- Joined
- Sep 22, 2021
I've been using Neovim for a while, but for bigger projects I like to use a full-fledged IDE. Vim/Neovim is good for quickly editing stuff, but it gets kinda complicated trying to have a bunch of files open at once.
Tech you miss/ new tech trends you hate - ok boomers
- Thread starter Kenobi
- Start date
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2018
Going by foot to the nearest store and buying a physical game is faster than waiting for these 100gb monstrosities to download and install.
Even with a decent connection.
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2020
You can add an external disc drive (or an internal if your pc is a desktop)
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2020
They also had to actually finish the game and do a number of QA cycles before release instead of releasing a buggy mess and patching it later and adding content that missed the deadline.
However what I don't miss is breaking/losing the CD ROM and having to buy it again, as well as having to have the physical CD as proof of ownership unless you rolled the dice with a no cd crack.
Where is your nearest game store though? 100gb at 512mbit/s is ~30mins and have opening hours: if I want to play Max Payne 2 at 2am nothing can stop me (aside from os compatibility issues lol)
All things considered, digital distribution is still superior.
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
Here's another couple - I miss game demos and shareware. Being able to play a little chunk of a game for free was great; you'd get to see if that game you had been reading about in the magazines was actually worth spending your hard-earned cash on, or maybe you'd find some weird, obscure shareware gem buried on a BBS somewhere. Now? Enjoy paying $70 fucking dollars on a game you may or may not enjoy that you'll have to fight some minimum wage customer service rep to get a refund for. You would think it would be even easier to make game demos in this all-digital, own-nothing world we live in - grant a license for, say, two hours, and then revoke it until you buy the full game. Hell, even Microsoft was looking at using xCloud to deliver on-demand game demos. Then again, maybe that's what sailing the seven seas is all about - download what you want, and support those you really like.
I bought a couple of monitors over the weekend. Are people using monitors as cheap TVs these days? I couldn't find a single monitor on the shelf that didn't have crappy built-in speakers. Honestly, I wouldn't have cared so much if it weren't for the monitors I bought overriding my audio output defaults every time I turned on my computer, even after disabling them at the driver level! Like yes, I don't want to listen to my music through my professional audio monitors, I want to listen to music through a pair of dime-sized, 1-cent Chinese tin cans!
I bought a couple of monitors over the weekend. Are people using monitors as cheap TVs these days? I couldn't find a single monitor on the shelf that didn't have crappy built-in speakers. Honestly, I wouldn't have cared so much if it weren't for the monitors I bought overriding my audio output defaults every time I turned on my computer, even after disabling them at the driver level! Like yes, I don't want to listen to my music through my professional audio monitors, I want to listen to music through a pair of dime-sized, 1-cent Chinese tin cans!
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
I miss the DVD drive in laptops. I liked burning CD's for my car, and it was nice to have it as part of the package, even if it was slow. Now I need a separate burner to do it. Fuck this gay earth.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
in those times, having a case was just in the way of upgrading computer components, which you basically had to do weekly. I have some really clouded 90s memories of having a PC just lie in assorted connected parts on the desk that'd change over the months. ( I had a serious need for speed then)
It really is. The only thing that was superior about physical distribution was way back in the day at your comfortable brick&mortar non-chain video game store, when you knew almost everyone that worked there and you could talk videogames with them, or generally just shoot the shit for half an hour or so. Then you'd go home with a nice cardboard box that had some extras, like a map, some "feelie" (e.g. like the "moonstone" in the Ultima 6 box, or the collection of SciFi short stories and in-world written manual you got with the Elite games) or a very nicely written manual sometimes with fancy paper and design, drawing you into the world of the game. (as the graphics certainly wouldn't lol)
As soon as they stopped doing that, these stores closed and you could only get your games from some generic electronics retailer/game store chain, and the package was basically just a CD and some cheap booklet thing explaining to boomers how to insert a CD and do the needful, (or some very overpriced limited edition thing that I'd be embarrassed walking out the store with) there was no point anymore in physical distribution for me.
It's called early access now and you're expected to pay the full price for the demo. You might or might not get a full game eventually.
Really, and they're all doing it. I have absolutely no idea why. I think it's a checkbox the engineers need to tick as requested by marketing. Monitor manufacturers are almost all just people that put an LG or Sharp panel into some more or less fancy packaging. They already get bonus points from me when they don't screw up the EDID, have firmware with no massive bugs or somehow damage the panel in the process. For me they're the special needs workshop of computer parts manufacturers and I don't buy monitors anywhere where it's not easy to just send them back.
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- Joined
- Aug 17, 2018
It makes sense to me. You rarely see someone bothering with extra pc speakers these days.
That moment when I pack my DVDs for a family vacation along with my old laptop with a built-in DVD. I want to go back, bros.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
I did a fair amount of computer repair then so I'd often end up with junk parts like a motherboard with dead parts on it, but not the proprietary case it went in, slightly flaky video cards, hard drives on their last legs, etc. and just swap out parts whenever I got one slightly better than what I had. And of course recklessly overclock until it stopped working then back up one step.
Now I just buy parts like a normal person. Lately with as often as I do build a new computer (every few years) something has changed to the point I don't understand it any more.
- Joined
- Mar 19, 2017
I don't think it's consumer-driven, manufacturers have been trying to combine their monitor & tv product lines for years to try and save money. Started when they switched from predominantly 16:10 for monitors to overwhelmingly 16:9. The TVs were all 16:9 already and some companies just decided there's no point buying two different shapes of glass.
- Joined
- Sep 28, 2022
Or leaving the side panel off to hook up other peoples hard drives instead of transferring things over the shared 10mbit network. Fucking hubs...
- Joined
- Jul 22, 2021
Way old reply, I know (this post is on page 4), but I found myself buying a big LCD TV from 2013 because I needed a big TV with a small footprint and analog inputs. All the TVs made nowadays have feet at the corners instead of a central stand, making it hard to place a large tv on a small console. I also didn’t want a smart TV.
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
Nowadays if you want that small console experience, you need a wall mount. Great if you own the home or the place you're renting already has one/ allows one to be installed, but if not... well shit.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2018
The worst about screens is that people are still just content with absolutely terrible sub 100 ppi screens that won't display even somewhat smaller writing without being blurry. Many people even still rocking fucking awful TFT panels. I've bought a 13.3" 16:10 "mobile" screen because it has a PPI of 227 and I never, ever want to go back. It's like seeing for the first time. I actually consider the small size to be a bonus. Works for notebooks so good enough for me. I also placed it on top of my mini ITX PC I sit directly in front of for that classic desktop experience and it's just comfy.
For me it's mostly that those intricacies are missing. You pick the more expensive parts with the higher numbers, you get the better computer. Nothing to look for on mainboard layouts. No chipsets of five different manufacturers to compare. All this shit will work reliably. it's often not even worth it to get the better computer, contrary to back then, when every 10% extra could make a huge difference. There are no surprises. Nothing to understand. No secret tricks to get a bit more performance out of it all, performance you probably aren't going to need anyways. GPUs are the big thing now but all the differences in the high end stuff feel highly theoretical and I can't be fucked to pay $1000 for something that'll maybe make two videogames I won't play anyways look a bit better and drive my power bill up in the process.
Also there's no easily accessible, real in-depth information about the hardware anymore. Even the most normal of computing magazines would really go in-depth about technologies. Today it's all just consoom, consoom, consoom. Targeting completely different types of people. I'm just waiting now for needing a monthly hardware subscription for your intel SoC to e.g. unlock higher CPU clocks. Now that Moore's Law is dead and a ten year old computer is perfectly usable for day-to-day tasks it's a question of time.
Look at Mr moneybags over here with his fancy hub. Try trunk network with coax cable setups. Think I still have these BNC T-pieces and terminators lying around here. To be fair though, that stuff could bridge quite a range and was pretty fast (for the time) too.
It was kinda required by my work so I had the fancy stuff which mostly meant intel in the CPU bracket those days. Some of these lower budget companies that often ended up in OEM could be good value for the price though. Some of those e.g. Cyrix CPUs you could overclock to insane speeds if you had a good mainboard and could live with the occasional crash and they often had hidden processor flags for tinkerers that'd enable additional albeit not always stable stuff. Nowadays they're my favorites in my old computer junk and all these former top-of-the-line Pentiums are just boring. Also doesn't help that intel used to nickel and dime you for features in e.g. it's chipsets a lot of stuff like SIS or Via did at no additional cost. The most interesting secret sauce overclocking tip was overclocking the ISA bus in the early days. Some of these VGA chipsets could take insane speeds and you sometimes could triple your performance there.
For me it's mostly that those intricacies are missing. You pick the more expensive parts with the higher numbers, you get the better computer. Nothing to look for on mainboard layouts. No chipsets of five different manufacturers to compare. All this shit will work reliably. it's often not even worth it to get the better computer, contrary to back then, when every 10% extra could make a huge difference. There are no surprises. Nothing to understand. No secret tricks to get a bit more performance out of it all, performance you probably aren't going to need anyways. GPUs are the big thing now but all the differences in the high end stuff feel highly theoretical and I can't be fucked to pay $1000 for something that'll maybe make two videogames I won't play anyways look a bit better and drive my power bill up in the process.
Also there's no easily accessible, real in-depth information about the hardware anymore. Even the most normal of computing magazines would really go in-depth about technologies. Today it's all just consoom, consoom, consoom. Targeting completely different types of people. I'm just waiting now for needing a monthly hardware subscription for your intel SoC to e.g. unlock higher CPU clocks. Now that Moore's Law is dead and a ten year old computer is perfectly usable for day-to-day tasks it's a question of time.
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2021
Steam still has those. On special occasion, you can play them during SteamFest.
Also, I hate SEO and SEOmaxxing websites. Before, you could google an issue and get reliable help from a tech forum or subreddit in the first page.
Now? The first pages are filled with generic articles from shitty websites that offer a basic solution to the most basic problem. The first 5 or so pages are just "here is how to fix this issue and others in 2022! Guaranteed to work!" from 100 or so separate websites competing for top page. They don't even offer a solution, but it is guaranteed that the words you used in the query will appear at least once. Your problem better not be outside the 3% common problems with the thing, or you're fucked!
Searching for a 2week old article or piece of news is a nightmare as well! Want to know who won the Eurocup last time? The top 100 articles are about what the Eurocup is and where you can watch it!
Go ahead try it yourself! Lmk if you get less than 100 pages of useless websites!
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
I miss Cyrix although overclocking them was often a crapshoot, but I had access to a large pool of them. They'd all reliably work as rated, but it was almost like getting a lottery ticket to get one of the ones that went up to insane speeds. Some would only overclock a little before flaking out. Still in general (used as intended) they were a really well-engineered chip for the time and on top of that great for just messing around.
Some would overclock and be stable at temperatures where they'd literally start to melt the board and this is when you could have fun with fancy cooling systems.
Fuck Intel and their anticompetitive trade practices as well as just the general market fumbles Cyrix itself made (that resulted in the company being gobbled up by something and changing direction). Near the end they had a chip that did video, audio, and more or less anything a computer needed on one chip, but for some reason it never found much of a market.
Not much fun to be had in overclocking, although most boards support stuff like XMP profiles and you can generally tweak most GPUs with proprietary software to eke out a little performance. This is actually useful for CUDA/crypto and probably for AI art (although my GPU is too weak to do much better no matter what I do to it).
It's not as fun as moving around jumpers and soldering (or desoldering) stuff on the board to send a CPU into interstellar overdrive though.
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2018
Its all bullshit, Between the spam crap SEO, what you describe, issues with 365 exchange? Just run /sfc scannow! responses, and vendors wont keep docs up to date on their lets change shit all the time bullshit. I am just getting sick of it, and to make support even harder how search engines now "Customize" searches based on what they think you want vs what you really want. A few times this has fucked me over giving me results for something even if I included the context it should have needed to say "Oh hey Stupid is looking for x in y field and not z like normal".
- Joined
- Aug 13, 2020
What I really hate is the predictable format to fill in more space and throw in more keywords and the actual fucking answer is on page 2 and you have to dodge a wall of text explaining what Microsoft Exchange is and why emails are a good thing and scrolling and scrolling until I finally get to the powershell one-liner that fixes the problem.
When looking into Microsoft software problems in their modern stack I generally get good answers from their docs but a lot of their sites for older tech just got straight up deleted with thousands of dead links everywhere so the best source for info is these stupid content mill websites which are just stack overflow answers rewritten to boost SEO.
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ditto
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2019
Microsoft also just up and deleted all the comments from their old MSDN blogs. Nearly two decades of MS engineers answering questions directly, gone.