Even though the main article has a lot of drivel about the old days, there are things we have lost.

As an EMACS user, I really do hate it that other editors and readers (e.g. adobe reader) don't let me view multiple sections of a document at one time. Lately, Adobe Reader on linux seems to have adopted a "feature" that if I open up a second copy of a document, it instead just brings the window of the first copy to the front, so I can't even use that to work around the lack of multiple views of a single file. (I think I found a way around that problem, I just can't remember what it was.)

It used to be in unix you would run one process for one task. Now it has become popular to run one process to manage many GUI windows; instead of an Xterm process per window, we have one gnome terminal process handling all terminal windows. When that process dies, you lose all your terminal windows. The same thing applies to browsers: Why do I lose all my windows when the browser crashes instead of just one? Because they couldn't implement proper file locking to allow multiple proceses to access the .mozilla directory?

And the NFS / NIS multiple workstations with a single home directory used to just work, and was expected to work. fvwm was fine. But now Gnome has decided it doesn't have to handle multiple versions of Gnome (from workstations with different software installed) accessing ~/.gnome*. It even is screwy if you are only logged in one place at a time but switch between workstations of the same version of Gnome but radically different screen resolutions. If I log in on a lab machine, firefox won't start because my default profile is still in use back at my desk!

Not so long ago, Gnome went on a "simplify everything" spree, removing features left and right. Among other things, I dearly miss edge flipping, where you move the mouse cursor past the edge of the screen to change desktops. So much so that I go through the hoops of installing a non-standard window manager to get around it. Even though I don't know who Dean Johnson is and can't remember where I got the quote from, I found he agreed with me, and I've had a quote from him in my rotation of random email .sigs ever since:

"The ONLY thing that I really miss is mouse edge flipping and I will punch Havoc the next time I see him for that." -- Dean Johnson

The original point is not incorrect. There are channels you can tune in using an antenna, for free. A subset of those channels (until the analog cutoff in the US anyway) are digital, and a subset of the digital channels are HD.

So there are free HD channels using an antenna. I watched the olympics and the superbowl in HD for free, and I'm not exactly a sports fan.

I can't tell you how many times I've turned on the TV, and used rewind on tivo to go back to the begining of what's currently showing.

I'd prefer SSD (that is, a version of it that doesn't wear out too quickly for this purpose) for the live TV buffer.