stevenaaus wrote:Anyway, desktops are increasingly going the way of the Dodo. iOS and Android are the main battlegrounds now.
Anyone want to bet Windows 8 / Surface won't be another humiliating shot-duck for Mickeysoft.
Competing against their hardware partners is a bad idea imho. These people have a choice - Android or Win8. And beside that, microsoft are years behind everyone else in terms of making a touch driven gui.
To some extend i agree that desktops are increasingly under attack. For number crunching it'll keep existing for now as low power cpu's that are fast simply do not exist.
There is a few points however.
Realize the first ipad from apple with ios, that this version 1.0, still popular here and there, it can't even multithread. Everything has to be 1 thread.
That's very outdated you know.
Most mobile OS-es are pretty primitive so far. This is not possible at a mobile and that isn't possible. It'll change.
So far they keep equipping those things with cheapskate dual cores though. ARM7 version is very popular at 1Ghz. This is slow junk.
I just analyzed for tonight a variation to prepare for my opponent; as he isn't checking this forum within 15 minutes from now it's easy to post here the line i analyzed.
1.e4,c5 2.Nf3,d6 3.d4 cxd4 4.Nxd4 Nf6 5.Nc3,a6 6.Bg5 e6 7.f4
And now my opponent, if i go into this line, will play 7..Nc6
Even todays software has troubles though seeing the lines well there, and you bet it's total superior over me in those lines.
At a mobile with a 1Ghz ARM dual core from which usually you also lose 1 core to communication protocols, forget about it.
Knowing your mobile is similar to the laptop from some time ago it's no difference between taking a laptop and a desktop to a hotel.
First of all it's insured in a hotel and secondly the desktop has way more power and your mobile phone can already do what your laptop can.
Just typing is hell slower at a mobile phone.
I don't think it's tough to produce touch device type software. I disagree there completely. I'm not defending anyone here. It's an open battleground and you see that the operating systems they show up with are pretty much childish, especially from security viewpoint.
The quicker and cheaper it gets produced the easier. The actual facade you like so much is the simplest part of the work really.
What's really worrying is that manufacturers in order to keep price down, still keep using those cheapskate suck processors and this in hardware that's pretty expensive.
Much of the sales there comes from the 3d world nations. Instead of a laptop or computer, they buy the cheaper mobile phone.
As for companies, just a few years ago when i took a good look at one of worlds largest banks where i have an account, they still were using OS/2. Not os/x, OS/2. You still remember it?
Of course that was just for terminals and what they need it for is pretty limited.
We can definitely say that microsoft is a tad overcharging for what they deliver. They deliver something that's systematically unsafe and though they do big effort for maintaining it, they keep it a single processor operating system to large extend.
There is no 'increased quality' for what they deliver. Same problem with linux. It's a single processor concept that's monolithic. Drivers all integrate into the kernel and Linus isn't willing to ever change that. He doesn't give a clear explanation why. Just an excuse.
The excuse is that it would slow the kernel down. At the same time he doesn't want to really make it multicore capable. The important functionality like sockets still works in a centralized unsafe manner and is central locking every single action it undertakes.
You find it weird that seemingly stuff works fine at the mobile phones?
The big 2 operating systems Linux and Windows are still single processor and you feel that smell everywhere.
THAT is what makes it unsafe.
Now suppose it wouldn't be that outdated. Suppose both would be SAFE and multiprocessor not locking central. Then suddenly you'd dislike mobile phones as they're so unsafe from security viewpoint.
Every chinese guy who walks closeby has all your memo's instantly. By bluetooth or whatever technology you didn't realize that auto activates itself when you didn't suspect it.
Yeah sure, just for a couple of milliseconds. Enough to get hacked when they need to
They both didn't improve much. Linux has more drivers nowadays which is nice, means more companies that wrote those drivers can also hack you.
In that sense your desktop simply IS NOT different from your mobile phone. As long as it keeps that way, desktops for many people don't have a big added value.
Why not just add a TFT to their mobile phone next generation and a keyboard if they need to write a document?
Who needs the old fashioned desktop there?
So there we agree, but probably not for the same reason