5 ms·

What a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. This isn't some Marxist struggle between the owners of the means of production and the smartphoneliteriat. The reason we don't real

• mirimir 11y ago
  To the extent that smartphones are "supercomputers", they're mostly super at games and video. Otherwise they're more like dumb terminals than PCs.
  • sliverstorm 11y ago
    As used today, yes. And that's kind of the point of the original observation. Smartphones are not true supercomputers. But they still smoke a Cray-1, and yet we use them as dumb terminals. What can we use that power for, that filled a room twenty years ago? Their existing roles have value! But there is a sense of leaving something untapped, when you use them only as dumb terminals. A sense of, what am I missing?
    • brador 11y ago
      It doesn't make sense to have a supercomputer as your phone. In your phone you value excellent long battery life. Better to offload the supercomputer part to central processing and pipe down a "viewport". Economics always wins.
      • robotresearcher 11y ago
        But you already have the performance of a 1980s supercomputer in your phone. It doesn't have to make sense.
        • s73v3r 11y ago
          But you have a limited power supply.
          • mirimir 11y ago
            I can easily carry a power brick. Or a hydrogen fuel cell like they use for power tools.
            • s73v3r 11y ago
              But most people either can't or don't want to.
      • e12e 11y ago
        "Phone" isn't really a term that makes sense for the future. It's just a somewhat anachronistic bundling of microphone/speaker/digital radio/battery (and the tiny bit of logic needed for that to work together). It does make sense to carry the things that comprise a "smart phone" (as above, +powerful cpu that can scale down to conserve power, gpu, screen/hud/display, camera(s), low-power local-area digital radio (eg: bluetooth), touchscreen (or drawing surface/digitizer), text-input (keyboard), gps, interface for connecting 4k+ display, possibly direct-attached storage), along with a headset, preferably wireless. I just don't see why this should all be forced into one unit. I'm not sure how much power miracast would require -- but could it really be more than what the led-lit touch-screen uses? Because surely it'd be easier to have big battery+wlan/miracast/bluetooth/cpu stuffed in your pocket, and a small display+touch+bluetooth device on your wrist, with the option to pull out a phablet-sized hi-res touch-screen with it's own battery, but only miracast+bluetooth (maybe a gpu)? The "smart stick" (the smarphone less the camera/screen/mic) could probably be made to fit more nicely in a pocket if there was no need for a display. Shape it like a rod, add a powerful vibrator and the thing would even be dual-use ;-) (seriously, though - if it's intended to be kept in a pocket, a vibrator might make sense, as well as a couple of status leds). The screen is going to be a bit clunky anyway (unless it folds/rolls up) - so no real issue to add a dedicated battery for it. Maybe I should file a patent for "smart rod".
    • mirimir 11y ago
      For me, they're mostly missing privacy. That is, they're not securable from supposedly trusted providers. So for me, a precondition would be full control of the baseband, and running open-source software. Or maybe for now, using Android kernel to load Debian, and nuking the radio. I'm sure that lots of cool distributed computing stuff is doable. But I'm not much interested until it's securable. For those who think I'm crazy, consider what company would accept smartphone-like security for its servers. And OK, upon reflection, some apparently do. But my point stands.
    • pjc50 11y ago
      For most people, computation isn't nearly as valuable as communication. Raw computation isn't useful to non-scientists; the smartphone computation power is put there to render games and web pages.
    • s73v3r 11y ago
      Unless I'm mistaken, a Cray supercomputer generally had a dedicated and consistent power supply, i.e. they're plugged in. Most phones aren't, and battery technology is still not at the point where you could achieve constant performance if you were using the phone all day.
  • DavidPlumpton 11y ago
    Well one of those games is playing world championship level chess. Pretty cool for something that fits in your pocket.
    • castell 11y ago
      Not at all. Even IBM Deep Blue chess computer relied heavily on opening and ending chess databases. It's a common thing. Also does the app rely on a server to do the processing? As many F2P and online games do.
• haxel 11y ago
  So information has no value? Why do we say that information is power? I suppose that idea could be just as wrong as saying we have a supercomputer in our pocket, but the idea that information is power is much, much older. Information isn't being hoovered up at the cost of billions of dollars without a very good reason for doing so. Still, it seems a matter imagination. If our personal computers have tremendous (and accelerating) power, there's few actual limits to where we can take them. The deck even has a slide that talks about pulling components off the shelf and playing lego with them. I think it's prudent to consider whether the average person is, all things considered, empowered by our Internet-connected computers. If so, great. If not, or not enough, then how?
  • sliverstorm 11y ago
    You're trying to tie together unrelated ideas. Beneficial utilization of a phone's incredible raw computational muscle is basically unrelated to the harvesting of your personal data, in which the phone is merely acting as a networked array of sensors. There is virtually nothing stopping you from harnessing the full computational power of your phone supercomputer-style to do whatever data crunching you might imagine. The challenge is the imagining (and implementing)
    • haxel 11y ago
      I'm speaking of value, which I view as the balance of risk vs reward. Your view may differ. On one side, it seems to me that the reward or benefit we're receiving isn't anywhere near proportional to the power increases we've seen. On the other side, what are the risks of exposing so much personal information? Receiving information seems much more valuable than giving it. After all, information has a price. If giving is not so great, shouldn't we be a little concerned about the consequences of trading away so much of it? Information asymmetry strikes me as the root of many power imbalances. So, if we want more _value_ out of our "pocket supercomputers", it seems we have to consider the overall value proposition. Then perhaps we can figure out how to do better.
      • nostrademons 11y ago
• minthd 11y ago
  You don't have to take it as far as science. Previously ,Google had a web search engine that searched discussion groups - a great tool, and an important one from the democratic point of view. Now it's gone. Why ? One guess would be that no company wants to slap ads near a vibrant discussion - not a good place to sell lies. So in a sense this do fit the theme OP raised. BTW, with connectivity - the distinction between smartphone and server is little. Even weak phones have supercomputers at their disposal.
  • icebraining 11y ago
    One guess would be that no company wants to slap ads near a vibrant discussion - not a good place to sell lies. Really? Is there any large discussion forum that doesn't have ads? Reddit, SomethingAwful, they all make their income slapping ads near discussions.
    • minthd 11y ago
      reddit just proves the point , huge traffic , bad monetization.
    • minthd 11y ago
      reddit just proves the point , huge traffic , bad monetization.
  • navait 11y ago
    You can still search discussion google groups. They removed it because most people didn't want it.
• ozmbie 11y ago
  It's the idea that the content available on our devices is shaped by the economic framework that supports it. When the economic model is advertising and data tracking, the types of apps/services that are available are the ones that work best with advertising and data tracking. And it turns out that consumer-oriented social sharing services fit that model pretty well. So that's mostly what we have. Those services do have value. But I think it's limited. When I walk into a cafe with a beautiful view and everyone is on their phones, or when people awkwardly scroll through Twitter at a group event instead of enjoying the world around them or interacting with strangers....I dont see people gaining value. Especially when it's children doing it. I see compulsive addictive behaviour that erodes human value for the benefit of advertising companies.
  • nostrademons 11y ago
    The economic model follows consumer desires, not vice versa. It's a lot easier for a startup to change their business model to fit what people will actually pay them money for than for them to convince people who aren't willing to pay to ante up. If people would pay for value, startups would spring up to capture that. That's actually what we see in the SaaS business. Consumer entertainment has always been a hard sell, which is why the radio and TV businesses were also ad-supported.
• mahranch 11y ago
  > The reason we don't realize the value is because we haven't concocted applications. Some of us realize the value. I just think it's impossible for most people to not take it for granted. If you're under 30, you inherently take it for granted because you know of nothing else, you simply cannot appreciate the technology as much as someone who lived a good chunk of their lives without it. You can "know" and imagine what life was like before our current internet culture, maybe even empathize, but there are still things that are unknowable and can't be experienced by just going off the grid. One such example is culture. The culture of society was different because of the technology (or lack of) at the time. Everything from how you interacted with your friends, to how you received and consumed media, to banking and your place of employment. Everything was different before our current technology. The people who grew up with supercomputers in their pockets don't know of a world where 3-way calling was something magical and you'd get giddy when you used it (or horrified when it was used as a tool to trick you into admitting you liked someone and they were on the phone silently listening). Or a world where if you wanted to find an address or phone number, you had to go find a phone book. Wanted to go on a vacation and look up cool places to see while there? You were heading to the library. If you were on the road driving, and wanted to call someone, you had to stop off and find a payphone (and pay a fortune if you were out of the area). Good luck if you blew a tire. But back then, more people were inclined to stop off and help because of this very problem. Again, society was very different back then. People take for granted the fact that you now have all the world's information and entertainment at your fingertips. I know because I take it for granted myself and I know what the world was like before our current technology. I'm in my late 30s. If I take it for granted from time to time, how can someone who never knew a life without internet & cell phones appreciate what they have? I know this sounds a bit preachy, and I didn't really mean for it to come across that way, but I find myself echoing Louis CK sentiment on technology and today's youth. His bit here really struck a chord with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E