On 21 June 2013 18:57, Jonas Otter <jonas at otter.se> wrote:
On Fri, 21 Jun 2013 15:04:39 +0100, Liam Proven
<lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
And as I usually say -- and as usually gets completely ignored -- I am
sure that the older, less-populist ways of doing things are not going
to instantly go away. They will still be available, especially in FOSS
systems, and as long as people want them and use them and are willing
to either keep them in active maintenance and development, or are
willing to pay someone to do so, then long may they persist.
Yes, you have said so.
Oh, well, OK, so long as you noticed. :?)
For me, what
is interesting is the direction that the mainstream of
the computer industry is going. It moves like an am?ba: it extends
exploratory pseudopods in multiple directions at once, and when one of
them finds an advantage -- or if you like, when it finds a toe-hold in
some niche -- then the rest of the organism goes that way.
Yes, but you are equating the "mainstream of the computer industry" with
desktop machines, phones and Web servers, more or less. What I mean is that
those parts are a large portion of the computer industry, but not
necessarily the "mainstream". For very many applications of computers, they
are completely irrelevant. It is like saying that Hollywood is the
mainstream of the movie industry. True if you restrict the world to the US
and Europe, but if you look at the world as a whole, it is only a part of
the movie industry.
This is a fair point, but...
[a] it's largely all that I see;
[b] it's what /most/ people see and therefore what is best-received
when I write about it;
[c] it tends to be the source of a lot of the tech that ends up in
embedded systems etc. rather than the other way round (except of
course for the stuff that is just different & unrelated between them);
[d] I suspect -- but do not know -- that the desktop/laptop/mobile
segment accounts for a very large part, possibly a majority, of the
market in purely financial terms, if not in units shipped.
--
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