121–130 of 157 posts
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Both great for IT guys, society writ large though? Really?
Android is a Linux.
The history of Android is a story about the exploitation of 'open-source', not the incorporation of the benefits of software freedom into society.
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I don’t think much “computing” is done, in our sense of the word, on tablets and phones. Personally, I’ve found that almost any slightly complex, has-to-be-done-once-and p-right, action is better performed on an actual computer. And that’s not even considering writing new programs.
This hasn't been my experience. I'm able to be surprisingly effective on my smartphone. I've constructed trip itineraries, balanced outing budgets, shared shopping lists, designed room layouts, computed food and drink recipe ratios, built DJ sets, laid out wood pieces, and read books using my smartphone. Coding is probably the only thing that I find unparalleled with a keyboard and a seated position than my smartphon…
What you're describing is fairly basic stuff, and the computational resources required to perform those tasks has been outpaced by the miniaturization and price-to-performance value of a smartphone or tablet. But complex tasks have always required complex tools, and complex tasks become more and more complex over time, they take advantage of modern-day performance.
The smartphone is the modern-day personal computer. A workstation is still a workstation, and just because it comes in an ATX tower doesn't mean it's consumer-grade hardware.
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Imagine a world where you can just assert any fact as the starting point of speculative fiction. Then imagine that someone would write a piece where computers were inherently old.
It's like asking "would you believe in homeopathy if doctors all told you that it was correct?" To which the answer is "Doctors believe things for reasons. You can't just flip a switch and change what doctors think without changing the entire world so that homeopathy is actually true, and that would be such a weird world that science in it would be unrecognizeable." (And since I'm not ChatGPT, I can answer your entir…
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Step 1 is really hard if computers are useful (why do you stop making something that's useful?), but step 3 is simply not believable: a society that has machines that could, at the minimum, help solving complex calculations and engineering problems much better than humans decides to completely ignore them. That's not how societies work.
Step 1 and 3 are, arguably, quite probable to happen in the future. I don't think you're appreciating just how many circular dependencies we have in the global supply chains. We're one big cataclysm or global war to reverting back to pre-industrial times , and if that were to happen, we'd likely be stuck there for quite a long time. Consider the following observations: A. For obvious reasons, we continuously improve…
It seems almost certain that climate change is going to severely disrupt several of these cycles in decade or two, and a slightly different failure mode of what you allude to in C. is that our tech and processes become capped before we adequately scale up renewables, and overshoot kicks in and it's actually a negative feedback loop that certainly doesn't just stop with computers.
What is the point of this kind of "finding the essence" exercise anyway? Definitely seems to be very subjective, to say the least.
I am not sure when it happened but I discovered that every game I played over the last twenty years, reduced to it's bare minimum functional components, was aligning a pointer on an X/Y axis and pressing the correct button within a time window. The goal of computers, reduction or multiplication of work, is often lost because the output does not last longer that the work required to generate. Computers are tools. They…
Sports are just a series of muscle contractions with timing; music is just different accelerations of the air; ... I think these statements, and yours concerning video games, are overly reductive.
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Electrolytic capacitors can dry out, boil out, oxidize, generally break down. There's many failure modes for them that can be caused by wear, age, or unuse.
Whether or not the rated limits printed on the can match what they're actually capable of is another matter, as people found out for a couple of years in the early 2000s.
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Let me Google that for you: "All electrolytic capacitors with non-solid electrolyte age over time, due to evaporation of the electrolyte. The capacitance usually decreases and the ESR usually increases. The normal lifespan of a non-solid electrolytic capacitor of consumer quality, typically rated at 2000 h/85 °C and operating at 40 °C, is roughly 6 years. It can be more than 10 years for a 1000 h/105 °C capacitor ope…
The "capacitor plague" thing was because in the early 2000s every manufacturer started buying the same kind of cheapest electrolytics they could find that simply did not meet spec.
If your electrolytic caps are failing after six years, you're running them at too high a voltage.
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>Tags or folders, I don't care. My point exactly. The people who cry that the young today can't file-and-folder fail to understand bloody nobody, neither young nor old, cares for file-and-folder.
I like file and folder. I like tags. I need something .
For another example of this "I refuse to file-and-folder" phenomenon, try and recount how many people go to Amazon by going to the address bar, typing www.amazon.com, and hitting enter instead of going to Google, searching Amazon, and clicking the first listing.
Fact of the matter is people don't fucking care for file-and-folder, people don't fucking care for locators. For most people, a given something is "in the computer" and that is as far as they can be bothered to care. Abstractioning of file systems and similar constructs to improve end-user usability is the correct decision, given this situation.
Yes, the small handful of us that understand and use file-and-folder and Universal Resource Locators hate the abstraction, but we are Nobody. They (most people) are Everyone.
The Photos app dumping all photos into one singular location with no hints as to where it's located in the file system is better usability for everyone. That's the brutal-to-nerds reality.