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> Personal computers with attached storage are disappearing and giving way to thin clients attached to the mainframe - without computing power, individuals have
by 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 agoTo 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 agoCompare 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 agoPhone 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?
- cm3 11y agoWhile this is nice, I could never use something with such high latency for editing code or interactive sessions. You've just added latency all over the place. Delayed input and output plus networking across the world.
- fsckin 11y agoRemove the extra step going from Phone to Chromecast (plenty of phones have HDMI OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client) and this a great solution with minimal latency. Anything remotely comparable in the 80s/90s would have been totally out of reach on a student budget.
- Godel_unicode 11y agoSerious (I hope!) question: how does one run the SSH client on the Chromecast? Are you proposing installing Linux on the Chromecast, or is this something available out of the box? Totally agree with your point about HDMI, I overlooked it because my phone doesn't support it.
- manveru 11y agoYou can cast your whole screen from Android or a Chrome tab to Chromecast (now called Google Cast). That includes any SSH client you have running there. (There are SSH clients for both Chrome and Android)
- Godel_unicode 11y agoIf you look at my GGP comment, you'll see that mirroring to the Chromecast is what I initially suggested. I was specifically asking about the statement "OR the Chromecast can run an SSH client".
- frio 11y agoYou're absolutely right -- it is just an anecdote :). hk__2 further down points out that these are possibly people who've never owned a computer, and that this should be viewed as a step forward -- hk__2's right! The devices they own are cheap (or at least: are much more affordable than a laptop has ever been) and limited, but having them is still better than having no device. With that said, I'd argue that selling at these (absurdly) low prices is creating a new market segment. I guess I wanted to express my concern at dismissing the part of the population that "don't use more than a smart phone". They exist!
- chrisan 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. But will that always be the case, especially when the "next Netflix" comes around? I'm in the same boat as you, everyone I know has both a laptop and/or desktop as well as a smartphone and possibly tablet. However, less and less of these people I know are buying new laptops/PCs because for the average person... why do they need those?
- Amezarak 11y agoA friend of a friend saw me working on my NAS a few weeks ago and said "I didn't know anyone used those anymore." I said "What do you mean?" "Computers, I didn't know anyone used computers anymore."
- bad_user 11y agoArguably the people using restricted mobile devices exclusively would have never used PCs. These are the same people that 10 years ago where buying DVD players, PlayStations and other limited appliances for their living room, because PCs are way too complicated for some people. And you can't really blame them. Just the other day I cleaned my father's computer of viruses. I also believe the market for content producers that need general purpose computing devices is bigger than ever, and growing. It's just that it's being eclipsed by the market of content consumers. Plus upgrade cycles have gotten much longer, 4 or 5-year old PCs being totally fine. And speaking of phones, dumb phones are dead, the smartphone is the new norm, yet how many smartphone users are heavy Internet and apps users? I bet it's not that many.
- cm3 11y ago> 4 or 5-year old PCs being totally fine Especially content producers can easily use up all hardware enhancements for rendering and such, so they do appreciate a newer machine.
- bad_user 11y agoI'm a software developer, so I'm arguably a content producer. I have a 4 year old laptop that's still fine for software development, even though I'm using heavy tools to do it (e.g. Scala, IntelliJ IDEA), I only had to replace its battery. Producing content doesn't necessarily mean 3D rendering. It can mean just writing Word / Excel / PowerPoint documents.
- dzhiurgis 11y agoI guess in your case you are more of a content input, rather than producer. Or perhaps producers should be called content farmers/hackers.
- bad_user 11y agoContent, noun: 1. the amount of a particular constituent occurring in a substance. 2. the material dealt with in a speech, literary work, etc. as distinct from its form or style. 3. information made available by a website or other electronic medium. Producer, noun: 1. a person, company, or country that makes, grows, or supplies goods or commodities. 2. a person or thing that makes or causes something. Maybe we are not speaking the same language.
- hk__2 11y agoA lot of the people who now own a smartphone didn’t own any computer-like device (i.e. laptop/desktop/tablet) before; I think that’s a step forward, not backward.
- Kurtz79 11y agoI think it is largely the same segment of the population that before didn't use computers anyway, or used them as dumb browsers or e-mail clients.
- EGreg 11y agoFunny enough, home kitchens used to not exist in Roman times as far as I know.
- jonahx 11y ago> All of this sounds like this: everybody goes to a fast food chain to get food, what will happen to kitchens now? But this isn't an absurd question at all: Fast food and packaged food have dramatically changed the way people eat, for the worse.
- chii 11y agoFast food has some undeniable short term benefits, which the lizard brain considers more important than long term benefits. It's no wonder why a lot of fast food chains are massively profitable. The same can be said for walled gardens.
- jraedisch 11y agoFollowing that reasoning, there are other substances that have similar short term benefits. Like cocaine.
- silence4802 11y agoMany things have both short and long term benefits, in addition to their both short and long term detriments... Like Cocaine.
- elevenfist 11y agoThis is just the marketing hypnosis speaking. Fast food tastes awful.
- elevenfist 11y agoThis is just the marketing hypnosis speaking. Fast food tastes awful.
- TrevorJ 11y agoThe trend has been towards locked down hardware and software, and that trend is starting to encroach on even desktop systems.
- e12e 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. I don't see why (if we're talking 10 years time here). Cameras comes with wifi, Photoshop and other software is rented in the cloud, arguably it's easier to have your data in one place, close to the processing -- publishing is done in the cloud (even if the end result is a photo print, it's likely that you use a third party to do the printing). Games streaming is already a thing. Granted, there are some hard physical limits on latency (speed of light roundtrip) -- but I see no particular well-founded reason to believe all our computing privileges can't be locked up in "the cloud". It's much more feasible for a small team to produce an entire computer today (as in instruction set, volatile and non-volatile memory, i/o etc), than it was in the 70s - but it's still fantastically more expensive than buying off the shelf hardware. Which means that if the majority of the market truly moves to locked down devices, everyone will have to move to locked down devices. >> What's the next step? > Something else produced on IBM compatible PCs or Macs, naturally. I think how Apple handled Final Cut Pro is a great example of how dangerous tivoization of an entire platform for computing can be.