I have a retail copy of Photoshop 7 I bought decades ago with hard earned money. A full copy of Photoshop then was hundreds of dollars. I still use it to this day.
I learned Photoshop well enough back in the day to do cool stuff and make a few bucks on the side doing graphic design. I'm not a professional graphic designer at all so it never made sense for me to get on the version treadmill. Even today it does everything I need and more.
Adobe got paid for the work they did. I've gotten incredible value out of my purchase since I've used it so long and the cost has amortized over decades.
Subscriptions imply change. I don't necessarily want change. If I buy something that suits my needs...it already suits my needs. Adding more shit isn't necessarily a boon. Changing the behavior or look with a new update is infuriating. This is especially true of complex software that takes time to learn.
For a developer selling a subscription the strategy of locking up data is entirely rational. They'll keep getting money no matter what they do because they're holding my data hostage. It's a model I have no interest in.
Even better is when they decide to shut down or get bought out. If the subscription shuts down there's no amount of money I can pay to get it back.
I don't know what you mean, I mean I made a million dollars with only a small hundred million dollar loan from my dad! This sort of entrepreneurship is available to anyone in America.¹
It is astonishing to me just how bad end user software has gotten over the past twenty years. It's just goofballs. It's not like that point was when software started requiring more resources, the "What Andy giveth Bill taketh" aphorism was coined in the 90s after all. Software gets complicated over time. Every bug fix or added input validation or whatever adds code. That's fine and appropriate. Convenience and integrity add code/complexity. That's not what I find so bothersome.
I find 2006 an interesting horizon. It was then that the average home computer massively jumped in processing power compared to the software running on it. For the vast majority of users the computer spent more idle time waiting for input than users waited for output. Of course for some users there's never enough power but for most all of their tasks were effectively instant. Even heavyweight (for the time) stacks like Java ran incredibly well. He'll even Emacs could run well!
Then the curve seemed to invert. Hardware kept getting more capable with even faster CPUs, more cores (on common consumer machines, and more RAM. As the article points out a "lightweight" Linux DE with native apps really flies on such hardware.
But more development seemed to move to the web. More JavaScript required more powerful JS engines and those are up more and more memory. More shit loaded into the DOM means more and more objects on the heap with more pointer chasing.
Modern stacks are really only fast because modern computers brute force their way through them. A simple CRUD type task that fly as a VB or Delphi (neither stack performance kings) app on Windows 2000 now requires a 2GHz dual core CPU with 4GB of RAM as a baseline thanks to it now being a web app.
Using a twenty old machine with native applications and the CLI feels to me like a super computer compared to the computers I first used (Apple IIs). A Core 2 Duo is a stupidly powerful CPU for most tasks. If you can get by with a command line workflow even a Core 2 Duo is crazy fast.
Except no one will be able to afford those laptops. The hyperscalers will buy up literally all the RAM and high power GPUs. So you'll be stuck with 8GB of unified memory on anything affordable. A laptop of better capability will cost 50% more than today (at least). That won't be your biggest problem because some C-suite goon with stars in their eyes laid you off because of AI.
Which requires them to explicitly ask your age outside the bounds of qualification for a job (over 18 etc). Which ends up opening them to age discrimination lawsuits.
You'd be right if ISPs didn't do mass DPI and modification of pages to inject their own ads and trackers. They also routinely hijack and intercept DNS responses. They absolutely cannot be trusted carrying unencrypted traffic.
> People are bad with computers because "Designers" have been objectively value negative for decades. Instead of paying attention to the reams of scientific data that tells you exactly how to make a UI better, they smoke crack and make things transparent.
I've run into a lot of "UI designers" that were just graphic designers that lucked out getting a job in a software company. They design and compose the UI for static screenshots like they would do a 2D graphic composition. Far too often they'd hand off Photoshop PSDs they would expect a developer to turn into an actual UI. They don't follow a HIG document or respond to any pushback with "you have to know when to break the rules" (they do not know when to break the rules). A good UI designer is worth their weight in gold. In my experience most are worth their weight in very low grade playground sand.
Flash as an animation tool vs Flash as a web development tool are two very different discussions. There's overlap and they're related but still separate.
Flash was very interesting as an animation tool because it was at its core a vector drawing animation tool. All the scripting components were icing on the cake allowing automation of things that's incredibly tedious in traditional animation.
The fast vector animations made Flash very useful for web distribution. That's all well and good. But as it became the go-to for interactive websites the structure of Flash was antithetical to the web. Deep links became meaningless and content became locked behind Flash. Adobe was also a terrible steward of Flash and only put effort into Flash for Windows. Every other platform was an also-ran for them and the Flash experience was terrible.
The security of Flash was a bad joke on top of it all.
As an animation tool and delivery vector for interactive content beyond the abilities of browsers of the era it was useful. As the front end of the web it was an awful mess.
I set up an isolated network on my LAN with its own WAP to play with my old devices that don't support WPA. I don't leave it on all the time and the network segmentation limits any blast damage. Works well since I have so much old crap with early WiFi.
Including but not limited to dual gigabit Ethernet (on a PCIe bus), NVMe slots, and a capable power supply is included in the box.
I lucked out having bought a few N95 mini PCs a few years ago. They were even cheaper then with 16GB of RAM out of the box. To me they're vastly superior to the various RPis I replaced.
I sold off my Pi 4s and never bothered with the 5s. I kept my mix of older Pis for projects that need GPIO and of those my Pi Zeros are the ones that really get used.
Online services most assuredly billed by the minute. He'll, AOL had a huge marketing campaign offering "free" minutes for new customers. You might also have charges from the phone company but those were independent of the online service charges. It wasn't until the late 90s the major online services went to flat rate "unlimited" plans.
For me and most people I knew at the time, VHS didn't have a noticeable quality loss over broadcast unless you were watching LP/EP recordings.
Many TVs people already had in the 80s didn't have RCA connections so VCRs were connected via twin lead to F connector adapters. They had the same noise as the antenna or cable input. So your commercial tapes usually looked about as good as broadcast. If you actually read the instructions with your VCR to set the timing correctly recorded broadcasts in SP mode also tended to look pretty good.
In absolute terms the VHS video was worse than the original broadcast but on the TVs we had it was hard to notice.
This definitely changed through the 90s. Larger and brighter tubes made the deficiencies of VHS more noticeable. Moving to cable TV from antenna was also very noticeable and made VHS quality more apparent.
If you happened to see a LaserDisc video as a comparison to VHS then the quality difference was stark. As much as VHS and DVD by the late 90s and early 00s. However I think that direct comparison was out of reach for most people.
While DDR3 is cheaper it's still tripled or quadrupled in price over the past two years. I just bought a pair or sticks for an old Mac Pro and it was 4x what i paid just a few years ago.