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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.
The PC isn't dying. Not at all. Despite tablets and mobile devices, there's a lot of work that can't easily be done on them. There are lots of jobs that still require or are much easier when done on a PC. This question is built upon a premise that is false. As long as there's work that requires a PC, and there will be for the foreseeable future, the PC sure isn't going to die.
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!
For once, we will have PCs in future to write software. In addition we have open devices such as the raspberry pi , arduino and others.
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.
And by the way, the article is wrong. The first PCs were not easy to code for. Sure, MSDOS 3.3 did include gwbasic, but for anything complex you had to license compiler software from somebody else. TurboC and the like were not free, you know. Or you could always code in assembly.
'Member GWbasic? 'Member shareware? 'Member BBS? I 'member. (South Park reference)
Establish that the PC is dying in the first place.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Open Source is not taught, it is encountered and embraced. Open Source programming is community. Those people who have oh so specialized cognitive abilities will naturally gravitate into the Open Source world. Not everyone belongs there and the idea of introducing this into curriculum is a waste of time when they should be learning something else. Of the Open Source programmers I know and have otherwise met, not a single one of them were taught about it in school. However, many got started in programming at a pre-teen age.
You can cite figures of slumping PC sales for sure. But what about the balancing figure that shows people aren't buying new desktops because the one they bought five-years ago is still blazing fast. Right now I am writing this on a Windows 10 tablet. It's a great device but the quad-core Cherry Trail and four gigs of ram are nothing to write home about... oh, a Bluetooth keyboard and I can code away on this tablet. Next room over I have the desktop I built when I need serious horsepower for something or need my nerd fix. It is 6-core AMD machine with 16 gigs of ram, a 120 gigabyte SSD and, integrated video. That is straight of 2011 and I call that my fast machine.
I could get back into carrying on about Open Source, but this statement:
Reveals the depth to which you have no clue whatsoever what you are talking about. There are plenty of people around here who might take the time to write a small book about it for you, but I am not one of them.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
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
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.
Couldn't find an exact figure, but this got me an approximate figure.
Which goes to show that tons of people don't mind going through minor hoops to get into the app store.
Does the OP have any proof that "Fewer people have the opportunity to write code and share it"? If anything, it's easy these days to get a professional development environment for pretty much any programming task, be it a pro version of Visual Studio for free or a free professional game engine. And people use them, as is evidenced for example by the huge growth in the number of PC and mobile games being published. Not to mention that consoles are a lot more open than they were in the past, with lots of indie games being available, and a normal Xbox One can be used for console development.
So even disregarding the sensationalist "PC is dead" angle, I feel that pretty much everything in the OP is not only unsubstantiated, but the opposite of the truth.
I can't really back this up with any data, but it's my speculation that all the people that NEED PCs are still getting them. What we're seeing in the area is that people that never actually needed everything a normal PC offers have migrated to phones and tablets. If you're just doing email and Facebook, a desktop machine is overkill, but there was no other choice for a long time.
There will always be programmers working on these sorts of "open" machines. We need them for academic and industry work and there's not any way that's going to change. Apple itself will always be a maker or a purchaser of those sorts of machines themselvesâ"OSes can't be made on heavily restricted machines.
What is the basis for this claim; ie, the PC is dying? I get the impression someone is pushing an agenda.
It may be that people who were using their PC primarily for gaming are beginning to opt for consoles more (if I understand the term "console" correctly), but there are a lot of people who don't play video/online games.
And if the major software manufacturers decide to move to consoles, I think that will encourage more people to use FOSS.
I have a hard time imagining SAP or Oracle releasing their products on consoles. And wouldn't they end up all wanting their own console? Imagine having a console for each business application.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
Are we talking the 'death' when a generational math prodigy turns twenty-five?
Or the 'death' when a the fastest of all fast-living rock stars turns thirty?
Or the 'death' when an formerly fetching actress turns forty?
Or the 'death' when a corner-office executive producer turns fifty.
Or the 'death' when a commercial pilot turns sixty?
Or the 'death' when a professor emeritus turns seventy?
Or the 'death' when a defeated American presidential candidate turns eighty?
Or the 'death' when everyone's favourite preschool teacher turns ninety (on Okinawa)?
Or the mostly-just-resting 'death' when the queen mum turns one hundred?
And we're still not done. George Burns lived an entire Windows 95/98 maximal uptime (49 days) after his one hundredth.
Why do your processing on a slow machine when you can have access to a remote rendering farm.
Are $5 per GB uploaded or downloaded and 1000 ms ping to said "remote rendering farm" reasons enough? This is the reality of satellite Internet.
Sure, modern machines don't boot up into BASIC (though I have two that start up in bash). But there's eclipse, Code::blocks, various QT things, and if you hold your nose even community editions of Visual Poodio that you can get with a few clicks for exactly zero of Her Germanic Majesty's finest pounds.
I want to know what this person is smoking, so I can go get some.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Turbo Pascal ad Turbo C were $99. Borland C++ 3.1 was available for upgrade pricing for far less then 1/4 the cost of a home computer then. And if you really wanted to scratch your itch, debug was free, and plenty of programs were built using nothing more than that (plus it gave you a good education into how computers worked).
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Sorry but Intel will forever make desktop, workstation, and server processors, and you wil lbe able to buy cased, power supplies, motherboards, etc...
Calling the death of the PC is one of the single most stupid trends in "journalism" I have seen in the past 5 years. I have heard these wannabe bloggers calling the death for a half a decade and it is still not even close to true.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
5years? My Macbook pro from 2011 still beats the hell out of most laptops made today. and it's benchmark numbers are only slightly lower than $900 laptops sold today as new. My workhorse Toughbook that I use for the garage CNC machine is from 2005 and it will not need to be replaced until it DIES.
Maybe if intel started making processors that gave us real speed gains over processors from 2 generations ago? My desktop i7- 4th gen is benchmarking better than the latest and greatest from Intel's 6th gen. Why would I buy new and lose performance?
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just because the exponential growth of sales has ended, thus the PC is now in structural decline....
does not mean the PC is dead.
All it means is that New people who never owned computers before are no longer getting in at a fast rate.
There's a huge population now who have purchased desktops more than 4 years ago, but less than 8 years ago,
who already have all the Laptops and Desktops they will need for years to come. We're largely still running Windows XP and
Windows 7, if we can, or perhaps Linux, and we don't like changes Microsoft made in Windows 8 and Windows 10.
New operating systems are no longer a reason to upgrade hardware.
Our personal computers are lasting longer between upgrade cycles, and we need new ones less often.
This is a good thing for consumers, and a terrible thing for the hardware and software industry.
Industry in decline, or no longer exponentially growing does NOT mean the product is dead, it means a thing called
Market saturation was reached, new growth will not be possible, since everyone who would demand it has already
has bought it, and does not mean there is no future demand for PCs. They are rather ubiquitous in fact.....
For something that is dead I see and use an awful lot of them.
Your next PC just might be a smart phone. The computing power of smart phones is getting close to the power of some desktops. So we may see docking stations that you simply plug in your monitor and key board and speakers and drop in your smart phone thus eliminating that box we are all used to having
AMD plans to have more pci-e then intels desktop chips.
But any ways the intel desktop boards stuff usb, storage, networking, most of the pci-e lanes all over the pci-e 3.0 X4 DMI bus.
I have all the toys in question - 2 laptops, 2 tablets and 3 cellphones. Here is how each of them is used:
1. This laptop I'm working on (w/ TrueOS) is where I do the bulk of my stuff - my shopping, banking, slashdot and a few other sites I participate in
2. My Wintel laptop, which is what I use for work, as well as anything where I need something that's only available on Windows
3. My iPad, which I use to listen to Sirius XM when I am at home and not driving, as well as some games
4. My Ellipsis, which I use to check stuff in my various accounts. While I use the laptop to do things like money transfers and stuff, I use the tablet to make payments, or check the status of a transaction. I also use it when I'm travelling - to carry my e-ticket and so on
5. My iPhone, which I use to FaceTime and WhatsApp w/ family members, and also play games while I'm waiting for something at a restaurant, or in a clinic, or at the movies
6. My Moto X, which I use as a work phone, and separate from my personal phone. If any employer were to ask for a BYOD, that would be it
7. My Lumia, which I use as a travel phone whenever I'm out of the US and in exclusively GSM territory
Of the things I listed above, granted - a lot of them can be consolidated to 2 or 3 devices. But while I have a wireless keyboard for my iOS and Android tablets, I've found that a lot less convenient than a laptop. OTOH, I can't use my laptop if I need to call Lyft for any reason, like if my car is in service.
The reason everybody has sold production to China is that previously, everything was merely outsourced to the likes of Gigabyte, Asustech, Acer, Compal, Quanta, et al, and slowly, everybody realized that they were only paying extra for the brand, but otherwise getting the same shit from an HP or a Dell. Which is why it makes more sense to buy from a Lenovo or an Acer. But end result is that the only thing the IBMs or Dells are now making are the high end boxes. As far as Apple goes, it does make more sense for them to switch to A10s and beyond for their laptops: OS X is already iOS-ized, and that would also save them from Hackintosh undercutting their Mac sales, to the extent it happens at all. There ain't a strong reason for Apple to base its computing infrastructure on x64. Even for Mac Pro, Apple can introduce multiple A8 cores or something to match the throughput, since the underlying OS is perfectly SMP capable
Quantity vs quality. The software built today is shite - that's why it needs the internet, for the constant bug fixes and patches. Back then, the cost, labour, and time delay of shipping out a patch or bug fix on floppy was inducive to getting it right the first time.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Oh, are PCs dead again? What is this, the 15th consecutive year they have ceased to be?
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Maybe now, but my first computer I got for college cost $2000 and it wasn't top of the line. You could argue that college pays for itself and so it was for profit, but it was a personal use machine, not for business or other organization. That's just what computers cost back then, you paid it or you went without (and by without I don't mean just use your phone, I mean no computing whatsoever).