The cloud isn't nearly fast enough or cheap enough to replace any sort of local storage. That's not even getting into the obvious question of reliability and availability that so many people like to just gloss over.
A small form factor PC is cute but it's not terribly maintainable. It's also going to be less reliable because of the high likelihood that you are cooking your components. Modern machines need fans and air circulation. Mac Minis and iMacs and associated wannabes have problems in this regard.
You can even burn yourself on an iMac.
Most people don't really "need" tiny. It's just something that adds costs, decreases reliability, and ruins maintainability. Unless you are a hipster in New York or San Francisco, you can accomodate a conventional PC.
Even hiding it is easy enough.
Tablets are still years behind in terms of performance despite PCs being pretty stagnant. If you bolted the graphics terminal form factor to tablet hardware, you probably wouldn't want to use it like that. Once you left the manicured garden, you would realize how weak the hardware is.
> Running your own code isn't the definition of a personal computer
Yes it is. That's where the PERSONAL in personal computing comes in. YOU are the one that's in control of it.
The iPad is just a replacement for the centralized control model that existed before the PC. You were not in control of the experience. Someone else was. Apple is the new central IT authority in your "new" terminal based model of computing.
People used the PC to rebel against that old model because it was too confining, didn't allow for innovation, and prevented people from getting work done.
> They are personal computing devices that also have the ability to place and receive phone calls.
Not at all.
They are phones. People need phones.
They need phones just like they need microwave ovens, regular ovens, refrigerators, cars and washing machines.
They are not sold as general purpose computing devices or even as information appliances. They are sold as phones to be used with a phone service.
Some people just choose to confuse the issue. These are people that lost the last platform war and think they are going to win the next one when it's all just a side show.
The price I pay is actually very low. It's cheaper than the cheapest ION based lower profile machine I could lay my hands on. The fact that this price might be "subsidized" doesn't really matter since my phone bill won't go down if I'm kinder to the planet and forgo a phone upgrade.
The problem with these numbers is that you are comparing devices with a key useful function that has nothing to do with computing and conflating them with dedicated computing devices.
My oldest HTPC is 5 years old. It was originally purchased because it was the cheapest thing I could lay my hands on at the time. It has been repurposed over time and has had minor upgrades to reflect that.
The machine is maintainable and not too terribly obsolete. Than means that I don't have to buy another one. PCs in general tend to be like that.
A similar machine of the same age that's more "integrated" like a mobile device would be a doorstop. (Got 2 of those actually)
Even if they aren't, you might be able to deal with the situation with a cheap video card upgrade or something else like an SSD replacing the boot drive.
There are plenty of pretty simple ways of tweaking a PC.
Despite the screeching of a certain type of anti-intellectual, removing a couple of screws and shoving a video card into a socket is not exactly rocket surgery.
In other words you are advocating the MS-DOS mentality.
It doesn't have to be robust because "it's only for home use".
Unfortunately that rationale doesn't work here because all of the best video drivers are not going to be supporting Wayland. Beyond the whole "we actually do real work with Linux" sort of people, you also have a whole bunch of other people that actually like to get the most out of their graphics cards.
Wayland will do exactly squat to address that as the companies that make the best hardware and provide the best drivers have no interest in Wayland.
Right now Wayland is a lot of hype and nonsense. Nothing has actually materialized. It has proved nothing. It's really only rallying point for mindless X haters repeating other people's propaganda.
Wayland even fails for the "but it's only for home use" argument. It actually fails harder in that regard.
Replicating the usefulness of my Nvida blob? Good luck.
> 2) Really have more wealth? Some do yes, but it is nothing like 30 years ago. These days the problem is that you have a set of folks that have money and others that do not.
The US standard of living has always been higher and Americans have more disposable income. Even Europeans that are supposed to be well off live in conditions that most American professionals would consider intolerable.
It helps to actually get out and see the world so you don't have to listen to anyone else's propaganda.
Some things might seem better in Europe if you don't bother to scratch the surface. It's very easy to selectively present information or cook numbers to suit a particular agenda.
Vista didn't "succeed in the market". It was the next iteration of a monopoly that dates back to DOS. They only thing it needed to do in order to "succeed" was just show up. Except it didn't quite work that way. No. Vista managed to fail despite of it's market advantages. People and companies avoided it in droves. Hardware vendors offered downgrades to XP.
A monpoly product is a failure when people actively avoid it for the previous version.
They couldn't even force feed Vista to people.
Vista was responsible for XP continuing to linger on until the next version of Windows was released.
> Seriously, I've got a half dozen old 'Linux games' from the first time around, and of those, none of their original binaries will run on a current linux distro
I still run CivCTP and SimCity 3000. Kohan and Majesty and SMAC do well too.
"Being mainstream" is not the problem with Windows and viruses. The problem with Windows is a refusal to learn from the mistakes of others or even your own mistakes. Windows started with a lot of nasty legacy stuff to support and just added more cruft over the years.
A lot of stuff on Windows still screams "single user system".
Everyone has their own reasons for liking "the old things". When snot nosed kids come along repeating 15 year old propaganda from guys that can't even do their own interfaces right, they get all excited and want to tear everything down. New is good and old is bad as an article of faith.
They're full of themselves and think they're smarter than everyone else and thus don't bother to actually consider the end user and what people's requirements might be.
You end up with something that's shiny and new and worthless.
This kind of drama plays out in corporate environments all the time.
...so it still makes much more sense to have a "home cloud" rather than depending on some stranger's server that sits some place on the other side of that network bottleneck.
That doesn't make 10x or 100x transfer rates any less useful.
Any commercial wiring installation should be a little more flexible and more robust than your average cut-rate tract home. Plus you have the likelihood that a corporation isn't quite as cheap as a consumer. That's why companies have wired interfaces already.
Wireless is a clusterf*ck in general. It's something that sounds like a cool idea but has a lot of technical hurdles. Its kind of fine if you have no other choice but sucks when compared to the alternatives.
Cowards must be the masters of really retarded analogies.
Securing a "thing", any "thing", regardless of what that thing is is a far more finite problem than trying to capture the air. That's basically what any anti-piracy effort is attempting. You're trying to control the actions of EVERYONE rather than just focusing your effort in a single place (like a liquor store).
You're burning down your neighbors house to fight spam.
Slashdot Mirror
The cloud isn't nearly fast enough or cheap enough to replace any sort of local storage. That's not even getting into the obvious question of reliability and availability that so many people like to just gloss over.
A small form factor PC is cute but it's not terribly maintainable. It's also going to be less reliable because of the high likelihood that you are cooking your components. Modern machines need fans and air circulation. Mac Minis and iMacs and associated wannabes have problems in this regard.
You can even burn yourself on an iMac.
Most people don't really "need" tiny. It's just something that adds costs, decreases reliability, and ruins maintainability. Unless you are a hipster in New York or San Francisco, you can accomodate a conventional PC.
Even hiding it is easy enough.
Tablets are still years behind in terms of performance despite PCs being pretty stagnant. If you bolted the graphics terminal form factor to tablet hardware, you probably wouldn't want to use it like that. Once you left the manicured garden, you would realize how weak the hardware is.
> Running your own code isn't the definition of a personal computer
Yes it is. That's where the PERSONAL in personal computing comes in. YOU are the one that's in control of it.
The iPad is just a replacement for the centralized control model that existed before the PC. You were not in control of the experience. Someone else was. Apple is the new central IT authority in your "new" terminal based model of computing.
People used the PC to rebel against that old model because it was too confining, didn't allow for innovation, and prevented people from getting work done.
> They are personal computing devices that also have the ability to place and receive phone calls.
Not at all.
They are phones. People need phones.
They need phones just like they need microwave ovens, regular ovens, refrigerators, cars and washing machines.
They are not sold as general purpose computing devices or even as information appliances. They are sold as phones to be used with a phone service.
Some people just choose to confuse the issue. These are people that lost the last platform war and think they are going to win the next one when it's all just a side show.
Someone somewhere might spend more but I don't.
The price I pay is actually very low. It's cheaper than the cheapest ION based lower profile machine I could lay my hands on. The fact that this price might be "subsidized" doesn't really matter since my phone bill won't go down if I'm kinder to the planet and forgo a phone upgrade.
The problem with these numbers is that you are comparing devices with a key useful function that has nothing to do with computing and conflating them with dedicated computing devices.
...really funny considering that both of the leading smartphone products are based on Unix and one actually runs the Linux kernel.
The usability of both depend pretty critically on the likes of apt-get.
My oldest HTPC is 5 years old. It was originally purchased because it was the cheapest thing I could lay my hands on at the time. It has been repurposed over time and has had minor upgrades to reflect that.
The machine is maintainable and not too terribly obsolete. Than means that I don't have to buy another one. PCs in general tend to be like that.
A similar machine of the same age that's more "integrated" like a mobile device would be a doorstop. (Got 2 of those actually)
Even if they aren't, you might be able to deal with the situation with a cheap video card upgrade or something else like an SSD replacing the boot drive.
There are plenty of pretty simple ways of tweaking a PC.
Despite the screeching of a certain type of anti-intellectual, removing a couple of screws and shoving a video card into a socket is not exactly rocket surgery.
You can't put a virtual machine next to your TV while it's still running on the noisy server in your basement.
> But refrigerators don't double in power every 18 months.
When you're talking about hardware that's a throwback to the 90s in terms of real performance, you need some "performance doubling".
My current desktop rig already runs circles around ARM anything. I am hard pressed to justify upgrading it and I am the sort most likely to want to.
Normal consumers? Why would they bother at all?
In other words you are advocating the MS-DOS mentality.
It doesn't have to be robust because "it's only for home use".
Unfortunately that rationale doesn't work here because all of the best video drivers are not going to be supporting Wayland. Beyond the whole "we actually do real work with Linux" sort of people, you also have a whole bunch of other people that actually like to get the most out of their graphics cards.
Wayland will do exactly squat to address that as the companies that make the best hardware and provide the best drivers have no interest in Wayland.
Right now Wayland is a lot of hype and nonsense. Nothing has actually materialized. It has proved nothing. It's really only rallying point for mindless X haters repeating other people's propaganda.
Wayland even fails for the "but it's only for home use" argument. It actually fails harder in that regard.
Replicating the usefulness of my Nvida blob? Good luck.
> 2) Really have more wealth? Some do yes, but it is nothing like 30 years ago. These days the problem is that you have a set of folks that have money and others that do not.
The US standard of living has always been higher and Americans have more disposable income. Even Europeans that are supposed to be well off live in conditions that most American professionals would consider intolerable.
It helps to actually get out and see the world so you don't have to listen to anyone else's propaganda.
Some things might seem better in Europe if you don't bother to scratch the surface. It's very easy to selectively present information or cook numbers to suit a particular agenda.
Vista didn't "succeed in the market". It was the next iteration of a monopoly that dates back to DOS. They only thing it needed to do in order to "succeed" was just show up. Except it didn't quite work that way. No. Vista managed to fail despite of it's market advantages. People and companies avoided it in droves. Hardware vendors offered downgrades to XP.
A monpoly product is a failure when people actively avoid it for the previous version.
They couldn't even force feed Vista to people.
Vista was responsible for XP continuing to linger on until the next version of Windows was released.
> Seriously, I've got a half dozen old 'Linux games' from the first time around, and of those, none of their original binaries will run on a current linux distro
I still run CivCTP and SimCity 3000. Kohan and Majesty and SMAC do well too.
There is also #4. It's not WinDOS.
"Being mainstream" is not the problem with Windows and viruses. The problem with Windows is a refusal to learn from the mistakes of others or even your own mistakes. Windows started with a lot of nasty legacy stuff to support and just added more cruft over the years.
A lot of stuff on Windows still screams "single user system".
Everyone has their own reasons for liking "the old things". When snot nosed kids come along repeating 15 year old propaganda from guys that can't even do their own interfaces right, they get all excited and want to tear everything down. New is good and old is bad as an article of faith.
They're full of themselves and think they're smarter than everyone else and thus don't bother to actually consider the end user and what people's requirements might be.
You end up with something that's shiny and new and worthless.
This kind of drama plays out in corporate environments all the time.
...and will be as useless as using VNC with a Mac.
Before you try to clone something, you should actually use it yourself first. Same goes for goading other people to clone something.
...so it still makes much more sense to have a "home cloud" rather than depending on some stranger's server that sits some place on the other side of that network bottleneck.
That doesn't make 10x or 100x transfer rates any less useful.
Any commercial wiring installation should be a little more flexible and more robust than your average cut-rate tract home. Plus you have the likelihood that a corporation isn't quite as cheap as a consumer. That's why companies have wired interfaces already.
Sometimes you just have to pony up.
Wireless is a clusterf*ck in general. It's something that sounds like a cool idea but has a lot of technical hurdles. Its kind of fine if you have no other choice but sucks when compared to the alternatives.
> No, Troll is not a generic name for an evil company.
No. Troll is a metaphor. That part you conveniently ignored in your rush to defend your favorite corporation.
Sure.
A troll is a parasite extracting payment for something that isn't really his.
Cowards must be the masters of really retarded analogies.
Securing a "thing", any "thing", regardless of what that thing is is a far more finite problem than trying to capture the air. That's basically what any anti-piracy effort is attempting. You're trying to control the actions of EVERYONE rather than just focusing your effort in a single place (like a liquor store).
You're burning down your neighbors house to fight spam.
Sure...
Copying stuff is the same as taking physical things and shooting people in the process.
Can we shoot you the next time you speed or jaywalk? We would only be applying your own standards to you.
...more than 10 years old.
A 733Mhz machine was a relic even 10 years ago. You might as well pine for a 486 while you're at it.