I’ve been programming for 15 years now...There are no additional features. They are not faster or more optimized. They don’t look different. They just...grow?
I've been programming for over 40 years. OP's take is a classic underestimate of how many features new versions of software have added.
My first computers in order had:
64k of RAM
128k of RAM
640k of RAM
Those first two booted up literally instantly as they copied firmware into RAM. That last one booted up in about 10 seconds from an unbelievably slow C: drive.
What did all three have in common? Did not even have basic networking built-in. Yes, systems are bloated today but they do so much more than the systems you're comparing them to. Yes, they could re-write them from scratch to remove this bloat but we knew for 8 years before OP started coding that is not the right answer either.
Me too! Although I did web hosting and company ISDN lines and not dialup 1996-1998.
Used Windows NT for web hosting and Slackware Linux with qmail for mail hosting. Sold out at what I thought was the top - which was a year or two too early but that's OK.
We did our billing with great plains accounting software which still exists as Microsoft Dynamics GP.
When 56k came around you had to do ISDN, but for many rural ISPs the tariffs for ISDN was cost prohibitive so POTS was the only option.
I worked for a few ISPs and negotiated telcos to bring in redundant OC12s to support the need, allowing them to use our data centers for the local switching. We never needed that capacity ourselves, but as it was before they started using multiple colors per fiber that was the smallest they would run.
I also started out with stacks of external modems and NT RAS.
I remember that the plastic on stacked modems would blacken due to heat in about 6 months.
I dealt with sendmail, bind, etc and didn't do the account provisioning but it was written in Delphi.
As I had written an entire 7 digit double entry accounting system in college in two weeks backed by dbase, this stories excel and paper based system seems like an anomaly for the time.
NT we hosting was a pain, but front page did make it a popular option you had to support.
While I did introduce Linux, we were mostly on DEC Alphastations because you could support a lot more load for less money than the sun boxes at the time.
It was a fun time. I remember hopping on #nanog on irc because I couldn't get uunet support to pull routs from us and had them pulling from us in less than an hour.
> NT we hosting was a pain, but front page did make it a popular option you had to support.
I don't remember the details, but at the micro-ISP I worked at, I got frontpage extensions working on Apache for customers.
We had two T1s, one for upstream, one for modems (which I never got to play with), we also contracted out nationwide dialup through megapath? or someone... We ran a radius auth server and they did the rest. Some java accounting package; I did an integration for ach billing, and made a module so we could sell domains (via Tucows OpenSRS). At some point, the modem T1 stopped working and we couldn't get the telco to fix it, so we had to move all the customers to the outsourced dialup provider, which wasn't great for the business... I left because of scheduling/poor performance at school and they got purchased by a customer.
Blockchain technology has historically claimed several innovations:
1. Decentralized currency
2. Immutable ledger
3. Transparent transactions
4. Streamlined transactions (no T+2 or T+1 settlement)
5. Borderless transactions (between people in other countries)
6. Microtransactions (transactions a tiny fraction of a cent)
7. Smart contracts
These are innovations, the question is do they solve real world problems without creating more? For example, decentralization is great until you lose your keys or the government wants to shut down money laundering.
I have yet to see a real world benefit from blockchain / cryptocurrency technology. web3 is the closest to reality but I feel like it goes against human nature and the concept of decision fatigue. I don't want Netflix to prompt me, "Want to watch the next episode for 4 cents?"
> I don't want Netflix to prompt me, "Want to watch the next episode for 4 cents?"
Neither does netflix. Vast amounts of under-used subscriptions paid at a full rate would suddenly get a huge discount. At the other end they wouldn't be getting much more revenue out of those that watch more than average because they'd likely cut down.
There must be plenty of ways of making a microtransaction in ways customers don't mind, many of those haven't been invented yet. I have no idea why blockchain is necessary for microtransactions nor why we all have to pay a microtransaction sized spending tax to the owners of the payment systems every time we spend our money now. Will blockchain fix this? I have my doubts about blockchain but damn, someone should. It seems popular amongst the powerful that they can cancel someone's ability to raise funds on the basis of an accusation alone. Most people hate that idea as stated, except for "$that_guy who I've just heard of and is clearly a creep so that's fine." Who is it today? How did that work out in the past? Maybe it will be more like justice this time than before? Who knows?
Where are the innovations? Every bullet point has other solutions or a very major asterisk that is always conveniently left off.
I've been a big proponent of crypto over the years and think its pretty cool technology. I just can't think of any problem it solves that isn't better solved by some other solution.
Enshittification is the problem that crypto solves. When you have a giant shared transaction log, many forms of information that were formalized services are now self-servicing, aggregated by the chain.
The usual rebuttal to crypto is that something else is cheaper, faster, more safe, more convenient. And within the crypto space itself, the worst actors have sold themselves on being cheaper, faster, more safe, more convenient. And then, much like the early railroads, they exploit anyone who buys in, and do nothing to deliver on the principled part of the tech.
Well, you do this for a while, and it does seem like it's scams everywhere. But the bull cycle creates a round of scattershot investments in the core tech. Some of them become survivors and succeed at some kind of pro-social function, if only in proof-of-concept. We can even extend this cycle back to the pre-Bitcoin electronic cash ventures. Bitcoin proof-of-concepted the idea that it was actually possible. Of course now it's a chain inhabited by laser-eyed prospective future masters of the universe. But the people working on the tech have largely moved on from it.
Crypto's real allure as a tech is not that it has to be good at the things that are already good(as much as that tends to be the inclination), it has to be not bad at the things that are presently hopeless and normalized as unsolvable nature-of-man type problems. And it has to be roughly as boring as a train running on time.
An antagonist seller can still fail to deliver after accepting payment. Unless what's being sold is digital and payment embeds flawlessly written smart contracts and no one has 51% of mining.
> I don't want Netflix to prompt me, "Want to watch the next episode for 4 cents?"
No prompt needed - just as your electricity company doesn't prompt you before you watch TV either. You trust the rate to be reasonable and you just get billed for it.
This pricing model is the consumer's ideal pricing model for most things - pay close to what it actually costs at a reasonable rate - because that's the most efficient and keeps decision fatigue minimal. We just don't have it for everything because the industry hasn't matured yet.
Principle of Belief Conservation. For any proposition, P:
1. Taking a certain cognitive stance toward P (for example, believing it, rejecting it or withholding judgement) would require rejecting or doubting a vast number of your current beliefs,
2. You have no independent positive reason to reject or doubt all those other beliefs, and
3. You have no compelling reason to take up that cognitive stance toward P.
Then it is more rational for you Not to take that cognitive stance toward P.
---
This is basic logic. If you're proposing a system of raising children that goes against the vast majority of cultures spanning thousands of years then it's on the proposer of the new system to come up with the evidence that it's just as good.
The principle of quickly googling any logical principle that suits you, and then claiming, roughly, that it is applicable here, and that if you disagree, you are effectively denying that 1+1=2.
I called almost exclusively local BBSes with my 300 bps modem starting in 1985. There was no local Compuserve dial-in number for me. Between the long distance and the per minute charges, Compuserve was out of reach.
By the way, your 1200 bps modem was actually 600 baud! People often use baud and bps interchangeably but they're different. The most common 1200 bps standard was v.22 which used 600 baud.
I mostly called local BBSes. I had to get on CompuServe first, to even find the numbers for local ones. I ran my own BBS for a while, also! Fun times. I still miss those days.
Same. In 1990 was a field service engineer at a PC shop. We used to use circuit cooler or "cold spray" as we used to call it.
We had three levels of hard drive data recovery that we did in order. Usually didn't have to get past #2.
1. Put it into another computer
2. Cold spray the heck out of it and see if it works for an hour
3. Remove the circuit board of the drive and replace it with the circuit board from a matching known working drive
If it didn't work after that and they 100% needed the data we sent it out to Ontrack. They'd put it in their clean room, remove the platters and read the data directly.
3.5% unemployment rate = nothing will get people back into office if they don't want to be in the office.
This all flips around at some point though. Maybe 10% unemployment?
For me, I'm looking incredulously at people making decisions on where to live assuming that "work from home" is locked in forever. I know someone who is in the process of settling on a house in the middle of nowhere working for a large publicly traded company remotely. The company just posted their first quarterly loss in forever.
If she ends up losing that job, she'll be 100% dependent on being able to find another remote position or be forced to sell her house.
That's true for anywhere you live. If I get a new job in New Jersey and buy a house there, then I will have to get another job in New Jersey or sell my house if I lose that job.
It's really awesome how different people are able to engage in this hobby with different requirements.
For me, working on a real 64 is essential but I don't care about disk drives at all. So a Commodore 64 + Ultimate II+ (or pi1541) is a great combination. I love being able to use real 64 joysticks with no lag.
Keeping the hardware going is half the fun - I have replacement chips for everything on the board, diagnostic carts and have enjoyed picking up soldering again.
For Assembly language programming though, Visual Studio Code + Kick Assembler + Vice + C64 Debugger all the way!! Makes the development and debugging process completely seamless.
I've been programming for over 40 years. OP's take is a classic underestimate of how many features new versions of software have added.
My first computers in order had:
64k of RAM
128k of RAM
640k of RAM
Those first two booted up literally instantly as they copied firmware into RAM. That last one booted up in about 10 seconds from an unbelievably slow C: drive.
What did all three have in common? Did not even have basic networking built-in. Yes, systems are bloated today but they do so much more than the systems you're comparing them to. Yes, they could re-write them from scratch to remove this bloat but we knew for 8 years before OP started coding that is not the right answer either.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...