Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

In other news, old man yells at cloud. You conveniently ignore the changed reality: since the 90ies, the number of active internet users, malware, services, goods sold, and customer expectations have skyrocketed.

What you have in stock is nostalgia, my friend. Everything worked? Like Windows 95 crashing if you looked at it sideways, Linux requiring you to compile drivers for pretty much any device yourself, like fifteen competing printer protocols all incompatible with each other? You might want to get a reality check :)

View on HN

In the late 90s, I used to collaborate with about 10 people, all in the same office on the same LAN, for production of a magazine that sold IT stuff.

We used the "Excel Shared Spreadsheet" functionality. The file was hosted on a network drive. It corrupted or crashed so frequently - even when only one person had it open - that we took to copying it to your local machine, making the network copy read-only, editing the local copy, then copying back onto the network drive. Even this was buggy, so possession of a stuffed octopus represented a lock on the file. Microsoft themselves got involved at one point, as we were a reseller for their products. Their solution was no better.

So if there was a halcyon period for collaboration at some point in the past, I'd like to know when it was. When I see 100 people live editing the same Google Sheet, I think perhaps we are in the golden age.

Please tell me you called it locktopus

Heh, we had a similar process for modifying the schema for an Access database or… something adjacent to it. There was a bunch of XML that needed to be versioned and if two people modified it, committed to SVN, and merged, there was almost certainly going to be huge breakage. I went out for a cigarette after one of the moments of frustration, saw a nice maybe 2kg rock, and the Lock Rock was born :D

so young man yells at old man yelling at cloud? TBF, software in the past handled fluctuating connectivity much much better than todays, probably because back then this was normal. Once you got a thing working (a printer driver, say) it typically worked.

Today, with spotty internet, software you have or could have on your device might or might not work. Just recently I have seen a website which loaded, but was non-functional until 2 mins later a cookie warning was also loaded.

Nothing in there is about

> the number of active internet users, malware, services, goods sold

but about not building for applications only loading half (because we are still waiting for some obscure JS or CSS from not the original domain that noone really never needs.)

At least the printer protocols have stayed true to themselves, the more the merrier.

Picking a random example: "AirPrint®, Brother iPrint&Scan, Mopria™ , Cortado Workplace, Wi-Fi Direct®".

Will a lists like that be enough to overcome your fear and skip the costly upsell to exactly the same printer, but it also understands PCL6? (likely a bit flipped in the firmware...) You decide. It's like a reverse confidence trick: "look, it's 2023 already and it's awesome, you really don't need PCL6 anymore. Trust me."

Haha I got a WiFi direct printer. It made no indication of working with Linux but it just worked out of the box. It came with a driver disk, and it's needed to get it working with windows ..

Nice to hear! I'm not really doing Linux on the desktop, but in this age of almost-but-not-quite paper free, I like to think of printers in decades. And on that time scale, "no special fiery hoops to jump through on Linux" is really the only thing that has any value as a predictor of future usefulness. After some googling my vague conclusion was that a full complement of wireless protocols would indeed be a tolerable substitute of PCL6, but I'm glad for the confirmation. (even if I recently dropped out of the printer market again, turns out that the day I gave up on my ca 2001 Samsung I just wasn't sufficiently desperate to tease it into accepting an empty page as something to print on)

"paper free" sounds un-fun. I have a brother laser, that replaced a 2 decade old HP laser that my youngest broke when he was 2 or 3. We go through about 3 reams a year, more when one of us is going for a degree. I print maybe 5 things a month on average, usually recipes. I wouldn't forego a printer for any reason.

you can use gimp to take images and make them into coloring book pages, you can print instructions, calendars, drawings, diagrams; prompts for writing, your own writing to make sure that the "screen" isn't tricking your brain making you miss editing/grammar errors. Coloring pages, maps of countries, and other educational things are more fun if you can hold them and put them on your wall, if my kids are any indication. Having a scanner and a copier and a networked printer in a single box for what they cost - that makes it difficult to see the aversion.

I have had fancy e-readers since the original kindle, and before that a Clie and two palm pilots with acrobat and an epub (or whatever) reader. and i still prefer dead wood. I read more books on paper than e-ink. I read more on a computer screen than books, though.

> You conveniently ignore the changed reality: since the 90ies, the number of active internet users, malware, services, goods sold, and customer expectations have skyrocketed.

Now our printers, cars, and soon fridges are DRM-locked and doing surveillance.

And they can stop working at any time if the manufacturer goes bankrupt or simply stop supporting them.

in the 90s, there was microsoft messenger. real time, point to point (and maybe ptmp) chat, audio, and video. What replaced it? I have to run a coturn (STUN) server just to be able to talk to my friend in a private way, which means now i gotta deal with some provider for hosting both coturn and, say, Matrix (Synapse).

I also run a PBX, just in case coturn decides to stop working from lack of use. Now i gotta make sure i start the PBX app (3cx) once a week otherwise android helpfully removes notifications for me!

AIM, ICQ, etc were great - and i'm discounting "presence", because that was a small part of it. realtime communication for "free". I've been running chat servers for over a decade, and right now, there's three people on my matrix server, me, wife, and my best friend. there's five people on my PBX, same three plus my youngest child without a SIM card, and grandma, so grandma can call kid and vice versa. I've run ircd, matrix, rocket.chat, mattermost, a couple of the jabber systems, ventrilo, teamspeak, hand-rolled garbage.

we've had people sign up and chat once, but as soon as notifications stop working we never see them again. Heck, i have 3 PUSH accounts just to make sure that notifications go through everywhere.

Meanwhile, 20-25 years ago, load up trillian or AIM/ICQ and there was everyone, literally everyone. I know facebook ate that lunch, but i refuse to have any facebook apps on my phone, and most people i know refuse as well, so that's a non-starter. Texting is still spotty, because VoWiFi tends to just magically stop working if you leave the wifi area a couple times in a day, so texts will sit in limbo until you realize. Phone calls are the same way (except via PBX, those always seem to work for some reason...)

running out of IPv4 and the ubiquitousness of CGNAT have killed what the internet was. And that's sad; "nostalgia" isn't necessarily a negative thing. It used to be better, at least in the West. Maybe wechat and signal and telegram and whatever work better for the rest of the world now than any of our stuff from 25 years ago, i wouldn't know, because i know exactly zero people on any of those services - i've checked, once every couple of years.

But have you tried to move any users over to, "wechat and signal and telegram and whatever"? Getting users onto your own system wasn't trivial. If you want to move to a more supported system like, say, Signal, then you have to pay the platform switching costs, which includes moving your group of people. Which involves having the social capital to do so, which is unfortunate for the less social of us.

There are many things that killed what the Internet was in the 20-30 years hence. IPv4 exhaustion is regrettable, but entirely predicted, and for those in the west, not a huge deal. I can pay any number of cloud providers a small fee to host me a box with a publicly routable IPv4 address. CGNAT is annoying, but the number of libraries which will punch a hole in that NAT has also expanded by a huge margin since the 90's. So those up things are unfortunate, but I think there are many other things that changed the Internet, some for the better, some for the worse.

> But have you tried to move any users over to, "wechat and signal and telegram and whatever"?

no, because everyone uses something different and there's no "trillian" or meebo for all the shiny-tech. If we're going to play "encrypted chat", that no one can agree what that means, or what service to use, may as well use my own. Hopefully matrix becomes more popular (it probably won't, unfortunately*), but if not, i still won't use the likes of telegram or FB messenger or tiktok DMs or anything of that nature. there's not a good IRC client for phones, last few times i checked over the past 15 years.

* Matrix has the curse of being good enough on the client side, but kind of a PITA on the server side. Synapse, the reference implementation is in python, which is single threaded, so joining a large room "as-is" out-of-the-box is not feasible. You have to split each of the synapse elements into a microservice that gets its own python instance, but the documentation was (and probably still is) quite sparse. I'm sure there's a discord where i can get help.

>Linux requiring you to compile drivers for pretty much any device yourself

It's not much better on modern Fedora. The drivers do come precompiled but you have to reboot sometimes twice per week to install updates.

Nothing forces you to reboot it twice per week.

Agree, they deliver updates and fixes, its good to have the option.

I rarely do updates and don't get notifications for them. Windows OTOH will demand I update, or decide to when I don't want it to.

But how many ads did your Windows 95 start menu have?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com