Alcohol was already illegal then in Egypt, and they didn't lack for a local population to oppress either. And then there's the "League of Nations" business, which makes the UN's ability to write a stern letter an overwhelming show of force.
At a certain level understanding of economics leads inevitably to an ethical imperative for political activism, or being a jerk by letting things go to hell without doing anything about it. By the way, the idea isn't his: he's just playing a riff off of Robert J. Gordon's essay. Now that I'm done with your ad hominem, I may as well comment on the fine article.
In enterprise systems design we've been running out of real problems for about four years. Once you integrate virtualization, modern 10Gbps or faster networks, multicore processors, vast RAM and SSD I/O you're down to working around glitchy legacy software and interpreting the niceties of licensing agreements. The premium names still draw premium prices for these things, but in 2013 that ends as almost all of the redundancy and reliability they provided to justify the premium is replaced with software redundancy on commodity hardware, as happened in SANs over two years ago. Every year the fraction of businesses that need exactly three geographically isolated physical servers grows. You need "big data" or "HPC" problems to find a hardware bone with meat on it still, and those are coming more rare than the people who solve this sort of problem. There are only so many of Twitter, Facebook and CERN. This probably means a career change for me and many others as we become redundant, so I'm not exactly thrilled with it but it is what it is.
Desktops and laptops have been "good enough" with great software for over seven years, or old software for four or five. Sure, gamers still buy premium systems - as do high-end engineers and others with special needs. But drilling down into system specs to deliver the best cost/benefit ratio for an office worker or typical home browser? No. You can buy a PC with 32GB of RAM, a 6-core processor and decent GPU at Costco for next to nothing. You literally can't get it wrong. Or you can SSD upgrade the one you have already, and blow the dust out and it will do what you need until the electrolyte in the capacitors gives out. The computer in your pocket has far more processor and storage than most people would need. It needs the screen size, but you can attach some of them to any HDMI monitor or 1080p HDTV now for a bigger screen and as many pixels as your laptop or desktop has. That smartphone would have been considered a supercomputer not so long ago, and quite a good PC later even than that. Laptop makers could probably sell one more trip around the upgrade treadmill by offering 4K resolution and touchscreen capability. Probably a half-lap actually.
So yes, the growth in tech is over at least in the US. With each generation of innovation the people who need or want it grow more scarce. It's diminishing returns. Sooner or later it ends.
Experts are still needed to wrangle this hardware into a usable state as the software situation is dire and redundant networking remains an occult science. Crudware is inscrutably still a problem. Security and services are still viable markets. But as far as getting any more utility from faster processors, more RAM, faster storage, better batteries and so on... not so much. Mobile devices are where it's at now, and they're disposable. TV repairmen had this problem too, once upon a time.
This is going to be an unpopular post as well as TL;DR and will probably moderated to death. I'm OK with that. But it's true. For most people and situations computation has come "good enough" for quite some time and is now well into overkill. Like improving the iPad display past "retina" resolution there is no true further progress to be had if further improvement is beyond our ability to perceive the difference. Moore's Law made it all the way to The End.
The purpose of drug criminalization is to create an oppressable minority. As humans we seem to not be able to do without one. It is not an accident that drugs were criminalized just as the prisons were being emptied of rum runners, moonshiners and bartenders. Don't worry, though: it turns out we still have the poor to oppress and it seems it's their turn again.
Oh, yeah. Nobody ever thinks about IBM anymore. Even though they're about to knock Microsoft off their perch as "third largest technology company by market capitalization." IBM probably likes it that way.
Half a billion people have iPhones now. And another half-billion Android phones. It takes under an hour with one of these before you say "Man, this rocks but you know what would be totally killer? If it was bigger."
Yes. Also, a lot of "apps" used in business have been converted to standards-based web apps now that work with any browser to get out of the "IE" trap.
You could have chosen another quote. "Halfway" can mean many things. For example: "Get to low-Earth orbit, and you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system." - RAH
I think we could appropriately address the unfairness of the current situation by throwing the media moguls in prison. And then setting the prison on fire.
I "know" that because in Ada not only can you overload the "=" operator, but you can change the flow of interpretation from left-to-right to Reverse Polish and back again - in the middle of a formula.
Fact: silent browser extension installation is like a browser version of Microsoft's AutoRun. There is no reason why a legitimate extension needs to install without asking the operator for permission any more than a program on a disk or share needs to autorun on mounting the volume.
Slashdot Mirror
Alcohol was already illegal then in Egypt, and they didn't lack for a local population to oppress either. And then there's the "League of Nations" business, which makes the UN's ability to write a stern letter an overwhelming show of force.
At a certain level understanding of economics leads inevitably to an ethical imperative for political activism, or being a jerk by letting things go to hell without doing anything about it. By the way, the idea isn't his: he's just playing a riff off of Robert J. Gordon's essay. Now that I'm done with your ad hominem, I may as well comment on the fine article.
In enterprise systems design we've been running out of real problems for about four years. Once you integrate virtualization, modern 10Gbps or faster networks, multicore processors, vast RAM and SSD I/O you're down to working around glitchy legacy software and interpreting the niceties of licensing agreements. The premium names still draw premium prices for these things, but in 2013 that ends as almost all of the redundancy and reliability they provided to justify the premium is replaced with software redundancy on commodity hardware, as happened in SANs over two years ago. Every year the fraction of businesses that need exactly three geographically isolated physical servers grows. You need "big data" or "HPC" problems to find a hardware bone with meat on it still, and those are coming more rare than the people who solve this sort of problem. There are only so many of Twitter, Facebook and CERN. This probably means a career change for me and many others as we become redundant, so I'm not exactly thrilled with it but it is what it is.
Desktops and laptops have been "good enough" with great software for over seven years, or old software for four or five. Sure, gamers still buy premium systems - as do high-end engineers and others with special needs. But drilling down into system specs to deliver the best cost/benefit ratio for an office worker or typical home browser? No. You can buy a PC with 32GB of RAM, a 6-core processor and decent GPU at Costco for next to nothing. You literally can't get it wrong. Or you can SSD upgrade the one you have already, and blow the dust out and it will do what you need until the electrolyte in the capacitors gives out. The computer in your pocket has far more processor and storage than most people would need. It needs the screen size, but you can attach some of them to any HDMI monitor or 1080p HDTV now for a bigger screen and as many pixels as your laptop or desktop has. That smartphone would have been considered a supercomputer not so long ago, and quite a good PC later even than that. Laptop makers could probably sell one more trip around the upgrade treadmill by offering 4K resolution and touchscreen capability. Probably a half-lap actually.
So yes, the growth in tech is over at least in the US. With each generation of innovation the people who need or want it grow more scarce. It's diminishing returns. Sooner or later it ends.
Experts are still needed to wrangle this hardware into a usable state as the software situation is dire and redundant networking remains an occult science. Crudware is inscrutably still a problem. Security and services are still viable markets. But as far as getting any more utility from faster processors, more RAM, faster storage, better batteries and so on... not so much. Mobile devices are where it's at now, and they're disposable. TV repairmen had this problem too, once upon a time.
This is going to be an unpopular post as well as TL;DR and will probably moderated to death. I'm OK with that. But it's true. For most people and situations computation has come "good enough" for quite some time and is now well into overkill. Like improving the iPad display past "retina" resolution there is no true further progress to be had if further improvement is beyond our ability to perceive the difference. Moore's Law made it all the way to The End.
The purpose of drug criminalization is to create an oppressable minority. As humans we seem to not be able to do without one. It is not an accident that drugs were criminalized just as the prisons were being emptied of rum runners, moonshiners and bartenders. Don't worry, though: it turns out we still have the poor to oppress and it seems it's their turn again.
It seems the market likes Google's chances of muddling through.
Oh, yeah. Nobody ever thinks about IBM anymore. Even though they're about to knock Microsoft off their perch as "third largest technology company by market capitalization." IBM probably likes it that way.
Our programmers and engineers still need a Workstation class laptop and Windows or Linux OS.
In a VM, which is where desktop Windows belongs.
Microsoft has a near monopoly on Business servers
On what planet?
We don't know yet and likely won't know if this was the fault of AWS or a hamfisted Netflix engineer. Let's not leap to conclusions.
Censoring the Internet is never the right answer.
And for many people that is "good enough".
Half a billion people have iPhones now. And another half-billion Android phones. It takes under an hour with one of these before you say "Man, this rocks but you know what would be totally killer? If it was bigger."
Yes. Also, a lot of "apps" used in business have been converted to standards-based web apps now that work with any browser to get out of the "IE" trap.
Battery life is not the reason we don't want Windows tablets. Windows tablets suck. Might as well evaluate which one makes a better skateboard.
You could have chosen another quote. "Halfway" can mean many things. For example: "Get to low-Earth orbit, and you're halfway to anywhere in the solar system." - RAH
They're doing the same thing, but it's a private company. And they're hiring.
They already tried to weasel it into a "protect the children" bill.
I think we could appropriately address the unfairness of the current situation by throwing the media moguls in prison. And then setting the prison on fire.
BTW: Programming in Ada is like "Australian rules football". Changing the rules is part of the game.
I "know" that because in Ada not only can you overload the "=" operator, but you can change the flow of interpretation from left-to-right to Reverse Polish and back again - in the middle of a formula.
She did leave me for a frenchman. How did you know?
It's actually a nice boat. I wouldn't mind sailing on it.
It might something something me. Ah hell I lost it.
Well I guess the only reasonable response to this is: don't eat lead-based paint chips. Your post has nothing to do with my post.
Fact: silent browser extension installation is like a browser version of Microsoft's AutoRun. There is no reason why a legitimate extension needs to install without asking the operator for permission any more than a program on a disk or share needs to autorun on mounting the volume.
This is so well documented that your denial is absurd. There are numerous online histories of this whole sordid mess. Here is one: http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=20071217022527429