It seems like there have been an inordinate number of “I’m old, I don’t want to change, and computers are expensive!” posts around here. Even when the computers and software in question are actually quite ancient and the replacements are cheap by nearly any yardstick.
When did we get so old and fuddy-duddyish? Everyone knows computers aren’t like toasters; you can’t buy them and expect them to run forever without periodically upgrading the software and hardware.
Moaning about $129 MS Office upgrades seems backward to me; that’s CHEAP today; that’s what it cost 20 years ago IIRC. Or even more maybe.
Trying to keep a computer with Win 7 going because you don’t want to spend $150-200 on a Chromebook or something and undergo the minor changes to use it is absurd. When did we lose the curiosity and start grumping about things being different? Seems like it used to be that Dopers would relish the idea to figure something new out, not complain that it’s not the way it used to be.
Don’t get me started on Discourse. If there was ever a nothing-burger as far as users are concerned in a system migration, this was it. But you’d wouldn’t think that, based on the bitter bitching and griping that it wasn’t just like vBulletin or whatever it was before, despite Discourse adhering to the standards of nearly every other web app in the past decade or so.
I’m just disappointed. I don’t like seeing the board descend into grumpy old man (or woman) territory, and a lot of the technological threads and comments seem like the canaries in the coal mine.
Maybe so… but that’s kind of the same argument. Software has always been licensed not sold, and the only thing that gave the illusion that someone “owned it” was that it wasn’t technologically possible until the mid-2000s to separate the software from the installation media. So people who owned a CD with the software installer on it believed that they "owned’ the software. Which was never the case.
It just became obvious after always-on internet connections became common- publishers could enforce subscriptions, upgrades, EOLs, and the like in ways they couldn’t with physical media.
But the “own it outright” argument falls apart when there is support needed- I’m sure a non-trivial proportion of users would buy their $129 software and then gripe 15 years down the line when Microsoft says “No, we didn’t upgrade your ca. 2010 software to work with a 2025 computer.”
Software isn’t a consumable media like a book or music CD, it’s more of a living thing, in that good software is continually updated, it’s supported, and like any living thing, it eventually dies. The “own it outright” crowd don’t seem to get that all MS and the other software companies are doing is basically euthanizing their software, rather than letting it hang on out there.
I think when people are working and making a decent salary they don’t worry as much about what a software renewal costs or the latest and greatest laptop. However, once you retire and no longer have a paycheck, all of a sudden things seem to cost a lot more than they should.
I live on my Social Security and 401k savings, so paying hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a laptop or smart phone is no longer possible. I will keep using my existing technology, I have an 8-year-old Lenovo laptop and an iPhone 8 Plus, until they die and I am forced to buy a replacement. I may be old and grumpy, but don’t call me a Luddite.
Yeah, I broadly agree with the OP but the shift in software from “You own this software (license)” to “You get to use this software for a year” is a terrible one for consumers. The complaint there and desire to find an alternative is a legitimate one.
My biggest “Luddite” complaint is that everything seems to require that I add an app to my phone in order to use it. I replaced my HVAC system and the thermostat wants to be connected to my wifi and have an app on my phone so I can change the settings. I suppose this would be fine if I was away from home and wanted to have the house heated up when I got back, or wanted to monitor the thermostat settings when I’m on vacation for some reason.
Similarly, I just bought a new stove. It wants to connect to my wifi and add an app on my phone. If I want to turn the burners or the oven on, I can just as easily do so standing in my kitchen. Why do I need to be able to do it from my living room?
Not wanting to be sucked dry by rent-seeking corporate profiteers trying to ‘monetize’ every single interaction—even for things that have already been purchases, such as having to pay automakers a subscription to ise the heated seats in the car you purchases—in the same way that has already ruined the Internet with spam, selling user’s private information, intruise modal popups and autoplaying videos, et cetera, does not make one a “grumpy old luddite”. Or if it does, count me as a proud member of that group:
Software has always been licensed, not owned. That is an extremely important difference that many people do not understand. However, even with the common meaning of “own”, there is still lots of software you can buy, and then use as much as you want with no more cost.
That is only if you decide to use something that has a $129/year subscription. There are almost certainly other options, even if they not be your first choice. That is the nature of economic constraint, you have to make compromises.
They are already dead. “But they still work perfectly.” No, they don’t. They’re walking dead zombies, where the hardware still functions as well as it ever did, but the software is effectively a ghost; locked in a past and unfit for modern times. A phone or computer isn’t a thing that can be limped along by adding some oil every 1000 miles, until the transmission finally gives out. Once your preferred software is no longer receiving patches and updates, they’re on borrowed time.
I tend to agree on Computer (including Smart Phones) Hardware, OP systems and Browsers. But for non-collaborative Spreadsheets & Word Processors, I disagree. No real need to upgrade. I get why MS drops support for old Office products, but it is not dangerous.
Though using an outdated version of Outlook would be insane.
Sounds like you’re referring to @wolfpup’s compliaint while ignoring all the times he clarified what his complaint actually was. Would you complain if he was trying to keep his vintage sports car running because he didn’t want to spend a few hundred dollars on an e-bike?
I’m sick of the people who pipe up whenever anyone posts AI art to snark about how “that’s not really art, since you didn’t draw it with your own hands, and therefore you should be shamed for posting it”. Piss right off with that.
I really hate the app and QR requirements for so many things.
For instance we have been going through an extensive tech update at work. New security that requires an app to log in to my desktop. Fine.
We received new landlines which required training sessions to learn how to operate. They come with an app that needs to be downloaded by the IT department and god knows what functionality or lack thereof it will rain down upon me.
I didn’t go to the landline training. I figured out to set up my voice mail and I can dial out and answer. What else could I possibly need?
Then all of my cell phones update themselves and everything gets rearranged/renamed.
My Do Not Disturb setting changed without notice the other day. A momentary fix to understand but really?
I’ve been using tech for many, many years and have kept up with what I need to use. The landscape is getting a little cluttered these days.
I am not grumpy about it. I adjust and move on the best I can.
The other thing is that back when we were mostly a young and vibrant board, the demographics skewed to well-off. Not rich, but not scrimping.
IMO as the board has aged, and as the outer society has changed and new ways of spending time online have been invented, a lot of the better-off folks have wandered away. Leaving a large fraction of our posters being people who make ends meet. Barely. Until the car breaks down. Again. Part of the reason they preferentially stay here is the entertainment value/price ratio is so wonderful.
Whatever amount of curmudgeonly can be laid at the feet of simple aging, being skint all the time sure makes one a poor fit for hobbies like internet-connected computers that demand keeping up with the technological Joneses at the risk of being pwned by the malware.
20 years ago, it was $0. It’d cost you somewhere around that to buy it, but that isn’t the price to buy it, it’s the price to keep something that you’ve already bought.
Can you name a single other web app that uses the username as the global unique ID, instead of following the standard of user numbers (a standard that had been in place for decades, and which vBulletin knew about)? And that, in turn, meant that usernames were restricted to characters that could be used in a URL (and Discourse didn’t even use the, also standard, workaround of % character specifiers), so a lot of folks’ usernames got mangled in the transition. Which is the kind of thing that’s very visible to users, and so yes, there was a lot of griping about it.
You should be ashamed of posting AI-generated art because it is uniformly crap. It all has a similar, overly jumbled look or sound with no real sense of composition, coherence, or narrative, and aside from depriving actual human artists of work when used in a commercial application, it has been trained using the intellectual property of artists without compensation (and no, feeding an AI model digitized training data is not at all the same thing as a human artist looking at or listening to influential artists before them and interpreting their works in a way that stimulates human creativity), notwithstanding the enormous energy and ecological resources that go into the brute force training of generative AI models to produce a dull facsimile of what a human brain creates on ~25 watts.
‘Artificial intelligence’ has valid purposes but replacing human-made creativity is not a good application even if current generative AI were any good at it, which it isn’t. The creative impulse and the legitimate industry that it drives to produce novel art, music, film, literature, philosophy, science, et cetera is really what fundamentally distinguishes us from other animals; using ‘AI’ as a tool to facilitate the creation of good art is a worthy application, but supplanting or replacing it is not, especially when it is just atheistically so absolutely terrible and just serves to erode commercial support for and appreciation of human-created art.
I got old by the natural progression of the species. It beats the alternative, at least for now. As for fuddying and duddying, I’m typing this on my month-old 17" HP Envy. It wasn’t cheap, but I don’t care, I just amortize the cost like I do for most all things with a price tag. It makes sense, unless you’re buying a new car and having to take out a fucking seven year mortgage to be able to afford it. I’m done with that.
