10 ms·

The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected

by kobeya 9y ago

The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.

justhackedme 9y ago
This is wrong. If you're 10 or 65 this is correct, but for anyone else the PC has not only been increasing in use but other parts of your life are filled with other computers.
Silhouette 9y ago
That's profoundly disappointing, I agree, but in a sense perhaps we geeks only have ourselves to blame. We didn't solve the basic (to any normal user) problems of ease of use and security, despite having decades to do so. We also didn't start routinely educating the next generation of kids in how useful and powerful programming skills are. Consequently, for many people personal computing has been reduced to little more than a mechanism for consuming online content and for relatively simple communications using a few trusted channels. The one comfort is that someone still needs to be creating all that content and all those communications channels, and those people are always going to benefit from something much more capable than a small, lock-down touchscreen+WiFi device.
- kobeya 9y ago
  > The one comfort is that someone still needs to be creating all that content and all those communications channels, and those people are always going to benefit from something much more capable than a small, lock-down touchscreen+WiFi device. Maybe. Let's see what the next generation of visual programming and IDE UX bring.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  >We didn't solve the basic (to any normal user) problems of ease of use and security This user is a strawman. The problem we didn't solve was decoupling ourselves from corporations controlling our user experience, because we didn't create a good enough alternative for getting stuff done.
fsloth 9y ago
Uh oh, I think I'm about to rant. Scuse me. Given how cheap even powerful general purpose computers are I don't think they ever will be prized beyond availability. Aficionados, internet stores, arm, Linux, market forces, etc. To some part, good riddance. Software engineers and product designers are the reason the PC is effectively broken by design in UX. Because they are inexcusably slow. There is 0 reason anything I want to do with e.g. office would not have 0 wait time except non-user centric design. My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC. The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wait a year and get a new faster CPU. No need to spend resources on optimization. I don't know who started with the idea that it's smarter to buy more hardware than to spend resources on programming but if I had to guess, it were the mainframe vendors. Cool for embarrassingly parallellizible batch processing jobs for massive bureaucracies, not so much for desktops. And don't get me started on the idiocy of thinking it's fine software developers don't need to develop domain understanding in the field they operate. With the general purpose computer desktop development, we have a system that's broken on so, so many levels. At least Os X seems to try to do the right thing at an attempt at fluency and I can get a linux desktop to operate smoothly. Even windows 10 starts fast but O brother and sister of the clunkyness of software. Despite what I said, I think the situation is improving. Immediacy in handheld devices puts pressure on the desktop to concentrate on not wasting the users time as well. Let's see how it goes.
- arkh 9y ago
  > The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wait a year and get a new faster CPU. No need to spend resources on optimization. I'd like to see a word 1.0 coded with current tech stacks. Same functionalities. And see how fast it feels. I think this feeling is a combination of a lot of things taken for granted and nostalgia.
  - fsloth 9y ago
    "with current tech stacks" Computers will behave sluggishly, unless care and dedication is paid they don't. I'd start from a 3D engine, a font layout system, and the huge chunk of simple and efficient open source utility libraries that have sprung up. Or slap it on top of QT if that system can be made to behave non-sluggisly. One point is, that you need to be able to access the low levels of the system. To understand it's limitations on your higher level architecture, and on the other hand, figure out what can be made blazing fast under which circumstances and use those as your bearings as you are developing the system. With usability, and understanding of end user being on the front seat. The whole time. The point is, although the system does a great many things, there is no reason from the usability point of view those things are done in serial except legacy and poor design. A system can be made to feel immediate despite what it's doing under the skin. Delay those action, design the system with the user and her time as the first class citizen, rather than some other constraint. Take a modern complex 3D AAA game. One of the root constraints is that it should never lag. Well, they do, obviously, but that is considered a defect more often than not. And... Word... would need some deeper fixing on it's basic premises. As I recall I was pretty easy to break the Word 1.0 layout system in any number of ways.
pimmen 9y ago
This really destroyed my day. I really have a big problem staying positive for at least a day now that you've eloquently expressed what I've had a creeping feeling of but just quite couldn't word in any discussion. As computers become "locked app collections" they become appliances, appliances business and government institutions can control and regulate. "Can you make the iPad just not do that thing?"
- swyx 9y ago
  ok honestly i dont understand this fear. isn't the open web the antithesis of the locked appstore?
  - kelnos 9y ago
    Yes, but: 1) Some would say that the open web isn't so open anymore, and is under constant assault. One example might be the recent W3C adoption and endorsement of EME. 2) The fact that the open web "lost" in the battle for mobile dominance is a thing. Most "serious" apps have a native version on at least iOS and Android, and the webapp version (if there even is one) is usually a worse experience.
    - jo909 9y ago
      I would like to think the open web has not lost yet, and that progressive web apps still have a great chance of taking over. Nobody wants to develop apps for at least three platforms. Nobody wants half their user base use old versions. Nobody wants to fear being dropped from some walled garden without any recourse. There are still good technical reasons for some native apps, but that will dwindle more and more.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    For the point of the developer, maybe. From the point of the user, not really; at least for many of them I can disable updates and keep running them even if the company goes bankrupt. The ones that depend on cloud services are arguably the worst of both worlds, though. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
closeparen 9y ago
Did people really think the arms race of heuristic malware detection in bolt-on security software would be be sustainable? Sandboxing applications and ending the free-for-all over the user’s entire file system were a long time coming. Then spammy software download websites and “Download Now” banner ads bigger than the official download buttons for popular software made it obvious that we needed a trustworthy distribution center. Of course someone starting an OS in the mid 2000s wasn’t going to adopt the Windows shareware distribution model. The Linux distribution model of a vetted, quality controlled repository of software from a trusted middleman was so obviously superior, of course it won. I guess it’s surprising that iOS got so far with no escape hatch, but Android is the far more popular platform and has always let more technical users peek over the walls if they so desire. I’m more surprised that so many people are content to type on glass. I was sure that the blackberry keyboard was the future.
- abecedarius 9y ago
  False dichotomy. A user-in-control sandboxing model is perfectly possible, e.g. https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ I agree that mainstream desktop OSes have failed to give us this yet. Fuchsia sounds like an opportunity to do better.
  - Mayzie 9y ago
    Thanks for sharing that link with me. Never heard of Sandstorm before. That's a really impressive product. I'll definitely be using it in the future.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    Agreeing with you, mini rant time: Why in the fuck do desktop computers have user-based permission models? Don't answer that, I know why, it's because they inherited them from the server-OS ancestors, but it's retarded. Desktops are personal computers, there is no reason to stop the user from doing what they want because it is their computer. Some might say, "oh, well, we can protect the system from malicious software by limiting user access to it" and they're correct, but who gives a shit? If my OS gets destroyed I'll reinstall it. It's a bit of a pain, but whatever. What's really important to me are my documents, my work, and the user-permission model does jack and shit for protecting those as the ransomware wave proved. Application-oriented permissions are the obvious and correct way to do things in personal computing.
vortico 9y ago
Eventually at some point, you have to get some work done, and you just can't do that with a tablet screen or a touch interface. The mouse and keyboard will reign, and even if the concept of a non-sanboxed system goes away, the future will still have hardware which look like desktop computers and laptops. The OS filesystem won't go away because applications on these personal computers need to be able to talk to each other somehow, and the current iOS method of "launch a file in this application from this other application" is too limiting. The only thing that will change is the application packaging, which will become optionally centralized and have permission levels just like Android apps. I think overall, future computers will be just as pleasant to use, just as programmable/configurable, and just as easy to download software from decentralized sources. Just think, Chrome OS has essentially failed to take over the OS market, so I doubt anything using this overly-sandboxed model will be successful in the future.
- taneq 9y ago
  > Just think, Chrome OS has essentially failed to take over the OS market, so I doubt anything using this overly-sandboxed model will be successful in the future. But that's the thing, there's no "os market" for appliances. ChromeOS won't 'take over' computing devices any more than toasters will take over your kitchen.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
swyx 9y ago
as a web developer i am bemused at every other comment on here that seems to agree with your sentiment that the world is walling up. yes, app stores will be a control mechanism for ever and consumers may not understand what they are opting into. but equally the open web will never go away and that's what general purpose computation has shifted to, thats basically all we've done this century. am i misunderstanding what you mean by general purpose computer?
- chubot 9y ago
  Can a program written for the web access all the great sensors on your Android or iPhone? Can it access new movies and TV shows? The web is a big success story, but it's not all there is in computing.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    I hate the browser as a platform, but the answers to your questions are yes, and yes.
    - chubot 9y ago
      The web can't access all the sensors on your phone -- at least not in their full glory. It might have trivial APIs like "take a picture", but it can't do anything specific to a piece of hardware, by definition. It can't control the camera's imaging pipeline (lighting, focus, preprocessing, etc.). As a shortcut to understanding this, consider what hardware support something like ARKit [1] needs. Or consider whether you could write a multitrack audio recorder as a web app (no, because the web audio APIs aren't multitrack). My point is that you need "general purpose computing" that is not the web for many things. The web is indeed open, but we also need our general purpose computers to be open. Android is better than nothing, but it's arguably not as open as a PC running Linux. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/about_augmented_reality_and_arkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/about_augmen... The answer to the second question is also no.
  - zerostar07 9y ago
    I think it can , but if your website needs to use these things, then it essentially locks itself in the "app garden" we 're talking about escaping from.
amelius 9y ago
Yes, the only direction seems to be that of closed systems. Smartphones will probably never be as open as desktop systems once were.
- fosco 9y ago
  I have overwhelmingly big hopes for postmarketOS [0] and Debian Mobile [1] [0] https://postmarketos.org/ https://postmarketos.org/ [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
  - amelius 9y ago
    Do they run Android apps? I'm asking because for banking, I really need to run such app.
zerostar07 9y ago
It all started with laptops. Wish we could do something to the direction of personal, components-based workstations. Gaming does that.
gilbetron 9y ago
Huh? I'm not following. Do you just mean desktops?

by kobeya 9y ago

The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.

justhackedme 9y ago

This is wrong. If you're 10 or 65 this is correct, but for anyone else the PC has not only been increasing in use but other parts of your life are filled with other computers.

Silhouette 9y ago

That's profoundly disappointing, I agree, but in a sense perhaps we geeks only have ourselves to blame. We didn't solve the basic (to any normal user) problems of ease of use and security, despite having decades to do so. We also didn't start routinely educating the next generation of kids in how useful and powerful programming skills are. Consequently, for many people personal computing has been reduced to little more than a mechanism for consuming online content and for relatively simple communications using a few trusted channels. The one comfort is that someone still needs to be creating all that content and all those communications channels, and those people are always going to benefit from something much more capable than a small, lock-down touchscreen+WiFi device.

kobeya 9y ago
> The one comfort is that someone still needs to be creating all that content and all those communications channels, and those people are always going to benefit from something much more capable than a small, lock-down touchscreen+WiFi device. Maybe. Let's see what the next generation of visual programming and IDE UX bring.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
>We didn't solve the basic (to any normal user) problems of ease of use and security This user is a strawman. The problem we didn't solve was decoupling ourselves from corporations controlling our user experience, because we didn't create a good enough alternative for getting stuff done.

fsloth 9y ago

Uh oh, I think I'm about to rant. Scuse me. Given how cheap even powerful general purpose computers are I don't think they ever will be prized beyond availability. Aficionados, internet stores, arm, Linux, market forces, etc. To some part, good riddance. Software engineers and product designers are the reason the PC is effectively broken by design in UX. Because they are inexcusably slow. There is 0 reason anything I want to do with e.g. office would not have 0 wait time except non-user centric design. My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC. The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wait a year and get a new faster CPU. No need to spend resources on optimization. I don't know who started with the idea that it's smarter to buy more hardware than to spend resources on programming but if I had to guess, it were the mainframe vendors. Cool for embarrassingly parallellizible batch processing jobs for massive bureaucracies, not so much for desktops. And don't get me started on the idiocy of thinking it's fine software developers don't need to develop domain understanding in the field they operate. With the general purpose computer desktop development, we have a system that's broken on so, so many levels. At least Os X seems to try to do the right thing at an attempt at fluency and I can get a linux desktop to operate smoothly. Even windows 10 starts fast but O brother and sister of the clunkyness of software. Despite what I said, I think the situation is improving. Immediacy in handheld devices puts pressure on the desktop to concentrate on not wasting the users time as well. Let's see how it goes.

arkh 9y ago
> The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wait a year and get a new faster CPU. No need to spend resources on optimization. I'd like to see a word 1.0 coded with current tech stacks. Same functionalities. And see how fast it feels. I think this feeling is a combination of a lot of things taken for granted and nostalgia.
- fsloth 9y ago
  "with current tech stacks" Computers will behave sluggishly, unless care and dedication is paid they don't. I'd start from a 3D engine, a font layout system, and the huge chunk of simple and efficient open source utility libraries that have sprung up. Or slap it on top of QT if that system can be made to behave non-sluggisly. One point is, that you need to be able to access the low levels of the system. To understand it's limitations on your higher level architecture, and on the other hand, figure out what can be made blazing fast under which circumstances and use those as your bearings as you are developing the system. With usability, and understanding of end user being on the front seat. The whole time. The point is, although the system does a great many things, there is no reason from the usability point of view those things are done in serial except legacy and poor design. A system can be made to feel immediate despite what it's doing under the skin. Delay those action, design the system with the user and her time as the first class citizen, rather than some other constraint. Take a modern complex 3D AAA game. One of the root constraints is that it should never lag. Well, they do, obviously, but that is considered a defect more often than not. And... Word... would need some deeper fixing on it's basic premises. As I recall I was pretty easy to break the Word 1.0 layout system in any number of ways.

pimmen 9y ago

This really destroyed my day. I really have a big problem staying positive for at least a day now that you've eloquently expressed what I've had a creeping feeling of but just quite couldn't word in any discussion. As computers become "locked app collections" they become appliances, appliances business and government institutions can control and regulate. "Can you make the iPad just not do that thing?"

swyx 9y ago
ok honestly i dont understand this fear. isn't the open web the antithesis of the locked appstore?
- kelnos 9y ago
  Yes, but: 1) Some would say that the open web isn't so open anymore, and is under constant assault. One example might be the recent W3C adoption and endorsement of EME. 2) The fact that the open web "lost" in the battle for mobile dominance is a thing. Most "serious" apps have a native version on at least iOS and Android, and the webapp version (if there even is one) is usually a worse experience.
  - jo909 9y ago
    I would like to think the open web has not lost yet, and that progressive web apps still have a great chance of taking over. Nobody wants to develop apps for at least three platforms. Nobody wants half their user base use old versions. Nobody wants to fear being dropped from some walled garden without any recourse. There are still good technical reasons for some native apps, but that will dwindle more and more.
- icebraining 9y ago
  For the point of the developer, maybe. From the point of the user, not really; at least for many of them I can disable updates and keep running them even if the company goes bankrupt. The ones that depend on cloud services are arguably the worst of both worlds, though. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

closeparen 9y ago

Did people really think the arms race of heuristic malware detection in bolt-on security software would be be sustainable? Sandboxing applications and ending the free-for-all over the user’s entire file system were a long time coming. Then spammy software download websites and “Download Now” banner ads bigger than the official download buttons for popular software made it obvious that we needed a trustworthy distribution center. Of course someone starting an OS in the mid 2000s wasn’t going to adopt the Windows shareware distribution model. The Linux distribution model of a vetted, quality controlled repository of software from a trusted middleman was so obviously superior, of course it won. I guess it’s surprising that iOS got so far with no escape hatch, but Android is the far more popular platform and has always let more technical users peek over the walls if they so desire. I’m more surprised that so many people are content to type on glass. I was sure that the blackberry keyboard was the future.

abecedarius 9y ago
False dichotomy. A user-in-control sandboxing model is perfectly possible, e.g. https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/ I agree that mainstream desktop OSes have failed to give us this yet. Fuchsia sounds like an opportunity to do better.
- Mayzie 9y ago
  Thanks for sharing that link with me. Never heard of Sandstorm before. That's a really impressive product. I'll definitely be using it in the future.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  Agreeing with you, mini rant time: Why in the fuck do desktop computers have user-based permission models? Don't answer that, I know why, it's because they inherited them from the server-OS ancestors, but it's retarded. Desktops are personal computers, there is no reason to stop the user from doing what they want because it is their computer. Some might say, "oh, well, we can protect the system from malicious software by limiting user access to it" and they're correct, but who gives a shit? If my OS gets destroyed I'll reinstall it. It's a bit of a pain, but whatever. What's really important to me are my documents, my work, and the user-permission model does jack and shit for protecting those as the ransomware wave proved. Application-oriented permissions are the obvious and correct way to do things in personal computing.

vortico 9y ago

Eventually at some point, you have to get some work done, and you just can't do that with a tablet screen or a touch interface. The mouse and keyboard will reign, and even if the concept of a non-sanboxed system goes away, the future will still have hardware which look like desktop computers and laptops. The OS filesystem won't go away because applications on these personal computers need to be able to talk to each other somehow, and the current iOS method of "launch a file in this application from this other application" is too limiting. The only thing that will change is the application packaging, which will become optionally centralized and have permission levels just like Android apps. I think overall, future computers will be just as pleasant to use, just as programmable/configurable, and just as easy to download software from decentralized sources. Just think, Chrome OS has essentially failed to take over the OS market, so I doubt anything using this overly-sandboxed model will be successful in the future.

taneq 9y ago
> Just think, Chrome OS has essentially failed to take over the OS market, so I doubt anything using this overly-sandboxed model will be successful in the future. But that's the thing, there's no "os market" for appliances. ChromeOS won't 'take over' computing devices any more than toasters will take over your kitchen.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

swyx 9y ago

as a web developer i am bemused at every other comment on here that seems to agree with your sentiment that the world is walling up. yes, app stores will be a control mechanism for ever and consumers may not understand what they are opting into. but equally the open web will never go away and that's what general purpose computation has shifted to, thats basically all we've done this century. am i misunderstanding what you mean by general purpose computer?

chubot 9y ago
Can a program written for the web access all the great sensors on your Android or iPhone? Can it access new movies and TV shows? The web is a big success story, but it's not all there is in computing.
- kobeya 9y ago
  I hate the browser as a platform, but the answers to your questions are yes, and yes.
  - chubot 9y ago
    The web can't access all the sensors on your phone -- at least not in their full glory. It might have trivial APIs like "take a picture", but it can't do anything specific to a piece of hardware, by definition. It can't control the camera's imaging pipeline (lighting, focus, preprocessing, etc.). As a shortcut to understanding this, consider what hardware support something like ARKit [1] needs. Or consider whether you could write a multitrack audio recorder as a web app (no, because the web audio APIs aren't multitrack). My point is that you need "general purpose computing" that is not the web for many things. The web is indeed open, but we also need our general purpose computers to be open. Android is better than nothing, but it's arguably not as open as a PC running Linux. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/about_augmented_reality_and_arkit https://developer.apple.com/documentation/arkit/about_augmen... The answer to the second question is also no.
- zerostar07 9y ago
  I think it can , but if your website needs to use these things, then it essentially locks itself in the "app garden" we 're talking about escaping from.

amelius 9y ago

Yes, the only direction seems to be that of closed systems. Smartphones will probably never be as open as desktop systems once were.

fosco 9y ago
I have overwhelmingly big hopes for postmarketOS [0] and Debian Mobile [1] [0] https://postmarketos.org/ https://postmarketos.org/ [1] https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile
- amelius 9y ago
  Do they run Android apps? I'm asking because for banking, I really need to run such app.

zerostar07 9y ago

It all started with laptops. Wish we could do something to the direction of personal, components-based workstations. Gaming does that.

gilbetron 9y ago

Huh? I'm not following. Do you just mean desktops?