Technological doom

[kitchin]

Does anyone else feel like they're working harder to maintain increasingly complex systems, while users increasingly expect things to "just work" ?

Is technology actually breaking down and starting to fail everywhere, while the end users think it's all getting better?

I have client on a local cloud hosting service (obviously leasing from a big provider). It's not powerful enough to run a moderately complex Wordpress with low traffic. Yet tech support claims there is no more powerful instance, it's one size fits all. That kind of thing.

[Wassercrats]

And didn't all web based companies used to accept email correspondence? I'm having a dispute with Ebay and my cell phone company and neither does. Ebay doesn't even provide a postal mail address. I couldn't even select the entire chat session with T-Mobile to paste it somewhere. I had to tell the guy "one second" while I took two screen shots of the little text area from the last part of the discussion so I'd have it for a BBB complaint. And remember the recommendations for how many seconds it should take a webpage to load? My current computer has more of everything yet webpages load slower (particularly news sites) and the Esc key doesn't stop them from loading. And you have to be lucky to be able to select and copy what you want without half the page being selected with it. And the text is even smaller! It was too small even 10 years ago and higher resolution didn't just increase the resolution, it made everything smaller!

[kitchin]

News sites are loaded with redundant javascript libraries for ads and other features. A few years ago I measured the NYT and it was something live 250K of javascript.

Also jquery animations use a really tight loop, tens of milliseconds, by default. If you get a few of those running on a moderately old laptop, you can hear then fan go on and responsiveness starts to crawl.

[Kevin]

A good RSS reader makes internet news much easier to deal with. I use Liferea.