• 1 Post
  • 19 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: September 11th, 2023
  • aredditimmigrant@endlesstalk.orgtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Which album was a band's creative zenith/magnum opus before falling off?
    5·
    9 months ago

    More popular, more commercially successful, and more accessible to casual fans. Agreed.

    But for magnum opus, I gotta agree with the wall for a few reasons

    1. They made a movie out of it
    2. The ode to the intense para social relationships that revolve around stardom and how a truly crazy creative can take advantage of it in scary ways was not only true back then, but predictive of how much worse it would get in current time.
    3. DSotM always seemed like a lot of good ideas in an unordered list. I felt like they could be scrambled and the album would be similar, except for the first and last songs… Meanwhile the wall tells a story of pain, alienation, search for meaning, lashing out, and then a quest for self-forgiveness.
  • aredditimmigrant@endlesstalk.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.world•What DID Apple innovate?English
    42·
    11 months ago

    Seamless integration has been around since the first real-time chatrooms though. Again, just making a better UI

    For phone calls that’s just VoIP which was around waaaaayyy before the iPhone, Skype was doing something similar in the consumer geek market in 2004/5. They just brought it to the big consumer market, and again, made it 1000x easier to do.

  • aredditimmigrant@endlesstalk.orgtoTechnology@lemmy.world•What DID Apple innovate?English
    881·
    11 months ago

    There’s an old saying in computing. “you improve usability by taking away options and features” apple didn’t necessarily invent this mindset. But they perfected it.

    They took BSD, a security focused, but not very user friendly, offshoot of Linux/unix and made it “popular” by adding several layers of polish and doing a lot of the configuration work for you and made it osx. This was a time when Linux usability/management on the personal/newbie scale was garbage. If you wanted to install a certain distro of *nix, you better make sure you have supporting hardware and the right up to date tutorial, which is managed by an unknown volunteer, which was usually some person bored on the weekend a few months ago and never updated, they’ve made *nix installation and management a lot better though recently.

    They also did this with music. People used to have large collections of unorganized mp3s in the early 00s, unless you were really anal and had a lot of time in your hands, because you were likely downloading them from several different illegal places, and legally buying mp3s were all over the place. You could buy the album off this weird obscure website that you didn’t want to trust with your CC information, because there were a lot of mom and pop music stores online. Then apple brought out iTunes and allowed both buying and managing (and eventually upgrading, traveling around with) music to be dead simple.

    For smartphones, they stole a LOT from BlackBerry, but they took it to the next level. Blackberry had email, a private messaging network, and mobile web scrolling waayyyy before anyone. And so many people loved it so much that even Obama famously didn’t want to give his up when he took office. Then apple came out with the iPhone, and blew it away with a bigger screen and again, a lot more polish.

    Innovation happens in small steps over years. Apple didn’t invent mobile phones, smart phones, tablets, or computing, they didn’t invent security, encrypted audio/video calls, or music management. They’ve done a lot of crappy stuff, and they charge super high amounts of money for less than state of the art hardware. Their innovation could be summed up by this profound statement I remember a friend said to me once around 2003/4.

    “Osx, because making Linux pretty was easier than fixing Windows”

  • aredditimmigrant@endlesstalk.orgtoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Tech workers - what did your IT Security team do that made your life hell and had no practical benefit?
    31·
    1 year ago

    Worked at a medium sized retail startup as a software engineer where we didn’t have root access to our local laptops, under the guise of “if you fuck it up we won’t be able to fix it” but we only started out with a basic MacBook setup. so every time I wanted to install a tool, ide, or VM I had to make a ticket to IT to come and log in with the password and explain what I was doing.

    Eventually, the engineering dept bribed an IT guy to just give us the password and started using it. IT MGMT got pissed when the number of tickets dropped dramatically and realized what was going on.

    We eventually came to the compromise that they gave us sudo access with the warning “we’re not backing anything up. If you mess up we’ll have to factory reset the whole machine”. Nobody ever had to factory reboot their machine because we weren’t children… And if there was an issue we just fixed it ourselves