Ask Slashdot: Is Computing As Cool and Fun As It Once Was? 449
dryriver writes: I got together with old computer nerd friends the other day. All of us have been at it since the 8-bit/1980s days of Amstrad, Atari, Commodore 64-type home computers. Everybody at the meeting agreed on one thing -- computing is just not as cool and as much fun as it once was. One person lamented that computer games nowadays are tied to internet DRM like Steam, that some crucial DCC software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop) and that many "basic freedoms" of the old-school computer nerd are increasingly disappearing. Another said that Windows 10's spyware aspects made him give up on his beloved PC platform and that he will use Linux and Android devices only from now on, using consoles to game on instead of a PC because of this. A third complained about zero privacy online, internet advertising, viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware. I lamented that the hardware industry still hasn't given us anything resembling photorealistic realtime 3D graphics, and that the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have. A point of general agreement was that big tech companies in particular don't treat computer users with enough respect anymore. What do Slashdotters think? Is computing still as cool and fun as it once was, or has something "become irreversibly lost" as computing evolved into a multi-billion dollar global business?
No. (Score:2, Interesting)
There's no variety of systems, operating systems, one API set trying to prove that it is better at one task than another. Now it's basically 2.5 platforms and that's it.
Sadly, I don't think the best or even more interesting platforms won.
Definitely no.. much more boring now than 30 years ago.
Re:No. (Score:5, Interesting)
Definitely no.. much more boring now than 30 years ago.
That is called "growing old". Everything is more fun when you are young.
Today's younglings likely enjoy using WebGL to make 4K 3D webpages more than I enjoyed writing UIs with curses [wikipedia.org] on a VT100 30 years ago.
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: No. (Score:5, Funny)
~35 years ago, I got a Vic-20 for Christmas. It took me an hour to write my first program, including the custom character design. Today, if you got a new Dell laptop for Christmas, you'd be lucky if Windows Update finally allowed you to even *do* anything within the first hour or two. Fuck, even a brand new Xbox One or Wii-U (and probably a PS4) will make you wait at least 30-60 minutes for mandatory updates before it'll allow you to play your first game.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: No. (Score:4, Insightful)
What this guy said.... The barrier to entry for nerdy children is much higher now then it was for me. The sole saving grace for them is the open source community and vast availability of examples and information. But even then, you still need multiple skillsets with graphic design, code, data, story/purpose. Microcontrollers and SBC like Arduino and Pi's making IOT devices is the best way to amaze now.
Re: No. (Score:5, Informative)
The barrier to entry for nerdy children is much higher now then it was for me.
This is what my 8 year old daughter did:
1. Go to https://scratch.mit.edu/ [mit.edu]
2. Start coding
Total time to surmount barriers: 10 seconds.
Re: No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. This.
There is so much fun around. Yeah, there's also the mundane and the boring stuff, too. People have bills to pay, and sometimes being a meaningless dweeb is how the lights stay on.
But there's never been more real fun. If you don't like code projects for Big Corp, you can get into the mad crazy fun of Arduino, Pi, FPGAs, robotics. SoCs, SDRs, and a myriad other interesting projects.
I've been around since doing 6502s and Z80s in assembler. It's necessary to peel off the layers of cruft and mold that get into one's system when you sit still too long. Coding for secure, optimized code has been increasingly crazy, but if you know your platforms, go for it.
I watch kids doing fascinating things. Truly sophisticated toys that twenty years ago were impossible at any price. My only fear: letting people get controlled by the advertisers and the government, each of whom are power hungry and relentless. Otherwise, if you're bored, break out of your box.
Re:True, but only to a point (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers are a lot more expensive.
Cost of an IBM PC in 1983: $4000.
Cost of a Raspberry Pi in 2016: $29.
The Raspberry Pi is several orders of magnitude faster, and comes with WAY more free development software.
Re: (Score:3)
Sorry, but I find TV's to be quite affordable. Chances are, the kid already has access to one. Keyboards and mice are a dime a dozen. Yeah, a sporty gaming set will put you back, but Fry's has wireless mice for $6. It'll get the job done. Most people could scrounge free ones from a friend as well. The Pi's being just the board provide the opportunity for the device to only cost $29. It's a whopping $50 for the case and power as a kit. That's still a reasonable birthday present.
If the cost is still a
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IBM Color Monitor in 1985: $590 ($1300 in todays dollars)
LG 4K LCD Monitor today: $300
QNIX 2K (2560 x 1440) Monitor today: $177
Dell Full HD LCD Monitor today: $79
Re:No. (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day we were writing more challenging programs than "Hello, World!". I personally wrote custom parsers, real-time control software (on a PDP/11 running RSTS/E), a numerous problems requiring serious algorithm design. A lot of what I did would be easy to do today because of a combination of computing power, rich libraries, and scripting languages, but doing it all yourself in C with nothing but the (then much smaller) standard library made it pretty interesting.
The big difference is how much closer you felt to the bare iron back in the day. Today we work in the context largely of other peoples' frameworks and libraries. If I had to draw an analogy it'd be like voting in a town meeting in a small frontier town, and voting as a citizen in a republic with a hundred million citizens. In which case do you have the most power? It's not a straightforward question. In a small town you can shape policy in a way you can't in large republic, but you're limited by the limitations of that town itself. You can vote to put a man on the Moon, but it's not going to happen.
The important thing to realize is that as you get older, you just don't have as much fun, pretty much across the board. You have to cultivate playfulness because it doesn't come as naturally as it once did. When I hear people middle aged or older (like myself) pining for a lost past, it's often clear to me that what they're mourning is the loss of their youth.
Re:No. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's less-fun today, even for youngsters.
Just look at the technologies you listed.
WebGL is just a shitty subset of OpenGL, which actually isn't all that different from SGI's old IRIS GL library from the 1980s.
And they're using WebGL from JavaScript, which was a shitty language back in 1995 when it was first released, and has only very recently seen positive improvements. In many ways JavaScript is still a step back from C89, and even from K&R C!
A lot of what people are doing with WebGL today was done a couple of decades ago when VRML was the big thing, except VRML offered more practical higher-level abstractions.
4K is just a bigger version of 640x480.
They don't even have the benefit of doing this within the context of a real operating system, like IRIX or SunOS. They're constrained to the quite limited and often idiotic web browser ecosystem!
As odd as it may sound, the youth of today are doing the same stuff the rest of us had done 25 or 30 years ago. But for whatever reason they're using worse libraries/frameworks/APIs (WebGL), from worse programming languages (JavaScript), in a worse environment (web browser)! Just going back to what we were using in 1990 would be a big leap forward.
Re: (Score:2)
I worked on both IRIX and SunOS. Those machines often ran $20k. There pretty much were no kids involved, those were often reserved for graduate students and even college kids used worse systems. They also were used professionally.
As for Javascript being a step back from C. They aren't remotely related to one another. JavaScript is an interpreted applications language that operates safely cross platform on large computer networks. In the time of IRIX or SunOS interpreted languages were things like BASI
Re:No. (Score:4, Funny)
640x480?! That's just a bigger version of 320x280, and I started out with a lot less than 320x280, I can tell you. Bloody kids, next thing they'll be wanting more than 4 bits of colour information in each pixel.
As for VRML, I often use it as an example of why 'open standards' are far from a panacea. It's a truly dreadful standard, created in academia before there were either competing implementations of the problem, or even much of a problem, that actively held back VR and web 3d stuff generally for years. Also a useful example of "worse is better".
Absolutely not as cool or fun, but not boring (Score:4, Insightful)
Replying here partly in agreement but mostly in wonder about the OP's AC status. If your ideas or opinions are so bad that you don't want to associate your name (or even a handle) with them, then why bother to post at all? I'd make an exception for cases where you are saying something with possible repercussions, but I'm not seeing it in the OP of this thread. (In a sense, it's moot, since my settings render the ACs nearly invisible. It was the quote in the visible reply that exposed this AC.) Incidentally, it doesn't matter in terms of protecting privacy. Slashdot knows who you are, and surely you can't trust the sanctity of your personal information as stored on Slashdot.
Now what's the agreeing part? In the days of yore computers were within the scope of understanding of a single person. The systems were still small enough that it was at least theoretically possible to understand all of how they worked. I thought that was really fun and cool, even if I never got there I enjoyed the chase. I caught just the tail end of that period.
Not sure when the transition happened, but at this time there is clearly no hope of understanding everything about any "normal" machine. Both the hardware and software have passed the human scope of understanding or control. No one has time to look at billions and billions of transistors or millions and millions of lines of code. We have to abstract, and picking your level of abstraction is not the same as understanding the entire thing.
There's also a level of threat and paranoia that cuts into the fun. Maybe part of that is a result of getting old, but I think it is mostly just a matter of experience and understanding my own limitations. I really don't want to be pwned, but all it would take is one juicy vulnerability, and I'm sure the serious black-hat hackers can find one if'n they want to. If a serious hacker is coming for me, I might as well save both of us the trouble and just turn over my passwords now, eh? The best defense is having nothing worth hacking for?
Re: (Score:3)
The problem isn't pseudonyms. The problem is that you can't distinguish one AC from another. You can't have a discussion beyond 1 post, 1 reply with someone using a non-unique identifier.
I know what MdSolar says, read Bruce Perens (Score:3)
You do have a point. Also, a counterpoint:
> but I don't see how someone claiming to have a PhD in nuclear physics is somehow more credible just because
If you read here often, you start to recognize some of the names. Actually even if you DON'T read here often, you may recognize somw names, like Bruce Perens. Bruce doesn't "claim" to have a PhD, Bruce is a *recognized* expert. When Bruce writes about security and such, you can bet that he has good reason to say whatever he says, he knows what he's tal
Re: No. (Score:2)
I'm all for bringing back modems, bbs'ers, terminate and high memory, man I missed the days when Windows shipped without tcp/ip!
Re: (Score:3)
Today's younglings likely enjoy using WebGL to make 4K 3D webpages
I don't know. I'd like to hope that this would be the case, but I watch my 13-year-old son so quickly lose interest with complex computing platforms because it just takes so long to get to where you produce anything that looks like anything you're used to. When I was his age, I could realistically put my C64 into graphics mode and code up something that sort of approximated what professional games looked like at the time. Nowadays, the best he can realistically hope for is approximating what games looke
Re: (Score:3)
FTFY
Android, iOS, Darwin, Linux, CentOs, FreeDos (Score:2)
There's an F-Bomb of variety out there. You don't even have to look that hard.
You switched to Android (Score:4, Insightful)
Because of Windows spying?
LMAO.
Re: (Score:2)
Because of Windows spying?
LMAO.
He was just sad that he wasn't bad-ass enough to have the NSA spying on him, just Microsoft. Wait. Now I'm sad too.
Betteridge's law (Score:5, Informative)
That is all.
Systems are too complex (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the day, someone dedicated could learn everything he had about a system, from the CPU, registers, RAM, I/O, video, etc. It was relatively simple.
The only way to get that same "cool and fun" feeling is to dive into the 8-bit microcontrollers such as the ATmega328P. Even the latest Arduinos have become too complex with their ARM SoC.
Look on hackaday.com, there's often fun projects based on those basic, entry-level, sub-100MHz 8-bit uC.
Re: (Score:2)
> Back in the day, someone dedicated could learn everything he had about a system, from the CPU, registers, RAM, I/O, video, etc. It was relatively simple.
And fully documented, in a real manual.
Re: (Score:2)
Basically I think you said what I wanted to say better than my earlier comment, but I am going to disagree with you on the grounds that the understandable systems have become toys. I used the qualifier "normal" in my comment to refer to non-toy machines, but I could also say that your approach is to limit the level of abstraction.
You already got the "insightful" mod you deserve, so in this case my lack of mod points doesn't even bother me... (Now to see if there are any actually funny comments...)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Internet of things, 3D printing, maker movement (Score:4, Interesting)
Cool is about pushing the boundary and enjoying experiences which are decades away from mass production. A desktop is not going to be super cool in 2016. Arduino controllers to operate hand wired power windows in your home might be.
You can get very open and hackable Linux / Chromebook+chrouton desktops and laptops, but you may be hard pressed to get them to do anything which is not already widely available.
Hell Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)
rose colored glasses (Score:3)
It never was that great.
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Re: rose colored glasses (Score:3)
Are you a Hacker or a Gamer? It makes a difference (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're a gamer, you are going to be forever at the mercy of the game companies, who are going to exploit their customers to some extent to maximize profit.
If you are a hacker, you have your own hacker-produced computing platforms and tools and a wide-open vista of hardware and physical objects that can now be designed and manufactured by the individual.
If you depend on some company to make everything you use, you've set yourself up to be their "client". Don't do that.
Re:Are you a Hacker or a Gamer? It makes a differe (Score:5, Interesting)
While all true, people seem to forget how hard it was to get software before the internet, especially if you were a kid with no money. These days you can download vast amounts of high quality software, and its source code to tinker with. In some respects we are a lot better off now, and when you had to rely on friends, clubs and magazine cover disks/tapes.
On the other hand, we are definitely a lot further removed form the inner workings of computers now. There is a massive amount of abstraction, which is kind of good for a lot of purposes but also very much encourages people not to look too far beyond really high level library functions. The lack of hacking friendly ports on the hardware side is a big issue too.
But then again you can get a pretty good oscilloscope for peanuts now, so in some ways hardware hacking is a lot easier than it used to be to get into. We don't have those great kits you could buy from magazines any more though, and while people like Adafruit do offer some interesting stuff it's more Arduino level plugging modules together than figuring out why your transistor biasing isn't working.
Personally I like the older stuff. Emulators are great for it actually - back in the day I used to reboot my computer about 900 times a day as I was trying to debug assembler (didn't have a single step debugger and of course no memory protection) and figure out what the hardware was doing, and emulators make it much easier.
Re: (Score:2)
people seem to forget how hard it was to get software before the internet, especially if you were a kid with no money
I agree, and this goes double for hardware. I grew up with minimal access to computers at home or school. When I stayed with relatives over holidays, I'd spend every possible minute on their computer, but then most of the year I had no access to any computer, let alone any manuals or software. I contented myself with books from the local library, but in 1984 (when I was 13) there wasn't much available. I learned 8080 architecture and machine language, and ANSI C, by reading about them in books, but I didn'
Re: (Score:2)
If you're a gamer, you are going to be forever at the mercy of the game companies, who are going to exploit their customers to some extent to maximize profit.
What about all the Open Source and even Free Software video games out there? Sure, they are grossly outnumbered by their commercial counterparts, but some of them are actually very high-quality. There's enough of them to where one could reasonably waste all their time never playing anything else.
I have a Gog account (Score:3)
would you like some cheese with your whine.... (Score:2)
yes its fun - Arduinos, Rpi, fpga with fricken Arms embedded .. ... ,..
thinks we only dreamed of 30 years ago
don't like an 'app' build it
don't like a platform move
-- get off my lawn sonny --
80% of those complaints are Windows. Linux solves (Score:5, Insightful)
> many "basic freedoms" of the old-school computer nerd are increasingly disappearing
There is an organization devoted to computer freedom called the Free Software Foundation, closely allied with GNU. GNU makes most of the operating system we call Linux.
> Software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop)
There are several alternatives to Photoshop which use free licenses, meaning licensees that respect freedom. None of them do everything Photoshop does in the exact same way Photoshop does it, but for any *particular* Photoshop user, there's probably a free software package that fits their particular needs well.
> Windows 10's spyware aspects made him give up on his beloved PC platform and that he will use Linux
Linux is certainly one way to avoid Windows built-in spyware.
> viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware
That's 99% Windows too, Linux desktop users see viruses and malware very, very rarely - maybe once every 15 years.
Linux isn't perfect. It does however address most of the concerns mentioned.
Re: (Score:2)
If I were a kernel dev or even just a website admin I might be able to get by. However, people just like to use commercial software. People laugh at me when they see me use GIMP. Could I use Photoshop? Sure. However, there's zero alternative to Acrobat. Yes, I could cobble together Evince, CUPS, and Inkscape, but they just don't do the trick well. E
Re: (Score:3)
I take it, then, that you've never looked at Scribus [scribus.net] a cross-platform, FOSS page layout program that's being used by professionals to create newsletters, periodicals and books. And, if you're having trouble with it, there's an active and helpful mailing list full of people ready to advise you. Check it out; you might just be surprised by how good it is.
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None of those complaints have anything to do with either "cool" or "fun". Most of those complaints are something that the common user doesn't give a shit about and thus has no impact on "cool" or "fun".
News for nerds. Also, Raspberry Pi & Arduino (Score:2)
Slashdot - News for nerds. I take it Mr. Garbz isn't a computer nerd. What type of nerd are you, anyway?
Also it occurs to me that some of the hacking "cool" flavor that the OP mentions may now be found around the Raspberry Pi, Arduino, and other hobbyist platforms.
For Linux-unfriendly corporate, GPL on Mac Unix (Score:3)
> I ran Linux in a corporate environment for 10 years. It certainly worked, and I found ways to get what I needed done.
It does work, my corporation ran Linux exclusively for 15 years. It was a network security company, so for most of those years Windows was not allowed on the corporate network.
> I think Linux is fine for the home, fine web browsing, but it becomes a major problem for people in corporations, simply because they're addicted to Windows
Working in a Windows-centric company, there is a com
Depending, CLI or GUI. Most use the freedom licens (Score:2)
I suppose "most" or not very much depends how how big your system is and what you use it for. In a small CLI-based system, most of what the user interacts with is gnu tools. On a Gnome desktop - not so much. Perhaps I should instead say:
Most of the OS we call "Linux" is governed by the freedom-focused licensing created by GNU.
git off-a my lawn comment (Score:3)
Re:git off-a my lawn comment (Score:5, Insightful)
computing, music, whatever was better back in the day.
No, it wasn't better. It was much, much worse. It was so rudimentary you could actually start at:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
20 GOTO 10
There's no doubt that a chain saw is far superior to a hand saw. But if I was interested in saw-making and how saws work it'd be an awfully lot easier to build a hand saw from scratch, all the way down to forging the blade, fitting the handle and giving it teeth. In fact it's often an inverse relationship between how hard it is to make and how hard it is to use, like an automatic gearbox is more complex than a manual gearbox. As progress means that we build more and more advanced and complex solutions, the more it is out of reach for the hobbyist. I could almost make something similar to commercial games on the C64 because many of them were actually written by one man in a garage. Today you look at $100 million dollar titles and realize that even if you did this professionally you'd be one little cog in a very big wheel.
It's in the nature of advanced civilization, we're all doing a very small part. I depend on other people to produce the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the hot and cold running water, the electricity, the car and the roads etc. and all I do really is program computers and trade for everything else. That means I know a lot about that and very little about the rest. Or I could train for the post-apocalyptic society were I have to survive using whatever crude means I can pull off on my own, but life is short. I think I'll just take my chances and if shit hits the fan contribute to the rapid de-population back to an agrarian society.
Back in the day (Score:5, Insightful)
I have this conversation periodically, except it is usually addressed to music, art, tv, sports, or any of a number of topics. It's like those guys who see a high school girl now and say "Man, they did not look like that back in my day".. yes, they did. It's just that when you saw them then, you didn't see a cute blond, you saw the B***h from social studies.
There are many exciting things going on now. I am looking at how quickly and massively raspberry pi's have been moving into area where their creators never thought they would be used. I see arduinos and the maker movement and think "Wow". Just a look at adafruit or any of a hundred other sites and the amount of very affordable tech is staggering. We could stop all tech development now and it would be centuries before we explore all the possibilities of what is sitting on the desk in front of us.
I met someone at a coffee shop awhile back and there was a bunch of teenagers acting like teenagers. My friend is now in their mid-30's. I am in my 50's. I had first met them when they were a teenager at a coffee shop. My friend commented that they were not like that back then and I pointed out that I was their current age when we first met and yes.. my friend was just as dumb and teenagery back then.
Excitement is never external. You can look at any family pic taken at Disneyland and see the scowling goth kid who is totally not having fun. OK. You have given up windows as the programming platform and gone to Linux and Android.. So? You did not start programming on Windows. You started on other platforms and moved with the times.
But, that is not what you are complaining about..
What catches my attention is that *none* of your computing complaints are really computing complaints. They are consumer complaints. You should not be doing this comparison back to their early 80's equivalents.. televisions with 3 channels. Radio. Vinyl records. Newspapers. Magazines. Computing is more than fine right now. It completely rocks. Consumer products are far greater than what they were.
Fun (Score:5, Insightful)
I have thought the same thing.
Of course there are a few fundamental differences between then and now from my point of view:
1. I was a young teen and had tons of time (and energy) on my hands to play with these things.
2. Everything you learned you figured out on your own or as a group share with close friends, supplemented with a few manuals and magazines.
3. The hardware was finite enough you could basically learn everything from the low level access to the hardware to all the software features (basic or machine language). You could literally learn what every location in IO or memory did (53281 anyone??).
4. With a few days or at most weeks time with even modest skill levels you could put together something that could "wow" your friends and perhaps even non-computer family members.
5. Atari / TI / Commodore computer overnight parties where a bunch of us get together to compete to show off the best games etc. in an attempt to prove we had the best platform.
Today we have a lot more learning resources out there, and the hardware is much more powerful but in my mind it just isn't as fun. There is certainly no way to whip up something that would "wow" anyone. It's more a tool now than a fun hobby.
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I agree. Assembly code, trap vectors, hardware interrupts, blitters, custom chips, etc. Exploring and figuring out how to use computers and their internals were difficult, time consuming, and ultimately very rewarding once you got it to work. Today's easy access to information for anything changed everything and IMHO killed some of the joys of exploration.
-- This sig reserve the right to refuse service to anyone
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Exactly that.
I was going to liken it to doing levels for games like Doom.
Back in the day, with QERadiant and an illegitimate copy of Photoshop, you could whip up a sweet little PVP quake level even with some custom textures in a half a day. And it looked fine, was fun, everyone was happy.
Now, with the AAA level standard we're all used to, anything you do in a half day is going to look like complete shit, for textures you practically need an art team, and you're going to spend weeks building the sorts of de
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VR (Score:2)
"and that the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have"
No, VR can die in hell with Betamax, MiniDisc, and 3D TV.
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Head-mounted displays just aren't a good idea. They seem like a good idea, they seem like the first step towards a hollodeck, which is the thing that everyone really wants, but they're awkward to use and any immersiveness that they may impart is fairly meaningle
I'm still enjoying computing (Score:5, Interesting)
This weekend I spent some time improving my personal installation of SOGo groupware, so that my wife and I can better share email, calendars, and contacts on a system that we personally own.
Certainly, big companies don't respect users, but it's still possible to provide all of the services that I need using only Free Software, so I do. Pretty much the only exception is navigation, for which I use Google Maps. Everything else we do with Free Software and the more I move my wife to our own services, the happier she is. Personally, I find that immensely gratifying. As long as that continues, I'll find computing as cool and fun as ever.
'Fun'? Not so much. (Score:5, Interesting)
These days? You might, if you wanted to take the time, effot, and expense to do it, design and build PCIe cards for special functions, but largely there's no point; almost anything you'd want the hardware to do, you can just go out and buy. 'Building a computer' now takes a screwdriver, not a soldering iron, and just about any teenage kid with half a brain can get the parts and cobble a box together. Sure, there's microcontroller stuff of all kinds out there, but there's little to do between those and full-blown desktop systems anymore. Likewise, writing software yourself is almost pointless, you can download just about anything you want, too. Even general electronics as a hobby isn't very accessible or fun anymore, because so much is surface-mount only, not too much is through-hole, so the really interesting devices mean you're more or less required to spin a PCB for whatever it is, which makes it so much more expensive and so much less accessible.
I guess if you're into computer gaming (I lost interest years ago) or just using a computer as an appliance (which they more or less are anymore) then I guess it's 'fun' for you, but from the background I'm coming from, it really isn't so much anymore.
Too much shit. (Score:4, Informative)
Dealing with crap like systemd.
Learning a new language, you don't just learn the language. you learn the build system, sopme complicated IDE plugins, some decent libraries, but most are hack together messes etc.
One example illustrates it all: Javascript.
Your friends suck (Score:2)
Is computing as cool? No of course not to the self-described nerds who helped build it to where it is now. It's a lot more accessible and exponentially more powerful.
So instead of lamenting the past, appreciate what's been built and work to making the experience as pleasant as you found it back when you were younger.
"Old skool cool and fun" almost exclusively Linux (Score:2)
The only platform that you can still get the hood open now is Linux. I personally prefer Arch Linux or OpenWRT depending on the hardware and expected use for a project.
But even with Linux you need to choose carefully as vendors work to close even the many products built upon Linux. Just buying hardware with Linux doesn't mean it's open enough to be useful for example: Android as generally sold. AOSP is the exception.
If you want to intro someone to "old skool" look at the Raspberry Pi platform or OpenWRT. NO
Everything is more complex (Score:3)
No more. People expect remote access and that everything should be working 24x7, the added complexity of building out those environments, and the merging of multiple technologies means that every change becomes a much more complex endeavor. Encryption requirements makes everything more difficult to implement and troubleshoot. There are caveats with virtually everything, and I just don't have the time to be an expert on everything around me.
Example from this year - my IP phone system, which integrates with Exchange using custom nonesense for playback in outlook, using the LLDP enabled voice VLAN on my switches, with servers running on my vmware hosts, each of which have multiple redundant connections, with handsets connected to a switch using 802.1x authentication, that's complex enough as it is, but then buried deep in the release notes was a bullet point that exchange 2013 wasn't supported, 18 months after exchange 2013 was released. That's a lot of stuff to be an expert in; a far cry from 10/100 hubs with a single management IP address and a stand alone server that send voicemail over encrypted SMTP.
It's not computers, it's you. (Score:3)
Developing GUIs for databases on Windows 10 is not going to be fun and cool. But that existed back in the 80s, it was COBOL on mainframes.
If you want it to be fun then you have to pick something fun, which usually involves one of the small boards like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, adding some motor control... This is what I do. These small systems are all quite digestible and have stuff built in we would have killed for, and you can make actual things which do things, be they useful or just playful.
Or you could develop games for a classic system - there are still people doing homebrew games for all the old systems like Megadrive, Speccy, Apple ][, C/64, Lynx, etc etc. Or there's RPGMaker.
There is so much awesome stuff going on right now from Arduino-like Maker stuff to drones to GPU power to deep learning to VR - I just got excited about a cheap tiny little camera component (neeeerd).
So when you say 'computing isn't as fun and cool as it used to be' you mean YOU aren't as fun and cool as you used to be - and who is, besides Betty White? Not me. But that's what really happened, don't blame it on computing. You let your skills decay, didn't keep up to date, don't get excited by new stuff, and are too lazy to even keep up with what you knew how to do. The C64 is still thriving if you thought it was more interesting than watching sports or, oh hey, Westworld is on, I'll start tomorrow.
Not to hear my son tell it (Score:2)
Yes, the mainstream of computing is different. I no longer have to worry about dip switches or whether I can address memory above 4 MB of RAM.
However, my teenage son is now designing 3D printed objects on his homebrew PC (dual-boot Win10 and Mint) which he then sends to his MonoPrice 3D printer, which he built from a kit then - not liking the p
Of course not (Score:3)
This is the sort of complaining that has no place on a 'news for nerds' site - if you want it, build it. If you can't build it, don't bitch that others haven't done it as quickly as you wanted. I don't think OP submitter was the one working on the VR judder problem or the high density screen refresh problem or any of that. This sounds like a bunch of dipshit 'enthusiast' friends from the 80s that only ever dipped a toe in the industry and didn't actually end up building anything they wanted over the thirty years of their careers
Remember when space was the coolest? (Score:2)
Remember when space was the coolest? [youtube.com]. For a significant portion of Slashdot's demographic, the answer is "no" because they're not young any more. Younger people are probably dabbling in Maker stuff and might be wondering why this question is being asked.
I miss the old days of coding (Score:2)
Building software without the technical bureaucracy was a lot of fun.
Uh (Score:2)
Sounds like someone is in for a rude awakening about Android [stackexchange.com]. (I think Win10 is worse than stock Android re:data collection, but if your primary concern is privacy...)
As to the question itself: It absolutely is, for varying definitions of "cool" and "fun". I'm a 90s kid (so many things I have to remember) so I didn't cut my teeth on a C64, but as a youngli
This reminds me of the old "declining SAT" crisis. (Score:5, Insightful)
Declining SAT scores were a big topic of discussion in the 80s and 90s, but what most people never really took into account was that in the 50s most jobs only required a high school diploma; by the 80s more people felt they needed to have a college degree. The decline in scores didn't reflect a decline in ability of graduating high schoolers, it reflected more of the lower-performing graduates taking the test.
I've been in the computing field for a long time. When I went into it back in the early 80s most people had never seen a computer. There were a very small number of people who worked with computers, and I'd say about half of them were doing at least moderately interesting stuff. Today there are many many more people doing interesting stuff, it's just that the growth in interesting work has been swamped by a rising ocean of mindless, bureaucratic IT drone work.
try something else (Score:2)
In essence: computing has grown up (Score:5, Insightful)
Take application development. Pioneering has been replaced by engineering. Great for making complicated and reliable products, not so great for empowerment of the individual. Software engineering tends to be teamwork. Depending on how "standard" the required end product is you can parcel out the interface design, the overall apllication design, the datastructures, the core algorithms, data management, and housekeeping. Could be 3-50 software engineers in a team. Used to be 1 programmer doing all of that.
Take high-performance programming. It used to be an art. Found e.g. in DOD stuff, scientific software, and games. Often in assembler, for speed. Nowadays that's mostly out. Certainly for scientific software. You use compilers of even scripting languages that call libraries to do the heavy lifting. You're quite unlikely to do better than the library builders. If you're writing some really new algorithm, you'll code it in C/C++. If absolutely necessary, you can make that code tunable (array stride, blocksize, etc.) and write an algorithm to optimise those parameters for your specific hardware (like e.g. BLAS). If it's too slow, buy better hardware. If it's still too slow, get access to a Hadoop cluster and parallelise your algorithm.
Take datacommunication. In the early days datacommunication meant controlling some UART and sending squiggles down a wire. Now it's calling a packaged protocol stack and talking to the appropriate protocol layers. More often than not that's the connection or session layer or higher ... unless you are a specialised networking engineer.
As for computer users as clients: the nerdy types are dying out. What today's consumer wants is things like smartphones and tablets. And what do they want it for? To surf the web (shopping, news, amusement (e.g. video torrents, Youtube)), and to waste time on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and various chats. If they somehow want a desktop computer, they'll only know it for the OS it runs. That would be "Windows" or "Apple" (meaning macOs, but Apple users typically don't know that). And that's what the industry is giving them. Want "Basic Freddoms" ? Bugger off and run Linux, you freak.
So, yes. Computing as a product has become commoditised and geared towards the mass market. It's not easy to turn a buck by catering for nerds: the real money is in serving customers. And it shows. Consumer-grade users get a consumer-grade experience plus consumer-grade treatment (read: DRM, spyware, bloatware).
Those who want to play around with a computer however never had it better. For less than 50$ you can get a complete Raspberry Pi system (or a lookalike) that's more powerful than a clunky old PC. For 500$ you can get performance you used to have only on workstations, and for 1500$ you can get the same power you used to need a supercomputer for.
The only thing stopping you is know-how, time and interest. But that's not the industry's fault,
Hmmm.. lets break it down (Score:2)
computer games nowadays are tied to internet DRM like Steam
So? Steam in particular is incredibly unintrusive unless you're actually trying to pirate the game, in which case it depends entirely on your definition of "fun" -- if you include the challenge of breaking DRM as "fun," then Steam and friends are far more interesting than "draw a black line on your CD."
some crucial DCC software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop)
Again, so? Admittedly its annoying having to keep re-paying for something, but that doesn't intrinsically lower the functionality of the software. That's like saying your house is crap because you had to m
Re: (Score:2)
the 360 doesn't already have Win10-like "features,"
Woops, I its the XBox One these days isn't it? Can you guess which console I prefer? Point still stands though.
Not fun or cool if it's your job. (Score:2)
I think tech and computing have changed for the worse across the board and often focuses on trivial "look at me!* products and services. For a long time now, it has been the case that a computer wasn't much without network capability, but I'll confess that I am so tired of what has come along (think DDoS, breaches, invasion of privacy, tracking, Ransomware) that I am about to just hang up my computer and spend time with paper books from the library.
20 years ago I would have said it was cool and fun,
Those days are gone just like ... (Score:2)
... customizing muscle cars in the late 50s.
The bad news is that cars are boring now.
The good news is that cars no longer require tinkering to get them to go.
I've changed out clutches, installed a/c, gapped plugs and points.
For modern cars, I don't know bullshit from wild honey about fixing them.
I'm a retired IT guy and cut my teeth on a TRS-80 I bought in Feb, 1978.
I helped bring in the first network for Mobil Oil.
I programmed Access, Lotus 123 (and later Excel) macros, and crap like that.
I do not miss tho
It's still very fun. (Score:3)
I am assuming you really meant "computing". Not just desktop programming and gaming like the examples implied.
When I was just a lad, the adults had programming careers that were very fun. They solved complex puzzles, and problems. It was very frustrating but very rewarding. Even growing up, I enjoyed programming which was very much a "figuring things out" topic minus the grease and back pain of former generations.
But today, with more than a decade into adulthood, that topic has become mostly a commodity. Windows, Linux, embedded, or otherwise. Lots of people "program" and most problems have already been solved. It's more a test of google-fu than puzzle solving. As a career it is very boring, trivial, and narrow in the results. There are still positions like before but they are outnumbered 1000 to 1.
So computing in that aspect is no longer fun. Same with hardware, it's all the same. It's all commodity. The gains in the permutations are so minor that cost easily overrides the performance benefits in most cases. This is primarily because hardware has outclassed software. I think software is probably a decade behind hardware now.
But if we switch to micro computers, sensors, and networks beyond just wifi: The glory days of the past still exist. Smart homes, smart gardens, etc are just a few tinkering days away. The common geek has access to fabricate their own custom hardware solutions. Writing the software is still mostly trivial due to the internet, but the ideas and solutions custom to a geeks unique physical world or situation is well with in reach. In this space we are still only limited by our imaginations in defining the problems to solve.
It is still very much FUN!
I think you need to ask a different question (Score:2)
Is computing cool and fun as it once was? Hell yes.
Does "cool and fun" have anything to do with your friend's privacy, social justice, or borderline tin-foil hat related opinions of their OS and their license agreements? No.
Maybe you need some actual cool and fun friends, or you need to change the question. Computing is more cool and fun than it's ever been. Some mythical issue with your software vendors does not change that. *
*Posted on a Windows 10 computer using a browser that sends scrapes my personal d
No, it's much moreso (Score:3)
Computing is a lot more fun now than it was even ten years ago, let alone twenty, let alone longer. You can still do all the same stuff people did back then if you want; people are still wire wrapping their own computers from scratch, for example. And you can still play the games of yesteryear, through emulation. But now there's a whole bunch of things to do which didn't even exist back then, and furthermore, it's vastly easier to get access to a leg up so that you don't have to do a whole job yourself. For example, it's been reasonably possible to build quadcopters since about the 1990s, when cheap MEMS accelerometers began sampling from Analog Devices, and before they appeared in the Wiimote and people began to reappropriate them. But today you can buy a flight controller or build one out of components or you can buy a MCU board and an IMU board. You can write your own flight control software or you can just download code and write the binary or you can download and compile and optionally customize. You can buy the ESCs off the shelf or you can build your own or you can buy cheap ones and reflash them with superior open-source firmware which you can customize. And this is computing, obviously, since each of these things is a little flying computing cluster. And that's before even getting into making them autonomous. We didn't used to have multi-core computers with multiple GB of RAM and an onboard multi-core vector processor which would fit into a ~5W power envelope to do stuff like that with.
Computing is also a lot more cool than it used to be, which ought to be painfully obvious. It's cool to carry a fancy, needlessly expensive computer around in your pocket! We used to get laughed at just for owning a computer, let alone one you could keep in your pocket. Now you get laughed at if your pocket computer is too old!
The definition of "cool" has changed (Score:2)
If you don't need a scientific calculator to help troubleshoot logic and/or circuitry, it ain't "cool".
It's more fun than ever (Score:2)
Games? Emulation, VPNs, old hardware for dirt cheap, etc. It's all there. How is Steam worse than the stupid copy protection of old? You really miss having to thumb through manuals for access codes? Use GoG. Buy the physical media. There are plenty of options.
BBSes or the thrill of war dialing? People s
It could be.... (Score:3)
Simplier designs (Score:2)
I miss the days (Score:2)
of the Commodore VIC-20, C-64 and the all awesome Amiga!
The days of the Amiga were the days of real hardware hacking, building your own SCSI controllers, your own cables. Hacking the Amiga hardware - cutting solder traces and soldering wires to the motherboard to add a toggle switch to toggle between 1MEG chip ram and 1/2 meg chip and 1/2 meg fast ram. Soldering wires to jumpers to switch to NTSC and PAL video mode. Multi-boot rom boards. Burning the whole Amiga 2.1 OS into EPROM and having and Amiga 2000 b
Being old... (Score:2)
... Yep, not fun and no time and energy like the old days like from the 1980s to early 2000s. :(
hobbyist (Score:2)
The Atari, Commodore 64, Apple 2... were hobbyist machines generally designed to interest children in computers. Windows 10 machines are generally work machines generally designed for adults who have some objective not related to entertainment that requires computer assistance to accomplish it. The systems you are describing are the ones that killed the DIY kits from the 1970s, they were part of migration away from hobbyist culture in that they allowed kids (and middle class families) and not adult hobby
I'm just disappointed more than anything (Score:2)
We have amazing systems and networks today.
Home 24x7 broadband Internet connections with bandwidth 100x of the LANs I grew up hacking together. Computers thousands of times more capable in every way.
Even Grandma's now ancient desktop has an operating system with memory protection, preemptive scheduling, multi-processing and a capable IP stack.
Pocket sized computers now sport capabilities I wouldn't believe myself had someone from the future came back and handed me.
There have been amazing advances in nifty
Fun in different ways (Score:2)
It's not as roll-your-own as it used to be, but I still enjoy working with computers. The big trend I see causing long term issues is consumerization -- everyone is demanding services that work 100% of the time on their phones, so everything is geared towards that. My big thing is scripting and automation -- making something idiot proof so I can send it out to idiots. ;-) I don't have much time for gaming anymore as I have 2 little kids, but when they get old enough I'm sure I'll get back into it.
One thing
Mostly perception, not reality (Score:2)
There's a couple of basic problems the submitter and his circle of friends have here that makes it appear that it's not as cool or fun anymore. The first is that they're old enough to start seeing things that are different from how they were in their childhoods as not as good. The second is that they're looking at the designed to be idiot-proof mass market and expecting to see DIY where you can get your hands dirty messing with the inner workings of things.
Games being tied to DRM is an issue, but it can be
Two answers: No and Yes (Score:2)
No. Mainstream computing is dull and boring and often frustrating.
Yes. Old time computing still exists, it just isn't mainstream anymore, it is fringe. My first computer required being soldered together from a kit. All personal computers required being soldered together from a kit. I think of the C64 as the third or fourth generation of hobby computers. But guess what: I'm still soldering together my own computers. And it's still fun, and it's still cool. It's just that now, what I do is so far from
Fundamental Missing Features (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget compiled languages. That's not fun.
We want command based (imperative) languages that can be run in a REPL for fun. BASIC basically fits this.
Take Python as a contemporary example. Now look at how many basic features of interactivity are NOT enabled in an easy way in Python by default: LOCATE, INKEY, SOUND, PLAY, SCREEN, PSET, LINE, CIRCLE, PGET.
Just these. You can't do ANY of these things in Python with a basic install. "Yes," if you have tkinter in your install, you kind of can. But it's hairy and complex. It's not anywhere near as simple or accessible as BASIC. Pygmy makes some of these things possible, but those are further steps of installation away, and the interactivity feels further away.
Line numbers are incredibly simple (read: understandable) as a flow control model. "Why Johnny Can't Code" outlined the problem with mandatory complex abstract control structures.
I think there are basic fundamental missing pieces in the contemporary programming environment, and that the industry is worse for it.
Re: (Score:2)
And yet the PC guys basically need Windows for most of their games. So who are the real dummies here?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
" Live like that for a month and then tell me which is better"
OK but do I also get my 20-year-old body back, union jobs, single-income families that can afford a house, and a future in electrical engineering?
I'll tell you right away what is better.
Re: (Score:3)
You don't need to use Steam. You don't need to use Photoshop. What's that? You like the features or the convenience of the walled garden? Oh well in that case I guess computing really does suck.
You seem to suggest that a walled garden is necessary to enjoy those features. The fact is, Photoshop, and other software in the Creative Suite used to be available for purchase. Now, it's rent only. I think that's what he was complaining about. I, too, am irritated by this. I still use CS6, the last version of Creative Suite you could buy. I refuse to use rented software.
Re: (Score:2, Redundant)
True. I felt terribly robbed when I was a child that analogue computers using vacuum tubes and only running a single small program weren't available anymore and I was stuck with digital computers that could run arbitrary code. Amazing I survived this deprivation.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft made a deliberate decision back in the XP days to get rid of the command prompt. And the world is poorer for it.
What deliberate decision? NT Command prompt continues to exist as it always has. More advanced (and overly powerful) PowerShell exists too, so even Microsoft hasn't abandoned CLI.
They did get rid of direct* COMMAND.COM access as they built their consumer OS (XP) on the stable NT kernel, and not the soggy cardboard DOSshell known as "Win9x". The world is better for them abandoning Win9x.
*16 bit DOS emulation exists on 32 bit versions of Windows, but doesn't allow direct access to hardware as COMMAND.COM allo
Re:No even NO, but HELL NO! (Score:5, Interesting)
The programmer's toolbox is better now, with more languages, code can have longer, clearer and more complex lines, safer calls, better garbage collection and modularity, a more uniform common user interface, and sophisticated database interactions.
What's missing is that great unknown, limitless potential, the clubs, Dr. Dobbs, and the clueless millions wanting, needing and willing to believe whatever you told them. And they were willing to pay too.
Programming isn't as cool anymore. I know people in IT who look down on programmers, ridicule what they do. They beg their bosses for classes on how to be an administrator and run Windows, Servers, SharePoint, 365, Azure, Exchange, SMS,...
There is big money in programming, but rarely for programmers. Corporate programming jobs are often outsourced with short short term contracts, or just part time, which negatively affects the software product. The corporations don't care, as long as it doesn't affect the bottom line. Further hampering good programming, the sales departments have become dominant, turning software products into advertising platforms - even the operating system. Surveillance has become an indispensable revenue stream, as businesses have learned from Google and FaceBook how to monetize user information.
The game industry rakes in over $20 billion annually. As they've gotten richer, they've gotten more paranoid over DRM. 3rd tier business software is everywhere, with customers paying more every year. Accountants', auditors' and governments' standards demand that certain financial information be packaged according to the rule books. If anything goes wrong, until otherwise proved, it's the local programmer's fault. The one exception: if the programmer is in 'the club', they find somebody/something else to blame.
Yeah, programming can still be fun, but cool - eh.
Re:No even NO, but HELL NO! (Score:5, Insightful)
IT landscape is pain in the ass if you are seeking for a motivating programming job. Usually, large companies buy products to do almost everything. What is left is customization to your particular business or enterprise. In this arena, the software vendors are making huge efforts to make the interface as boring as they can since "easy to customize" is a major selling point. They want to tell your boss your work can be done by a monkey, so they make it that way. Some are having graphical interfaces which at the end of the day happen to be more time consuming than an standard API in any language a good programmer can take advantage of.
A fool with a tool is still a fool. So, they hire monkeys to play with the graphical programming interface and they produce shitty code because it is so easy to add layers and layers of shit over shit. Then they wonder why that beast they paid many hundred thousand dollars is working so slow and so bad.
All the fun is at home.