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That's just the thing, desktops computers have always been in an important way the antithesis of a specialized appliance, a materialization of Turing's dream of
by pegasus 10mo ago
That's just the thing, desktops computers have always been in an important way the antithesis of a specialized appliance, a materialization of Turing's dream of the Universal Machine. It's only in recent years that this universality has come under threat, in the name of safety.
- calmbonsai 10mo agoI wouldn't save the driver is "safety". It's happened that a few highly-specialized symbolic manipulation tasks now have enough market value such that they can demand highly specialized UX to optimize task performance. One classic example is the "Bloomberg Box": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal which has been around since the late '80s. You can also see this from the reverse (analog -> digital) in the evolution of hospital patient life-sign monitors and the classic "6 pack" of gauges used in both aviation and automobiles.
- pegasus 10mo agoI meant the universality (openness) of desktop computers comes under threat, as the "walled garden" model seeks to make the jump from mobile to desktop.
- calmbonsai 10mo agoAh yes, I agree. I run macOS as my daily driver, but otherwise barely skim the Apple ecosystem. Apple laptops were just the best hardware to run a Unix-ish (BSD) on. Now with performant hypervisors, I just run a bunch of Linux VMs locally to minimize splash-zone and do cloud for performance computing. I'll likely migrate fully to a Framework laptop next year, but I don't have time (atm) to do it. Ah, the good 'ole glory days of native Linux on Thinkpads.