retrogamerguy1997 wrote on 2022-05-20, 03:46:

I was born in 97 so I didn't really experience the 90s, but something I say kinda in line with this thread is that I miss well forums. Nowadays everything is on consolidated on some giant social media or even discord. forums just aren't much of a thing anymore. And with sites that have both traditional forums and a discord server, well the forums are dead a lot of the times.

Forums were the means of collecting discussion around a topic back in the 90's and 2000's. They are still going strong in some areas (like this) but most discussions - i.e. words typed in response to words typed, are now taking place on twitter, facebook, instagram and discord and others. These latter methods are good for quick exchanges but not good for longer more detailed discussions with multiple people over time. generally their search options are limited and finding a thread via a search engine less likely if not impossible.

It was one of the fun things online in the 90's to find forums about things, not many lasted long though but even their construction was interesting - cgi-bin, php and other techs all being used

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-05-19, 17:54:

Here's stuff I hate about modern Japanese cars:

indeed, all things which may seem more 'marketable' but increasingly put the car's maintenance completely out of reach. By the time cars become 'transport as a service' self drive EVs people wont want to own one anyway. Possibly a 'good thing' to some, but it heralds another phase in which we ourselves cease owning things and just rent everything (from some place that does own everything!)

I refuse to set foot in a self driving EV, especially if it's sold by snake oil salesman Elon Musk. Everything that guy is involved in is not all that innovative or an outright scam. Only the technologically ignorant think that guy is the second coming of Steve Jabs (another overrated con artist). So I guess that was another nice part about the 90s...we didn't have to see Elon's ugly mug in the news every morning. Unlike a lot of people, I don't dislike him for political reasons. I just think he's a self serving-jerk. I guess in the 90's Bill Gates was the guy to hate. I guess I still hate him too, but these days he's not really involved much at Micro$hit craporation.

Imagine being able to get in your own car and drive from one place to another - no GPS or network connected devices, no mobile phones linking up to various masts and triangulating position, no always-on cctv recording number plates every junction or so.

and if your car did falter, well a set of skills and some easily carried tools might help you solve the problem yourself and failing that almost any garage and almost any road side assist would be able to figure out the mechanical problem and get you going again

that is pretty much the past

the present is doing the above but being trackable always and relying on specialist digital tech for many car repairs

the future is sitting in an EV self drive 'transport as a service' owned by some vast interconnected multinational corporation, every yard of your journey duly tracked and paid for, data submitted for analysis (social credit suitably altered well, hopefully not!)

heh the 90's was when i got involved with computers. Things got interesting for me in 1996 when I got a 486 SX machine. Before mp3 came out i remember 1 audio track from CD would take a great deal of hard disk bigger than windows 95. I thought it was an error and 8bit audio was yuk.
So the main use was shareware promotional discs on tech magazines and sneaking into public education places to get a look at playboy centrefolds online.
Having the ability to tell netscape navigator allowed me to save images to diskette without viewing (so i wouldn't get kicked out)
There was some crazy shareware out in those days like virtual shooting cats thrown instead of clay pidgeons anyone remember cat splat for 95 🤣
All of my 90's and windows 2000 days were brushed away when xp came out I beleive XP was the only OS that took me by my soul it kept a few things from the 90's like CMD and TELNET but it was richer and probably shadows 98SE as one of the best of all time.

I look at this with a tron effect. Tron has a feel to it that encompasses passion, flair and the time it was made, it had style. Then i look at tron legacy and thing corporate shite.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-05-20, 08:24:

I refuse to set foot in a self driving EV, especially if it's sold by snake oil salesman Elon Musk. Everything that guy is involved in is not all that innovative or an outright scam. Only the technologically ignorant think that guy is the second coming of Steve Jabs (another overrated con artist). So I guess that was another nice part about the 90s...we didn't have to see Elon's ugly mug in the news every morning. Unlike a lot of people, I don't dislike him for political reasons. I just think he's a self serving-jerk. I guess in the 90's Bill Gates was the guy to hate. I guess I still hate him too, but these days he's not really involved much at Micro$hit craporation.

Each decade has had its "man to hate." In the '70s, it was Howard Hughes, in the '80s it was Steve Jobs, in the '90s Bill Gates, in the 2000s, Bernie Madoff, in the 2010s, Zuckerberg, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk (a tie between them), now in 2020s, it is most definitely Elon Musk alone. Followed closely by Mr. Jeff "Dollar signs" Bezos.

I can't stand the guy, he's a socially defective, capricious, immature, self-serving narcissist obsessed with his dangerous status of having too much money and power. We must watch him and most definitely limit his power. He's also so eccentric and unpredictable that he may turn out to be the next Howard Hughes. He will do much to foster and foment the "rent everything model, own nothing, and pay him to rent it." Especially in automotive and electricity industries.

Well, I have zero problems with Musk and Jobs, and a ton of problems with Gates and “modern”Windows 🤷🏻‍♂️

Don't forget about eating bugs and the vegetarian equivalent of pink slime.

I mostly agree with all the hated rich jerks, but not Bernie Madoff. Bernie Madoff is my hero. He only screwed over other rich assholes and brainless celebrities.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-05-20, 08:24:

I refuse to set foot in a self driving EV, especially if it's sold by snake oil salesman Elon Musk. Everything that guy is involved in is not all that innovative or an outright scam.

SpaceX and Starlink are "not that innovative"? 🤣 k.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2022-05-12, 17:46:

I miss the simplicity of gaming in the mid to late 90s. You would go to a physical store, buy a game CD, put it on your PC (or PlayStation) and it would just work. No mandatory firmware updates, no enormous day 1 patches to download, no hiding half of the game's content behind season passes and no "always online" DRM for single-player games

The rapid hardware advancements were another cool thing during that time. A lot could change in just a few years. In particular, upgrading from something like a Pentium 133 + S3 Trio64 to a Pentium 3 Coppermine + TNT2 felt like a quantum leap.

It was a quantum leap.
Now a 10 year old system is still fairly respectable but back then 10 years was the difference between a real computer and basically a glorified calculator. People really didn't think it would ever be worth anything again.

I think the rapid hardware advancements is one of the reasons we used to have such a great time getting parts for retro hardware.
It's actually around the start or the first 5 years or so of when internet was becoming mainstream (and when things like ISDN were actually acceptable standards), when I started collecting parts which were cheap as heck, all the physical PC shops that don't exist anymore.
That's actually something that I miss. And that if we bought something, we would actually own it.

TheMobRules wrote on 2022-05-12, 17:49:

After thinking a lot about it, what I miss the most is the pre-Internet days. Or I should say the pre-"massive Internet adoption […]
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After thinking a lot about it, what I miss the most is the pre-Internet days. Or I should say the pre-"massive Internet adoption" days, I'm fine when it was non-essential for life. What I really miss is how slow some things used to be... when a movie, game or album came out, there was enough time to absorb it, enjoy it to the fullest (or be thoroughly disappointed by it). Nowadays these things are no longer an "event", it's just about the hype about what's coming next, and as soon as it's there you pretty much have to move on to the next big thing at breakneck speed.

With a game, for example, the hidden secrets and that sort of stuff took time to be unraveled, sometimes you would find it on a magazine or a friend who stumbled into it. All that is gone now, when a game comes out it gets fully datamined in less than 24hs and in the same period of time you already have thousands of 100% playthroughs. And the key here is that unless you cut yourself off the Internet for a while, you can't avoid it.

It also has affected my work as a software developer. New versions of libraries and frameworks are released almost daily, many times breaking compatibility with the previous versions and threatening to end support unless you update. All of this without providing any real added value. It's 2022 and we're still finding new and innovative ways to render an accordion in HTML, while using extremely complex algorithms behind the scenes to determine which annoying adds we're going to show to the hapless users. Or crypto mining, another example of heaps of processing power absurdly wasted on inane things.

I would pay good money to get back to those saturday mornings when my friends and I would go to the (not entirely legal) games store with a box of floppies to get the "latest" stuff, fooling around waiting for the game to install. Even if it was a disappointment, we would go back to Wolf3D/Doom (or downloading 640x480 pics of Pam Anderson at 2KB/s) and have a lot of fun.

I can really relate to this.
My primary school period was basically computer free. I knew only 1 or 2 people who had a PC back then. I even remember when someone got their first color card (basically a display adapter that could show more than just the amber color) and I didn't even know anyone that had a real sound card.
Playing with friends I'd have to call them with a phone that was corded to the wall, so you'd have to share and couldn't really have private conversations. And phones were prohibitively expensive, it went by the minute. These days I can VoiP for hours a day and it doesn't matter.

Even during middle school I could get by without a computer fairly easily but more and more people were beginning to get a PC and some even had internet (but very few had broadband).
At some point I finally did get my first PC. We didn't have internet so I'd bring a bunch of handmedown-diskettes and use their internet. But of course we'd have to ask first and then we had only very limited amount of time to downloaddownloaddownload like no tomorrow and cut the connection! and then I'd carefully copy everything to disk. Twice for most things and three times for stuff I really didn't want to get corrupted. 🤣.

Mobile phones were still not a thing back then. Some had these pagers though but it was mostly just a gimmick.
I still went to a library if I wanted information and I read books! Tons and tons of books! Now I only need to click meh keyboard and there it is! In between all the junk. But it's all from my own home instead of having to plan a half days trip to spend an afternoon over there.

I'm thankful that we did have internet when I started collecting hardware as it was a great help in self-teaching how to build computers and learning what was what.
I mean when I was dumpsterdiving I barely knew what I was doing, so I picked apart the computers that I found and only when I got back home could I actually look up what it was that I brought home with me.

I really dislike the online-all-the-time stuff and the you-don't-really-own-anything-anymore-but-you-basically-rent-it-after-having-paid-full-price-for-it stuff.
Gaming overall has filled up with the dumb pay2win 'games' that are barely worth being called real games. They are more like elaborate 3D advertisements for their online shop and they spend more time monetizing their product instead of trying to deliver a good product. And some of these companies use real psychology to make their games as addicting as possible. Some of these games just want to turn their 'players' into binary junkies with the company being the only dealer on the block.

I definitely prefer the more old-fashioned games where it was less about grinding ranks and hoping for a good lootbox drop and more about getting the most amount of frags or beating the ai on your favorite map in the most efficient way you can think of. Or just about beating a game. Modern games basically don't even have an end, they just keep on and on and just continue to add stuff just so they can sell you more. Ow and of course the stuff you bought last year? yeah that's all obsolete now. Powercreep is a thing now and we're supposed to believe it's an ordinary fact of life which of course it isn't xD.

There's still some good games out there, but one needs to dig deep and far to find the real gems. Just like in the early days actually.

One thing I also like about older games is that these are easier to mod. Modern games need entire teams before you can produce any meaningful mods unless you make really small mods. Or if you are really exceptionally talented which I am not.

Plasma wrote on 2022-05-21, 13:03:

SpaceX and Starlink are "not that innovative"? 🤣 k.

Perhaps SpaceX is an innovative way of stealing taxpayer money to privatize NASA. The idea of reusing booster rockers is just idiotic and will result in many fatal catastrophes if it comes to fruition.
Did I miss something about StarLink? It's satellite internet...and...it has a cool sounding name? I think "Earthlink" would have been more appropriate.

It's like Richard Branson's Virgin "Galactic". He thinks he's built the starship Enterprise, when in reality he can barely make it into Earth's lower orbit.

Now a space elevator...that's innovative. Where's my space elevator?

SpaceX has had the vast majority of their missions on reused 1st stages it's come to fruition. How will it cause any fatalities. You my good sir are confusing SpaceX with Boeing. The Boeing built SLS and Starliner will be what gets people killed. Hell Starliner barely made it to orbit Thursday and had quite a few issues with the docking on Friday. Starlink can't be called EarthLink as that's already and American ISP.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-05-21, 23:14:

Perhaps SpaceX is an innovative way of stealing taxpayer money to privatize NASA. The idea of reusing booster rockers is just id […]
Show full quote

Plasma wrote on 2022-05-21, 13:03:

SpaceX and Starlink are "not that innovative"? 🤣 k.

Perhaps SpaceX is an innovative way of stealing taxpayer money to privatize NASA. The idea of reusing booster rockers is just idiotic and will result in many fatal catastrophes if it comes to fruition.
Did I miss something about StarLink? It's satellite internet...and...it has a cool sounding name? I think "Earthlink" would have been more appropriate.

It's like Richard Branson's Virgin "Galactic". He thinks he's built the starship Enterprise, when in reality he can barely make it into Earth's lower orbit.

Now a space elevator...that's innovative. Where's my space elevator?

Have you been living under a rock? SpaceX has been reusing Falcon 9 boosters since 2017. They have lowered space launch costs by 95%. If anybody was "stealing" taxpayer money it was NASA.

Starlink is an order of magnitude better than existing satellite internet, due to 2400 satellites in low earth orbit. Traditional satellite internet uses only a few geostationary satellites, with 10x higher latency. It's a huge improvement.

Plasma wrote:

Starlink is an order of magnitude better than existing satellite internet

Also it's a possible prequel to anime called "Planetes".

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-05-22, 00:12:

How will it cause any fatalities.

They have lowered space launch costs by 95%.

If we recall the Challenger and Columbia, we know that space travel is inherently dangerous.
At least with the space shuttle program the most dangerous component of the system was not being reused.
Privatization and cost cutting in lieu of safety. What could possibly go wrong?

The space shuttle program was really cool back in the day, and although it was mostly built for dick wagging and the Russian/Chinese system is probably both cheaper and more reliable, I'd take that any day over Musk's crap. If funding for NASA hadn't been slashed to fund useless imperial wars, oligarchs like Musk wouldn't be needed to "save" the space program.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-05-22, 02:20:

If we recall the Challenger and Columbia, we know that space travel is inherently dangerous. At least with the space shuttle pro […]
Show full quote

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-05-22, 00:12:

How will it cause any fatalities.

They have lowered space launch costs by 95%.

If we recall the Challenger and Columbia, we know that space travel is inherently dangerous.
At least with the space shuttle program the most dangerous component of the system was not being reused.
Privatization and cost cutting in lieu of safety. What could possibly go wrong?

The space shuttle program was really cool back in the day, and although it was mostly built for dick wagging and the Russian/Chinese system is probably both cheaper and more reliable, I'd take that any day over Musk's crap. If funding for NASA hadn't been slashed to fund useless imperial wars, oligarchs like Musk wouldn't be needed to "save" the space program.

As far as shit takes go, this one was pretty mediocre.

NASA was fighting a losing battle right from the start, it was NEVER going to be viable compared to private corporations and there was no way in hell the US government was ever going to keep funding it once the space craze had died down and there was no PR left in it. The space shuttle was a great vehicle but it was being quickly outdated and was horribly expensive to both maintain and run, rockets are safer, faster and considerably less expensive, even more so when you can reuse parts of it. (They can also launch larger payloads into orbit faster than the shuttle ever could at a cost that is far cheaper, shuttles were EXPENSIVE)

NASA needs to refocus on what its great at, development and research and let the private corporations with the monetary collateral handle the actual vehicles and logistics of getting shit into space.

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-05-22, 02:20:

If we recall the Challenger and Columbia, we know that space travel is inherently dangerous. At least with the space shuttle pro […]
Show full quote

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-05-22, 00:12:

How will it cause any fatalities.

They have lowered space launch costs by 95%.

If we recall the Challenger and Columbia, we know that space travel is inherently dangerous.
At least with the space shuttle program the most dangerous component of the system was not being reused.
Privatization and cost cutting in lieu of safety. What could possibly go wrong?

The space shuttle program was really cool back in the day, and although it was mostly built for dick wagging and the Russian/Chinese system is probably both cheaper and more reliable, I'd take that any day over Musk's crap. If funding for NASA hadn't been slashed to fund useless imperial wars, oligarchs like Musk wouldn't be needed to "save" the space program.

I don't understand this argument. The space shuttle also reused rocket boosters. The difference is SpaceX lands them upright on the ground. So they don't have to go fish them out of the ocean.

Most of SpaceX's flights are unmanned. That's as safe as you can get for humans. The space shuttle never had an unmanned flight.

I fully agree that Musk has an ego problem and I probably wouldn't want to hang out with him. But you cannot honestly say that he isn't involved in anything innovative. Jobs and Gates pale in comparison. Their companies essentially just churned out computers and software. SpaceX will likely put the first man on Mars. I'm sure NASA could also achieve that with enough funding, but politics always gets in the way.

Plasma wrote on 2022-05-22, 06:18:

I don't understand this argument. The space shuttle also reused rocket boosters. The difference is SpaceX lands them upright on […]
Show full quote

Anonymous Coward wrote on 2022-05-22, 02:20:

If we recall the Challenger and Columbia, we know that space travel is inherently dangerous. At least with the space shuttle pro […]
Show full quote

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2022-05-22, 00:12:

How will it cause any fatalities.

They have lowered space launch costs by 95%.

If we recall the Challenger and Columbia, we know that space travel is inherently dangerous.
At least with the space shuttle program the most dangerous component of the system was not being reused.
Privatization and cost cutting in lieu of safety. What could possibly go wrong?

The space shuttle program was really cool back in the day, and although it was mostly built for dick wagging and the Russian/Chinese system is probably both cheaper and more reliable, I'd take that any day over Musk's crap. If funding for NASA hadn't been slashed to fund useless imperial wars, oligarchs like Musk wouldn't be needed to "save" the space program.

I don't understand this argument. The space shuttle also reused rocket boosters. The difference is SpaceX lands them upright on the ground. So they don't have to go fish them out of the ocean.

Most of SpaceX's flights are unmanned. That's as safe as you can get for humans. The space shuttle never had an unmanned flight.

I fully agree that Musk has an ego problem and I probably wouldn't want to hang out with him. But you cannot honestly say that he isn't involved in anything innovative. Jobs and Gates pale in comparison. Their companies essentially just churned out computers and software. SpaceX will likely put the first man on Mars. I'm sure NASA could also achieve that with enough funding, but politics always gets in the way.

Politics is the exact reason NASA will always be boned in regards to both funding and actually getting anything done in a timely manner, the government has an ulterior motive in keeping the human race bound to the planet ..control. Shit we should have been on Mars already and have stations on the moon but politics has pretty much made sure that wont be occurring anytime soon. So while I agree that Musk and his ilk are arrogant ego drive assclowns they dont have to deal with politics holding them back and they are likely to be the ones moving us the fuck off this rock.

Its only a matter of time before we face the same fate the Dinosaurs did.

I personally would feel much better if humanity had a way out of such a situation or at the very least didn't have all its eggs trapped on one planet, for the first time in our history we actually have the technology and know how to leave Earth and live off world . .so the question is why the fuck are we still here and not out there populating this little solar system.

The answer will involve a large amount of politics.

Edit - I myself would happily buy a one way ticket to live on Mars, to be one of the first settlers there .. man that would be both terrifying and exciting.

NASA has been paying tax payers money to private corporations since its inception.

"As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind - every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder."
John Glenn 1962

spiroyster wrote on 2022-05-22, 08:37:

NASA has been paying tax payers money to private corporations since its inception.

"As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind - every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder."
John Glenn 1962

well someone has to make their parts, usually the lowest bidder in Taiwan. /s