Deeper Into the Age of Stupid
Sep. 11th, 2017 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ceagleOf course there are lots of things we could cite to exemplify the Age of Stupid. The one I'm choosing right now is Microsoft Word.
In the 1990s, oddly enough, Word 4 for Mac (and later Word 5.1 also) were gleaming examples of Fast and Capable writing/editing software. WordPerfect was good too, but I didn't get to use it that much, so I'm less familiar with it.
...but I used Word pretty much every day, and when you needed to edit FAST and THOROUGHLY, it did the job amazingly well, even on those slower machines back then. The most IMPRESSIVE thing about Word was its ability to Find/Replace pretty much EVERY INVISIBLE CHARACTER conceivable. This was VERY important, considering I would receive files from many sources at my editor's desk... and there was crucial need to strip out random and repetitive TABS, Carriage Returns, Line Feeds, and pretty much all the BLOCK characters in the ASCII table.
I could do it in a few seconds to a few minutes with Word 4, and also Word 5.1 ... Word 6 began to be a bit lumbering, but it was still fairly decent. Between Word 4 and another two programs (WriteNow and Aldus PageMaker, which sometimes could catch a few stray characters too), it was a fast and smooth process ^v^
But now.. enter the Age of Stupid. Trying to make every web page look best only on tablets and phones. Not programming auto-device-detect to instead direct you to more capable pages when a full computer is detected. And composition software that barely even comes close to the editing capabilities Word 4 had .. ;P
And I emphasize this, because Microsoft Word no longer can easily detect all those deadly invisibles that are so important to catch before you send the file to press. AND, OpenOffice sadly does not offer a useful solution either! This is shocking to me, because progress is supposed Build on successes in history, not forget about them and leave them out in the dust.
This situation has obviously existed for quite a few years (after the 1990s when operating systems changed mostly) ... but having just had to go between LibreOffice and WordPad back and forth for a 1/2 hour just to do what Word 4 could have done in 30 seconds, I thought it might be useful to revisit this lament and get it off my chest... ;P
Any of ya have other glaring examples from today's Age of Stupid that you'd like to put into the spotlight? :}
In the 1990s, oddly enough, Word 4 for Mac (and later Word 5.1 also) were gleaming examples of Fast and Capable writing/editing software. WordPerfect was good too, but I didn't get to use it that much, so I'm less familiar with it.
...but I used Word pretty much every day, and when you needed to edit FAST and THOROUGHLY, it did the job amazingly well, even on those slower machines back then. The most IMPRESSIVE thing about Word was its ability to Find/Replace pretty much EVERY INVISIBLE CHARACTER conceivable. This was VERY important, considering I would receive files from many sources at my editor's desk... and there was crucial need to strip out random and repetitive TABS, Carriage Returns, Line Feeds, and pretty much all the BLOCK characters in the ASCII table.
I could do it in a few seconds to a few minutes with Word 4, and also Word 5.1 ... Word 6 began to be a bit lumbering, but it was still fairly decent. Between Word 4 and another two programs (WriteNow and Aldus PageMaker, which sometimes could catch a few stray characters too), it was a fast and smooth process ^v^
But now.. enter the Age of Stupid. Trying to make every web page look best only on tablets and phones. Not programming auto-device-detect to instead direct you to more capable pages when a full computer is detected. And composition software that barely even comes close to the editing capabilities Word 4 had .. ;P
And I emphasize this, because Microsoft Word no longer can easily detect all those deadly invisibles that are so important to catch before you send the file to press. AND, OpenOffice sadly does not offer a useful solution either! This is shocking to me, because progress is supposed Build on successes in history, not forget about them and leave them out in the dust.
This situation has obviously existed for quite a few years (after the 1990s when operating systems changed mostly) ... but having just had to go between LibreOffice and WordPad back and forth for a 1/2 hour just to do what Word 4 could have done in 30 seconds, I thought it might be useful to revisit this lament and get it off my chest... ;P
Any of ya have other glaring examples from today's Age of Stupid that you'd like to put into the spotlight? :}
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Date: 2017-09-11 09:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-11 09:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-12 01:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-12 02:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-09-11 03:32 pm (UTC)I also remember everyone in the office having those plastic things that fit over they keyboard's function keys to help keep track of all the functions.
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Date: 2017-09-12 02:26 am (UTC)I used Word 7 quite a bit, and it was pretty effective. But yeah, the incremental bloat of the last couple decades is really starting to catch up to it. :\
Maybe this is just my tin foil hat being on too tight, but my favorite gripe these days is how loose people are with personal information, and how willing (through either blindness or indifference) they are to allow corporations to exploit/commercialize everything they do.
There are also many examples where it's more of a tradeoff so I can't really complain but I'm a little challenged to pick a side. Like, on one hand I miss the days when I could tune up a car with naught more than a screwdriver or maybe one or two wrenches... but on the other hand I'm struck by how cars start so reliably that they now turn themselves off at red lights to save fuel.
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Date: 2017-09-17 04:42 pm (UTC)Maybe the concept of the ribbon interface, or Outlooks suicide-inducing pavement-gray colour scheme, or the concept of flat shaded interfaces, the concept of tiles, invisible clicky areas, websites morphing into full blown apps requiring loads of bloated javascript to see literally anything, mass surveillance masquerading as operating systems, the utter uselessness of websites due to intrusive advertising that prevents literally any content being readable, Android - I just don't know which to pick on first. It's probably more difficult to think of a product that's only ever continually got better and better! Go on, I challenge you! I think all software 'peaks', then goes into rapid decline for no good reason.
Not just strictly software but proper 'appliances' too, my 'YouView' PVR which earlier this year morphed into a completely different and vastly inferior device due to a forced update and no way to revert, anything boasting "Cloud" or "IoT", modern in-car entertainment systems, cars with forced telemetry, utterly terrible audio products dismissing a century of amassed engineering knowledge,
Nobody can engineer anything well anymore. I used to love technology, now I actively hate it since pretty much everything became software controlled/defined and we're sliding into the 'data age', which seems like a dystopian future without a whole load of new protective laws nobody's proposing.
On the plus side, at least Adobe Flash is dead! Yay! Although I kinda miss the days when updating flash was all we mostly had to worry about...