News?
The FBI claims they have cracked the iPhone from San Bernardino with the assistance of an Israeli company. They have dropped their complaint against Apple.
Also of interest: Easter egg hunt at PEZ Visitor Centre descends into chaos as competitive parents run riot. Parents, adults, were mugging 4-year-olds to get the most Easter eggs while their children observed their parents stealing from small children.
At another Easter related event, over 60 people were killed by a bomb in a park in Lahore, Pakistan.
There is nothing like a religious holiday to bring out the worst in people.
89 comments
I discovered them after my accident in ’08. Spending a year or so in bed gives one a lot of time for boredom! LOL Funny thing, for all the *big* games I play, these two are probably my favorites and that I play the most. They are excellent for whiling away time. I use them now while waiting for a d/l to finish! LOL
Funny, I get expensive games, like Doom III + the expansion, which cost about AU$85 for both on special (usually about $140 for the two I think), and yet these two games for less than $10 each I find are far better value for money and entertaining. 🙂 But I do like the challenge sometimes of the big complex games! Just not all the time. 😉
Oh, one thing… They don’t give a link for the graphics pack. When you install & register the game, it will ask if you want to check for updates. Do it. The graphics packs will be d/l as part of the update. 🙂 The game and packs are updated fairly regularly. 🙂 They are quite mature, so bugs are rare. most of the updates are either cosmetics, UI, performance or new game variants. But you have complete control. If you don’t like the modern UI for example, you can go back to the original. The included game rules & help are also quite good! M$ could learn a valuable lesson from these guy’s!
Anyway m8… Enjoy! 😀
You have to wonder if some of these guys have ever seen mahjong in a local Chinatown or in Asia. Watch the elderly ladies click those tiles is an amazing thing, and big money can change hands. The tiles run from simple to carved art depending on the neighborhood and the players. Asian do like to gamble.
Matching and pattern recognition – necessary skills for intel and police work 😉 That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I used to watch games in Hong Kong. There were street parlors, even small back rooms in restaurants behind a curtain. 😀 Aussies are notorious for betting on anything! LOL Pretty much every Aussie I met in the military knew where a card game or two-up game was happening somewhere! 😀
Pattern recognition has been a necessary skill most of my life. As an INTJ, it’s inherent. Probably why I’ve always liked mahjong and other similar games. I’m quite good at Roulette for example. A friend and I would save for 6 months or so, and when we had a decent stake, we’d make a small holiday out of a trip to one of our big Casino’s for a long weekend staying at a nice hotel, usually a Sheraton or something like that. We had 3 rules, never count the winnings, and always put the gambling money (or chips) in one pocket, & the winnings in another. Never gamble any money you couldn’t afford to loose. 🙂 It was supposed to be fun, not cause severe debt stress. One of our favorite haunts was the Wrest Point Casino in Tassie. They had a nice revolving restaurant. At 8 PM, we’d head for the restaurant, and see what we had in the winnings pocket, which would decided how good a meal & wine we could afford. Sometimes, we were actually quite surprised! LOL We got to know the Manager pretty well after a year & he expected us, having been informed of our routine. He’d usually greet us with “Hello boys! 😀 So, club sandwich or 3 course meal & wine tonight?” And this particular night, I said “James my good man, bring out the silverware and best champagne! Tonight we live like Kings!” And we’d all laugh! They made one of the best roast beef dishes I’ve had anywhere! 😀 If we’d had a good win, we were quite generous with tips. Grandad always said “Always look after the staff, and they will look after you.” We’d won over $10k that particular night. 🙂 We were best at roulette & blackjack. Whenever I played blackjack, after awhile, there would be a couple of casino staff hovering nearby trying to figure out if & how I was cheating! LOL But I just knew the cards & the odds, and each dealer usually had their own *pattern*. 🙂 I’d play low bet’s for an hour or so until I’d get the *feel* for the table. Then go for it! They usually changed the dealer after an hour of me winning high stake games. 😀 Then I’d go play roulette for awhile. We pretty much always had some decent money after the bet money was gone. 🙂 Sometimes less than we started with, sometimes a lot more. But always something. 🙂
Then, like most things, I felt my luck was changing, and I was getting bored with it after 6 or so years. So I stopped. Last time I was in a Casino was 2003 I think with Paul Drain! Nothing worse (for the casino) than 2 INTJ’s playing blackjack! LOL Now there’s a story! For another time. 😉 😀
Oh! That game I mentioned above “Doom III” It’s actually just called “Doom” but it is the 3rd (or maybe 5th… Doom, Doom II, Ultimate Doom, Final Doom… Yeah, 5th. Just called “Doom”. Circle complete, maybe…) incarnation of that game. The original was ’93 I think. But I actually meant “Diablo III”. No matter, of course. 🙂
Oh, wait! There was a Doom 64 in ’97 too! Almost forgot! It was a long franchise! LOL I’ve lost count of the incarnations now! Oh well. LOL There was a version for pretty much every platform out there! DOS, Win, OS/2, Linux, Amiga, MAc, SuperNES, Genesis, Game Boy… Andless list! If it had an OS, it had Doom! LOL
It is probably impossible to have been involved in computing in the last century and not played Doom on one or more OSs. Before Doom, on minis it was Cave, a text-based game.
After playing poker for 48 hours waiting for an assignment in the military and coming up 12 cents ahead in a game that went from penny ante to paychecks during that period, I gave up gambling. I was no good at it. I didn’t lose, but it wasn’t worth the time for the lack of reward.
Yes, I understand about getting in the flow of a dealer, because people will fall into a pattern even when they are trying to avoid it. Sometime the house requires they follow certain rules, and that sets up the pattern. On paper I’ve won billions 😉
Given that the chances are something poisonous is going bite you every day, I can understand why Aussies take chances 🙂 😆
Yeah. Colossal Caves. 🙂 That was one of my all time fave games. 🙂 Was truly amazing at the time. I mentioned above that a couple friends and I ported it from Fortran to DEC BASIC. 🙂 Originally created by Will Crowther for the DEC PDP-10 in… ’76, I think. Then Don Woods expanded it in ’77, adding a lot more locations. 😀 I got to meed Crowther briefly at a DEC conference. He said the game was based loosely on his experience in the Mammoth Cave in… Kentucky? Man… I played that so many times! (Well, there wasn’t much else in the late 70’s!) I still remember some of my fave lines (especially since we spent many nights porting it to BASIC). Crowther was one of the developers for ARPANET (which was part of the reason for this conference). Woods said he expanded the game based on his love of the J.R.R Tolkien books. 🙂 Oh!! Remember “xyzzy”? LOL That will haunt me forever! And of course, the dreaded “You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.” Noooo! LOL
The thing with Casino Gambling for me was it was a game between my head & my gut. LOL I used it to hone my trust in my instincts. After some years, I got pretty good and it got boring. 🙂 After my accident in ’08, everything changed. I’ve spent the years since trying to get back those “skills” that I seem to have lost somehow. I’ve gotten better at pattern recognition, but my instincts still fail me. I don’t know why. I don’t feel like “me” any more. The one thing I learned when I was quite young from my Grandfather was “Excess kills! Moderation in everything is the key.” And he proved it in his life. It’s why I was never a chronic gambler or chronic anything actually. 🙂 Anything can become addictive in excess! Anything. And once something is addictive, it’s no longer *fun*.
LOL I just did a search and found there is a version for Android on Google Play. 😀
Android: Colossal Cave Adventure
Cool! LOL I’ll finally get some decent use out of my phone & bluetooth KB! 😉 😀
And M$ have ported it to Windows in the M$ Store:
Windows: Colossal Cave Adventure
Both apparently free. Wonders never cease! 😉 😀
You can only install them via their respective “Store App”. Very annoying.
Ahhh! Found an article on TechCrunch that has links to the original version for Win & OSX:
You Must Remember This: Colossal Cave Adventure
Yayy! 😀
I just got an offer that is difficult to refuse. But I don’t want to spend any money right now either! LOL
I think I mentioned I’m considering a small NAS for my home use (the big Buffalo NAS is way overkill for that! And if all goes well, that will end up in an office).
The offer is a SEAGATE NAS Pro 4 Bay diskless (STDE300) for AU$299! It’s from a commercial computer components company (oh! C4 LOL Ahem.) that I dealt with a lot during the late 90’s – 2k’s. It usually sells around the $500-$560 range. It has an Intel dual-core 1.7GHz CPU + 2GB DDR3 RAM (expandable) & 2 GbE ports that can be tethered giving 2 Gb/s, & 3 yr warranty. It’s actually not a bad unit. 🙂 The equivalent Synology 4 bay is better in some performance tests and the Synology OS s/w is better, but it costs around $580+ (I did a quick check).
The reason is that I currently have the build from hell set up with a 4-drive soft RAID with Seagate Enterprise NAS HDD’s (ST4000VN0001) that I got at a relative bargain. :). The performance is garbage & I want to add another Samsung 950 m.2 SSD. Doing so will disable 2 SATA ports & I’ll lose 2 of the RAID drives. Plus, I’d rather have an external NAS anyway connected to the router that my 3 other devices can easily access it rather than having the power hungry beast on all the time. 🙂 The 4 HDD’s also block the airflow from the two front intake fans. Without the drives in the way, they will blow cool air right onto the video card that gets quite hot (the m2.2 SSD’s get pretty warm also when used heavily & they will be better cooled also.)
Hmmm. Well… I guess I just talked myself into it! LOL Thanks. 😉 😀
After I left the Air Force my next computer was a Tymnet DEC 10 via a Teletype 33 with a Bell 103 handset modem. All of 10CPS of uppercase on a metal cylinder slamming into the yellow paper on a roll and off-line storage on paper tape. Not quite cuneiform, but close 🙂
Yes, we can all find reasons to buy things.
I don’t know if Cave would be the same if I wasn’t freezing in a refrigerated computer room sitting at the console on the night shift with batch jobs running in other partitions.
My first experience with CC was on a Honeywell Multics. I had to log out of my project and log in to the games project (only available after 9pm) to access it, note that user ID’s were constant on Multics, project ID’s differed based on what project you were working on and you had to log into a specific project and got access to whatever resources were needed for that project. In the case of the “games” project, this was, of course, our collection of games :). But only accessible late at night (you could set access schedules for projects under Multics) This likely accounts for my preferred daily schedule of arising around noon and working into the wee hours :).
I was about to order that Seagate 4-bay NAS (STDE300), and I thought maybe I should check around first. And I found another business/network specialist company in Melb. selling it for AU$249! And insanely, the 2-bay version (STDD300) is “on special” for… AU$459 (down from AU$599)! I checked the part numbers & they correlate with the NAS’s on the Seagate website. So, I ordered it. Aus. consumer law protects me if they don’t send the advertised product @ the advertised price! It included free shipping too. *shrug* Damned if I know!
Badtux, your schedule is similar to mine. lol I much prefer working at night. I can put my headphones on and shut the World out! 🙂 It’s just after 8AM here now, I haven’t been to bed. But I was out yesterday from 8:30AM – 2PM and was tired. So I had a nap that lasted just over 4 hours. 😀
My first computer was a junior programmer (Fortran) on a Sperry Univac 1100. The only game it had was tic-tac-toe! Apparently, it was part of it’s diagnostics suite. 😀
I was about to order that Seagate 4-bay NAS (STDE300), and I thought maybe I should check around first. And I found another business/network specialist company in Melb. selling it for AU$249! And insanely, the 2-bay version (STDD300) is “on special” for… AU$459 (down from AU$599)! I checked the part numbers & they correlate with the NAS’s on the Seagate website. So, I ordered it. Aus. consumer law protects me if they don’t send the advertised product @ the advertised price! It included free shipping too. *shrug* Damned if I know!
Badtux, your schedule is similar to mine. lol I much prefer working at night. I can put my headphones on and shut the World out! 🙂 It’s just after 8AM here now, I haven’t been to bed. But I was out yesterday from 8:30AM – 2PM and was tired. So I had a nap that lasted just over 4 hours. 😀
My first computer job was a junior programmer (Fortran) on a Sperry Univac 1100. The only game it had was tic-tac-toe! Apparently, it was part of it’s diagnostics suite. 😀
You become separated from the normal sleep/wake cycle when you spend most of you time inside rooms with no windows bathed in florescent light. The 3-11pm was my preferred shift.
You could only get the resources for Cave when you were running batch jobs, not when CICS was up.
Multics didn’t have a batch mode as such, it was explicitly designed to be a timesharing system. The Pentagon had a lot to do with its final design, thus the whole projects thing, which basically was a way of enforcing “need to know” and logging who accessed what resources at a given time. Even sysadmins could not access data without being assigned to the project that contained the data, and of course there were audit logs if they assigned themselves to projects. Beyond projects there were levels, even if you had access to a project you couldn’t access data that was above your level. That’s one reason why the whole Snowden thing just completely bumfuddled me. It’s as if a giant mind eraser struck the Pentagon and wiped out every bit of institutional knowledge since 1975.
So anyhow, we were a university doing ARPA research on a Multics system, and our sysadmins helpfully set up a “games” project that operated late at night when nobody else was using the system, mostly because they liked playing games themselves :). I think one of our students wrote the very first MMORPG there… he realized, “hey, Colossal Cave would be a lot more fun if I could do it *with other people*!” It turned into a vast dungeon that was always being redesigned as kids in the Beta Project (our honors program) morphed the source code… I remember playing it once from 9pm in the evening to 5am in the morning. I was pretty fried for classes the next day, probably one reason I didn’t graduate with a 4.0 average :).
Computer folk lore has it that when AT&T brought Ken Thompson et al. back to Bell Labs from MIT, Ken started on Unix as an OS for a DEC PDP-7 he found in a hallway, so he could continue to play Cave, Unix being a single user version of Multics. The obvious problem with that version is that Unix has always been multi-user in all its variations.
I administered a genuine AT&T UNIX version on a PDP-11. They got a free academic version from AT&T after DEC wanted to charge an arm & a leg for Ultrix. It was almost two weeks before Cave was procured…
I’m not sure that the first PDP-7 Unix was multi-user. I remember that they re-wrote it entirely when they “ported” it to the PDP-11, because it was all written in PDP-7 assembler, which of course was useless on the PDP-11. So they designed a new high-level PDP-11 macro assembler and called it “C” :). I have a PDP-11 architecture manual somewhere around here, I remember reading it and noting to myself that pretty much every construct in “C” exactly mapped to a construct in PDP-11 assembly language, heh. Had much the same reaction when I looked at the assembly language emitted by the first 68000 “C” compiler that I encountered… “oh look, that pointer fetch and increment is a single instruction!” The 68000, of course, having been inspired by the PDP-11 except with 32-bit registers…
Now we have 64-bit processors and I don’t think anybody other than compiler writers even bothers looking at the assembly language generated by the compilers anymore, except in a few very special cases deep down in the guts of operating systems where they rely on compilers to emit very specific sequences of instructions to handle things like mutexes. And of course you have atrocities like Java which basically *never* compile down to assembly language, unless you count that JIT nonsense as “compiling”, which I don’t because it doesn’t have the full semantic context that the original source code had and thus cannot produce code as good as a “real” compiler…. but that’s what passes for computer languages today. SIGH.
Man! You guy’s are really on reminiscing mode! And you are gonna make me all teary! 😉 😀
I really liked the PDP-11. We had 2, a PDP-11/03 in a black cabinet about the size of a 2 drawer filing cabinet. The /03 was the first based on the new LSI-11 chip-set & Q-Bus. We also had a PDP-11/70. The /70 was expanded to allow 4 MB memory & the new high-speed (at the time) Massbus. we mainly used RSX-11M & RT (Single User Real-Time OS) for the OS’s. The thing I remember most about RSX was that the programs all had to have 3 letters. I still remember many! LOL I think PIP (Peripheral Interchange Program) was the most used I think, for copying files. Let’s see… FMT to format a device, FLX for converting between DOS-11 & FILES-11 volume formats, CMP for comparing files, DCL & MCR for CL shells, EDT the editor (still supported by EMACS I believe)… and so on! No wonder IT people love 3-letter acronyms! 😀
The LSI chips were manufactured by Western Digital (remember them? 😉 They used to make pretty good IC’s & components before they decided to get into hard drives). It also used a new Q-bus (a variant of the UNIBUS). It was a shame the architecture was hardware limited to 16-bit addressing. Otherwise, it was extremely flexible. That was why the VAX (Virtual Address eXtension) architecture was created primarily. It had 32-bit addressing. Intel’s 8088 CPU was based largely on the LSI-11, with the 80386 being based upon the VAX.
The college bought some Heathkit H11 Computer kits for the students to *play with*. These were based upon the LSI-11 architecture & compatible with the PDP-11. I remember when a company called… Schlumberger (sp?) opened an office in Melb. in the mid-70’s selling Heathkit gear. I learned that Schlumberger were actually an Oilfield company which I thought was weird! LOL Then that abruptly changed to Zenith when Zenith apparently bought Heath which became ZDS (Zenith Data Systems) in the late 70’s.
Heathkit… Now that is an amazing story in itself! The company that would not die! LOL I actually got an email October last year from the once-again renewed Heathkit that they were in business again (in Santa Cruz) with a new kit! LOL I’d totally forgotten that years earlier I’d asked to be put on a mail list. 🙂
It’s aliiiiive: Heathkit
I read some years ago on an old-timers forum I was a member of that someone (I forget the name) hacked MicroEmacs to run like EDT when RSX was replaced with Unix. 🙂 OH!! LOL Speaking of that old forum… I found something on an old archive CD I was looking through the other day… Yeah! Did you guy’s know this?
A guy by the name of Gordon Booman created an unofficial PDP theme song called “That Old-Time PDP” sung to the tune of Bob Seger’s “That Old-Time Rock’n’Roll”. 😀
I had a couple boxes of manuals for the PDP-11. Most were destroyed in the flood of Nov. 2010 not long after I moved here. A few survived. I lost a lot of stuff in that flood. *sigh* I was going to donate them to the pdp11[dot]org, a group still online I believe. 🙂 The PDP-11 was one of the longest running computer series I can remember. From 1970 to 1994, then by an Irish company Mentec Inc., who bought the rights from DEC, from 1994 onward. the pdp11 group have some PDP-11 emulators I downloaded but never got around to trying. 🙂
I thought I’d posted this yesterday, for some reason it hasn’t appeared. *shrug* Try again…
I was about to order that Seagate 4-bay NAS (STDE300), and I thought maybe I should check around first. And I found another business/network specialist company in Melb. selling it for AU$249! And insanely, the 2-bay version (STDD300) is “on special” for… AU$459 (down from AU$599)! I checked the part numbers & they correlate with the NAS’s on the Seagate website. So, I ordered it. Aus. consumer law protects me if they don’t send the advertised product @ the advertised price! It included free shipping too. *shrug* Damned if I know!
Badtux, your schedule is similar to mine. lol I much prefer working at night. I can put my headphones on and shut the World out! 🙂 It’s just after 8AM here now, I haven’t been to bed. But I was out yesterday from 8:30AM – 2PM and was tired. So I had a nap that lasted just over 4 hours. 😀
My first computer job was a junior programmer (Fortran) on a Sperry Univac 1100. The only game it had was tic-tac-toe! Apparently, it was part of it’s diagnostics suite. 😀
OK! This is weird! I tried posting this yesterday & today! Try again…
OK Bryan! I surrender! *sigh* I tried posting a short update to my buying the NAS yesterday & today, but it refuses to post! No idea why, has no links or anything gnarly I can see! Even tried block-quotes! Oh well. *shrug* (wonder if this will appear?) 😉
Oh… I agree about Java etc. badtux. Very few real programmers left today. *shrug*
OK. So this is fine apparently. Damned if I know! Try here:
I was about to order that Seagate 4-bay NAS (STDE300), and I thought maybe I should check around first. And I found another business/network specialist company in Melb. selling it for AU$249! And insanely, the 2-bay version (STDD300) is “on special” for… AU$459 (down from AU$599)! I checked the part numbers & they correlate with the NAS’s on the Seagate website. So, I ordered it. Aus. consumer law protects me if they don’t send the advertised product @ the advertised price! It included free shipping too. *shrug* Damned if I know!
In the amateur radio world there’s still a lot of people who remember Heathkit fondly. The old Heathkit radios fetch a good price on the rare occasion they hit the market, which is generally when an old ham goes silent key (sigh) and has their estate auctioned off rather than trashed. What really killed the “old” Heathkit was surface mount technology and wave soldering. Back when electronic devices were made of discrete components hand-soldered via thru-hole soldering, it was quite a bit cheaper and somewhat satisfying to buy a kit and make it yourself. Afterwards, it was sort of disappointing to buy a kit, because a kit was a pre-soldered board with surface-mount components on it and a case and all you did was screw the board into the case and you didn’t save any money by doing so. But now with Arduino and etc . we may be moving into a new era of kits, but one that is about flexible devices that can be reprogrammed to do lots of different things not thought of by its initial inventor, not soldering together an LED clock for your bedside.
About Java, that’s how I make my living nowadays, but it’s frustrating as bleep because a) garbage collection, with b) resulting performance stutter, and c) ridiculous amounts of inefficiency *everywhere*. For example, the standard way to access databases in Java is called the JPA, the Java Persistence Architecture, and the standard library implementing JPA is called Hibernate. Well, flushing your Hibernate session to the database can take *minutes* for especially large sessions, and *it’s all CPU time*, not database time! Only Java could make database operations be CPU-limited, ROFL! It turns out that they do multiple nested loops attempting to make sure things get flushed out in the right order (e.g., make sure a ‘bytes per second performance’ record gets flushed out *after* a ‘network interface’ record referred to by the performance record), rather than creating some sort of dependency tree beforehand, resulting in an exponential growth of CPU use with session size rather than some general rule that says “flush all the component records before flushing their performance data.” WTF? What fail!
In a way I’d like Apple’s new language Swift to take off. Java may be the new COBOL, what all IT professionals today use to build corporate applications, but it’s a COBOL that *sucks* at data processing. Even throwing massive amounts of hardware at it — and I’m throwing *massive* amounts of (Amazon LOL) hardware at it — barely makes it perform acceptably well due to fundamental architectural issues caused by being written by people who knew the value of everything, but the cost of nothing. Swift avoids some of the insanities of Java while bringing along what few benefits Java has…
Kryten, I found most of your missing comments in the Trash’ folder and 1 in the ‘Spam’ folder, almost as if you hit delete while editing, but fear not I do find them. WP may not put things where there belong all the time, but they make it damn hard to lose anything.
My Dad used to build Heathkits, and they were the source for some of my best test equipment. I had a strained experience helping a friend build one of their stereo receivers – she neglected to mention she was color blind. The receiver worked, but the friendship = not so much…
The thing about the PDP-11 is that you could get used parts, knock-off parts, bits and pieces and devices, whatever because there were so many around for years. There are dozens, hundreds still out there running experiments that have gone through generations of researchers.
Java, the concept, was great, but Java, the reality is really disappointing.
zork!
played at 3am while waiting for the computer operators to let your job run . . . .
… And Cave begat Zork …
Yep, if you couldn’t locate Cave, you started looking for Zork, and we (operaters) wouldn’t even load that partition until after 8PM at the earliest 😉
I told you before Bryan. Your blog hates. me. 😐
You had to bring up Zork?! Sheesh! I owned every version & played them to death & beyond! I actually still play Zork 7 & Nemesis in a DOSbox. 🙂 BTW… Zork is still very much alive! 😉 😀
Here: Installing and Playing Zork Games on Modern Operating Systems
It has guides for playing Return to Zork, Zork Nemesis & Zork Grand Inquisitor on Win XP-W7, Linux & OSX (using ScummVM or DOSbox), and a whole lot more there! 😀
What about Space Quest, Kings Quest, Police Quest (and whatever other xxxx Quest I’ve forgotten!) Or Lesure Suit Larry? I had ALL of those too! LOL
Ahem! Right… Now for something somewhat different, and speaking of the many demises of Heathkit due to inability of keeping up with changing technology trends… They are not the only ones! See this?
Why Intel’s Job Cuts May Be Just the Beginning
Hey Bryan… Did you know Florida is home to one of the most mysterious ultra-high Tech companies in the World? Very, very few have any real idea of what they do, and even fewer how they do it, but they’ve raised over $1.4 billion in funding! LOL WIRED Have been allowed to see for themselves for an article, and are still highly frustrated! 😆
The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup
I call shenanigans on the notion that computers are being replaced by devices. Devices haven’t replaced a single computer anywhere in my workplace or extended family. What has happened is that the computers got so powerful that there’s no need to replace them as often. Take this big 12-disk dual-processor Nehalem storage server sitting next to me. That particular processor was introduced seven years ago. The server itself is around five years old. There’s no — zero — reason to replace it, it works just fine. Eventually it won’t work fine, and then I’ll replace it. The 12 terabytes of effective storage on it will likely fit on a single SSD by then, LOL.
The thing about devices is that the technology is moving so fast there, a three year old device is obsolete and new software won’t even install on it because it doesn’t have the latest Android or iOS on it. But eventually that curve will flatten out too.
What’s happening is that Intel geared up for continuous growth, and now they’re in a new era of no growth, where people buy new equipment only when the old equipment wears out, not because the old equipment is no longer capable of running the latest operating systems and software. But the death of the PC isn’t happening. Just isn’t. Because sometimes you need a screen bigger than a postage stamp and an actual keyboard to get shit done. That’s why my managers gave up trying to do their work on iPads and now have Microsoft Surface II “fat” tablets, they hook’em up to real keyboards and monitors when they get to the office, because when you’re trying to design a presentation or view a spreadsheet, a tiny postage stamp display is the *last* thing you want to be staring at…
I mostly agree with you badtux. 🙂 I know from my own experience over the past 15 years, that there has been a shift from desktop to portable, both in offices and homes. 15 years ago, it wasn’t unusual to have 2 or 3 PC’s in a home. Now, some have none but have notebooks instead, & tablet’s & smart phones/TV & consoles. 🙂 For most of the 90’s and early 2k’s, I had 2 PC’s and a laptop (though, I’ve always had a need for portability. I even owned an 8088 based Kaypro *luggable*!) LOL Remember those? 😉 Now, I have my *build from hell* 6th Gen i7 graphics design/gaming rig, a high-end 5th Gen I7 based 17″ notebook, my 11.2″ tablet and my 5.4″ phone. Oh, and my 46″ Smart TV! 🙂 And honestly, the real world performance difference between the previous gen notebook & latest gen PC, isn’t that great. 🙂
I think Intel underestimated how quickly the reliance on big systems would slow. It hasn’t gone, and like you, I doubt it will. 🙂 But it isn’t what it was 10 years ago. One thing I have to give Jobs credit for, he saw it coming! And rather than wait for the shoe to drop, he became a cobbler and drove it even faster! LOL In the mid-2k’s, we had memos that the manufacture of notebooks & server systems would increase, but desktops would decrease. The focus shifted to backend systems & portability. The G5 was the last of the *big* desktop’s for Apple. Jobs was working with Intel at the time making the move from IBM/Motorola who just couldn’t compete (in terms of compute power & power requirements)! But Intel stubbornly refused to see it. *shrug*
Intel’s new Broadwell-E line I think will find a shrinking market. The high-end 10-core CPU might find a home in high-end design systems, and the loyal fan boys will buy them for their gaming rigs, for little real advantage. 🙂 I think they will have more success with the Kaby Lake-U and Kaby Lake-S chips, and maybe the Apollo Lake SoC’s. Only time will tell. 🙂
Intel announced in March, in a Form 10-K report, that it had deprecated their usual “Tick-Tock” cycle in favor of a three-step “process-architecture-optimization” model. Under this *new* model, three generations of processors will be produced with a single manufacturing process, adding an extra phase for each with a focus on optimization. Intel already broke the cycle by delaying the 10 nm Cannonlake to 2017, and planning a third generation of processors using 14 nm, the Kaby Lake.
I think AMD saw it also. They knew they couldn’t really compete on the desktop any longer, and decided to focus on server & portable technology. And maybe, they will be the winner. I don’t know. 🙂
BTW… Know what I use the most? 😉
The DELL Venue 11 Pro 7140 tablet! LOL I love it, really. 🙂 I have it hooked up to my BenQ GW2255HM display (via it’s micro-HDMI port) that I got for a steal price of $129. 🙂 I have a 7-port USB 3.0 hub hooked to it’s single USB 3.0 port, with my old Tesoro Gungnir H5 mouse and the Ducky Zero mech KB, and a bunch of external HDD’s. The Gigabyte Aivia M8600 v2 mouse & the big Aivia Osmium KB are on the *build from hell*. 😀
When i go out, I take it with me, but with a small Bluetooth KB with a trackpad. I prefer it to the touchscreen which get’s hard to read after 10 min’s! I have to constantly clean it, same with the damned phone! *sigh*
Pretty much everywhere here in the Silicon Valley, all you see is Macbook Pros and Macbook Airs or, now, the Microsoft Surface Pro. We haven’t bought any desktop computers at my employer since we went into business 3 years ago. We’ve bought a single motherboard in that time to upgrade one employee’s Linux desktop. That’s it. We bought a couple of Mac Minis for developing iPhone software, and the rest was all laptops, Macbook Pro for the web designer, a Lenovo for the Windows driver geek, and so forth.
I have a desktop computer here at home, running Windows 10. But it’s strictly for games. Everything else is done with my Macbook Pro, currently hooked to a 32″ 1440p monitor and Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to bring you this tome :).
I didn’t always agree with Steve Jobs. But he had a talent for spotting where the industry was going — or needed to go — and steering his company there. Apple has really been in a holding pattern since his death, just endlessly iterating on things Steve did, rather than looking ahead. That’s not a recipe for long-term success, as Intel is finding out as pushing forward Andy Grove’s strategy over and over again worked for many years, but has decidedly hit its limits now.
As for AMD, they’re basically out of the CPU business now except as a chip design and licensing firm akin to ARM. They’ve licensed all their CPU designs to a consortium of Chinese chip firms who are going to be doing all the manufacturing of the next-gen AMD processors. Real men have fabs, but when fabs cost $5B and up, what can you do? Other than license your designs to people who *do* have fabs?
A three year life was once assumed because that was the life of a lease and the amortization write off for high tech. Then Y2K came along and business upgraded equipment out of cycle to avoid any problems. In 2003 people noticed that instead of some equipment being upgraded every year, nothing was upgraded for three years, and no one wanted to replace all of their equipment, so they just upgraded some of their equipment.
People hung on to Win98, so they didn’t need extra speed, and then the hardware seem to still be usable, so to save money money many businesses changed to ‘change when broken’ rather than a schedule. This led to the extended life of Win98, and especially WinXP.
Obviously the Great Recession didn’t do anything good. for any sector of the economy.
The companies that still have a regular replacement cycle are at 5 years now. Many businesses will have fixed systems at offices, a significant number are shifting to the laptop or laptop/dock model rather than a box for most workers in sales and marketing, but the data entry and accounting departments will still want a box with a good keyboard and decent screen. The graphics people need big displays and alternative input devices.
I have an two towers, two laptops, and the iPad. I would have a Smartphone if the phone companies would stop ripping people off. The initial cost is high, but the monthly cost is what keeps me out of the market.
At the end of the day I dump everything into the big box, and then back it up. That, together with some thumbdrives is my version of the ‘Cloud’ that is available to me anywhere.
Another thing that Intel and others might want to consider is that they can’t outsource all of their good-paying jobs to low wage countries and expect to have many people left to buy expensive products.
thank you, kryten! I look forward to playing zork once again.
we (operaters) wouldn’t even load that partition until after 8PM at the earliest
we (long-suffering students) found that we could get our jobs run fastest if we took our cards in to the computer center after 2am. 😛
The graveyard shift was always looking for something to do.
No problem hipparchia! 😀 Anything else you need… just post a comment. I am the font of knowledge of all things on the Internet you know! And modest too. 😉 😆
We had the graveyard when I was junior programmer on the Univac. It got really exciting one night! They had a Halon gas fire system. The access to the room was via a narrow, short corridor that could accommodate only two people at a time, and only one door could be open at a time. Usually, there were only 6-8 people in the room. This night, there were 14 as we had tech’s from Sperry working out an upgrade & maintenance program. The fire alarm sounded, and we froze. We’d had drills and knew only 10 could get out before the gas vented. We were on the 2nd floor. Two of us grabbed the big & heavy line printer and hurled it through the window! (I was weightlifting at the time & the strongest there). Turned out, it was (an expensive) false alarm. LOL *shrug*
Halon systems were effective, but you really needed emergency air packs if you were going to use them. Specifically air packs, as oxygen was not something to store or use just anywhere.