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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.
Oh dear god no! Please! I'd rather use a Mac!
Not so fast. These little bastards can be amazingly useful. If you can manage to use a Gnu/Linux box, you can use a Raspberry PI 3 as a (very) capable Graphic terminal for your cloud appliances without worries.
I'm using a bunch of crap, I mean, Raspberry Pi Models B (that one with 512Mb) in a little cluster for miscellaneous tasks, and the damned things work fine. I built a web radio for my home with two of them, and they still have a lot of juice to spare.
Banana Pi and Orange Pi are also capable machines, but lack the support Raspberry Pi has. But other than that, there's some interesting applications for a small computer (smaller than a 3.5" sata HD") with sata ports.
Lisias@Earth.SolarSystem.OrionArm.MilkyWay.Local.Virgo.Universe.org
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.
+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.