Good Advice for First-Time Computer Buyers

[athelind]

Your First Computer.

Offered without comment, but with Comments wide open. Have fun!

Comments

[reveille-d.livejournal.com]

The crazy thing is that it's still relevant for today. Replace Floppies with CDRs, replace OS/2 with OSX or Vista. Our vaunted Xeons and Athlons are nothing more than 8088s that have been injected with massive amounts of steroids. I think that's the most frightening thing: almost 20 years later, and there haven't been any true mainstream technology innovations, just different ways of doing the same thing faster.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I dunno; don't underestimate "doing the same thing faster".

All that power has gone to interface improvements that have made computing more accessible to a wider range of individuals, and, frankly, we're doing a lot more with it beyond that. MP3s are more than just a quantitative improvement on the tinny Beep Boop Beep taht passed for "computer music" back then, and frankly, my current job in GIS/Digital cartography would have been IMPOSSIBLE in the days of Hercules and CGA. The VGA card that would have just barely allowed the POSSIBILITY of what I'm doing would probably have cost as much or more as the 30", 2500x1600 widescreen LCD panel that I'm blessed with at work.

SOFTWARE improvements matter -- even if a lot of it's been bloatware filling up the available computing power.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

Oh, you could have done your job with reasonable ease and speed back then... It just would have had to be on a Workstation(TM), not a PC. Silicon Graphics or Sun, some of HP's HP-UX-running stuff, etc. That's the world where ArcView came from, after all.

But yes. I enjoy being able to run some of the projects I do on modern hardware. Just look at how long that mosaic thing would take on a 1993 Workstation(TM) vs. a modern laptop- doing it on a typical 1988 PC, while still theoretically possible, would have been slow beyond all tolerability- and required a lot more trickery to get around the system's limitations.

[reveille-d.livejournal.com]

I believe it is that very accessibility that has led to stagnation. People are comfortable with these things, and they don't want to change/are too invested to change, and so instead of moving on to newer, greater things, with harder interfaces, higher learning curves, but more options and greater flexibility, we continue on the path of ease and familiarity, either because the better option lacks the support for some application we're familiar with, or because the other offering lacks the documentation we're used to, and so we must learn through trial and error. Of course, without more users, the better option will never gain wide enough acceptance to ever thrive, and so will remain a fringe art, black magic beyond understanding. Suck is Linux in a world of OSX and Windows.

It seems to me that much of mankind's path is this way. Take space. We can chose between what is unknown and expensive, and what is easy and cheap. We could send probes to far reaches, have manned space flight to stars, leap ahead the way we did in the past. But no, we do what is easy, and cheap, sending a paltry amount of craft up, all the while letting the space program dwindle, because no one can see an immediate return of investment in space.

Profit over knowledge is what it seems to come down to, because pure profit is faster than profit from knowledge.

Aaaand, that's enough meaningless rambling from me. @_@

[bear-helms.livejournal.com]

See also my main-thread reply to Athelind, talking about the reason why Woz created the Apple 1 in the first place.

He was an idealist - believing all he needed was to make computing power cheap enough and accessible to the public, and people everywhere would learn programming and take matters into their own hands.

We all know all this did was change the monarchy from IBM to a certain Washington-based corporation. What they do affects business and private lives everywhere.

It's all because the garden variety human isn't all that interested in learning Von Neumann paradigms, logic, and mathematics. Woz was looking through some very rosy glasses when he thought different.

Ironic that "Think different" is a sales pitch from Apple in days past.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I suppose all that open-source stuff like Linux and Firefox doesn't count.

Jobs's vision has indeed come to pass: the personal computer and the heirs to the Apple I DID usher in an era in which anyone can learn to program, and where entire communities gather together to produce not just crude little single-purpose programs, but wide-ranging applications that are useful to other people.

Anybody CAN program, but not everyone HAS to -- and that's a much more positive and productive world than the "visionary" one you seem to be mourning, where everyone who wants to use a computer has to churn out their own code.

[bear-helms.livejournal.com]

It was Woz's vision, not mine, of getting rid of the computer priesthood and giving power to the people.

He mourned the near-monopolistic dominance of Microsoft, without naming names.

I am glad we do have Linux and Firefox despite every effort by Microsoft to dominate these markets as well.

I don't mourn so much the inability of Woz's invention to change the world in the way he intended as much as I mourn Microsoft coming into global power and near monopolistic stranglehold on Operating Systems and Applications.

I don't think anyone can argue that Microsoft is facing a fall anytime soon, not because of Linux, Firefox, or any widespread open-source project. We have a history of anti-trust and similar unfair business practice lawsuits as evidence otherwise.

Linux is the next closest thing to requiring people churn out their own code, anyway. I've never once gotten it running with the functionality and ease of Windows on any platform I've tried it on, and there have been dozens.

[bear-helms.livejournal.com]

Most industry speakers (that I've heard or read) tend to say software takes quite a long time to take advantage (especially full advantage) of available hardware. We have DirectX 10 now (with Vista, anyway), and its incremental step toward letting the rendering power of modern graphics solutions throttle up and burn rubber.

There used to be software and even OS resources to take advantage of then-optional arithmetic co-processor features in a computer. Nowadays, most compilers automatically include a math library that will cope with doing things with accelerated calculation power, or grind through operations procedurally via software.

The fact that scientific calculations can be performed in hardware at incredible speeds in the millions of floating point operations per second (megaflops) or even billions, shows that modeling and simulating things that have ties to physics (from the theoritical to the mundane) is becoming commonplace.

This means that games can model real-world interactions of collisions, explosions, liquids, reflections, and so forth. It also means that analyzing chemical interactions or subatomic particle behavior can be done within a short enough time to satisfy the need to publish or receive a grant.

Software improvements matter, indeed. I wanted to sing praise of some of the hardware behind the scenes, the lowly but awesome arithmetic calculation power in hardware, that also is making stuff possible, or at least doable within the limits of human patience.

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

640k ought to be enough for anybody.

[bear-helms.livejournal.com]

The configuration recommended there is adequate for the stated purpose of learning computing for computing's sake.

Steve Wozniak said in a public appearance (at which I was present) that the reason he wanted to make a personal computer was to deliver people from the tyranny of having to trust computation to a select few professionals.

He went on to say that he hoped this would encourage people to program computers for their own needs - write their own software. The fact that all it did was shift power into the hands of some other corporations whom we trust to give us the Operating System, Word Processor, Spreadsheet, and other applications shows his efforts were in vain.

He's talking about the Apple ][ - what history regards as the first real personal computer, and Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs listed together as its inventors.

The reason we need these gigahertz and gigabytes nowadays is the creeping featuritis of Operating Systems and as well the advancement in the sophistication of games and other applications. If VisiCalc were still a staple of financial planning today, we'd not have needed to evolve technology much past what the Apple ][ offered.

Wozniak was a dreamer, perhaps a bit too idealistic as to what would happen with computing technology if brought within a price range affordable by the average household budget. He thought that would be all that was needed to encourage people to learn logic, procedural breakdown of tasks, mathematics, and other computational paradigms.

It did encourage me. It did encourage Bill Gates. There are thousands of heroes and villians in the world of computing today. Mankind is no better or worse off than it has been after any new tool has been created. So as was with the plow, now as with the computer.