3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
4:12 p.m.
On 06/03/2013 03:37 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
Then don't.
Imagine it's a laptop. Imagine it's a dual-head desktop with 24"
displays. Whatever it takes.
For now, the old form-factors will stick around, but in a decade, if a
"PC" is a flexible A4 tablet, the thickness and weight of thick card,
which connects wirelessly to its peripherals and is driven by touch,
speech and the view from its multiple cameras, I submit that few will
prop it in a stand and drive it from a keyboard. But some will, and I
am sure that for them it will be perfectly possible - possibly driving
a tiled array of large screens which are the thickness (and
approximate power-draw) of paper and similarly can be rolled up for
transport or storage.
Again this smacks of a bias toward "computer" meaning "a box that is
used to access web sites and email". Yes, I will probably use that A4
tablet for those purposes. Hell, I use a tablet all the time right now.
But do you really see things like CAD (which, whether YOU do it or
not, is something that is widely done) shifting to tablets?
Do you really think programming will go from keyboards to speech
recognition? I don't, because I've seen 90%-effective speech
recognition systems in computers, even home computers like Apple ][s,
for ~25 years...and speech recognition still hasn't made any
inroads...NONE...into programming.
People do use computers for things other than browsing the web and
sending/receiving email. You, as a journalist, have a responsibility to
see that and understand it. These are not niche applications, they are
all around you.
Good heavens, man. You write for The Register. This is a
largely-technical publication targeted at a largely-techical audience.
It's not friggin' ESPN!
Yes. That has been going on for a long time in "trendy I.T."
organizations, and it's even starting to trickle down into more common,
less flashy situations nowadays.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA
(Pimps new article:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_f…
)
Very well-written as always, but this time I couldn't get past the first
paragraph. I have great difficulty imagining a day when I could do my job on
a tablet. Computers are shrinking and using less power. This is
more or less a
fact of life. They are not going to remain humming beige desk-side
boxes; those are already in decline, have been for a few years now,
and it's steepening.
Yes, of course. We all know that. The engineers of the world have
developed better ways to perform A SMALL SUBSET of the work that used to
be the exclusive domain of desktop computers.
A small subset.
Since that small subset just happens to include a very large
percentage (perhaps 100%) of what you do, I'm not at all surprised that
you have the point of view that you have. And you know what? It's not
wrong. FOR YOU, and your usage patterns.
But others' are different, and that's ok. I would like for you to
understand that.
The press
(as a whole) really needs to understand that "what sells best in
department stores" does not define the entirety of, or even a significant
part of, society's computing activities. Everything is WAY too tainted by
journalists' personal (and sometimes myopic) points of view, something that
journalism is, well, sorta supposed to be about not doing.
You're right. In businesses, increasingly, the beige boxes are being
replaced by graphical terminals to OS instances running in VMs on
remote hosts.