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The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology

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

#131

Post by randcraw »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #103
brainless wrote: post #6

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…

I was a computer geek from about 1981 onwards, starting with Commodore PETs at high school. These machines were uniquely accessible. You could do surprisingly creative graphics using only the graphic characters hardwired into the machine (no bitmaps, colours or sprites). But these characters were printed right on the keyboard, and could be used in normal BASIC "PRINT" statements to do quite performant animations and…

> With modern machines, even without the discouragement of locked down operating systems, missing accessible programming languages and such... there is just no hope of making something "cool" you can impress your friends with.

Every modern computing machine I know allows you to add a very rich set of coding tools, other than unjailbroken mobile devices perhaps. Yeah, poor access to mobile sucks, but if you feel the need to hack, you won't let walled gardens stop you.

Web scraping is an insanely rich source of data for building cool tools. Then you might add a bit of simple machine learning, like a voice-based interface or a GAN-based video face-melter or visualizing web-scraped results on a map. These sorts of tricks were hard or impossible to do 10 or 20 years ago. But not today.

If you want to hack, I'd start by immersing yourself in Linux. Or Raspberry Pi. Better yet, both.

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

#132

Post by koonsolo »

brainless wrote: post #55
koonsolo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the negative outlook? The world now is way more awesome for hackers than it was back then! 1. You can find any information you want, in an instant. 2. Hardware is very cheap, computers can be tiny, you can order components from anywhere 3. Robotics and electronics are way cooler now, with drones etc. 4. Software development is way more productive with all the libraries and tools we have right now. 5. When I was a…

Don't get me wrong, I am not talking about myself here. I am still an absolute curious fellow. I just started learning woodworking, I am 37 years old now. I start learning something new each year. I meant the current trend of digital products which are, in my opinion, more like a TV than "computers".

> I meant the current trend of digital products which are, in my opinion, more like a TV than "computers".

That is true. But I really wonder if the hacker/consumer ratio has shifted over the years or not.

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

#133

Post by randcraw »

sriku wrote: post #60
user-the-name wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn what? Installing Linux on a computer doesn't really teach you anything much at all about computers. It teaches you about Linux .

That's today, but it wasn't so initially. You'd learn about your monitor's scan modes, how the disk is structured, dumping bytes between devices, optimizing for load by placing bytes on the outer sectors of floppy disks, using RAM as a disk to speed things up, and whole lot of "useless" things that build machine sympathy.

Yes, but it's also true that drivers and peripherals are generally a lot more complicated today and hardware services more federated across layers of dependency and security than in the days of DOS or Windows 3. Reverse engineering today's Windows 10 wifi-based encrypted RAID disk array is a good deal trickier than a 30 year-old DOS FAT IDE drive ever was.

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

#135

Post by UncleMeat »

wayneftw wrote: post #121
mattkevan wrote: post #106

Thing is, in the ‘olden days’, the only thing you could do with a home computer was tinker - the job of a computer was to be a computer but little else. And the number of people interested in doing that was small. Today, the job of a computer is everything. Computers are in everything and do everything. They are our interface to the world. Their value is what they enable - writing, tax returns, video consumption, gam…

> I love the fact I don’t have to muck about with my iPhone to get it to work... Imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to your iPhone without asking anyone's permission though? Also, what if - as the owner of that device - you had full control over it's capabilities like you do with a desktop computer? Adding these abilities certainly would not be the downfall of phone ecosystems as we…

> Imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to your iPhone without asking anyone's permission though?

Cool? I'm a software engineer and I have no desire to do this. The number of people who care about this feature is vanishingly low. I think it is reasonable to lament losing a particular feature for tinkerers, but it becomes unreasonable to demand that businesses cater to this very small niche.

> Adding these abilities certainly would not be the downfall of phone ecosystems as we know them. People that want convenience wouldn't leave their app store.

Downfall? No. But locked down systems are a somewhat effective way of keeping badware off of devices for the masses.

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

#136

Post by rjsw »

kuschku wrote: post #77
stavros wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past, there were only enough components to fill a few shelves. Also, you can get many, many components from local stores now, if you're willing to pay the 4x-10x premium. Not many people are, so local stores aren't as common.

In 2010, the local store had more components than I can order at reichelt, and was cheaper than aliexpress (if you include shipping). I really miss having a place (back then we even had ad dozen of them in a few km distance) with a huge selection carrying every component you might ever need, and with enough technical expertise that you could show your circuit diagram and get feedback how to improve it. This is someth…

There was only one store like that in my childhood city but it had everything you might want.

There would be a queue of people waiting on a Saturday to give their handwritten list of components to an employee to go find.

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

#137

Post by CountSessine »

wayneftw wrote: post #121
mattkevan wrote: post #106

Thing is, in the ‘olden days’, the only thing you could do with a home computer was tinker - the job of a computer was to be a computer but little else. And the number of people interested in doing that was small. Today, the job of a computer is everything. Computers are in everything and do everything. They are our interface to the world. Their value is what they enable - writing, tax returns, video consumption, gam…

> I love the fact I don’t have to muck about with my iPhone to get it to work... Imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to your iPhone without asking anyone's permission though? Also, what if - as the owner of that device - you had full control over it's capabilities like you do with a desktop computer? Adding these abilities certainly would not be the downfall of phone ecosystems as we…

Imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to your iPhone without asking anyone's permission though?

Or even better, imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to someone else’s iPhone, without asking anyone’s permission though?

That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?

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

#138

Post by colllectorof »

mattkevan wrote: post #106

Thing is, in the ‘olden days’, the only thing you could do with a home computer was tinker - the job of a computer was to be a computer but little else. And the number of people interested in doing that was small. Today, the job of a computer is everything. Computers are in everything and do everything. They are our interface to the world. Their value is what they enable - writing, tax returns, video consumption, gam…

This is fake insight.

Most people I know who are any good at programming had started learning about it by modifying something either on their own computers (pre-2000) or on the web (post 2000). They took things they found interesting or useful and somehow introspected and changed them. Good chunks of skills gained by that were transferable to professional environment.

Today, this is not how people get into tech. There is an ever increasing gap between technologies used for professional computing and things that are observable and modifiable by a normal person out there.

Curiosity and experimentation have been replaced by (appropriately named) coding bootcamps.

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

#139

Post by [deleted] »

CountSessine wrote: post #137
wayneftw wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I love the fact I don’t have to muck about with my iPhone to get it to work... Imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to your iPhone without asking anyone's permission though? Also, what if - as the owner of that device - you had full control over it's capabilities like you do with a desktop computer? Adding these abilities certainly would not be the downfall of phone ecosystems as we…

Imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to your iPhone without asking anyone's permission though? Or even better, imagine being able to quickly and easily add your own custom programs to someone else’s iPhone, without asking anyone’s permission though? That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by IQunder130 »

dsr_ wrote: post #74
javajosh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"Software is economically worthless without making it artificially scarce" This is wrong, and every open-source project including OpenBSD and Linux, emacs and vim is counter-evidence. "A lot of "software innovation" is not about building better software, but building software you can charge for" -- this is correct.

What is the market price of a copy of the Linux kernel, I ask?
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