computer controlled in a car, I hate LCDs (they can't reproduce dat eyefeel of a good CRT, and I never liked TVs above 19 inches or so anyway), I think home computing peaked with the C64, and I think nothing sounds better than something from a good audio source recorded onto REEL TO REEL tape. How much of this is genuine and how much of this is just me wanting to go back to being a little kid again is easily debateable.

I don't think its about getting old so much as its about giving up control. A digital good is not the same as something you can hold in your hand. Especially now that companies are only giving you a "license" to use it that could be revoked at any time. Ditto goes for alot of the technology in cars that you can't fix on your own and instead have to go back to the manufacturer (and pay out the ass) to repair.

And now they are talking about level 5 autonomous vehicles. Now that is some hair raising shit. Things don't even have steering wheels. They explain them like they are some revolution in convenience, but what they are is the ultimate surrender of control to the thinking machines and the people that own them. I would legit consider rioting in the streets if they implemented that to the exclusion of everything else.

I think its really important for our generation (the generation old enough to remember when dial up internet showed up, and payphones were a thing) to make sure the up and coming one remembers a time when they weren't dependent on all this tech to do everything for them. Or else society will rapidly be filled with dependent children in adults bodies. We are seeing it happen already.

 

[DNA_JACKED]

Tech I miss:
Micro ATX high end motherboards. There are 3 main types of motherboards for desktops. Full ATX boards, with 7 expansion slots, Micro ATX, with 4 slots, and mini ITX, with a single slot. Mini ITX is 6.7x6.7 inches, and as a result are quite cramped. Micro ATX, however, can be made at 9.6x9.6, compared to the 12x9.6 of full ATX. This means that micro ATX can be made with just as much room for voltage regulators, heatsinks, chipsets, ece as full ATX, largely just sacrificing some SATA ports, M.2 ports, and 3 expansion slots. For most end users, micro ATX was perfect, large enough for a dual slot GPU, a sound card, and another expansion card, with no wasted space. In the early 2010s, there were boards like the GENE and Sniper M line from Asus and Gigabyte, respectively. These boards had the same VRM as their larger brothers, and were more then $200 each. They were grat boards. Today, for AMD you are largely limited to $100-120 boards with crap VRMs and limited capability, intel is slightly better but still there is nothing like the old GENE line. To add insult ot injury, most high end ITX boards have better VRMs then micro ATX boards these days.

Workstation cases. The trend today is RGB! FANS! GLASS PANELS! This means the death of 5.25" external bays. I still have optical media, memory cards, and I use my machine for work as well as play, so I have external hot swappable bays. Cases like the corsair 230T and the HALF X have died out, and left users like me scrambling to find leftover stock or used cases for future builds.

Removable batteries. Batteries are consumables, and there is no reason phones and tablets should have said batteries sealed. I used to rock a note 4 with a 10,000 MaH zerolemon battery, and LOVED it. Sadly, that is no longer possible, I still miss it.

Dual GPU. I was a Dual GPU fanboy. Dual 550tis, dual 770s, dual 6970s, ece. Loved every minute of it, and in this high refresh rate high resolution era, the death of dual GPU makes me quite sad.

Things I hate:

RGB all the things. SO many lights, so much wasted PCB space. My motherboard only has a single USB 2 and single USB 3 internal header because they had to waste so much space with fucking RGB headers.

Computer hardware design in general. It is all gaudy wasteful crap. Basic, well made, simple motherboards dominated the market a decade ago, and they just worked, now boards are covered in plastic and "armor" that does jack shit.

Software needing an internet connection to function. Fuck internet DRM, fuck having to download shit constantly, fuck having to host content on a server preventing me from having a full offline installer.

The constant trend of software having 0 optimization because RAM is cheap now. I shouldnt need 1.6GB of RAM to idle ubuntu on the desktop. It still hesitates as it loads shit off of the system disk, so what is the point of all that RAM usage? 10.10 was just as responsive and idled at like 250MB. Games use 150GB of storage and 10GB of VRAM to look a fraction better then games that fit on a single layer DVD.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

The constant trend of software having 0 optimization because RAM is cheap now. I shouldnt need 1.6GB of RAM to idle ubuntu on the desktop. It still hesitates as it loads shit off of the system disk, so what is the point of all that RAM usage? 10.10 was just as responsive and idled at like 250MB. Games use 150GB of storage and 10GB of VRAM to look a fraction better then games that fit on a single layer DVD.

Using DWM on Archlinux only eats around 240 MB of ram. It's all of the "features" of your desktop environment eating the ram.

 

[byuu]

Using DWM on Archlinux only eats around 240 MB of ram. It's all of the "features" of your desktop environment eating the ram.

Only?
I used to run a full-featured desktop on a 512kb machine.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

Only?
I used to run a full-featured desktop on a 512kb machine.

This is also with a compositor, conky on the dmenu, feh, and an st terminal. But your point is still valid.

 

[byuu]

This is also with a compositor

Mine too, the Amiga Workbench was technically the first compositing windowing system.
As well system information, desktop to launch applications, backdrop (patterns at least), and shell.

 

[He Who Points And Laughs]

Mine too, the Amiga Workbench was technically the first compositing windowing system.
As well system information, desktop to launch applications, backdrop (patterns at least), and shell.

What was the resolution? I never worked on the Amiga and had only seen some at the TV station a friend worked at.

 

[byuu]

What was the resolution? I never worked on the Amiga and had only seen some at the TV station a friend worked at.

320x512 when interlaced with full color, up to 640x512 with reduced colors
The later 1MB RAM variant could run up to 1280x512 (but that reduces the colors even more).

 

[DNA_JACKED]

Using DWM on Archlinux only eats around 240 MB of ram. It's all of the "features" of your desktop environment eating the ram.

But this is my point. Ubuntu MATE, for instance, uses 900MB at the same time bone stock ubuntu uses 1.6GB, and MATE on ubuntu 16.04 only took 300MB. Now, sure, you can say "well just use MATE then" but my point is these modern desktops are bloated as hell. Ubuntu unity shouldnt be above 1GB of RAM usage at idle.

 

[Turd Cow]

Micro ATX high end motherboards. There are 3 main types of motherboards for desktops. Full ATX boards, with 7 expansion slots, Micro ATX, with 4 slots, and mini ITX, with a single slot. Mini ITX is 6.7x6.7 inches, and as a result are quite cramped. Micro ATX, however, can be made at 9.6x9.6, compared to the 12x9.6 of full ATX. This means that micro ATX can be made with just as much room for voltage regulators, heatsinks, chipsets, ece as full ATX, largely just sacrificing some SATA ports, M.2 ports, and 3 expansion slots. For most end users, micro ATX was perfect, large enough for a dual slot GPU, a sound card, and another expansion card, with no wasted space. In the early 2010s, there were boards like the GENE and Sniper M line from Asus and Gigabyte, respectively. These boards had the same VRM as their larger brothers, and were more then $200 each. They were grat boards. Today, for AMD you are largely limited to $100-120 boards with crap VRMs and limited capability, intel is slightly better but still there is nothing like the old GENE line. To add insult ot injury, most high end ITX boards have better VRMs then micro ATX boards these days.

The constant trend of software having 0 optimization because RAM is cheap now. I shouldnt need 1.6GB of RAM to idle ubuntu on the desktop.

Yes, the only high end AM4 MicroAtx motherboard is made by asrock. I dont know why manufacturers can't just make at least one X570 board in that form factor. Basically just copy the ATX X570 board design and slap it on a MicroAtx. The motherboard I have is the B450M Aorus and it works fine for me. But for people who want MicroAtx they don't have the option becsuse manufacturers don't want to make a MicroAtx board for the High-End, and especially for AMD.

Windows 10 would literally take 3 GB on my shitty pentium N4200 laptop, like what's up with that Microsoft. The only thing thats install is steam and some required programs installed.

 

[DNA_JACKED]

Yes, the only high end AM4 MicroAtx motherboard is made by asrock. I dont know why manufacturers can't just make at least one X570 board in that form factor. Basically just copy the ATX X570 board design and slap it on a MicroAtx. The motherboard I have is the B450M Aorus and it works fine for me. But for people who want MicroAtx they don't have the option becsuse manufacturers don't want to make a MicroAtx board for the High-End, and especially for AMD.

Windows 10 would literally take 3 GB on my shitty pentium N4200 laptop, like what's up with that Microsoft. The only thing thats install is steam and some required programs installed.

EXACTLY. How hard could it possibly be to cut off the bottom of a x570 taichi, aourus ultra, or crosshair?

 

[אΩ+1]

I miss the widespread use of RSS feeds on websites, due to centralized platforms like Facebooks, Twitters, Reddits, YouTubes wanting to control discussion on the web.

Here's crunklord420's thread on RSS.

https://kiwifarms.st/threads/rss-can-save-the-internet.52146/

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

320x512 when interlaced with full color, up to 640x512 with reduced colors
The later 1MB RAM variant could run up to 1280x512 (but that reduces the colors even more).

Technologies I miss is the Amiga and the Amiga generation. It was such a strange place compared to consoles, PC wasn't much of a thing at the time.
Nidhogg 2 had a very Amiga 1200/CD32 flair to it in that someone made colorful art, but it had that feeling of no one supervising it so it's all weird.

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

Tech I hate:

-The Chocolate Bar Form-Factor Smartphone. I hate typing on a screen. Swype was my only outlet, and now it's dead. The on-screen keyboards by Google (GBoard) and Microsoft (SwiftKey) are not only inferior, but are also TERRIBLE for privacy. I use a pocket-sized bluetooth keypad if I need to text. The Chocolate Bar smartphone is also EXTREMELY limiting in terms of useability, and the only reason it is a design trend, is thanks to Apple. And when Apple does something, you know everyone else is going to follow right behind, which is why there are NO ALTERNATIVES to this form factor now. I early adopted Android with the HTC/T-Mobile G1, and that was, by far and away, the closest I've ever had to the feeling of a smartphone being a "computer in your pocket". It had four face buttons, a track ball with a selection button, and a full sliding QWERTY keyboard with an absolutely BEAUTIFUL opening mechanism. I will never get to experience this kind of user-friendliness again.

-"THE CLOUD". Back in my fucking day, we had a better name for this 40-year-old technology. It's called a "server". There is nothing magical about it. It's just a fucking server. No, I don't want to stream my fucking music library from 3000 miles away. I'm perfectly content with having all of my pirated music on my phone and computer, thank you very much.

-"Gamer" tech and marketing. Your "gaming" motherboard with RGB LEDs costs $100 more and does not perform any better than my mil-spec one, built for longevity. You wasted your money, you fucking idiot. I built my PC to be a computer, not as a needlessly "edgy" or "extreme" designed piece of jewelry that nobody is impressed by.

-Autonomous vehicles/New cars. Nope. Nopenopenopenope. I wouldn't be caught dead in a car with a fucking ethics subroutine designed to kill me to save a school bus full of children. I will not drive a car that tracks my location wherever I go. FUCK that. My newest vehicle is from 2007, and I dare not go any newer than that. I like working on my own car, too. It's therapeutic. Your post-2014 Chrysler vehicle can be hacked. Your steering wheel remotely controlled. Your brakes and transmission disabled. The software capable of doing this is available online. If your infotainment system is an attack vector to hack your car, you should look for another car.

-Single-year tech generations. FUCK YOU, you wasteful cocksucking sons of bitches. I do not believe in global warming, but that does not mean I am not an environmentalist. Samsung and Apple's fetish for releasing a new product every single year not only gives you a subpar product with terrible software, flawed hardware, and minor iterations in processor speed, but it also contributes to the e-waste problem that is destroying our fucking world. You cannot recycle an LCD screen or battery. You can turn an old phone into Best Buy's recycling program, but 90% of that device is going in the fucking garbage. If you buy a new phone every single year, or just HAVE to have the newest bleeding-edge product, then YOU ARE THE PROBLEM, and you should kill yourself. Limiting tech hardware generations to 3-5 years produces a better product that isn't hastily manufactured, and poisons the Earth on a much slower scale. Fact.

Which leads me into my next gripe:

-Industry-standard planned obsolescence/anticonsumerism. New video games are shit. MTX is a cancer. Always Online DRM should have you hanged. One day, your UPlay games library is going to be pulled and undownloadable, just like all of your WiiWare purchases. That aside, Apple and SONOS are the biggest offenders when it comes to this. Apple design their products to break. This is a fact, you cannot challenge it. They want you to buy a Macbook Pro, use it for a few months, and throw it away when a resistor shorts in the inverter board for the display, so you buy the next one. Your devices are not built to last, unless you go out of your way to build your own computer with military-spec components.

-IoT devices/Smart TVs/Smart [INSERT PRODUCT HERE]. What is there to say, really? You're buying a wiretap for your home. Simple as. You are fucking stupid for doing this. Feel bad. What can your Amazon Echo Dot even do that your smartphone can't? Go ahead, give me an answer, I'll wait... Oh, what's that, nothing? Gee whiz, wow, it's almost like it exists for the sole purpose of accruing data on you that gets missed by your smartphone, PC and game console! Enjoy your NSA stopgap.

-X-as-a-service. Do you really think that Microsoft makes it so easy to get Windows 10 for free/cheap, out of the goodness of their corporate heart? Fucking think about it for a second. They're making money off of you by selling your personal information, but it won't be that way forever. That's an unsatisfying way of making money, there has to be a way to squeeze another dime out of you. May my words be marked, right now; The next big iteration of Windows will be sold as a service. They're already doing this for some versions of Windows Server as a test market. One day, you will be paying a monthly Windows Bill like the fucking cuck you are, in a similar way that they're selling Office 365 as a monthly service. Move to Linux now and save yourself the trouble of having to learn it all at once. It's for your own good.

-Trannified Game dev/Linux dev teams. These degenerates spend more time talking about Orange Man and their underwater basket weaving degrees than they do writing code. It's fucking insufferable, and I can do their jobs better than they can, but I'll never be hired to do those jobs because I'm a white man, who "dominates this kind of space" because I know how to shut up and do my fucking job until it's time to go home.

-Honorable mention: The GNU Public License



Now, for things I miss in tech:

-Cartridge-based video games. There's really no good excuse for why we're not using physical flash media for game consoles right now. It's faster than reading a disc, more handy and accessible than buying all of your games online, more approachable for children who don't need to steal mom's credit card to buy Minecraft, and it just feels nice to slap a piece of plastic into another piece of plastic and make your shapes and colors appear on screen.

-Windows. I hate Windows 10. I hate it more than anything. It's a tinkertoy OS for the mentally deficient. I hate how it tries to identify as a 'we' ("We changed your filetype associations for .mp3 because you are a naughty boy who chose Foobar2000 over Windows Media Player."), I hate its coy, "people-friendly" design language for idiots. I hate Apps. I hate bloatware. I hate Tiles. I hate the new Start Menu. I hate its simple shapes and pretty colors. Windows 2000/XP was peak Windows. Prove me wrong. You can't.

-The 3.5mm Audio Jack. Goes without saying, really.

-Modularity in laptops. Remember when you could replace your RAM, CPU and GPU in your laptop? Remember when you could replace your hard drive in your Macbook? Me too. Now they're just bigger smartphones. RIP.

-Longevity. I upgrade my Desktop Computer completely, every decade. Somehow, I never fail to be able to run the latest and greatest programs and games during the interim period in which I am not buying new hardware. My one simple trick that Silicon Valley hates, is that I just keep upgrading and adding on to what I already have. My PC before the one I currently use can still run modern games, just fine. It can even emulate the Wii U and Playstation 3. It has 48GB RAM and a 6-core Xeon, and I started this build with a first gen Core i7 and 8GB RAM, in 2011. My only hope is that my current PC will be able to be upgraded in the same way.

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

I'm not crazy with having tech companies replace plugs and connecters (micro-USB, USB-C, mini-USB). Apple especially, since they break easily and expensive to replace.

I feel like you might be younger than I am, because honestly nowadays everything is standardized on MicroUSB. Some newer gadgets have been using USB-C for the past 2-3 years. MiniUSB is relegated to very old devices (6+ years now). Even with those three standards over the past, say, 8 years or so, we're still in a way better place now than we used to be.

Back 10+ years ago, literally every company/brand had their own power jack design, their own proprietary transfer cable standard, and all that shit. Now THAT was a hellscape of a world to be in. Oh you broke the power cable for your Sony digital camera? Buy the whole adapter over again. And be sure to get the one that came with your specific model, because the next year's model has a different jack and you can't use it.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Back 10+ years ago, literally every company/brand had their own power jack design, their own proprietary transfer cable standard, and all that shit. Now THAT was a hellscape of a world to be in. Oh you broke the power cable for your Sony digital camera? Buy the whole adapter over again. And be sure to get the one that came with your specific model, because the next year's model has a different jack and you can't use it.

That was the worst. Having a drawer full of different adapters wasn't uncommon.
I have pictures on my phone. How do I transfer them to my PC? Oh, it's a separate cable that hooks up to the serial port and requires drivers and special software because it does NOT show up as USB storage. And the drivers only support Win98, fantastic.

Hastily cobbled together Chinese flash carts had better software and felt less shady than trying to get something out of a Nokia or Ericsson.

 

[Varg Did Nothing Wrong]

That was the worst. Having a drawer full of different adapters wasn't uncommon.
I have pictures on my phone. How do I transfer them to my PC? Oh, it's a separate cable that hooks up to the serial port and requires drivers and special software because it does NOT show up as USB storage. And the drivers only support Win98, fantastic.

Hastily cobbled together Chinese flash carts had better software and felt less shady than trying to get something out of a Nokia or Ericsson.

Honestly the one place I still sort of see this is in laptop power adapters. I don't know if there's been any real major changes in recent times, the most recent laptop I've bought is a few years old at this point, but every laptop out of the probably 8 that I've owned over the years has come with a different jack and socket. When I buy a universal power supply I shouldn't have to worry that out of the 16 removable jack plugs that come with it, I won't be able to find one that fits (had that experience with a Lenovo laptop once). Why can't everyone fucking standarize on one voltage, so we don't have 11.1v out to fuckin' 24v or whatever for the battery packs and adapters, and one goddamn jack design that is designed to be the most usable??

Fuck.

 

[byuu]

Back 10+ years ago, literally every company/brand had their own power jack design, their own proprietary transfer cable standard, and all that shit. Now THAT was a hellscape of a world to be in. Oh you broke the power cable for your Sony digital camera? Buy the whole adapter over again. And be sure to get the one that came with your specific model, because the next year's model has a different jack and you can't use it.

Yeah, it was so bad that the EU decided to force everyone to use a standard connector for small devices with batteries.

Why can't everyone fucking standarize on one voltage, so we don't have 11.1v out to fuckin' 24v or whatever for the battery packs and adapters, and one goddamn jack design that is designed to be the most usable??

It might get more standardised with USB-C and USB PD. More and more laptop use it for charging.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

Honestly the one place I still sort of see this is in laptop power adapters. I don't know if there's been any real major changes in recent times, the most recent laptop I've bought is a few years old at this point, but every laptop out of the probably 8 that I've owned over the years has come with a different jack and socket. When I buy a universal power supply I shouldn't have to worry that out of the 16 removable jack plugs that come with it, I won't be able to find one that fits (had that experience with a Lenovo laptop once). Why can't everyone fucking standarize on one voltage, so we don't have 11.1v out to fuckin' 24v or whatever for the battery packs and adapters, and one goddamn jack design that is designed to be the most usable??

Fuck.

It's extra annoying when manufacturers have different plug variations across their line of laptops. I think it was HP that was a real pain in the ass because their chargers looked the same at first glance but then one had a tiny extra prong or bit of plastic so it wouldn't fit. USB-C for charging will be a blessing.