11 ms·

Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016. The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store). Personal co

Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016. The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store). Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice. I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even. I'll be fine as long as my old machines survive - but how are businesses going to produce mass market software when all the popular hardware is locked down? Just to pick an arbitrary example - how does a project like Bitcoin take off when all we have are tivoized devices that won't run un"trusted" code? The community of a few hundred hardware hackers isn't big enough. Not only that, despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots. It's a deliberate design decision to force the use of the network. The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What's the next step?

Karunamon 11y ago
ME is one thing (though given the hoops one must jump through to set it up, I'm inclined to believe most of the vitriol directed at it is the paranoid FUD variety), ..but secure boot? What possible reason could you have for being against a system that prevents bootkits from pwning your machine? You can load your own keys and boot whatever OS you want on all but a tiny subset of appliance-like locked down hardware nobody cares about. In general, code signing is a Good Thing, so long as the control remains in the hands of the user.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  "..but secure boot? What possible reason could you have for being against a system that prevents bootkits from pwning your machine?" The fact that I can do the same thing with firmware on a cheap ROM write-protected with a jumper. Additionally, the fact that there's competing I.P. in FOSS and corporate sectors for firmware that does trustworthy boot while leaving what's allowed in my control. "In general, code signing is a Good Thing, so long as the control remains in the hands of the user." With Microsoft and Intel style secure boot, it remains in the hands of Microsoft and Intel. And so on. Which is why we're against it.
  - Karunamon 11y ago
    The fact that I can do the same thing with firmware on a cheap ROM write-protected with a jumper Except secure boot isn't about firmware, it's about the code loaded on DASDs. >With Microsoft and Intel style secure boot, it remains in the hands of Microsoft and Intel. As long as you can program your own keys into it, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion.
    - dsp1234 11y ago
      As long as you can program your own keys into it Is this not the definition of gatekeeper? A system where you have to ask permission, but that permission is always granted is inherently different from a system where no permission is ever needed. Among other things, that permission can be revoked at any time for any reason.
      - nickpsecurity 11y ago
        "Among other things, that permission can be revoked at any time for any reason." BOOM! They can charge you for it and they can revoke it. Many companies did "open" platforms or software that later closed things off. Plus, they get more information about you than they even need. So, we can choose between a security standard that's in our control or theirs. And by theirs, we're talking about companies with a history of real scumbaggery. The design should default to us with no asking for permission. Numerous ones in CompSci and I.P. markets can do that. No excuse except Microsoft and Intel's profits and schemes.
      - Karunamon 11y ago
        but that permission is always granted is inherently different from a system where no permission is ever needed. Indeed. And that system, the one we've been using for a few decades leaves you vulnerable to bootkits in such a way that you'll never know you've been owned. The PKI has to have a trust root anchored somewhere for the concept to work, and it can be anchored under your control using your keys.
        11y ago
doctorshady 11y ago
Couldn't agree more. One of the really annoying things about the mass popularization of tech is we seem to always choose the sexier products over the more practical ones. On the hobbyist side of things, I wonder what it would take to get like, say, a kit ATX motherboard developed; one with modular parts that could gradually be upgraded or repaired over time, and designed to last at least a decade or two.
- HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
  Buy an old PC-XT motherboard and you'll have essentially that, except for the form factor.
- anexprogrammer 11y ago
  It's always been the software. VHS beat Beta, both beat V2000. V2000 was the best quality by far. VHS took a long time to get close. VHS had the most films. Same with PCs - the software done it. MS Office, Wordperfect, etc. Lots of more interesting, more sexy machines in the market became also-rans. I'm glad cars never quite got to the same homogeneity or we'd all be driving a Datsun Sunny or something equally horrific. I wish the market had settled for 5 or 6 different PC / phone / chip architectures, as I think the progress would have been more interesting, and much much further. Damnit Motorola should have kept making 680x0s, they were much nicer than Intels to program.
  - dognotdog 11y ago
    > I'm glad cars never quite got to the same homogeneity or we'd all be driving a Datsun Sunny or something equally horrific. Well, cars are incredibly homogenous ( https://medium.com/swlh/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d#.mu5k6xfki https://medium.com/swlh/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d#.mu5k... ) Some niche markets exist, but 98% of what's being bought is a completely interchangeable middle ground compromise, made by huge companies that are only looking at maximizing short term profits, without care for technological, economic, or sociological advancement. In every industry that requires large up-front costs for economic mass production, this is true. Hopefully, 3D printing and its sister technologies will make manufacturing many things on a smaller scale more affordable, and disperse the (mass-) consumer-producer dichotomy once again, in favour of local on-demand production of everyday items. Only with such a level and flexible playing field can you expect innovation to thrive: if it becomes affordable to buy (or create) the best tool for the job, instead of relying on mass-produced mediocrity because one-off items increase one or two orders of magnitude more in cost than in marginal utility.
jerf 11y ago
"Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016." I've often thought all web search engines would be considered grotesquely illegal if they hadn't been there since the beginning, but only started today. It is at times a fragile existence as it is even so.
- CamperBob2 11y ago
  Same with public libraries, for that matter. Can you imagine the hue and cry that the major publishers would raise if someone were just now suggesting buying one copy of a book for the express purpose of lending it to hundreds of readers? Or worse, having the government pay for it? They'd be burning up the telephone lines to Washington and hiring lobbyists by the trainload.
  - gist 11y ago
    Yes but there is enough friction with public libraries that that was never an issue. Also noting that many expensive books (or directories) have a market in selling to public libraries. Plus remember that only one person can take out a book at one time (unless multiple copies) and books take time to read so the impact is not the same as with digital works (you have to get to the library to take the book out and there are limits to how many you can borrow is another factor).
  - Matt3o12_ 11y ago
    Just imagine how big their outcry would be if it was new thatyou could lend a friend your book by just giving it to them in person. Now suddenly he and his friends will not buy that book and read its content for free. That would also be considered piracy and surely forbidden as well. Some digital laws are just ridiculous.
- growt 11y ago
  You're right. In germany there is a law called "Leistungsschutzrecht" that makes it illegal to publish snippets of news stories of the big publishing houses especially in search results such as google news. After some months the publishers realised that now they weren't getting as much pageviews as before (go figure) and granted google an exclusive license to publish their stuff. So now there is a law that would require any new search engine to make deals with every major newspaper in germany. On the other hand we do not have such a thing as fair use, so I imagine that image search is an endless ongoing lawsuit in germany, as every image thumbnail is illegal publishing of copyrighted material.
542458 11y ago
What is there in Bitcoin that requires running untrusted code?
- iMerNibor 11y ago
  Think they were talking about "untrusted" as in not reviewed by/available in an "app store"
  - 542458 11y ago
    Okay, but I'm still not getting it. I mean, what's keeping anybody from getting their bitcoin wallet or miner on an app store? The Apple OSX app store has at least one wallet on it. (Not that I agree with the "lock down everything" approach tech companies are taking, that is.)
    - stegosaurus 11y ago
      The article is specifically talking about the 'next Netflix'. I'm talking here about the 'next Bitcoin'. Perhaps the current one is fine. What about the one after that? What about the 'Bitcoin' that launches in 20 years? Do we have any mass market free platforms left then? Workstations may always exist - servers may always exist - but right now, the masses have general purpose computers on their desks, in their messenger bags. I want that to last.
    - morganvachon 11y ago
      I think it's more to do with the creation of cryptocurrencies in the first place, not just using them. A thin client with no level of user control (i.e. everything you do with it is managed on servers controlled by your provider) cannot be used to create something as low level as a cryptocurrency, or indeed any form of low level development. Of course, this kind of thing is why we will always have some form of generic, user-managed-hardware market. If you take away the tools used to create the apps and services controlled by the gatekeepers, you won't have any apps and services. To put it another way, Apple doesn't want to be responsible for creating the millions of apps in their store, they just want to be the ones in control of those apps. The workstation is not going away.
JTon 11y ago
> The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store) So true. You can sideload on Android though. So all is not lost.
- stegosaurus 11y ago
  I can. You can. The general public can whilst the 'allow untrusted sources' box exists. But once that box goes, the vast majority of the audience for software outside of Google Play is gone. F-Droid is already tiny as it stands!
- coroutines 11y ago
  I think what OP is talking about is even though we know how to get over the walls of these gardens, the average user would not. :(
- Falcon9 11y ago
  And with Xcode 7 you can deploy apps to your iOS devices with a free dev account.
  - khedoros 11y ago
    Which is fine, but if I write a piece of software that I want to distribute outside of the app store, then everyone that wants to install it needs their own Mac, right? I don't think that's quite comparable to side-loading, which can be done from the device itself, without any external account or hardware.
    - vbezhenar 11y ago
      There's nothing magical in Mac. iOS apps use standard cryptographic algorithms for their digital signature, so one can write a crossplatform client which will generate developer certificate for user, sign any given binary using that certificate and install it onto iOS device. For user it won't be any harder than typing "iport install things" (or click button with some fancy GUI). I'm surprised that this idea wasn't implemented yet.
cm3 11y ago
> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice. Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind. > What's the next step? Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally. All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food, what will happen to kitchens now?
- frio 11y ago
  > Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Sadly, that's an increasingly large segment of the population. Anecdotally, many of my extended family only have mobiles, maybe a tablet, and maybe a videogame console -- no laptops or desktops to be found. Many friends have similar stories.
  - rnovak 11y ago
    To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know, including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone and at least a laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically challenged siblings. Anecdotes are just that. I wont take yours to represent society as a whole, as you shouldn't take mine to either.
    - sloanesturz 11y ago
      Compare your experiences, though, to that of the developing world. Many hundreds of millions of people have gone online for the first time this decade and almost all new Internet users only have smart phones. This huge population never owned a PC and may never need to own one, especially as apps get better and better.
      - Godel_unicode 11y ago
        Phone with SSH client, Bluetooth keyboard, Chromecast to TV, digitalocean Ubuntu droplet. No computer != can't write code. What millenial had access to anything close to that nice when they learned to code?
merpnderp 11y ago
HTML5 service workers allowing near parity of web apps to native apps could easily change all that. If my web app on a phone can receive push notifications from my server even when it isn't running, there's not much I can't do.
weisser 11y ago
> Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016. Is that bad or surprising? Companies are very much dependent on timing, opportunity, seeing things as they are vs where they should go, and moving things in that direction. Example: Android — hardware companies didn't want Microsoft to dominate desktop AND mobile OS — huge opportunity for someone to act on this market reluctance to accept MS. Once the timing is gone, so is much of the opportunity.
balls187 11y ago
> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe Just pulled my old punch cards out of the attic and dusted them off, hoping I can use them again!
digi_owl 11y ago
> I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even. Thing is that ever since the first PC, "personal" computing has really been about business computing. Heck, visicalc basically sold Apple IIs. This because it allowed accountants to not argue with sysadmins about mainframe time. Secure boot and ME is Intel and MS responding to business needs. Thing is tough that flexibility/usability will always be the enemy of security. A building is more usable when the door are left unlocked, but at the same time you can't use said building to store valuables. PCs could ignore security for the most part back in the day, because they were airgapped. Frankly the most secure thing a home user can do is to pull the plug on the router when they are not using the net. But then what is not using the net these days?
- Kliment 11y ago
  ME is a huge net negative for security though
  - digi_owl 11y ago
    From who's vantage point? The end user, or the corporate sysadmin managing a fleet of desktops and laptops?
    - Kliment 11y ago
      Either - it's a massive added convenience, but in a corporate security setting an attacker invisibly having remote access to screen, input devices, and data is a security nightmare, and a single compromise can grant access to the entire fleet.
enjo 11y ago
The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play I can happily install whatever I like on my stock Android device.
- sspiff 11y ago
  You need to enable untrusted sources hidden away in a settings menu somewhere, and click past a nasty warning informing you of how dangerous outside software can be.
brakmic 11y ago
I may sound way too off-topic, so I expect a lot of down-votes, but I think one should learn at least a little bit about hardware and how to design it manually. For example how to create FPGA designs by writing them in VHDL or Verilog. In some sense it's like in the 70es or 80es. Big Corporations, (almost) monopolies, prehistoric laws...and a bunch of tech-savvy kids refusing to bow down ;)
- cubano 11y ago
  You're asking this of a population whom think that setting the time on their microwave oven is too difficult?
- erichocean 11y ago
  I'm doing that with my kids. Hardware has never felt so open. I'm loving the RISC-V project!
nunez 11y ago
> The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What's the next step? Something that envelops everything we do in our daily life whether we want it or not; sounds a lot like online advertising and social media!
derf_ 11y ago
> I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker... On the contrary, the slowdown of Moore's Law means the future has never been brighter for open hardware. Someone could actually design something for a process that hasn't been obsolete for over two years and still have a hope of getting it manufactured before it becomes that way.
skybrian 11y ago
At one time, most people didn't use computers at all. The people who did were the hacker minority. Machines were not portable or networked - you'd only pack them up in your car to take them to the local computer group. We may go back to that. There may be a hacker community using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Android phones and Chromebooks running in developer mode. That's still going to be a lot more than a few hundred hardware hackers. Look at how many people bought Raspberry Pi alone. There's a big middle ground between mainstream and utter obscurity.
bubblesorting 11y ago
> Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even. funny you mention that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11422531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11422531
Razengan 11y ago
> despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots. I'm sure there's different speeds and other variables to consider in flash storage, just as prices vary for RAM and just about everything else really. The exact tech in an SD card may not be suitable for your phone or tablet's permanent storage, and definitely not suitable for an SSD, otherwise everyone would be installing their OS on SD cards.

Karunamon 11y ago

ME is one thing (though given the hoops one must jump through to set it up, I'm inclined to believe most of the vitriol directed at it is the paranoid FUD variety), ..but secure boot? What possible reason could you have for being against a system that prevents bootkits from pwning your machine? You can load your own keys and boot whatever OS you want on all but a tiny subset of appliance-like locked down hardware nobody cares about. In general, code signing is a Good Thing, so long as the control remains in the hands of the user.

nickpsecurity 11y ago
"..but secure boot? What possible reason could you have for being against a system that prevents bootkits from pwning your machine?" The fact that I can do the same thing with firmware on a cheap ROM write-protected with a jumper. Additionally, the fact that there's competing I.P. in FOSS and corporate sectors for firmware that does trustworthy boot while leaving what's allowed in my control. "In general, code signing is a Good Thing, so long as the control remains in the hands of the user." With Microsoft and Intel style secure boot, it remains in the hands of Microsoft and Intel. And so on. Which is why we're against it.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  The fact that I can do the same thing with firmware on a cheap ROM write-protected with a jumper Except secure boot isn't about firmware, it's about the code loaded on DASDs. >With Microsoft and Intel style secure boot, it remains in the hands of Microsoft and Intel. As long as you can program your own keys into it, I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion.
  - dsp1234 11y ago
    As long as you can program your own keys into it Is this not the definition of gatekeeper? A system where you have to ask permission, but that permission is always granted is inherently different from a system where no permission is ever needed. Among other things, that permission can be revoked at any time for any reason.
    - nickpsecurity 11y ago
      "Among other things, that permission can be revoked at any time for any reason." BOOM! They can charge you for it and they can revoke it. Many companies did "open" platforms or software that later closed things off. Plus, they get more information about you than they even need. So, we can choose between a security standard that's in our control or theirs. And by theirs, we're talking about companies with a history of real scumbaggery. The design should default to us with no asking for permission. Numerous ones in CompSci and I.P. markets can do that. No excuse except Microsoft and Intel's profits and schemes.
    - Karunamon 11y ago
      but that permission is always granted is inherently different from a system where no permission is ever needed. Indeed. And that system, the one we've been using for a few decades leaves you vulnerable to bootkits in such a way that you'll never know you've been owned. The PKI has to have a trust root anchored somewhere for the concept to work, and it can be anchored under your control using your keys.
      - 11y ago

doctorshady 11y ago

Couldn't agree more. One of the really annoying things about the mass popularization of tech is we seem to always choose the sexier products over the more practical ones. On the hobbyist side of things, I wonder what it would take to get like, say, a kit ATX motherboard developed; one with modular parts that could gradually be upgraded or repaired over time, and designed to last at least a decade or two.

HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
Buy an old PC-XT motherboard and you'll have essentially that, except for the form factor.
anexprogrammer 11y ago
It's always been the software. VHS beat Beta, both beat V2000. V2000 was the best quality by far. VHS took a long time to get close. VHS had the most films. Same with PCs - the software done it. MS Office, Wordperfect, etc. Lots of more interesting, more sexy machines in the market became also-rans. I'm glad cars never quite got to the same homogeneity or we'd all be driving a Datsun Sunny or something equally horrific. I wish the market had settled for 5 or 6 different PC / phone / chip architectures, as I think the progress would have been more interesting, and much much further. Damnit Motorola should have kept making 680x0s, they were much nicer than Intels to program.
- dognotdog 11y ago
  > I'm glad cars never quite got to the same homogeneity or we'd all be driving a Datsun Sunny or something equally horrific. Well, cars are incredibly homogenous ( https://medium.com/swlh/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d#.mu5k6xfki https://medium.com/swlh/the-zombie-mobile-b03932ac971d#.mu5k... ) Some niche markets exist, but 98% of what's being bought is a completely interchangeable middle ground compromise, made by huge companies that are only looking at maximizing short term profits, without care for technological, economic, or sociological advancement. In every industry that requires large up-front costs for economic mass production, this is true. Hopefully, 3D printing and its sister technologies will make manufacturing many things on a smaller scale more affordable, and disperse the (mass-) consumer-producer dichotomy once again, in favour of local on-demand production of everyday items. Only with such a level and flexible playing field can you expect innovation to thrive: if it becomes affordable to buy (or create) the best tool for the job, instead of relying on mass-produced mediocrity because one-off items increase one or two orders of magnitude more in cost than in marginal utility.

jerf 11y ago

"Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016." I've often thought all web search engines would be considered grotesquely illegal if they hadn't been there since the beginning, but only started today. It is at times a fragile existence as it is even so.

CamperBob2 11y ago
Same with public libraries, for that matter. Can you imagine the hue and cry that the major publishers would raise if someone were just now suggesting buying one copy of a book for the express purpose of lending it to hundreds of readers? Or worse, having the government pay for it? They'd be burning up the telephone lines to Washington and hiring lobbyists by the trainload.
- gist 11y ago
  Yes but there is enough friction with public libraries that that was never an issue. Also noting that many expensive books (or directories) have a market in selling to public libraries. Plus remember that only one person can take out a book at one time (unless multiple copies) and books take time to read so the impact is not the same as with digital works (you have to get to the library to take the book out and there are limits to how many you can borrow is another factor).
- Matt3o12_ 11y ago
  Just imagine how big their outcry would be if it was new thatyou could lend a friend your book by just giving it to them in person. Now suddenly he and his friends will not buy that book and read its content for free. That would also be considered piracy and surely forbidden as well. Some digital laws are just ridiculous.
growt 11y ago
You're right. In germany there is a law called "Leistungsschutzrecht" that makes it illegal to publish snippets of news stories of the big publishing houses especially in search results such as google news. After some months the publishers realised that now they weren't getting as much pageviews as before (go figure) and granted google an exclusive license to publish their stuff. So now there is a law that would require any new search engine to make deals with every major newspaper in germany. On the other hand we do not have such a thing as fair use, so I imagine that image search is an endless ongoing lawsuit in germany, as every image thumbnail is illegal publishing of copyrighted material.

542458 11y ago

What is there in Bitcoin that requires running untrusted code?

iMerNibor 11y ago
Think they were talking about "untrusted" as in not reviewed by/available in an "app store"
- 542458 11y ago
  Okay, but I'm still not getting it. I mean, what's keeping anybody from getting their bitcoin wallet or miner on an app store? The Apple OSX app store has at least one wallet on it. (Not that I agree with the "lock down everything" approach tech companies are taking, that is.)
  - stegosaurus 11y ago
    The article is specifically talking about the 'next Netflix'. I'm talking here about the 'next Bitcoin'. Perhaps the current one is fine. What about the one after that? What about the 'Bitcoin' that launches in 20 years? Do we have any mass market free platforms left then? Workstations may always exist - servers may always exist - but right now, the masses have general purpose computers on their desks, in their messenger bags. I want that to last.
  - morganvachon 11y ago
    I think it's more to do with the creation of cryptocurrencies in the first place, not just using them. A thin client with no level of user control (i.e. everything you do with it is managed on servers controlled by your provider) cannot be used to create something as low level as a cryptocurrency, or indeed any form of low level development. Of course, this kind of thing is why we will always have some form of generic, user-managed-hardware market. If you take away the tools used to create the apps and services controlled by the gatekeepers, you won't have any apps and services. To put it another way, Apple doesn't want to be responsible for creating the millions of apps in their store, they just want to be the ones in control of those apps. The workstation is not going away.

JTon 11y ago

> The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play, iOS App Store) So true. You can sideload on Android though. So all is not lost.

stegosaurus 11y ago
I can. You can. The general public can whilst the 'allow untrusted sources' box exists. But once that box goes, the vast majority of the audience for software outside of Google Play is gone. F-Droid is already tiny as it stands!
coroutines 11y ago
I think what OP is talking about is even though we know how to get over the walls of these gardens, the average user would not. :(
Falcon9 11y ago
And with Xcode 7 you can deploy apps to your iOS devices with a free dev account.
- khedoros 11y ago
  Which is fine, but if I write a piece of software that I want to distribute outside of the app store, then everyone that wants to install it needs their own Mac, right? I don't think that's quite comparable to side-loading, which can be done from the device itself, without any external account or hardware.
  - vbezhenar 11y ago
    There's nothing magical in Mac. iOS apps use standard cryptographic algorithms for their digital signature, so one can write a crossplatform client which will generate developer certificate for user, sign any given binary using that certificate and install it onto iOS device. For user it won't be any harder than typing "iport install things" (or click button with some fancy GUI). I'm surprised that this idea wasn't implemented yet.

cm3 11y ago

> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have less choice. Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Everybody who takes photos, does engineering, develops software, works with media, plays games, or has a laptop, will at least have external local storage of some kind. > What's the next step? Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally. All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food, what will happen to kitchens now?

frio 11y ago
> Only for those who don't use more than a smart phone. Sadly, that's an increasingly large segment of the population. Anecdotally, many of my extended family only have mobiles, maybe a tablet, and maybe a videogame console -- no laptops or desktops to be found. Many friends have similar stories.
- rnovak 11y ago
  To counter your anecdote with one of my own: Literally everyone I know, including my 93 year old grand-parents own a smartphone and at least a laptop or desktop. Every. Single. One. That includes my technologically challenged siblings. Anecdotes are just that. I wont take yours to represent society as a whole, as you shouldn't take mine to either.
  - sloanesturz 11y ago
    Compare your experiences, though, to that of the developing world. Many hundreds of millions of people have gone online for the first time this decade and almost all new Internet users only have smart phones. This huge population never owned a PC and may never need to own one, especially as apps get better and better.
    - Godel_unicode 11y ago
      Phone with SSH client, Bluetooth keyboard, Chromecast to TV, digitalocean Ubuntu droplet. No computer != can't write code. What millenial had access to anything close to that nice when they learned to code?

merpnderp 11y ago

HTML5 service workers allowing near parity of web apps to native apps could easily change all that. If my web app on a phone can receive push notifications from my server even when it isn't running, there's not much I can't do.

weisser 11y ago

> Many companies that exist today seemingly couldn't begin in 2016. Is that bad or surprising? Companies are very much dependent on timing, opportunity, seeing things as they are vs where they should go, and moving things in that direction. Example: Android — hardware companies didn't want Microsoft to dominate desktop AND mobile OS — huge opportunity for someone to act on this market reluctance to accept MS. Once the timing is gone, so is much of the opportunity.

balls187 11y ago

> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe Just pulled my old punch cards out of the attic and dusted them off, hoping I can use them again!

digi_owl 11y ago

> I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker - Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even. Thing is that ever since the first PC, "personal" computing has really been about business computing. Heck, visicalc basically sold Apple IIs. This because it allowed accountants to not argue with sysadmins about mainframe time. Secure boot and ME is Intel and MS responding to business needs. Thing is tough that flexibility/usability will always be the enemy of security. A building is more usable when the door are left unlocked, but at the same time you can't use said building to store valuables. PCs could ignore security for the most part back in the day, because they were airgapped. Frankly the most secure thing a home user can do is to pull the plug on the router when they are not using the net. But then what is not using the net these days?

Kliment 11y ago
ME is a huge net negative for security though
- digi_owl 11y ago
  From who's vantage point? The end user, or the corporate sysadmin managing a fleet of desktops and laptops?
  - Kliment 11y ago
    Either - it's a massive added convenience, but in a corporate security setting an attacker invisibly having remote access to screen, input devices, and data is a security nightmare, and a single compromise can grant access to the entire fleet.

enjo 11y ago

The major computing platforms now have gatekeepers (Google Play I can happily install whatever I like on my stock Android device.

sspiff 11y ago
You need to enable untrusted sources hidden away in a settings menu somewhere, and click past a nasty warning informing you of how dangerous outside software can be.

brakmic 11y ago

I may sound way too off-topic, so I expect a lot of down-votes, but I think one should learn at least a little bit about hardware and how to design it manually. For example how to create FPGA designs by writing them in VHDL or Verilog. In some sense it's like in the 70es or 80es. Big Corporations, (almost) monopolies, prehistoric laws...and a bunch of tech-savvy kids refusing to bow down ;)

cubano 11y ago
You're asking this of a population whom think that setting the time on their microwave oven is too difficult?
erichocean 11y ago
I'm doing that with my kids. Hardware has never felt so open. I'm loving the RISC-V project!

nunez 11y ago

> The IBM compatible desktop computer produced the revolution we see today. What's the next step? Something that envelops everything we do in our daily life whether we want it or not; sounds a lot like online advertising and social media!

derf_ 11y ago

> I think we need to focus far more on hardware - it's never looked darker... On the contrary, the slowdown of Moore's Law means the future has never been brighter for open hardware. Someone could actually design something for a process that hasn't been obsolete for over two years and still have a hope of getting it manufactured before it becomes that way.

skybrian 11y ago

At one time, most people didn't use computers at all. The people who did were the hacker minority. Machines were not portable or networked - you'd only pack them up in your car to take them to the local computer group. We may go back to that. There may be a hacker community using Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Android phones and Chromebooks running in developer mode. That's still going to be a lot more than a few hundred hardware hackers. Look at how many people bought Raspberry Pi alone. There's a big middle ground between mainstream and utter obscurity.

bubblesorting 11y ago

> Secure Boot and the ME make me worried for the future of x86, even. funny you mention that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11422531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11422531

Razengan 11y ago

> despite the fact that 256GB of flash can be had for ~40GBP, the latest smartphones come with piffling amounts of storage and seemingly no expandable slots. I'm sure there's different speeds and other variables to consider in flash storage, just as prices vary for RAM and just about everything else really. The exact tech in an SD card may not be suitable for your phone or tablet's permanent storage, and definitely not suitable for an SSD, otherwise everyone would be installing their OS on SD cards.