101–110 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, SL is probably closest but they can't seem to get their users interested in headsets. Kinda ironic in a way.
Who wants to wear a VR headset for hours on end?
The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.
Given how cheap even powerful general purpose computers are I don't think they ever will be prized beyond availability. Aficionados, internet stores, arm, Linux, market forces, etc.
To some part, good riddance. Software engineers and product designers are the reason the PC is effectively broken by design in UX. Because they are inexcusably slow. There is 0 reason anything I want to do with e.g. office would not have 0 wait time except non-user centric design. My friggin circa 1984 Mac Plus felt faster on most stuff than the generic desktop PC.
The decade when Moores law gave freebies to software is probably one of the reasons for this astronomical sluggishness. Application feels slow? Well, just wait a year and get a new faster CPU. No need to spend resources on optimization.
I don't know who started with the idea that it's smarter to buy more hardware than to spend resources on programming but if I had to guess, it were the mainframe vendors. Cool for embarrassingly parallellizible batch processing jobs for massive bureaucracies, not so much for desktops.
And don't get me started on the idiocy of thinking it's fine software developers don't need to develop domain understanding in the field they operate.
With the general purpose computer desktop development, we have a system that's broken on so, so many levels.
At least Os X seems to try to do the right thing at an attempt at fluency and I can get a linux desktop to operate smoothly. Even windows 10 starts fast but O brother and sister of the clunkyness of software.
Despite what I said, I think the situation is improving. Immediacy in handheld devices puts pressure on the desktop to concentrate on not wasting the users time as well.
Let's see how it goes.
The general-purpose computer. It's a dinosaur on the verge of extinction at the hands of walled-garden app stores on phones and tablets. I never, ever expected that to happen.
As computers become "locked app collections" they become appliances, appliances business and government institutions can control and regulate. "Can you make the iPad just not do that thing?"
The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?
The converse is possibly even more interesting: what tech were you convinced would fail but took the world by storm?
Snapchat. But than again if we look at their finances (and stock), they have always been in the red and are resorting to selling glasses and hotdog costumes now (huge losses). So maybe they aren't that successful after all.
The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market. By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on. However, we ju…
yep. Haven't seen a single application that isn't primarily aimed at raising investment money. It's Ponzi's all the way down as far as I can tell. That may change, of course.
I thought this was going to be 'The VR Thread.' I still don't entirely understand why virtual reality didn't really catch on. I think there were some very poor business decisions by Facebook which were treating it as a success before it had even launched -- trying to ring-fence a platform, both hardware and software, whose early demographic is going to be entirely high information users seems a very questionable deci…
Even once you have the hardware, you need the space, and you need to decide to spend $500USD on a less-versatile HMD rather than a high-framerate gaming monitor.
For me, space is the hangup - my main PC has the grunt, but I share the space with another PC on another desk, and that takes up all the floorspace. The cost of getting more space makes the cost of PC hardware look trivial....