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The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

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91–100 of 228 posts

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#91

"Decline" as in "Still growing but not as much as some other things". This analysis sounds like sour grapes. "Phones get all the love!" doesn't actually mean that general-purpose computing is declining. Just the opposite. It continues to grow in power as it always has.

I agree and the pool of tinkerers and intelectually curious has been growing steadily. There are so many free resources available that the barrier to entry has lowered enormously. However, the enormous growth has gone towards consumption and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#92

This is what I personally feel is just missing these days. I was never part of the leading edge of hobby computing. I was very far off, geographically, growing up a teenager in India. But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other…

Software is economically worthless without making it artificially scarce. A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for , which means "walled gardens", patents, DRM, license servers, anti-tampering mechanisms, and the like. In essence all content (music, movies, software, books, etc) follows the same pattern. Note that profit-driven entities can give aw…

I don't think scarcity in ad space is particular artifical. Attention is a limited resource.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#93
post #73
post #2

Fab numbers are astronomical. "TSMC recently announced plans for a $19.5B 3nm plant for 2022". How can the next computing paradigm even take off when all the oxygen is depleted in chasing "proven" technologies?

What are the other options you would want to replace those proven technologies with? Sure, there are better semiconductor materials but they're expensive and already used where it makes economical sense. Nanotubes or graphene can't be handled at scale yet. Superconductors need huge contraptions for cooling. Using organic molecules is messy, see OLED. Optical parts might help, but that is difficult with silicon which…

Classic innovator's dilemma. I personally am biased to silicon optics after seeing a few impressive demos. Albeit in laboratory conditions, under controlled settings ;)

Rise of the learning machines

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41566-020-00748-w

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economically worthless is a very bad phrasing, but the concept is very real (economists go with non-excludable, but that has an underwhelming impact on laypeople), software authors have a really hard time capturing the value they create.

I've always thought of it as the turn-style in front of the theme-park. Without that turn-style, the theme-part is economically worthless no matter how good it is.

Yes, that's the idea, but keep in mind that "economically worthless" has a literal meaning that is almost opposite of what you are trying to say.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#96

This is what I personally feel is just missing these days. I was never part of the leading edge of hobby computing. I was very far off, geographically, growing up a teenager in India. But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other…

It's worth noting that the article is about the development of specialized hardware rather than walled gardens. In many cases this can be hugely beneficial. Not only has it allowed for the development of energy efficient hardware to watch videos on a smartphone, the same concept has allowed for the development of efficient encoding hardware for video to serve that market. Likewise, the energy efficient processors that enable media consumption have other applications. In the end we carry around a tremendous amount of general purpose computing power in our pockets.

Walled gardens and specialization are somewhat different concepts. The former is primarily concerned with restricting how hardware is used, while the latter is mostly concerned with optimizing hardware for specific applications. While there are times when these two concerns can overlap, this need not be the case.

This can be seen historically. Early microprocessors were developed for integer calculations, with floating point operations being done in software or with an optional floating point coprocessor. Floating point was integrated, and became a fundamental part of our notion of general purpose microprocessors, later in the game. The path taken in computer graphics was much more complex, but it is also worth noting that it started off as specialized hardware. Experimentation resulted in GPUs becoming a generalized tool. Recent developments have encouraged them to diverge into a multitude of different specialized tools. Both of these examples illustrate how specialization has broadened what can be done, without creating and environment that restricts what can be done.

While I agree that walled gardens encourage media consumption at the expense of experimentation or creation, this is more of a cultural thing. There is far more money to be made in the former than the latter, so that is what the market focuses upon.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always thought of it as the turn-style in front of the theme-park. Without that turn-style, the theme-part is economically worthless no matter how good it is.

Yes, that's the idea, but keep in mind that "economically worthless" has a literal meaning that is almost opposite of what you are trying to say.

And not only that... but a theme park without an entry fee is still a money-maker via snacks, drinks, souvenir cups, and extra-cost rides and line-skipping.

In much the same way that a company can produce an open-source product and charge for support, feature development, consulting, data feeds and sometimes SAAS operation.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#98
post #2

Fab numbers are astronomical. "TSMC recently announced plans for a $19.5B 3nm plant for 2022". How can the next computing paradigm even take off when all the oxygen is depleted in chasing "proven" technologies?

That's not as much money as it sounds for the industry.

Apple revenue is more than that each month.

There's enough money around. So it seems unlikely that the cost of TSMC silicon fabs would be the obstacle to others developing alternative computing paradigms.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#99
The article is factually correct, but I feel that the analysis is missing some of the historical context. Here's a quite probably strained analogy to cosmology:

Microprocessors and CMOS upended the computer industry, to the extent that a few years later, all the big companies in computing, up to that point, were in precipitous decline (even IBM, which embraced the new world order with the PC, only delayed this reckoning.)

In those days, microprocessors and DRAM alone were the cutting edge of technology, and they opened up all sorts of possibilities (though this also depended on some additional special-purpose equipment, notably for graphics and networking.)

One might draw an analogy here to the Big Bang. What happened next was like a period of cosmic inflation, in which Moore's law and Dennard scaling (plus fiber optics and the wiring of the world) created exponential growth. As in cosmology, we end up with a much bigger but quite uniform universe, in this case because the growth of the basic technology alone was enough fuel for all the innovation we could come up with.

It was only after inflation that the universe became really interesting. It is still overwhelmingly hydrogen, but it has differentiated: there are also galaxies, stars, planets and people.

So, the long-delayed conclusion to this analogy: innovation in computing is now more mature, but it is not shrinking, it has diversified - and there are still 10^n (for some large n) 8- and 16-bit microprocessors being made, and there are still hobbyists doing clever things with what is now basic, even primitive, hardware (that, not so long ago, was unattainable) - but we also have emerging technologies (machine translation and autonomous vehicles, for example) that quite a few people, not so long ago, assumed would be forever beyond the capabilities of mere machines.

Re: The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

#100

This is what I personally feel is just missing these days. I was never part of the leading edge of hobby computing. I was very far off, geographically, growing up a teenager in India. But back then, 1998 - 2006 ish, I feel the Internet was a lot more about experiments. I would read up on some software or hardware group all the time. LUGs were way popular. I used to be on chat rooms from MIT or other unis every other…

The difference is that those people who are happy with YouTube videos wouldn’t have been tinkering with computers in 2006. You have to remember that tinkering with computers was and still is a nerdy niche. Let’s say there are 1000 people in the world. Of those, 10 are hackers (in the “tinker with computers” sense, not on the malicious sense), 20 are enthusiasts, the rest are neither. In 1990, you’d have 15 people on…

Somehow related:

> //i.ibb.co/3Sv29Qs/23340-en-REVIEW-FINAL-Mail.png ^^

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