Post by hikari 🌟 (fell out of the sky), @hikari@noyu.me

hikari 🌟 (fell out of the sky) @hikari

lamented to a friend how full installs of software are increasingly a thing of the past, and this is terrible for software preservation among other things

1990's: your harddisk is tiny, we'll install only the essentials, keep the CD handy for playing the game or (for software) for installing extra stuff later
2000's: your harddisk is huge, we'll install everything, we'll even install the installer, you'll never need the disk again outside of catastrophic circumstances, but hold onto your product key
2010's: you have internet access, we'll install only the essentials and download the rest whenever we feel like it, maybe never, pray the servers never go down

Published: Jul 12, 2025, 13:42
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hikari 🌟 (fell out of the sky) @hikari

and following on from that, the tragedy of what happened to “online help”

ok there's this really funny demonstration of this
the phrase “online help” does not originally mean *internet website* help
it means the manual or part of it is available on the computer in digital form
in 1990's computer software you see “online help” quite a bit, it was a completely offline thing that was installed with the software or kept on the CD
in the 2020's a lot of software's “online help” is in fact *online* in the modern sense
so good luck if you lose your internet access and need to look up how to fix your internet access in the online help
this particular thing bothers me tremendously because there's no real excuse for it
text takes up *so* little space
the entire documentation for a piece of software probably takes up less than 10% or even less than 1% as much as the software itself, depending on exactly how bloated it is

Published: Jul 12, 2025, 13:54
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🗦new🗧 FireFly @firefly@frogs.lgbt

@hikari . o O ( documentation can be simultaneously online (active), inline (not standalone) and offline (not internet-dependent) )

Published: Jul 12, 2025, 14:12
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R @r@glauca.space

@firefly @hikari "classic visual studio dot net intellisense" my beloved

Published: Jul 12, 2025, 14:21
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social.noyu.me

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