Look back in sorrow. Modern tech's cool, but many things used to be so very much better than now.

[liam_on_linux]

I love my Android phone in some ways - what it can do is wonderful. The formfactor of my Nokia E90 was better in every single way, though. Give the Nokia a modern CPU, replace its silly headphone socket, MiniUSB port & Nokia charging port with a standard jack & a MicroUSB, make the internal screen a touchscreen, and I would take your arm off in my

Comments

[geoffcampbell]

I think your attitude to life, or at least to technology, is extremely unhealthy.

If you want progress, things change. Not all of those changes will be 100% aligned with what you want. So learn to adapt, and open your eyes, and you will see that, in fact, we are light years ahead of where we were in the '90s. In pretty much every case you list, the old system was just crap compared to what we have now, and the only way you could write that list was by cherry-picking some largely irrelevant bits, making things up, and completely ignoring the huge advances that have been made.

Adapt or die, dinosaur!

GJC

[liam_on_linux]

I am busily trying to get the hell out of a business that I increasingly feel has been sprinting down a blind alley for 3-4 decades and is now rapidly approaching the large, solid brick wall at the end

[geoffcampbell]

OK, let's play the game by your rules.

Given 3-4 decades of development *exactly* as you would have liked, what would we have now? Try and keep it feasible rather than Science Fiction, or I shall feel sorry that I indulged you, and neither of us want that.

GJC

[liam_on_linux]

How exactly is that going to help? This was not an exercise in speculation about nonexistent tech. It was one in surveying opinion about what seem to me to be missed opportunities.

But all I am getting from you is abuse, basically. "You're stupid! It's great! Everything in the garden is lovely! This is the best of all possible worlds! Why would you want anything else?"

[steer]

Your networking stuff is totally all over the place there. You start off with the idea that everything's getting worse but your main issue is that TCP/IP is not something you like -- it's the oldest one on your list. Also it's the only one on your list providing end to end global scaling. (NetBeui? Relevance here apart from that it's somewhere on the stack -- usually above TCP/IP). Could you build a global internet from IPX/SPX? You're not comparing apples and oranges here, you're comparing apples, an orchard, machinery to pick the apples and deliver them to customers, with oranges

[liam_on_linux]

I studied up on IPv6 in 2011 for my short-lived role with appiChar.

Yes, I *am* in part thinking of the mess of competing standards for tunnelling 6 over 4 and so on, but I disagree that this should be considered separately. There was a *lot* of time to sort this stuff out in advance. It was not done well.

NetBEUI used to be a protocol, before it was an API layer. No, it was not suitable for large networks, but you know what? Very few networks are large networks. Most of them are very small. This is something the folk behind IP didn't assimilate into their thinking, so instead of a big IPv6 network, we have millions of small IPv4 networks behind NAT and it all works fine. All the panic about running out of addresses was bogus, based on a profound misunderstanding of how actual real-world networks are used.

I could say much the same about Netware 4, or indeed about ActiveDirectory.

[steer]

There was a *lot* of time to sort this stuff out in advance.

In advance of *what*? In what world could it be done properly? There's no silver bullet here?

NetBEUI used to be a protocol, before it was an API layer.

I'm confused by your terms here. NetBEUI is a protocol which lives at a particular OSI layer.

This is something the folk behind IP didn't assimilate into their thinking

Their first network was two machines... it just grew. They scaled up the protocol as things broke.

we have millions of small IPv4 networks behind NAT and it all works fine.

It sort of does yes. I agree.

All the panic about running out of addresses was bogus, based on a profound misunderstanding of how actual real-world networks are used.I think the misunderstanding is yours. A lot of customers want an IPv4 address... fixed and working. If I set up a business, this is what I want. So I set up my business, I go looking for a provider and I say "I want a static IPv4 address please. This is not a problem because the ISP has a few left and if

[liam_on_linux]

I am no Jon Postel or Vint Cerf. I do not know how the upgrade of IPv4 could have been done better. However, 6 was spun as being simpler than 4 and the reverse is actually true

[steer]

With windows/office, they're all more or less acceptable after 1998. The one you like is most likely the one you spent most time with. I don't like the more recent versions of Word because I don't use them much so I don't know where the buttons are. I use Win 7 more than Vista and XP so I know wehre everything is.

Incidentally, I had the only trouble free windows install of my life yesterday -- and it was windows 7 via a USB stick, sucked there by Dell backup restore magic and then piped into VMWare via ubuntu. But you know what, it was done in 2 hours with only 3 reboots. Almost Ubuntu good. I'd almost be tempted to say Win 7 was ready for desktop use.

[liam_on_linux]

Sure, Windows installation is getting better. Sadly, the UI isn't. Even MS recognises this and has started removing chrome from it. Unfortunately, they have also introduced a whole new type of chrome instead sitting uneasily side-by-side...

[steer]

That's my point... the UI is what it is, love it or ignore it. You like the one you use the most but they're all pretty much the same for ten years and any major change is interpreted as brokenness. (e.g. Office introduces ribbon, people using previous version hate ribbon, Windows 8 introduced new interface, people used to old interface hate it.)

MS is at the point where any major interface redesign is reviled -- so from 98 to windows 7 it's all been repainting the same stuff. That's not a sign things are getting worse... it is a sign things aren't getting better.

[liam_on_linux]

I will concede this one, in the case of Office

[steer]

Android -- if you don't like the form factor the same applies if you don't like jabbing sharpened spikes in your eyes -- don't do that then. There's a lot of form factors out there. Fewer if, like me, you want a physical keyboard, but you've still got a heck of a lot of choice... if you're willing to go to a separate PDA and phone solution with tethering then you've got the world of tablets, phablets and combination tablet+keyboard to explore from bargain bucket to costing the earth

[liam_on_linux]

I do want a physical keyboard. I also want a high-spec high-end phone. I can't have both.

I do take your point about customisability, tweakability and so on, although TBH I never did as much of it as you apparently did. But actually, in part, these days, I hanker for something that Just Works. I've spent 30y playing with computers for fun.

To quote "Bad Willow": Bored now.

I want whizzy intelligent C21 gadgets. I do not want Unix and filesystems and mount points and internal versus external storage and partitioning. But that's what I get.

[steer]

If you want whizzy high end gadgets that just work then they'll always be a bit dull because they're ubiquitous. Everyone has them, everyone can work them. You're never going to get the buzz of being the only kid on the block with a toy which can do X. The reason those old school gadgets were cool is that you could make them do stuff "for the first time"... android feels a bit boring because it does pretty much everything ubiquitously well and everyone has one.

Yes, you have prioritised other things over form factor... though to me the specs of the droid 4 aren't sufficiently worse than the note ii that I would have suffered the form factor -- but you make your choice.

[geoffcampbell]

Um, Bluetooth or USB keyboards are supported on pretty much all high-end phones.

GJC

[waistcoatmark]

In some cases (proper keyboards on phones, linux netbooks) there's just a lack of market. It sucks, but what can you do.

In other cases, things that were elegantly simple and appeal to N people, need more features/ greater scalability in order to appeal to 10N people. Whether the cost in elegance is too much varies from person to person

And in other cases you're outright wrong :-) NetBEUI outright sucked: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/05/12/416846.aspx

[liam_on_linux]

What can you do? Make a broader variety of devices, rather than everyone blindly copying Apple.

As for NetBEUI etc. - well, see my comment to steer above. As a comment in that very thread you cite points out, there /were/ seriously big scalable networks in those days, using perfectly scalable protocols of the day

[steer]

We have actually seen a net /loss/ of scalability in many ways at many levels and layers of the system.

Are you crazy? These days if I want to build a system which can serve a database and a web front end to a million daily visitors then give me a few thousand and a few months and you've got it. I won't need to hire anyone or do anything that clever because I know what to do. I won't even have to buy myself a new laptop. The network has never been so flexible and scaleable.

If I want to meld a dozen computers together into a cluster in my flat for fun, I can do that too and it's easy.

What are you trying to do that doesn't scale?

(Oh and whenever I did anything involving netbeui I got serious fear from it.)

[liam_on_linux]

The question I am trying to ask here is not "are modern networks scalable?" It is "are modern systems - hardware, software, OSes, stacks, applications - relatively speaking more or less scalable or powerful or flexible than their equivalents were decades ago