The decline of computers as a general-purpose technology • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by doteka » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:27 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #150

ravi-delia wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, in general I'm with you. But at the end of the day you just don't have to buy an iphone . Get an android device, flash it with Linux, buy a pinephone, do whatever you want! But Apple doesn't sell tinker's devices, they sell a walled garden. Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business, when there are plenty of other options? There's a reason I don't have any App…

Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business... The law should make it "their business". I don't believe it should be possible to waive your right to legally do what you want with your property. (I have similar feelings about restrictive covenants in the conveyance of real property, for example.) Since we're editing here: It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all compan…

You have the right to do whatever you want to with your iPhone. Apple is not obligated to make it easy for you to do so, or honor their warranty if you choose to fiddle with it. The law getting involved here would be total overreach, and I say this as someone who’s politically left, a total commie by US standards.

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

#152

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #135

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? 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 n…

[deleted]

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

#153

Post by shadowgovt » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:29 PM UTC

brucehoult wrote: post #39

SiVal wrote: post #28

There's no doubt that we're getting an ever-widening variety of clients, but this "general purpose" notion is a bit slippery. I remember when "general purpose" meant that not only did computers crunch numbers for science and engineering, but they could finally handle more general business computing such as accounting and text-heavy business data processing, which was much larger than number crunching--more general pu…

You are trying to define tasks as "general purpose". They aren't and never can be. The point is that the basic modern computer design works well (enough) for almost all of those tasks. For the most part all that you need is the basic operations on 32 or 64 bit "integers": move, compare, add, subtract, and, or, xor, shift left, shift right. With this you can do spreadsheets, word processing, database, accounting, desk…

>And show it all on a GUI on a high resolution bitmapped display.

Minor quibble aligning with my minor quibble with the article itself: modern graphics has been depending on a dedicated graphics subprocessor for ages now. Even most Linux distros that aren't targeting extremely constrained hardware vend a graphics subsystem that assumes an accelerator card.

Perhaps the graphics card can even be noted as the harbinger of the specialized-hardware trend (if one ignores the audio coprocessors before it). This trend has been riding alongside the CPU trend for ages.

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

#154

Post by shadowgovt » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:32 PM UTC

solinent wrote: post #95

I think as computers fail to get faster, we won't be able to improve performance without making application specific logical units, however, we may still be able to make it general purpose.

What I'm most interested in is what the trends will be in how those specialized circuits are developed.

Circuit design has been marching steadily along for decades, and between the tools available to allow non-specialists to go from abstract hardware description to image-ready chip specification and the ever-cheapening, ever-broadening capabilities of custom chip fab, are we approaching an era where fabricating mid-range specialized circuits is on par with the difficulty of writing and compiling software, only a bit slower?

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

#155

Post by mrzimmerman » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #150

ravi-delia wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe me, in general I'm with you. But at the end of the day you just don't have to buy an iphone . Get an android device, flash it with Linux, buy a pinephone, do whatever you want! But Apple doesn't sell tinker's devices, they sell a walled garden. Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business, when there are plenty of other options? There's a reason I don't have any App…

Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business... The law should make it "their business". I don't believe it should be possible to waive your right to legally do what you want with your property. (I have similar feelings about restrictive covenants in the conveyance of real property, for example.) Since we're editing here: It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all compan…

Don't you suppose you're being a bit dogmatic about it? Every device has to be as flexible as possible or it's against the law? Genuinely not trying to straw man, but should my oven manufacturer have to account for me wanting to turn it into a space heater if I feel like it?

Companies make and sell products for specific use-cases all the time. Saying the can't sell something unless they also make the product able to break away form that specific use case, regardless of time and cost to the company and consumers for parallel built in systems or whatever the lift may be doesn't sound feasible to me.

I don't know, I'm on your side that I should be able to dismantle my iPhone and use the parts to my hearts content if I want to. But I'm not sure that it's something Apple has to build into the system just in case someone feels like doing it, especially since I could buy any number of other computing devices that might work just as well.

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

#156

Post by EvanAnderson » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:48 PM UTC

doteka wrote: post #151

EvanAnderson wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business... The law should make it "their business". I don't believe it should be possible to waive your right to legally do what you want with your property. (I have similar feelings about restrictive covenants in the conveyance of real property, for example.) Since we're editing here: It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all compan…

You have the right to do whatever you want to with your iPhone. Apple is not obligated to make it easy for you to do so, or honor their warranty if you choose to fiddle with it. The law getting involved here would be total overreach, and I say this as someone who’s politically left, a total commie by US standards.

The technical protections in a modern device are impossible, from a practical perspective, for an individual to defeat. For all practical purposes Apple has removed the rights of owners to do what they please with the devices they own. It's not that they didn't make it easy-- they made it completely impossible.

I am not mature, informed, or articulate enough to argue about this objectively. I cannot conceive of how society benefits from taking away the rights of owners.

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

#157

Post by EvanAnderson » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

mrzimmerman wrote: post #155

EvanAnderson wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why force them to spend even 10 seconds of effort on something that isn't their business... The law should make it "their business". I don't believe it should be possible to waive your right to legally do what you want with your property. (I have similar feelings about restrictive covenants in the conveyance of real property, for example.) Since we're editing here: It seems pretty pointless to mandate that all compan…

Don't you suppose you're being a bit dogmatic about it? Every device has to be as flexible as possible or it's against the law? Genuinely not trying to straw man, but should my oven manufacturer have to account for me wanting to turn it into a space heater if I feel like it? Companies make and sell products for specific use-cases all the time. Saying the can't sell something unless they also make the product able to…

What Google did with the Chromebooks-- an interlock that zeros the manufacturer-provided root-of-trust-- is a good example of all that I want. No more, no less. Let me flip a switch and make the device "untrusted" so that I can load my own software.

I am being dogmatic. I can't think objectively about this because I have yet to see how it benefits society to absolutely remove the rights of owners to legally do what they please with their property (at least in terms of chattels).

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

#158

Post by ouchjars » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:53 PM UTC

imagine99 wrote: post #66

brainless wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

What, if any, resources did you use to learn woodworking? In-person courses and hackerspaces are not available in my area right now and I wonder if there are any good online classes. And by that I'm not talking about those quick-cut YouTube videos where you need a workshop worth 50k in machinery and tools to properly follow "this one easy trick" ;-) If you have any resources you can share/recommend, I'd be very curio…

Rex Krueger has the most budget-conscious channel I know of (https://www.youtube.com/c/RexKrueger). His "Woodworking for Humans" series starts out with just needing three tools and bootstrapping your way to more.

Personally I started with restoring discarded and thrifted furniture. The initial outlay was just for some glue, varnish, and sandpaper.

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

#159

Post by doteka » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 5:59 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #156

doteka wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have the right to do whatever you want to with your iPhone. Apple is not obligated to make it easy for you to do so, or honor their warranty if you choose to fiddle with it. The law getting involved here would be total overreach, and I say this as someone who’s politically left, a total commie by US standards.

The technical protections in a modern device are impossible, from a practical perspective, for an individual to defeat. For all practical purposes Apple has removed the rights of owners to do what they please with the devices they own. It's not that they didn't make it easy-- they made it completely impossible. I am not mature, informed, or articulate enough to argue about this objectively. I cannot conceive of how s…

I’m sorry to say, but your first paragraph is blatantly false. The jailbreaking community has been active since the iPhone product line existed, up to this day. Feel free to look it up. They provide instructions that a high school script kiddie is able to follow. I know because I was one of them.

If you were not motivated enough to research the options available to you, you cannot in good faith argue that Apple did anything wrong here.

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

#160

Post by fiftyfifty » Thu, Feb 25, 2021, 6:02 PM UTC

EvanAnderson wrote: post #146

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 ... I have changes I want to make to my iPhone. Some of them would be as easy as adding a trigger to an SQLite datbase that a stock "app" uses. I'm not "allowed" to. I don't think companies should be legally permitted to take away the rights of an owner to do what they please with their own property. Locked bootloaders, e-fuses, crypto keys b…

This is exactly why Richard Stallman created GNU and the GPL. He might seem like an idealist or even an extremist but he's been warning us about this very thing for decades now.