Re: Programming: Not stressful? Yeah, right...


Ben Pfaff wrote:
> Gerry Quinn <gerryq@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
>
> > In article <1130752019.596030.170530@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> > spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx says...
> >> [...] or a 100.00 global laptop made
> >> available to the masses by President of the World Serge Brin [...]
> >
> > $100 dollar laptops then will have wider screens than $2000 ones now.
>
> Why would "portable" machines be *increasing* in size over time?

Indeed. Here in Asia, people generally can't afford "laptops" (and, a
similar word in Cantonese means "rubbish"). Instead, cell phones with
minuscule screens are used in ways Westerners use laptops.

A simple solar home system available to rural villagers in India who
are outside the state electricity grid CANNOT POWER a laptop and can
power, at best, a black and white television.

These folks could use an Internet connection, for example to aid their
children's education and to find out what the most profitable crops are
given futures markets.

But they are not going to want an HDTV style monitor which would
overload their combination of solar home system and kerosene generator.

[Hmm, I may be wrong. For in China, the economy IS powered by the
luxury end, which does seem to have a systematic tendency to "pull" the
ordinary slob up through the mysterious nexus between high-end real
estate and ordinary opportunities.]

[The midcentury Socialist vision was that we'd all converge to an
egalitarian paradise in which we'd all drive Volkswagen Rabbits to work
and assemble Altairs if we wanted a computer.]

[Somehow, these models never get off the ground and become low-power
economies in which the lack of elite infrastructure makes getting to
work a Kolkata exercise in frustration.]

[Whereas when you let the Trumps and Bereshovskys in, they force the
government to spend on infrastructure.]

[As such, high-end computing infrastructure may create low-end
infrastructure whereas EXCLUSIVELY focusing on delivering low-end
infrastructure may never deliver. We gots micros because there wuz
mainframes.]

Indeed, there may be a need to consider a return to the days of
green-on-black, or amber-on-black, or simple monochrome text based
computing in other to open up what economists like Amaryta Sen feel is
the real market, the real "rest of us", the 99% of people at
subsistence levels.

Fancy, "vanity", and "power user" instruction sets like that of the
modern Pentium are power hogs and I for one would like to see an end to
the phenomenon of the xtra fan, for it means that extra power is being
consumed.

A downsized but powerful computing model would I think result in fewer
frazzled nerves in the metropolis, for most laptop and power desktop
users don't use all that power, but the power nonetheless gets in their
way, as in the case of batteries that don't last more than two hours
into a 16 hour flight from Hong Kong to Chicago after a few months use.

The metropolitan user is subject to blame the victim talk wherein when
he exercises his critical facilities, some lawn troll is available to
lecture him on how he's messed up, and lacks Due Respect for the
sufferings of inanimate objects such as batteries and computers...in a
systematic anti-humanism that the PDP-8 and other early paradigms tried
to redress.

However, given my parenthetical notes above, the low end will never
happen without the high end, which means that we should not look to
government to empower the masses. Instead, government should provide
for the common defense, enforce contracts, and (sorry, can't help it)
tax the shit out of the wealthy.
> --
> Ben Pfaff
> email: blp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> web: http://benpfaff.org

.

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