icemann on 15/7/2020 at 04:13
A post by Rocketman on systemshock.org got me thinking of this topic.
Now obviously going in this is going to be subjective as hell as it is all down to the individual. I'm going to paste Rocketman's post from over there:
Quote Posted by Rocketman
To generalize, lots of good things don't exist anymore but you would seem to be suggesting that they should, if they are in fact good. I'm just pointing out that goodness doesn't immortalize something. QWERTY keyboards were designed to slow down typists so they wouldn't jam the typewriters. DVORAK was arguably better but it simply didn't take and now nobody even knows what it is. Windows used to be good and now it's shit but younger people like it. Sound cards used to have hardware 3D reflections and 4 speaker HRTF and now they don't but modern software biased solutions have replaced them. The things that exist today do not always follow the obviously logical evolution, that stuff should improve over time and the best designs will always persist the longest. Instead, other factors like cost and misinformation/propaganda have a pretty strong effect. Maybe my argument isn't cogent enough to convince you but I'm just giving you my reasons for not being convinced that SS1 had a bad interface or that current interfaces are superior because they are found in popular games 30 years later. And since I know there are least a couple of other people who agree, my inability to make a good argument doesn't make the argument itself invalid. In fact it would only support my previous assertion that truth is largely based on how many people you can convince, in most every-day subject matter.
I think this is a great topic of conversation as we all have various tech which has been forgotten or replaced with inferior tech. For example Sony used to feature backwards compatibility in its consoles, but this fell by the wayside after later revisions of the PS3, with the removal of the emotion chip (which allowed for ps1 and ps2 support) for cost cutting reasons. Windows 7 was far more technical, where as Windows 10 went for a more simplified approach.
So when is newer tech not better? Was th was typewritter better than the keyboard?
Azaran on 15/7/2020 at 14:41
It boils down to (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence) this.
As a side note, if you're looking to buy a budget laptop, you're better off buying a refurbished business one. Don't even go near modern consumer laptops, they'll fall apart within a year
SubJeff on 15/7/2020 at 16:29
There are mixed issues here. Abandoning compatibility due to cost is a completely different thing to typewriters Vs keyboards.
PigLick on 15/7/2020 at 16:39
i always enjoyed beating my clothes against rocks
ZylonBane on 15/7/2020 at 17:27
Quote Posted by Rocketman
Windows used to be good and now it's shit
Oh how the turn tables.
rachel on 15/7/2020 at 19:15
I just got an Olivetti Lettera 32 in great condition for only 30 bucks. My mother used to have one, it's a great typewriter. Can't wait to work with it. :D
dj_ivocha on 15/7/2020 at 21:24
I'm too lazy to google, but wasn't the QWERTY keyboard invented in order to physically separate groups of letters that are often used together and so prevent jams? That is, not to slow down typists but to enable fast typists to keep typing quickly without jamming the typewriter in the process.
Anyway, for examples of newer tech being (partially) worse you have to look no further than smartphones. What's with the gazillion-inch displays nowadays? And the 3mm-thick phones with "edge" type displays and curved glass backs that you can't hold properly without interacting with the screen by mistake or dropping the phone because you tried using it one handed and it slipped due to being too wide and too thin? And the missing removable batteries? And the abysmal running times due to tiny batteries due to FUKEN 3 mm THICKNESS? :mad:
Nameless Voice on 15/7/2020 at 21:41
Trends are a major cause of it. With smartphones, Apple have a reputation for being the high-end business choice, so when they come up with something, all the other smartphone manufacturers copy them, even when it's a dumb idea.
One popular manufacturer sets a trend, and then others copy them to try to take a bit of their success.
(The planned obsolescence is also part of it, as Azaran mentioned, but it isn't the only reason.)
In the case of smartphones, all of what I consider "anti-features" seem to have come about like this.
Holes and notches in the screen, the removal of the headphone jack, the removal of the notification LED, weird bevelled-edge screens that serve no purpose other than making it impossible to buy a cover which will properly protect it, and of course the removal of replaceable batteries.
On the bright side, it's meant I've stuck with my now very old phone for a long time, because any potential replacement seems like a downgrade in at least some areas.
The other piece of tech which has dis-improved is: laptop keyboards. I've ranted about this before, but hey, always a good time to rant. My oldest laptop, a Thinkpad T43 from about 15 years ago, has the best keyboard, and every further generation just made the keyboards worse.
We're all used to the standard desktop keyboard layout, and a laptop keyboard should follow that as closely as possible - but instead they now try to squash them as much as possible, by either squashing up keys into random locations to make them more compact, or just straight-up removing essential keys because they were presumably designed by someone who has never actually used a keyboard.
Prime example: I have a laptop at work, a really high-spec professional developer laptop. It doesn't have Home and End keys. Two keys which any programmer wants to use constantly. Instead, it's a fn+ combination.
A lot of those laptops also have too-small keyboards because, to save costs, they make one model of keyboard across different laptops, so a keyboard which they had to squash to fit into a 14" laptop just has empty buffer space on the right and left on a 17" model.
On a completely different tangent: sound propagation in 3D engines. Seems like a really important feature to me, yet almost no engine has it. How is the Dark Engine, from over 20 years ago, still one of the leaders in something so important to one of our primary senses? All the development has gone into fancy graphics, and seemingly no one cares about audio.
Azaran on 15/7/2020 at 22:25
On the plus side with phones, since there's more and more variety, nowadays you can get a decent one for very cheap. And features exclusive to the high end models invariably end up in the cheaper ones within a year or 2
PigLick on 16/7/2020 at 03:31
it also keeps those south east asian wage slaves in work as well!