This is why, despite all the naysayers, I continue to use a Chromebook for email, web browsing and basic document work. Because all that stuff outside “What I use computers for” is taken care of by a two minute update every couple of weeks.
Unfortunately this means that 98% of my computer maintenance is performed for about 5% of my computing.
ow, my eye… solely
It’s enough to make you look at your computer and wonder which of you is really the tool.
fixed.
Just looking at the new BB design now on my phone. Sigh. Looks pretty much like any other commercial site now, ads all over the place, a big one in the middle of the post. Boring. Annoying. Sad.
Shouldn’t the endless tinkering be its own reward for the tech pride types?
If you wanted hands-off computing you could just switch to Mac OS or Ubuntu or something. Like a normal person.
I’ve been coding for over 30 years and, especially when I was on-call production support, I felt like I worked for the computer - not the other way round!
We are the computer.
DRM bites us in the ass again!
It’s so true; One of the things I’d love is for my Kindle Fire to actually read to me occasionally, when I’m in the middle of a great book and just want to rest my eyes for a little while and rest a bit.
But NO, because of the fucking DRM that the publishers of audiobooks insist can’t be used for that purpose. Like I’m really gonna buy a second copy of that book just to be able to listen to it occasionally.
It’s MY BOOK! I bought it! I just want to listen to it once in a while!
I don’t really see it this way. As the comic points out, backwards compatibility does mean constantly maintaining and adding to a huge always-accumulating pile of cruft, but we do the same thing in our heads and to our children so that we can understand and access our culture and heritage and science and civilization.
Likewise, the computer is really a gateway for accessing a vast heritage of software. That’s why it’s so easy to build a far more advanced personal computer or OS that blows modern computers and OS’s out of the water, and why those cutting edge super-machines never take off - we’re not actually buying a computer for computation, we’re buying it to access a software heritage. No heritage means no cruft (yet…) which means incredible performance and streamlined elegant design… and no apps.
(This is also why Tesla could beat the car giants at their own game - Tesla has no cruft - but also why many people are sticking with gasoline for now; Tesla needs a bigger heritage and is furiously working on that (gas stations are on every corner but super-chargers are not… yet…))
What about addressing the old stuff by a virtualized emulation and having the new, fast, streamlined next to it?
Fucking DLLs, how do they work? And why windows seems to collect them like pokemon.
We call that approach “Windows” and “OSX” etc - it’s a great solution, though it’s still subject to the criticism of the comic.
once upon a time , or so i was told then , the term " dll " referred to a DYNAMICALLY linked library , a set of helper routines that ( hopefully ) would be usefull for more than one program ( i think ’ programs ’ are called ’ apps ’ now ? ) , and would NOT take up memory ( let alone cpu cycles ) permanently ; but rather would load and unload gracefully , as needed ~ how they work now , and why windoze seems to find them so cute that none ever seem to have their " in-use " counters decremented or checked , i dunno ~ B|
Oh, wait… wasn’t this on snopes?
And by “fixed” you mean “joke removed”? I’m confused.
It’s funny that you think this doesn’t apply to Ubuntu or MacOS. Or, really, any OS from the last, say, 20 years.
Sigh… there are many sad truths about my computer.
I guess it can apply to pretty much anything with a command line, right?
What I guess I failed to convey with the “like a normal person” quip was a willingness to ease off on the power user custom stuff and embrace those dreaded factory defaults the uneducated masses get on by with.
Not that this is a likely path for someone who knows what VM or even a repository is, but still.
