This is an over-simplication. Yes, PCs aren't ageing as fast as they used to. But they are obsolete beyond 'not being portable'. Here is why tablets are winning: 1. Instant on. I can keep my thoughts in tact and act on them immediately. No booting, no memory lags, no millions of tabs open in a browser. 2. Focus. Desktop interfaces seem to be desperate to put everything onto one screen. I have a PC and a Mac (both lap…
> 1. Instant on. I can keep my thoughts in tact and act on them immediately. No booting, no memory lags, no millions of tabs open in a browser. Suspend to RAM, 8 GB of RAM and as many tabs open as I like (usually none, but Opera appears to handle 100s quite well, too). You must be using PCs wrong. > 2. Focus. Desktop interfaces seem to be desperate to put everything onto one screen. I have a PC and a Mac (both laptop…
Your point of view is certainly interesting.
As you suggest, I simply must be using PCs wrong. But then, the ipad doesn't need an instruction manual, or to be used perfectly, for me to use that right.
It's really _only_ code that is harder to create on tablets though, and it strikes me as extremely narrow-minded to write off the music, art, text, huge Minecraft sculptures, photos and videos of singing, dancing, playing, that have been gleefully created by people young and old on these devices. It's the exact sort of snobbery that has almost completely killed art, dance, drama and music in many schools, as if the o…
Code is harder because editing text is harder. Text input and manipulation is just not very good on tablets. Even if you plug a keyboard into iOS editing is still worse than WordPerfect circa 1988. You might type stuff in OK, but manipulating text is awful.
Yeah, I have no idea how Shakespeare got anything done.
Yea, I have a ten year old Toshiba P26-S2607 I still use on a daily basis. I have a one year old MBP that I haven't used much; I'm not sure why, but the screens seem the same? I do know one thing about most old laptops; they were made to last longer than 2 years. That said--HP--as made crappy laptops for quite some time. I bought one a few years ago and it was horrid on an engineering basis, but it looked Slick.
I had an HP laptop that I bought around 2009. It lasted a year before the insane heat issues started; I agree with you completely regarding the engineering issues. In the end, I ended up buying a Lenovo about two years ago, and it's been perfect for me. Getting back to the original story, I don't think I've bought a desktop since 2003. I prefer using them, but laptops are just so convenient.
Are you sure it was simple heat issues and not a defective Nvidia GPU? A bunch of them in that time period were prone to premature failure. Many HPs used them, as did a few Thinkpads.
Backend devs can probably use more computer resources, particularly cores and RAM. We want to simulate whole clusters on our dev machines and instrument them with tools like Ansible and Docker, and then deploy multiple (fairly heavyweight) processes like JVMs to them. But yeah, 4 (fast) cores and 16GB of RAM is available in a laptop these days, along with an SSD and the best display you can buy, for $3k. (Of course I…
You really can't get the screen, and the amazing OS support for it, anywhere else.
PCs are ugly, clunky and they take up a lot of space at home. Also, a PC reduces the appeal of home or office, compared with a Mac. Honestly this is one of the reasons I bought a Mac. Ofcourse Mac is UNIX, that is another major reason.
As a kid, my parents were really anti-videogames (except for a few educational ones), anti-TV (we had one, but it was in its own room and rarely used), and would only let me use the home computer for homework. As a result, I spent all of my childhood and teenage years reading (mostly fantasy and sci-fi; several books a week, at my peak) and programming. I taught myself programming in 7th grade because I really wanted…
Quite interesting thank you for sharing. The idea that constraints can guide creativity. It reminds me of pg's essay on distractions. I've got something of a different view. I was never limited TV or game consumption. My parents had the mindset of 'you'll have to learn to self moderation at some point, better to do it when the stakes are small'. They wanted me to learn to recognize when something I enjoyed was having…
Your observations are interesting. I'm in the early days of this process with my kids, but I do limit their tv and game time.
I've found (like the grandparent poster) that an absence of TV and games leads to other pursuits: sports, reading, programming, writing books, etc.
To give you an example: I just got the national school results. My son kicked ass in a school that underperformed. One of the key differences I've observed is ... TV and games. Other parents buy the books and encourage kids to do homework, but TV and games are too tempting for developing / young minds.
The other thing I notice is that after a while, routine kicks in and study has become fun for my kids.
The other obvious issue I notice is the mental fatigue that my kids have suffered when staying with friends for lengthy gaming sessions. We talked about his they felt, why they felt that way and side effects (short attention, lethargy, etc). But, they had no regrets and wanted to do it again. Reminds me of smokers... They know it's bad, but don't care.
When my kids are old enough, they can be responsible for themselves. Until then, they'll have to live with my constraints, healthy minds and bodies. I'll just have to accept your possible scenario that it will all collapse into a screaming heap in their early adulthood. Let's say, I'm dubious about your claim, particularly as most levels of freedom and responsibility are gradual with most kids ... But I have seen stranger things.
Quite interesting thank you for sharing. The idea that constraints can guide creativity. It reminds me of pg's essay on distractions. I've got something of a different view. I was never limited TV or game consumption. My parents had the mindset of 'you'll have to learn to self moderation at some point, better to do it when the stakes are small'. They wanted me to learn to recognize when something I enjoyed was having…
Ultimately, all humans are pretty different, and there is likely no one size fits all. My younger brother always had a really hard time with the constraints my parent set - he would watch TV and play video games in secret, and even sneakily used their credit cards to pay for the MMO he played (he was in his early teens, and my parents didn't give us any allowance- they'd just give us some money if we wanted to go out…
You sound like I imagine my son in 10 years ...
The reason I occasionally let him stay with friends for the junk food/games/TV binge with friends is so that he learns all types of experiences. I don't believe in banning anything, just regulating. How else can we understand our world if we don't experience it for ourselves?
If I were to host the junk food/TV/games binges, I'd have to buy the console and games and stock the junk food ... Things that I just don't want to do .. So it's easier to let someone else do it.
In return, I take others kids on bush walks, to BBQs, roller skating, etc - so their kids get to do something different too.
There may be some "it doesn't happen in my house" as you suggest, but it's not my primary or secondary motivator.
>Solution: clean it once in a while :) Teach me oh great one. Honestly I've never managed to clean a fan. You can brush off the obvious dust but the noise comes from dust getting into the fan itself.
Spray it with compressed air inside and out. You can get into the slit between the fan housing and the motor and blow it out there as well. Most fans start making noise due to bearing failure / wobble, not the dust. I have a small home server with 4 fans. After almost 10 years now 3 out of the 4 fans are as quite as they were on day one, the 4th has developed a bearing issue and needs to be swapped out eventually. I am assuming that Apple will use hire quality fans then the $3 crap fans I am using.
>Solution: clean it once in a while :) Teach me oh great one. Honestly I've never managed to clean a fan. You can brush off the obvious dust but the noise comes from dust getting into the fan itself.
Spray it with compressed air inside and out. You can get into the slit between the fan housing and the motor and blow it out there as well. Most fans start making noise due to bearing failure / wobble, not the dust. I have a small home server with 4 fans. After almost 10 years now 3 out of the 4 fans are as quite as they were on day one, the 4th has developed a bearing issue and needs to be swapped out eventually. I…
>Most fans start making noise due to bearing failure / wobble, not the dust.
That exactly is the issue. They don't just mysteriously develop bearing failure / wobble...they do so because dust gets into the bearings. And that exactly is my point...no amount of compressed air can fix dust in the ball bearing grease. I just end up replacing all the fans after a few years...
I can pop-up Activity Monitor any time in the day, with multiple apps open, and it's guaranteed the app using the most memory is a browser ( any browser). As a data point: Safari is using 600+MB now with just HN and GitHub open. It's using more memory than all the other apps (editor, terminal, mail, Rdio, Skype) combined. 600MB is not much by today's standards, but comparatively, is ridiculously wasteful. It's a damn…
Mavericks does amazing things to memory usage. My machine has 4GB as well, and safari went from 1GB+ memory usage to 200MB memory usage for the same amount of tabs. Under ML, I was swapping constantly; now, no swap at all.
Did update today, and it's certainly much snappier, it rarely hits the disk now.