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I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it ha

I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern systems. When my friends ask for advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just plain hard to be disappointed with anything new. I think I can pinpoint when this happened. It was the SSD. Getting an SSD was the last upgrade I ever needed. ~~~ Something does worry me slightly about the large shift to tablets, which are great devices in their own right. It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation. I think its extremely healthy to have the lowest bar possible to go from "Hey I like that" to "Can I do that? Can I make it myself?" I think its something hackers, especially those with children should ask themselves: Would I still be me, if I had grown up around primarily content consumption computing devices instead of more general purpose laptops and desktops?

PakG1 14y ago
What mitigation steps are you taking for when your SSD dies a horrible death? Do you keep all your important files saved on another SSD or in the cloud? And you'll just buy a new SSD and re-image? Or are you doing something else?
- pyre 14y ago
  You're basically saying, "What's your backup solution?" Backup solutions are needed even with spinning disks, it's nothing new to SSDs.
- lostsock 14y ago
  The same plan he has when his hard drive dies a horrible death? SSDs may have a shorter lifespan than some HDDs but the WILL both fail.
- coldtea 14y ago
  I've had had HDs who died of "horrible death" to especially worry about SSDs. You have the same strategy with everything: back up the stuff you want. And, even better, back them up twice, in different locations.
unclebucknasty 14y ago
Nailed it from top to bottom. That's about the time I noticed that I no longer felt the need to upgrade. And, yeah, tablets feel very constrained for creation. It is a consumption device. Perfect term. I am typing on a Galaxy Tab now, and after over a year, it still drives me slightly nuts to type more than a couple sentences; not to mention the thought of actually designing or developing on this thing. Maybe that will change as new input devices and peripherals are developed. But, at some point if it evolved enough in that direction, then it would no longer be a tablet per se, but more a PC in a different form factor.
- BariumBlue 14y ago
  >yeah, tablets feel very constrained for creation. It is a consumption device. Which why I like the idea of the Ubuntu smartphone so much; a portable consumption device that can easily turn into a development machine. At least, that's my hope.
  - pekk 14y ago
    Did you ever develop things on a phone before?
    - azernik 14y ago
      I don't think he's talking about actually developing on a phone interface; he's talking about the likelihood of this [1] happening on an Ubuntu phone. [1] http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android EDIT: Aaand it turns out that since I've last looked, Ubuntu for Phones has started advertising this on its own page.
coldtea 14y ago
>Something does worry me slightly about the large shift to tablets, which are great devices in their own right. It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation. Depends on the type of content. For writing text, painting, or making electronic music for example, there are tons of extremely easy to use apps for tablets. For example with something like Procreate people can draw stuff nearly as intuitive as using paper and brushes, something that is difficult in the PC, except if you have one of those Wacom monitors/tablets.
rogerbinns 14y ago
Just to note that some of us are the exception to these adequacy feelings, but that is possibly because I am a software developer. My current workstation has 32GB of RAM and an 8 thread i7. That is the maximum amount of memory the motherboard can take, and Intel had a few faster i7 models but not sufficiently faster single threaded to justify the massive price difference. Even my laptop is an i7 with 16GB of RAM (again both maxxed out). I am having to go in and make all the work I do be increasingly parallel and pipelined. This is a lot more effort than straight forward code. I used to have a first gen i7 and am now on 3rd gen i7. I recently transcoded a DVD which I had done before and the performance difference was incredible. Before it would take several hours, and now it takes 10 minutes! (There may also be a lot of credit to improved software too.) I will admit that sometimes I do feel the adequacy. During the tail end of the Soduko boom I decided to write a solver as an intellectual exercise. I started out with a brute force solver that tried every possibility. It was written in Python and I gave no thought to optimising data structures or the code - I just needed a baseline. It solved most puzzles before the return key had sprung all the way back. It took less than 5 seconds on "hard" puzzles. The most difficult puzzle I could find took under 45 seconds. I gave up at that point.
hobb0001 14y ago
> It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation. At the risk of using yet another car analogy, I see PC's becoming the pickup trucks of the computer industry. There will always be plenty of them around and will be primarily designed and built for utility. Many people who don't really need the utility will still buy them because they like the style. Over the years, the pendulum will swing back and forth between mobility and power -- and there will inevitably be the SUV cross-overs as well.
- cardine 14y ago
  I think his point was that this would be a very bad end result. If there are no desktops or laptops in a household it becomes very hard for a kid to be immersed in development from a young age as tablets and phones are almost exclusively meant for consumption.

PakG1 14y ago

What mitigation steps are you taking for when your SSD dies a horrible death? Do you keep all your important files saved on another SSD or in the cloud? And you'll just buy a new SSD and re-image? Or are you doing something else?

pyre 14y ago
You're basically saying, "What's your backup solution?" Backup solutions are needed even with spinning disks, it's nothing new to SSDs.
lostsock 14y ago
The same plan he has when his hard drive dies a horrible death? SSDs may have a shorter lifespan than some HDDs but the WILL both fail.
coldtea 14y ago
I've had had HDs who died of "horrible death" to especially worry about SSDs. You have the same strategy with everything: back up the stuff you want. And, even better, back them up twice, in different locations.

unclebucknasty 14y ago

Nailed it from top to bottom. That's about the time I noticed that I no longer felt the need to upgrade. And, yeah, tablets feel very constrained for creation. It is a consumption device. Perfect term. I am typing on a Galaxy Tab now, and after over a year, it still drives me slightly nuts to type more than a couple sentences; not to mention the thought of actually designing or developing on this thing. Maybe that will change as new input devices and peripherals are developed. But, at some point if it evolved enough in that direction, then it would no longer be a tablet per se, but more a PC in a different form factor.

BariumBlue 14y ago
>yeah, tablets feel very constrained for creation. It is a consumption device. Which why I like the idea of the Ubuntu smartphone so much; a portable consumption device that can easily turn into a development machine. At least, that's my hope.
- pekk 14y ago
  Did you ever develop things on a phone before?
  - azernik 14y ago
    I don't think he's talking about actually developing on a phone interface; he's talking about the likelihood of this [1] happening on an Ubuntu phone. [1] http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android EDIT: Aaand it turns out that since I've last looked, Ubuntu for Phones has started advertising this on its own page.

coldtea 14y ago

>Something does worry me slightly about the large shift to tablets, which are great devices in their own right. It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation. Depends on the type of content. For writing text, painting, or making electronic music for example, there are tons of extremely easy to use apps for tablets. For example with something like Procreate people can draw stuff nearly as intuitive as using paper and brushes, something that is difficult in the PC, except if you have one of those Wacom monitors/tablets.

rogerbinns 14y ago

Just to note that some of us are the exception to these adequacy feelings, but that is possibly because I am a software developer. My current workstation has 32GB of RAM and an 8 thread i7. That is the maximum amount of memory the motherboard can take, and Intel had a few faster i7 models but not sufficiently faster single threaded to justify the massive price difference. Even my laptop is an i7 with 16GB of RAM (again both maxxed out). I am having to go in and make all the work I do be increasingly parallel and pipelined. This is a lot more effort than straight forward code. I used to have a first gen i7 and am now on 3rd gen i7. I recently transcoded a DVD which I had done before and the performance difference was incredible. Before it would take several hours, and now it takes 10 minutes! (There may also be a lot of credit to improved software too.) I will admit that sometimes I do feel the adequacy. During the tail end of the Soduko boom I decided to write a solver as an intellectual exercise. I started out with a brute force solver that tried every possibility. It was written in Python and I gave no thought to optimising data structures or the code - I just needed a baseline. It solved most puzzles before the return key had sprung all the way back. It took less than 5 seconds on "hard" puzzles. The most difficult puzzle I could find took under 45 seconds. I gave up at that point.

hobb0001 14y ago

> It's hard(er) to create new content on a tablet, and I don't really want that becoming the default computer for any generation. At the risk of using yet another car analogy, I see PC's becoming the pickup trucks of the computer industry. There will always be plenty of them around and will be primarily designed and built for utility. Many people who don't really need the utility will still buy them because they like the style. Over the years, the pendulum will swing back and forth between mobility and power -- and there will inevitably be the SUV cross-overs as well.

cardine 14y ago
I think his point was that this would be a very bad end result. If there are no desktops or laptops in a household it becomes very hard for a kid to be immersed in development from a young age as tablets and phones are almost exclusively meant for consumption.