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Will The Death of the PC Bring 'An End To Openness'? (infoworld.com)
Slashdot reader snydeq shared "11 Predictions For the Future of Programming" by InfoWorld's contributing editor -- and one prediction was particularly dire:
The passing of the PC isn't only the slow death of a particular form factor. It;s the dying of a particularly open and welcoming marketplace... Consoles are tightly locked down. No one gets into that marketplace without an investment of capital. The app stores are a bit more open, but they're still walled gardens that limit what we can do. Sure, they are still open to programmers who jump through the right hoops but anyone who makes a false move can be tossed...
For now, most of the people reading this probably have a decent desktop that can compile and run code, but that's slowly changing. Fewer people have the opportunity to write code and share it. For all of the talk about the need to teach the next generation to program, there are fewer practical vectors for open code to be distributed.
For now, most of the people reading this probably have a decent desktop that can compile and run code, but that's slowly changing. Fewer people have the opportunity to write code and share it. For all of the talk about the need to teach the next generation to program, there are fewer practical vectors for open code to be distributed.
Back when I was more of an GNU zealot a decade ago I predicted open platforms would kill dumb phones as we saw the beginings of the smart phone starting.
Reason being is the PC won over the Mac because it was open. You did not have to go to the mighty Jobs and beg to be compliant and certified. Of course DOS the 8086 and most of the PC programs/DOS were absolute crap! But hey, coders loved it with it's limitations because of the low barriers of entry and DOS allowing assembly and low access to system calls.
Atari almost died in 1982 because they tried to control everything.
Boy, I was wrong :-( Android we all hoped would be a GNU OS with all rooted phones and terminals and hacks back in 2009 when we read about it. Nope. Is it too late and why won't Google be more open? Apple too. If they make barriers low and allow more with their phones more apps will come to Apple even if they lose out on iMac sales temporarily.
http://saveie6.com/
Even more need for platforms like the Raspberry Pi then!
the death of the PC has been a thing for a while...and yet it's not dead, not even close.
With general computing power and even decent graphics becoming ever cheaper and integrated even into some monitors at a fair cost the CapEx of a PC compared favourably with consoles.
Where a PC currently wins is versatility. I can Skype, Administer, Game, Code, Design, View and FB on one platform with ease and more importantly I can do this in almost any way I want on various software platform/s stacks.
Let's not forget I can typically expect to extend the life of the platform or change it's usability case with hardware upgrades.
No walled garden, console, smartphone or the like comes even close. all they do, if used at all, is complement my PC usage.
I'll not bother to list the amount of useful activities that are obviously inferior (to the layman) on other platforms.
Restriction to a person's freedom always results in that person seeking a way to circumvent or resist that restriction and learning to avoid restriction in the future...
Death of the PC they say? -tell uswhat genuinely better replacement is coming along and I'll agree...
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Agreed. With all the phones & tablets & the apparent attitude that PCs are dying, everyone still uses them. My stepson lives in a co-op with a ton of other 20somethings & not all of the own a PC but they sure like to use his when they have a need. Our local library's machines are almost always in use with people waiting. I sure as hell can't do any real work without a PC.
The demise of the PC is desire of the the greedy men that rule the world. Lock them down, no more of this wild west internet stuff. They've been telling us the PC is dying for years now & iOS, Android & now windows fucking 10 (still mostly open though) IS THE FUTURE. I wonder if some day using regular PC on a public network will be outlawed.
A 7+ year old PC is fast enough for most. This is the only reason PC sales are not what they once where.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
This all comes from people misreading statistics... seeing a "percentage decrease" in desktop market share, while the absolute number of desktop PCs in use has most likely increased it's just been dwarfed by the explosion of non desktop PC users who buy phones and tablets. The desktop PC is just a stable market, at the most it might be cannibalised by laptops.
Consider this: what demographic is most likely to tinker and experiment? I'd say it's older children. But parents are giving kids tablets instead of fully-fledged PCs, so they won't have the same access to tinkering tools. Also, as the kids grow up in Tabletspace, they'll most likely become accustomed to tablet-like ways of working. And OK, being honest, a lot of tablet workflows are better than PC workflows, but mostly because they're not part of a continuum of change. Most major music and photo packages are still heavily-hacked versions of an analogue to the analogue world, and tablet workflows are designed not for people who know the task, but for people who know tablets. There's no reason we couldn't make similar workflows for PCs, but for wordprocessing, coding and the like, the PC workflow can't be replicated on the tablet.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
ok then explain to me why I don't use a laptop currently? oh because they are not powerful enough, try creating a animated Television commercial on a laptop - it takes too long to render without dedicated custom build hardware to handle this task, time is valuable.
walk into a design agency, do you see laptops as primary workspace?.. no, always PC/mac. Laptops are there usually as concept/storyboarding tools when doing client consultation but the workhorse is a Pc/mac
How about Rip's for printing or secondary processing, again pc's there are niches that pc's perform so much better than any other device are going to find it very hard to replace, the customizability is the defining feature, something that laptop are not great at.
The PC isn't dead. There are just a bunch of people in marketing divisions which -want- it dead, because they want to replace the commodity priced item with free OS choices and privacy settings that the user can choose with a device that has to be tossed in 1-2 years, dumps telemetry data 24/7 with the user unable to a single thing about it, and requiring all transactions to go through some type of gateway, where they guard it, and do their best to monetize every transaction. This is a damn good deal for the tablet maker. It doesn't do much for the consumer.
This type of lockdown isn't new. About 12-13 years ago when Windows Mobile smartphones were used, Sprint only allowed signed applications on their devices, and one had to pay several thousand dollars to play in their ecosystem.
PCs are not going away anytime soon. I doubt there will be a tablet that has decent GPU performance that can handle two 4k monitors. In the PC world, $350 gets you a card that can easily handle this task.
Early software was written because the author needed to perform a function that existing software didn't address: either in terms of utility or quality.
The PC magnified this need, with millions being sold but only crappy commercial software to run on it. Whether the free/share-ware in question was a Windows app or a different O/S, the same voids were filled for the same reasons. (If Windows software had started out as low-cost and high quality, would freeware have become so popular? Discuss.)
The argument now is whether that phase is over. Do we have enough apps? Can we (users) do all the things that we wish to, with the software that is available to us, now? Do we prefer to spend 99 on an app that has "star" ratings, user feedback, integrated installation is (almost) guaranteed not to make our hardware die, send SPAM or steal our data - or do we prefer to download something for zero cost and then spend hours trying to configure it and bend it to our will?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
+1000
With the exception of the video card and a relatively cheap 512GB SSD, I also haven't seen the need to buy a new PC until it outright fails. It's still humming along on the i7-2600K processor and 16GB of RAM that it came with 5 years ago. While I'm sure there are workloads that can benefit from the latest and greatest, for most people there just isn't any compelling reason to upgrade. We're starting to see the same phenomenon in the cell phone ecosystem as well.
The only difference now is they use a smartphone or a laptop rather than a desktop.
The difference now is you can buy a computer for a few hundred dollars, even less if you just need hardware connected to the internet, along with a firehose of an internet connection, and can pretty much do what ever you want. That is as open as it gets.
The real heart of the matter is that most people could give a flip less about coding up their own solutions, any more than they are willing to change the oil on their car. They never will. The minority that is willing to do that will be the ones selling them solutions.
Computing as a service is taking over. Why do your processing on a slow machine when you can have access to a remote rendering farm. This is the future. Give it ten years tops and the PC will have died. Big corps want this, they don't want independent programmers to potentially compete. Governments want this, better surveillance and nobody cooking up any pesky encryption or 3d printed weaponry anymore. Consumers want this, why buy big expensive machines when you only need an interface to a remote machine? It's going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it.
either the next version of windows will be more suitable for industry or 7 will continue getting support like XP did.
if MS pushes the issue, they will lose industry to linux, and they know it.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.