Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

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> I don't know how limux was done, but modern hardware may give just about nothing to the users.

I am talking about machines with less than 2GB of RAM, running modern versions of Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice in addition to all the custom software required for the jobs (including, for some, the Java SAP client). You get why people complain about the computers being slow? FF is notorious for memory hogging, Thunderbird is not much behind it, and OpenOffice and SAP GUI are Java crap which means a tendency to leak memory the longer you have it running and general downsides of simply being Java. The machines swapped like hell, and SATA disks were not a given.

In addition, web sites themselves have grown in resource usage in an exponential way. HN and Fefes Blog are the only two websites I know that I can use even when my data allowance on my phone is finished and I'm throttled to 56k. Everything other? Forget it. And it's not just data usage, it's also RAM and CPU usage, e.g. due to ads and dozens of trackers.

> network config

Actually, it's not the config that's the bottleneck - it's the uplinks and crosslinks between the dozens of city buildings which includes the schools - mine, for example, was linked to the central DC with a 10/10 fiber 14 years ago and still was when I left the school 6 years ago, you can guess how much "fun" that is to use...

All fair points.

But the resource sinks are also something absurd that should be avoided. I've seen this first hand. Lots of business were seduced into migrating onto web based application. I was crying ..

Sure the old terminal apps were crude bug god they were fast, processing AND ergonomy. The new one looked fancy but wasn't a production tool. Came late and under delivered. And did less than the old tools by design.

It's all bs spread by consultants to gain market shares. Employees and consumers don't need this. The energy is spent where it shouldn't at the benefit of the wrong persons.

> Sure the old terminal apps were crude bug god they were fast, processing AND ergonomy.

The old terminal apps are mostly designed to run in batches, and it's horrifically difficult to implement (secure!) interfaces to any modern systems - which is expected from a government these days. There's a reason why many banks still don't offer instant payments in 2017 - not just because a tiny profit can be made by holding the money for a day, but also because the mainframe based batch processing stuff is not able to do realtime.

And to make stuff worse: many of these terminal apps have severe issues. They don't accept UTF8 (some only ANSI!), leading to data loss when you have customers/citizens with uncommon characters in their names - while e.g. a German system will often accept the Umlauts, it will struggle with French or Slavic diacritics and completely fail at Cyrillic or Japanese. Or they're hardcoded for example to encode gender as bool (0=male, 1=female), which breaks with intersexual people, or that a marriage may be between homosexual people (because the data fields are named as husband / wife)...

Sure, the same issues plague web-apps or native desktop apps too, but for these you can at least hire decent programmers pretty much anywhere while you will spend enormous amounts of money for mainframe experts.

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