
Then and Now: How Little Things Have Changed (2016) - kennethfriedman
http://kennethfriedman.org/thoughts/2016/then-and-now/
======
ams6110
> We are primarily using the same methods of input and the same applications
> for “productivity” as we did 20 years ago.

Longer than that. We've been using keyboards for over a century. The basic
idea of a document is centuries older still. Maybe there's nothing really
better.

~~~
imtringued
For some reason the article focuses on the solved problems and then complains
that they are still solved with the same good old solutions instead of being
completely replaced by newer solutions that might be worse at the old problems
but good at newer problems.

Keyboards have solved the problem of efficient text entry. PDFs have solved
the problem of displaying documents exactly the same way on every computer.
Written text has solved the problem of efficiently recording and passing on
information thousands of years ago.

The new solutions solve the same but slightly different problems by trading
off one aspect for another.

The touch screen is not the most efficient way of text entry and selecting 2D
points but it's the most portable. But this comes at a cost. When you use a
touchscreen your fingers obscure the screen and virtual keyboards take screen
realestate away. This is an acceptable tradeoff when you're not constantly
interacting with the computer.

The bandwidth of a human to a computer is very limited. Even very fast typist
can only transmit two words per minute or 10 bytes per second. It's not worth
it to waste 50% of you r already very limited productivity on something just
because it's new.

------
devereaux
There are a few improvements in UI and interaction. Something akin to the
touchscreen already existed 10 years ago - it was the Wacom. On 2006 era
laptops like ThinkPads, you had a Wacom behind a screen. Some of these laptops
had also a touchscreen on top of the Wacom. So not even the touchscreen is
really new.

But there have been a few genuine innovations. Personally, my favorite is the
notebook - whether from Rstudio, Mathematica, Jupyer, etc. especially when you
add dynamic widgets like D3 or maplets.

It allows not just literate programming, but quick prototyping and
verification, by integrating visualizations. Sometimes you can even embed your
datasets for replication.

I would love to see scientific publication move to notebook only - as it, I
want to download the whole thing and do some tweaks to see if I can poke any
obvious hole, or if it is genuinely interesting.

When I say the whole thing", I mean it. I do not want just the authors
verbiage and some screenshots of their tables and graphs. I want their data,
their formulas, their visualization, already implemented and ready for
tweaking without imposing any extra software dependency upon me.

~~~
kennethfriedman
OP here. Definitely some improvements... but (at least in my eyes)
incremental.

Notebooks are pretty sweet, but in the hands of very few. They're definitely
growing in popularity, which is great.

But even the "notebook" concept is a very limited "low pass filter" version of
the visions of Engelbart, AKay, TN, etc.

The video that AKay has been sharing around in the post than @dang linked
to[0] is a great example of what's not-even-close to possible on today's
systems.

[0][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnrlSqtpOkw&feature=youtu.be&t=135)

~~~
devereaux
(sorry on my first sentence I wanted to write "very few" \- I gave the example
of the Wacom to show that touchscreen were nothing new, and in fact quite
incremental changes)

I agree the notebook concept is still quite limited. I just see it as a step
in the right direction.

And great video BTW, thanks a lot for the link!

------
markbnj
I don't see why this should necessarily be surprising or viewed as a bad
thing. We've been using essentially the same controls to operate motor
vehicles for over 100 years. Sometimes the market evolves these things to a
point where they work as well as possible, or at least better than anything
else we can envision.

------
dang
Since the topics are related, maybe this is a good place to note that there
are some excellent discussions with Alan Kay happening right now at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15261691).
Fine Saturday reading abounds.

------
Animats
Microsoft Word supports dynamic content. That's what Object Linking and
Embedding is all about, and that dates back to the 1990s. Unfortunately, that
only works within the Microsoft world.

What's changed since 1998? Media consumption. That works much better. You can
watch just about anything, from live sports to porn, on any reasonably capable
device, if you pay the bills. That covers the use case for about 80% of the
population.

------
dogruck
When you read something like Programming Pearls by Jon Bently, it's startling
how similar the ye old problems were to today. For example, his article might
mention, "So, we built a system that had to store geographical data by
latitude and longitude, and we only had blah blah of memory....".

The machines have changed but, remarkably, the root problems are the same.

------
foobarbecue
But how have little things changed?

------
red_admiral
This article sounds poorly researched to me - examples:

    
    
      * He doesn’t have any interest in learning to program, so he doesn’t attempt to create new things with computers.
    

AppleScript has been around for a while now - and since OS X you have a full
UNIX system with terminal too. Johnny may just be a consumer, but Doris
Developer has a mac too.

    
    
      * The desktop paradigm has been around in the 1984 Mac — it’s time to re-think interfaces at just about every level.
    

It's not like this hadn't been tried (GNOME 3, Ubuntu, Windows Vista/8/10,
iPad "home"/"apps" screen, google's mobile-optmised interface guidelines). I
would hazard a guess that for productive work, the keyboard/mouse/desktop
interface is actually pretty good.

    
    
      * But there’s nothing inherent about the precision of a mouse that makes it better for content creation.
    

For programming, I've yet to see any input device that beats a keyboard. For
tasks from photo/image editing where sometimes I want 1-pixel precision to
games (mostly strategy) to 3D modelling, my experience is that a good mouse is
miles better than any touch interface I've seen so far, precisely because of
its precision.

    
    
      * [Word] allows people to create single document (that can’t connect to other documents).
    

I'm pretty sure "master documents" have been around for ages, templates even
longer and you can certainly manage a bibliography database shared between
different documents in recent versions.

    
    
      * The documents must be static, you can’t have any data-driven content 
    

I will grant that it's not the easiest thing to use, but various forms of OLE
and ODBC have been around since about the Windows 3.1 era. Embedding videos
and sounds in powerpoint presentations is really common too.

    
    
      * It’s clear: people see the need for new interfaces, and lots of research is being done. Why isn’t any of it hitting the mainstream? I have no idea. Let’s find out, let’s make it happen.
    

I don't see the need for new interfaces just for the sake of it and a lot of
the experiments I've seen over the past years haven't exactly been
improvements. It's got to the point where there's a free program called
"classic start menu" that gets you the older menu back on newer versions of
Windows, or Linux Mint the USP of which is at least for me "like ubuntu but
WITHOUT the new interface".

The change from toolbars to ribbons in office also "hit the mainstream" (I
think on balance this was a positive change, but I miss the old Control-
Shift-V for "paste without formatting".)

~~~
glyphy17
Deja Ubuntu still Kinda SUcks Again

I fry my AMD black edition 965 x4 and motherboard 64 bit.Was content staying
with Ubuntu 15.10 since it allowed my obsolete AMD video card to work while
subsequent editions didn't.

Relegated to my HP mini 1116NR with two MB ram I got the resident XP 32 bit
running pretty zippy. But I wanted my Ubuntu back so I went and installed
Ubuntu 17 and then 16 but neither of them made running my onboard Broadcom
modem possible.

I try 15.10 and the modem works flawlessly at installation and thereafter.WTF?
Why am I screwing with modems years after that was no longer a problem.

Fine. But now Ubuntu 32 bit is slogging along barely working and after digging
it appears to be the if you plug in USB stuff IRQ/9-acpi goes nuts on the
processor and virtual processor on the N270 Intel chip and takes up %100 of
the cpu so nothing works. No apparent work around works shutting off acpi and
others so I unplug the USB hub...

But still performance sucks. It turns out that COMPIZ is eating to much cpu as
well. Support the new desktop and the crappy guess what you want search for
applications and other crap menu shit thing that has all thosefilters and tie
ins to services...which I ignore and install classic menu instead all the time
anyway...

So then I install the Xubunt Desktop log out log into it and that goes
flawlessly. My machine humble 32 bit mini is able to function fairly
well...although consigned to obsolete browsers since my platform is only 32
bit it takes some tweaks to get Firefox and CHromium to perform adequately.

So obliged to head back to a small ram 32 bit machine on Ubuntu if you move
past 15.10 you are screwed. And old bugs aren't fixed. And Modems start not to
work all over again. And Compiz Desktop can't funtion without being a hog on
the CPU and who really needs it anyway with that crap guess what you need
search menu thing.

And systemd or not Ubuntu has gone the wrong way and as a desktop has no
backward compatibility and past 15.10 it can't run a broadcom modem in 32 bit.

And deja vu all over again it doesn't work out of the box and one is jumping
through hoops to make Ubuntu work because the latest versions are for people
that have the latest hardware i.e. money and its not desktop software but some
sorta everything pseudo phone software that is not even forward compatible
with a damn Broadcom modem.

So things haven't changed when things that once worked don't anymore.

