Preparing For Life After the PC 636
New submitter Doctor_Jest links to a recent I, Cringely column, in which Cringely "is speculating how the world will look when the 'Post-PC' era is in full swing." He makes the case that in just a few upgrade cycles, extensible phones and other devices, coupled with remotely stored data, could replace most of today's conventional PCs — but also admits he thought this transition would have already happened.
We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Interesting)
I know, stupid me, I never thought of not being able to buy parts.... I just thought I could put the PC in a cupboard and still access it. (High end sound, graphics processing, etc...)
What becomes of media creators? Do we have to buy more and more dedicated gadgets?
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
What becomes of media creators? Do we have to buy more and more dedicated gadgets?
The media creators will still have their toys, but this is all about the media consumers. Big money hates that every joe can create content and IP without them getting a cut, so they're pushing for a (licenced) media delivery only internet and killing the tools end users have for being creative.
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Persactly. I worked in big arse joe (main stream media), now I'm indie and I'm loving cheap media tools, subscribing and loving. Will I still get them? Can I still use the linux toolchain I have built for my work? Or
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
The "post-PC" meme is a false one, so you're safe. Yeah, a lot of stuff will change and morph, but consumers will swallow almost any false meme with a little ketchup or hot sauce.
The fact is: all of these items are personal computers. Some of your stuff will be on other people's computers, a/k/a "the cloud". The cloud offers some cool storage (albeit not very reliable and often highly proprietary in accessibility) and some great apps, single-user and group.
Spit the bait out of your mouth and continue to watch neat stuff appear in the market place. PCs come in lots of form factors from Raspberry Pis, smartstuff, clothing, iGoo, and will continue to morph. If you want to buy and use a traditional tower PC with discrete monitor, etc., do it. Or choose from a wide variety of, yes, PCs.
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Phones/tablets don't come with the same expectations that the user can modify both what's in the case (hardware) and on the HD (software) with any compatible off-the shelf product. Not only may you lose support for attempting unsanctioned mods, but you could find yourself blocked from the net or charged with a crime. They are not PCs because the 'personal' in the acronym denotes a certain minimum amount of user control. When we start with PCs and remove a lot of control from them, we call them thick clients
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
The P in PC stands for personal. That means that it's in your control. These new devices are basically following the old mainframe model and the corporate managed IT model. They aren't PCs. They're PCs trying to pretend to be appliances.
The best comparison is to a Tivo.
Whether or not a piece of kit has a keyboard or monitor is really the least relevant thing. If you've got root, it's a PC. If you don't have root, then it's not a PC.
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What coincides? That the industry realizes most people treat their computers as appliances, while at the same time technology allows them to create the actual computing appliances that better meets he needs of those people?
Of course that's no coincidence - you can't have the second without the first preceding it. But building what people want according to how they use their devices does not add up to a conspiracy to prevent them from creating unmanaged content.
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It'd sure seem less conspiracy-like if the way they were building these things wasn't rife with DRM that can't be turned off. But the entire ARM-based mobile world is basically centered around non-optional, inflexible lock down.
And a subset of that is being shoved into the PC space. Who knows how many iterations it'll be until it's pushed fully.
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What became of auto repairers? Want to repair a *your favorite brand here* car? Buy the tools from *your favorite brand here*, that is the hardware and software you need to interface the car electronics.
This has always been true for software developers but sometimes only on very loose terms: want to develop a desktop application for Windows? Get a Windows licence from Microsoft but buy the hardware from any manufacturer. It was car like at the time of mainframes and it got car like again a few years ago: wa
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
You still need some kind of development platform for the mobile devices, so the PC will still be around. And a lot of work done in reality still requires a PC.
Of course - you may argue that you will use the cloud, but the cloud isn't always accessible.
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess the bigger issue is not the form factor of future computers, but their capabilities. Will I be able to easily install an OS of my choice? Will I be able to develop for it without too many restrictions? Will I be able to modify it's bootloader and/or firmware? Will I be able to connect together diverse peripherals from many different manufacturers for the functionality I desire? Can I retain most of the functionality of the system even without an Internet connection?
Currently you can do all these with today's PCs. But will it remain so in the future?
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:4, Insightful)
Seeing how we already have Cyanogenmod (and quite a few others), initiatives like the Raspberry Pi and people are running Android on iPhones, yes, I think we'll still be able to do that for quite some time. It will probably be about as popular as Linux on the desktop is today, though.
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Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Interesting)
All software is censored and taxed by the platform holder's App Store. Nothing else runs, without (illegal) hacking of the device.
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Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:4, Insightful)
If Apple's app store started banning users with jailbroken phones that would push even more people to Google's Android based phones. Alternatively jailbroken iPhone users could point their phones to alternate IOS app stores which would be sure to pop up should Apple start behaving like you describe.
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually did this a few weeks ago, I lived Cringley's dream, and it sucks. My phone is the Samsung Galaxy S II, which just had the Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich" release for it on T-Mobile, my carrier. That means that I can now plug my phone into my monitor via HDMI (with a cheap cable), type with a bluetooth keyboard, and use a bluetooth mouse. I went and bought those three things the day after I upgraded the phone. I used it for about an hour. It just isn't a usable setup.
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the cloud isn't always accessible.
I hate the concept of 'the cloud' as much as any legitimate developer, but...
as I write this on a cross-country train with no wifi, I would have to disagree with you.
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:4, Insightful)
There are apps (cloud or device driven) for mobiles to make internet selling easy. I would have argued that's a perfect example of someone who doesn't need a pc rather than someone who does.
And you're wrong on gaming too. Mobile gaming is now higher volume than pc/console combined. It's only lower in cash volume because the price point fixed lower early on. Both Sony and MS have big worries about whether or not their next platforms can turn a profit given the direction the market is heading (because they initially sell the hardware at a large loss, they need to sell a lot of expensive games to make up the difference).
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> There are apps (cloud or device driven) for mobiles to make internet selling easy.
This is a pretty weak and lame remark.
Now if you said something like "my favorite mobile app for task X is A", then you would have said something worth wasting the infintesimal amout of resources your comment took up.
Lots of people make lots of wild vague claims with no details or anything else to back them up really. It's all just repeating someone else's propaganda in the end.
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course. Plus, I'm sure they would shit their pants with glee if the average person was out there replacing their computer as often as they're replacing their phone.
One can't ignore the benefit to the industry of throwaway electronics. When your PC breaks, you can take it to a shop and have someone attempt to repair it. When your phone breaks, you go to your carrier, get a replacement (either out of pocket, or via insurance, but either way they're getting paid), and the broken one gets sent back to be refurbished (and sold AGAIN at a profit) or ends up in a landfill.
Also, from a software standpoint, what's going to happen in this glorious "post-PC era" when half the devices out there are locked down to the point where they can only run "approved" software? We're going to have to hack our shit just to get back the ability to install and run whatever the fuck we want on our devices? Come on....
They can have my PC when they pry it from my cold, dead hands...
With any luck... (Score:3)
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember the conspiracy theorist in our office muttering 10 or so years ago about how he wasn't going to install Windows XP or buy a Pentium 4 because of "Trusted Computing" they would implement.
2.5 generations of OS and several CPU generations later...
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
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It got pushed into the high security niche. We deal with a lot of financial institutions and they want the TPM chip activated and the drives encrypted with the encryption keyed to the chip. It adds an extra layer of administration, but it is a pretty solid solution.
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lol - I love how ridiculous this articles are. Desktop PCs are not going anywhere. Laptops are great, phones & pdas are great in a pinch but nothing compares to a triple monitor beast to mess around with. If anything I see PCs becoming more relevant with wireless display tech. 1 computer, multiple users, multiple displays. No need to sync because it's all on one system. The cloud will be based out of the home and you access it from anywhere.
re: 1 computer, multiple users, multiple displays (Score:3)
This isn't going to happen on Windows. Could finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, though. Windows EULA specifically prohibits one shared computer with multiple users without a license for each user. Run any microsoft app, like Office, and you are doubly screwed. If a person wanted to be legal, this setup would cost a fortune, because you are really getting into Windows Server territory.
I've set up a desktop Linux (Ubuntu) with FreeNX. Holy cow, we are just a Linux-based Quickbook client away from ta
Re: 1 computer, multiple users, multiple displays (Score:5, Informative)
This isn't going to happen on Windows. Could finally be the year of Linux on the desktop, though. Windows EULA specifically prohibits one shared computer with multiple users without a license for each user.
Citation on that please.
Windows has the capability to have multiple users, with multiple passwords, built right in. I can't remember the last home PC I've had that hasn't had a separate user profile for every person in the house (plus guest). And they've never tried to extract more money out of me. Why would they put that option in there if it were illegal?
Back when I lived with my parents, there was one desktop computer shared by four people. Maybe this is a "youth of today" attitude- where it is now practically unthinkable that people might not have at least one computer each...
Re: 1 computer, multiple users, multiple displays (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. I just built a terminal server at work. 5 legal remote desktop users = 450.00 - 500.00 dollars. And that is not counting the OS, which must be a Server OS, or the hardware. You are easily looking at 1500.00 - 2000.00 for a legal 5 user remote desktop.
Make a copy of Office available on the Remote Desktop...need a license for each user. You sneeze right, you need a license for that.
There are several dirt cheap Citrix-like products: Check out http://www.thinstuff.com/ [thinstuff.com]
Now do a search to see if that product is legal. Well no, they are not. If you don't have a Remote Desktop User CAL for each user, it's in violation of Windows EULA. I just spent a lot of time researching this stuff.
You can even run thinstuff on XP. Works great. I tested it. Is it legal. No. On XP, you can't put in Remote Desktop CALs, so there is no way to make it legal, even if you used thingstuff and attempted to purchase legal CALs.
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Insightful)
You could have bothered to even skim TFA.
The argument being made is that the PC is going to be replaced with a mobile device, that can connect wirelessly to any keyboard, mouse, screen(s) at hand. This makes perfect sense. If I can essentially carry a PC in my pocket and wield all that power both while on the move (on the device itself) and through wireless docking, why not?
Granted, there are a lot of obstacles to overcome. But I don't have a need for a huge box under my desk if it fits in my pocket and does the same thing.
Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't disagree with your sentiments, but we're in the minority my friend. For most people, they want cheap, fast and easy access to Facebook, email and Angry Birds. You don't need a PC for that.
PCs, like most consumer electronic devices, become a commodity, disposable and then deprecated. When was the last time you fixed a VCR? When they came out, it was cheaper to have someone fix them. And then, if you had some repair skills, you could order parts for any VCR on the market. Now, just try to buy a VCR. Consumer electronics move toward no user serviceable parts; just look at the latest crop of ultra-thin laptops.
There will always be a need for PCs in the workplace and in software development. But their utility is going to be come very niche and they're well on their way to being replaced for most uses; just like the VCR.
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Re:We're gonna lose a lot. (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe we'll be back to the day when only nerds and smart people have computers, everyone else will just have gadgets.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Post PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm, there is going to be a continuing and significnt need for a device that has a real keyboard for all the people who write a lot of text every day; substantial local CPU power and storage for people that do stuff like development, modeling and simulations; good screens and specialized input devices for people that do graphical design CAD and the like.
Now, that device might not be an X86 box that runs Windows, so in that sense it may well be "Post PC". But to all intents and purposes it will look and act very much like the laptop and desktop machines i have today.
Re:Post PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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The "post-PC" world will look very much like the "post-book" world looks right now. *glances towards the large bookshelf to the right*
You grew up in the book era and take books for granted. The next generation might think of bookshelves as something that their grandparents have.
Re:Post PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Until the power goes out and they can't recharge their Kindle...then they're going to be right back to the books. Let's ask all those people living in those areas of the U.S. that have been without power for the last 3-4 days how well their eBooks are working out for them now...
I'll believe that eBooks are going to kill off paper books when the automobile succeeds in killing off the bicycle. I mean, it's only been a century or so, but I'm sure it's gonna happen eventually...
We all grew up with electricity, and those magic outlets have been ubiquitous for a century, but all it takes is one extended period without power for people to realize that they need a fucking back-up plan, and until we come up with portable cold-fusion reactors for every home, that's not likely to change.
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Until the power goes out and they can't recharge their Kindle...then they're going to be right back to the books. Let's ask all those people living in those areas of the U.S. that have been without power for the last 3-4 days how well their eBooks are working out for them now...
Honestly, I doubt that they're worried about what to read at this point.
Re:Post PC (Score:5, Insightful)
The Kindle's battery lasts for a month. I think if the power is out for a whole month there would be much bigger things that we'll be worried about than charging our Kindles...
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Post PC (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's ask all those people living in those areas of the U.S. that have been without power for the last 3-4 days how well their eBooks are working out for them now...
Not too bad since I can take it to my car and charge it and I get the added benefit of getting to sit in the car's AC.
We had a 9 day winter power outage last fall. The problem with that approach was that gas stations were also closed. The few that had generators and got deliveries had several hour long queues outside them.
We rationed the car use for (long) drives to get important items, while always leaving enough fuel to reach hospitals and vets, even if roads were closed and we'd have to deal with detours and traffic jams.
My UPSes were kept for quick bringing up of a router, in order to send/receive e-mails once a day (The cable modem and cell phone towers went out, of course, but DSL still worked. Strike one for POTS and its separate power.) an keeping a GPS charged.
While I had a nook and a Clie (favoured, because it's smaller) and numerous laptops, what I fell back on were books. With four book cases with around 100 books in each, and a few crates of books and magazines, there was no dearth of reading materials.
I tried the nook, but found it easier to read paper pages by candle light than e-ink was. And the self-discharge of the nook meant it was dead after a week.
So yes, books. And non-coloured magazines.
Re:Post PC (Score:4, Interesting)
What does this graph tell you?
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2TFMKwo394o/T8uuMgO0rxI/AAAAAAAAB7g/Ki-zwVPMegc/s400/PowerOutages.jpg [blogspot.com]
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Re:Post PC (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Post PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Thats why diablo 3 might sell 4 or 5 million copies but angry birds selling 100 million.
Because the fact that Diablo III costs $59.99 and Angry Birds goes for a whopping $0.99 has nothing to do with it...
People are coming to realise, why should I go out and spend 300 bucks on a shitty computer when I can spend 200 bucks on a google nexus 7 that will do what I want and I can carry around or just upgrade my smartphone I already have.
The $300 shitty computer can run pretty much anything you want to put on it. How many tablets and smartphones out there will even allow you to put any software you want on your device? Cheering on the post-PC era, with all the locked bootloaders and apps being pulled and features being removed after the device has already been sold via mandatory updates, seems a little short-sighted to me. I'll welcome the post-PC era when all the tablet and smartphone manufacturers aren't raping consumers for every penny they possibly can while deliberately degrading the experience of their previous devices to force users to throw their device into a drawer and buy a new one just to run the newest Angry Birds.
We're finally at that point with PC's where you don't have to run out and upgrade half the components in your build every 6-months to play new games and use new software, and you guys are eager to jump right on the platform that you can't even upgrade (nor repair, usually) and thus have to replace the entire fucking device to do so? What are y'all smoking?
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Almost none now, because most people are still not doing the bulk of their computing on their cell phones and tablets. People shrug their shoulders and say "meh" now when an app gets yanked from their device after they put it on there, or when they can't run a given application on their device at all because it's version locked or other some such shit, but that's going to change when it's something that's actually critical and not a dippy $1 game or Office app they have a PC version of to fall back on.
It's
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Until I have infinite bandwidth, I prefer my Movies on disk, I still buy quite a few DVDs instead of Blu-ray, mainly they look almost as good on my 25 inch (widescreen) TV.
The next generation of Console games will still use disk for the big games, since most people don't have infinite bandwidth. I can see more and more PC g
Re:Post PC (Score:5, Interesting)
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And since 99% (ass statistic) of the computer users simply don't need that much horse power, we may find that this does become the norm and our desktops may become somewhat esoteric and have a price to suit (in relative terms).
I feel it's probably still progress towards a better state, but there will be some transition pain like with many disruptive technologies - in a few years you phone will probably have the power of your Deskop(tm) and we'll just plug it into our nice monitors and keyboard - I'm actuall
Re:Post PC (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's a huge counterpoint to these idiots who constantly declare the end of the PC year after year yet it's demise has yet to materialize.
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The issue with mobile device as dockable PC is pretty simple. On a phone or tablet with a touch screen, you don't realize all of the little delays built into the system masked by the UI but when you hook your kit up to a mouse and keyboard, expectations change. And the ugly truth is, ARM just can't keep up. I've hooked my Xoom to a dock many times in an attempt to emulate a real workflow and it just isn't happening. And I've tried everything. turning off animations, over clocking, different apps, chroot. It
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Why are people posting about their very specific needs, and overstating the impact those needs have for everyone else? Your vertical market is the minority.
Yes, but there are shitloads of minority vertical markets which are currently served by the PC and for which tablets and phones are not viable replacements.
And that's just in industry, never mind that there are a lot of people recording music at home, putting heavily-edited videos on youtube and tens of thousands of webcomics being done in photoshop etc. That said, it would be nice to have tape machines back in production...
Re:Post PC (Score:4, Insightful)
Why are people posting about their very specific needs, and overstating the impact those needs have for everyone else? Your vertical market is the minority.
Because there is an awful lot of specific needs. The sum of the minorities makes for a huge market for general purpose machines that can do all this and more - including things we haven't thought of yet.
Re:Post PC (Score:5, Insightful)
It will come, perhaps not the way we expect it to though. And, it will come right after the paperless office
Re:Post PC (Score:4, Insightful)
So, actually not much different from the current options, just more refined.
And why did they put Slackware into the email address? I'm more of a Debian guy. o.O
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Hmm, there is going to be a continuing and significnt need for a device that has a real keyboard for all the people who write a lot of text every day
As one of those people I agree and would like to add something. If you're really writing a lot, not just any keyboard will do. Most laptops nowadays have really bad keyboards, and they became worse when everybody started to copy Apple's 'improved' laptop keyboards. Luckily, classic thinkpads still have decent keyboards. But of course, nothing beats buckling spring keyboards or Cherry switches. (I don't have experience with the latter but use a Unicomp at home; probably the best buy in computer hardware I've
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So someone is going to make voice recognition that doesn't suck soon? That, too, has been coming for decades.
Once, for a lark, I set up various voice options (Dragon, and the one built into Windows, and I think and OS X flavor) and read to them from various texts, from normal (a short story, and a newspaper article), to specialist (a Unix admin guide and a excerpts from Kant), to odd nonsense(Lewis Carroll and Dr. Seuss); the results were uniformly amusing. Obviously the more conventional material was tr
Dirt cheap? (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Wake me up once one of those toys can compete with an actual 3D graphics workstation.
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Wake me up once one of those toys can compete with an actual 3D graphics workstation.
By the time these devices can compete with an actual 3D graphics workstation, that target will have already moved on. So you will never be able get closure on "Wake me when X can do Y"
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You don't seem to have a grasp of how many people routinely use 3d graphics packages out there in the real world...
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Re:Meh ... (Score:5, Interesting)
99% of the user base doesn't need some given functionality of the PC that the other 1% depend on.
About 80% of the user base can think of some functionality that puts them in one of those "1%" groups. For some it's 3D graphics. For some, it's computing power. For some it's the layout capability that a large screen+mouse+keys offers. For most, it's the ability to type... with all of their digits.
It may eventually get to the point where PC hardware is just a big (very big) tablet with a mount and connections for network, keyboard ,and mouse, but it still will be a PC.
not working so much (Score:5, Funny)
I wanted to write a detailed rebuttal. But I don't have the patience to enter it in my phone.
the pc will remain (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't see people coding on devices with inferior screen(sizes), cpu power and input devices.
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And we'll be just heads in jars, like Nixon . . . (Score:3)
From TFA:
It takes society thirty years, more or less, to absorb a new information technology into daily life. It took about that long to turn movable type into books in the fifteenth century. Telephones were invented in the 1870s but did not change our lives until the 1900s. Motion pictures were born in the 1890s but became an important industry in the 1920s. Television, invented in the mid-1920’s, took until the mid-1950s to bind us to our sofas.
We still have books and telephones and movies and tv's so what the hell is his point?
ps--Judging by his photo in the banner, his blog ought to be called, "I, Crinkly".
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He's just showing us how he's 29 years ahead of the curve by adopting Instagram into his "professional" work.
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Telephones were invented in the 1870s but did not change our lives until the 1900s. Motion pictures were born in the 1890s but became an important industry in the 1920s
This argument is forced.
The most obvious example would be all-electronic television, commercially viable no later than 1939, but deployment held back by World War Two.
Take a closer look at the history of the movies:
The Birth of a Nation began filming in 1914 and pioneered such camera techniques as the use of panoramic long shots, the iris effects, still-shots, night photography, panning camera shots, and a carefully staged battle sequence with hundreds of extras made to look like thousands. It also contains many new artistic techniques, such as color tinting for dramatic purposes, building up the plot to an exciting climax, dramatizing history alongside fiction, and featuring its own musical score written for an orchestra.
The film cost $112,000 (the equivalent of $2.41 million in 2010). A ticket to the film cost a record $2 (equal to $45.95 today).
The Birth of a Nation [slashdot.org]
I have a copy of a contemporary essay from The Saturday Evening Post which explored the social changes that could already be seen at work in the success of the nickelodeon theaters of a decade earlier --- as the writer summed it up, the nickel theater was a night out any
Input Devices (Score:4, Interesting)
Bleak (Score:2)
So, when PCs have finally solved the problem of reliably working with standard OS and data (thanks to FOSS) we scrap it all to be more dependent on external providers.
It's not like prices will go up when the cloud becomes the only choice, oh no.
I said "we" but in truth, it's "they", the guys who seek more control over our computing experience (and have been doing so since they started closing the source and making a guy called Stallman have a working printer).
Cringely is a technological illiterate (Score:5, Insightful)
In TFA Cringely states: "Radio was invented with the original idea that it would replace telephones and give us wireless communication. That implies two-way communication, yet how many of us own radio transmitters?"
He is apparently unaware that cellphones, tablets, etc. use radio transmitters (technically transceivers) to communicate with cell towers, WiFi access points, Bluetooth headsets, etc.
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while many devices have transcievers, we aren't hooking up morse code keys and tapping out CQ QSX on them as the equivalent of the Slashdot nerds of early hobbyist radio thought everyone would be doing. While a cell phone has a transciever it acts like a telephone....not a ham radio setup.
Requires generational change (Score:2, Troll)
The reason is has not happened yet is sheer momentum, and the basic fact of human nature that people resist change.
Look at Slashdot readers, who you would think would be on the vanguard of this technological shift. Instead they are some of the clingiest whiniest buggy-whip holdingist resistors of change to be found, simply because post-PC devices cannot yet replace high-end CAD workstations or some other such uber-specialized nonsense that do not matter to the general trend.
The kids in grade school (at th
Re:Requires generational change (Score:4, Insightful)
Give me a call when you can easily develop for the iPad on the iPad. Or when you can develop complex server applications on a Galaxy S3. PCs are going away in the consumer world (to the detriment of anyone who wants to create anything outside work without forking out a fortune), but PCs are going nowhere in the office where you need a large screen or two to efficiently do your job and a decent keyboard to do accurate typing.
We are not whiny buggy whip holders, we are the people that work in real organisations, where the needs are more complex than Facebook access and where legacy applications abound. When you futurists can come up with a decent device for doing complex work that is a realistic alternative to the PC then you can criticise those of us who actually know something. Until then get the fuck off my lawn.
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but PCs are going nowhere in the office where you need a large screen or two to efficiently do your job and a decent keyboard to do accurate typing.
Haven't been paying close attention in some offices these days, have you. Those thiny little boxes attached to the backs of monitors, or off to the side? Thin clients, not PC's.
Re:Requires generational change (Score:4, Insightful)
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The reason is has not happened yet is sheer momentum, and the basic fact of human nature that people resist change.
It's not that at all, at least, not in this case.
A lot of foolish people assume that "new" means that everything else automatically becomes "old", and hence "bad". Now, in some cases, this is one hundred percent true, but such examples are the exception, not the rule.
We still wear cotton, several thousand years after it was first used, and a hundred years after synthetic fibres were invented. We have more sheep here in Australia -- raised mostly for wool -- than people! Is this simply "sheer momentum" or pe
What post PC ? (Score:2)
Some people do need an actual computer (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever I see people saying this, I wonder how many people actually use their computer to do real work.
I work as a recording engineer. You can buy non-PC devices to do the actual recording if you want, but even in that case mixing and post-processing really does require a computer with vast amounts of local CPU power and storage, in addition to some highly specialised equipment (such as external audio interfaces that connect via Firewire or even PCI cards). You can't record ten simultaneous tracks of uncompressed 24-bit, 48 khz audio to the cloud. I'm sure the same is true of many other fields like video and graphics production, software development, and scientific number crunching.
Sure, grandma probably doesn't need a full-blown PC to look at emailed pictures of her family, and maybe the "post-PC" era will benefit her. But I do worry what will happen to the PC world if major manufacturers keep taking their focus away from people who really do require serious equipment. (Hello, Apple, selling 2010 Mac Pros for 2014 prices, with an operating system that's leading the charge towards turning your desktop computer into an iPad!)
Looking at things wrong (Score:2)
Replace, or augment? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with such predictions is that they rely on the smartphone being a full replacement for a PC. And that's just not the case.
There's the obvious problems - typing large amounts of text, or doing things that require more processing power than a smartphone will have in the foreseeable future. These have been covered to death already; I won't bother reiterating them.
But then there's the lesser obstacles. Let me bring in some anecdotal evidence. I was feeling nostalgic, and wanted to play some of my old Game Boy Color games. I figured I should do so on my phone, rather than try to drag yet another bulky piece of electronics around. Finding an emulator was easy enough (finding one that didn't display ads was tougher, but doable). And I easily found a ROM file (just in case you're spying on me, MAFIAA, yes, I still have those games on cartridge, so bugger off).
But, every time I tried to download it, it prompted me for what program to open it in. And it only listed the ones that had registered themselves as being able to open .ZIP filesl the emulator was not among them. There was no option for "save the file locally, I'll handle opening it". None at all.
So in order to actually get it to work, I had to hook it up to my computer and copy the file over. Such a simple task, but it couldn't do it.
There are many other times I've tried to do something on my phone, but been unable to without using a PC. Here's a big one - development. You can code for Linux, on Linux. You can code for Windows, on Windows. I've even coded for freaking TI calculators, *on* the calculator. But you can't code for Android on an Android device, nor can you code for iPhone on an iPhone.
The running theme of it seems to be that smartphones and tablets are designed as consumers of data, not producers. But, given how essential producing data is to modern society, that means they will never replace the PC until that fundamental design concept is thrown out. Sure, for some, even many, uses, they're adequate, or at least capable of doing the task (if slower and more awkwardly). But so many common things remain impossible.
The more paranoid among you are probably preparing a rant about how this is $BIG_EVIL_CONGLOMERATE's wet dream, and something something 1984 something something DRM something from my cold dead hands. But that's not the case. Even *if* you posit a dystopian future where the $BEC controls everything, there will *still* be PCs, because *someone* will still have to produce data. They may become much less common, but a PC, or a PC-functional device, *will* be necessary.
Now, it could be possible that smartphones will change to have this type of functionality, and would be able, in theory, to replace PCs. But *that* seems unlikely, because the form factor itself, as well as limitations of technology, makes them very poor PC replacements.
[1] Note that, throughout, I use the term "PC" for "workstation, desktop or notebook". OS does not matter - your Mac is a PC; your Linux desktop is a PC; even that one guy still running CP/M is using a PC.
Notebooks, maybe, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
What’s keeping us using desktops and even notebook, then, are corporate buying policies, hardware replacement cycles, and inertia.
While I actually agree with the assertion that laptops are on the way out, I don't ever see a day I *won't* want to have my own dedicated box. And what's going to keep me buying (or, rather, building) desktop computers is customizability and control. I don't want Google, Amazon, HTC, Apple or anyone else telling me what my computer should be. I don't want an internet outage to prevent me from using my machine, I don't want to be told what software I can or cannot install on my machine, and I don't want to be a slave to a company's repair center whenever I need to do a simple replacement. It's in the name: Personal Computer.
I'm not saying that thin clients don't have their place, and I don't doubt that their popularity will rise, but I don't think the PC is going anywhere.
"Trucks and cars" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Given that comment, isn't it funny that the most popular vehicle of choice for many years was the minivan, more or less a slimmed-down version of a "heavy lifting" vehicle, and now, the SUV, which is basically a truck with an integrated camper shell.
This whole "end of the XXX era" crap is a typical has-been journalist's pathetic attempt to become a futurist because he thinks he has some kind of insight into an industry that he really doesn't have, all in a desperate attempt to remain relevant.
The truth of t
Governments love the cloud (Score:2)
Much easier to get at your stuff that way
still premature (Score:2)
In my tech support job, I still deal on a daily basis with people for whom the personal computer is a hateful thing they want to have nothing to do with. This technology is not yet fully integrated into our society.
It's all about the UI, at this point. (Score:3)
Can't believe the lack of faith here. (Score:5, Insightful)
All these arguments here over input devices and 3D capable workstations and "powerful" processors vs. "weak" tablets and smartphones. Give me a break.
We're talking about the FUTURE here. Rewind 10 years and tell me you EVER thought you would be sitting around with 3 terabytes and 32GB of RAM inside your "personal" computer at home for less than $1000. Now go ahead and TRY and predict what kind of computing power we're going to be literally holding in the palm of our hands in another 10 years as you complain about 3D capability and resolution (ironically while you hold your 2048 x 1536 iPad in your hand) .
As far as keyboards go, we're only beginning to see what interfaces like Siri can do. Yes, I love my keyboard and can type with speed. But it is still no match for my voice, and I would much rather use THE most efficient method of input. The average person can speak MUCH faster than they can type (250 - 300WPM), and as long as that statistic rings true (along with increasing levels of car accidents due to texting instead of looking at the damn road), we WILL have many reasons to move away from a box of keys.
Sorry, but considering what computing power has done in the last 10 - 20 years, I've given up on trying to predict the wonders of tomorrow, but I'm sure not going to simply dismiss them based on archaic mentality.
Post PC for the sheep only.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Many of us, specifically the ones that create or are techies, will have a "PC" always. the Post PC era is for the appliance operators, the ones that treat the PC as a toaster, and it's about time this happened. I have always said that a computer is NOT what most people need, they need something that is like a game machine. Fixed OS they cant write to, and software as read only. Give them a space they can write to for storage and call it done. An Xbox360 or PS3 kind of device that is a home computer.
Luckily it's coming to pass. and all people that have done IT support in their life will rejoice.
I have an idea (Score:5, Funny)
Pads and phones are the domain of the trivial (Score:3)
This is a human factors issue. Look, the form factor for tablets and phones is just wrong for most *work*. WORK. Remember that stuff? Sure, I can watch videos or play games on my phone, but I'm not going to be editing a spreadsheet, editing an engineering drawing, or typing a novel on my tablet any time soon. Servers and portables with keyboards are going to be around until we get practically useful direct neural I/O.
Paperless office (Score:3)
The post-PC world will look much like the post-paper office does... how long ago did they predict the paperless office again?
Data (Score:3)
If this prediction comes true, it's the ultimate lock-in for data. People complained in the 90s and 00s about how MS Office files weren't readable in other programs. Well, you could still back them up and distribute them as you wished, and MS couldn't take them away if they didn't like you. Text, image and video files on the desktop can be opened in different applications depending on the need, while in the cloud it's at the mercy of the provider. If the present is anything to go by, most providers aren't going to have public APIs for interoperability.
(There are of course advantages to thin clients, which are harder to implement in "fat" clients, and even harder in a P2P setup, but the lock-in problem is pretty fundamental)