Always good to chat with you, Ken, for a reasonable and well-thought-out discussion...
Thanks. I'm enjoying it also.
> Desktops are cheaper, faster, last longer and are easier to maintain than > laptops--and cannot be lost on the bus or dropped into toilets--and will > therefore be essential to the budgets of many organizations. Desktops are also really inconvenient to use on the bus or -- ew -- the toilet. People will choose the tradeoff that works for them; occasional inconvenience vs. portability. Well, I think the economics will change as the volume and rate of turnover changes. As demands for tablets and other portable thingies ramp up, costs will stabilize if not decrease. And power, CPU and memory capacities will continue to imrpove, of course.
Tiny cramped form factors will always impose impediments on speed and power that simply don't exist in the desktop world. Heat and battery-life are serious problems.
Sure, if people stopped making desktop machines today, in a couple years there would be handhelds with similar capabilities to those of the last best desktops. But as long as they make desktops, they will provide more speed and power for significantly less cost than handhelds can do, and the top-of-the-line desktop will always be faster than the top-of-the-line handheld.
I'm also pretty sure that due to the reduced heat stress, desktops will always last longer than hand-helds. Of course, the digital world is quickly adopting a throw-away culture. That's perhaps inevitable for now, but it's not good. It's all hazardous waste. I think it's irresponsible to encourage it.
Take a look at the latest Chromebooks as a bridging technology: $249 laptop. All your stuff is in the (waves-hands) Google Cloud. For IT departments, it means support involves taking away the Chromebook you spilled this morning's latte on and giving you a new one, along with a stern warning. No local storage that needs virus checking. No need for local, only enterprise, backups. No "desktop" machine. You can sit down at anyone's Chromebook, login, and you have access to your stuff. It's the "Network Computer" done right, or at least, right-er.
Well, I don't trust the cloud. Beyond that, I consider my data to be my data, and I consider it to be my right to access it any time I want, without paying somebody an ongoing fee for the privilege of having it stored for me or for providing me a connection to it. I don't understand why other people don't feel that way. But I do, and I always will.
And granted that broadband wireless connectivity is pretty good in many areas of the USA, there are many other areas where it is not. The ISP industry in this country is not particularly motivated to extend coverage to areas where it can't easily harvest thousands of customers, and unlike other places where sensible people vote for sensible governments, it is unlikely that anybody here is going to legislate a change in this area, so there are going to be a lot of places in this country where this strategy simply won't be an option for the foreseeable future. Including the rural area I lived in for 25 years, until I moved here about a year ago.
>Big tea fan, myself. Coffee, stat, in the AM, but I taper off after that. Decaf after 4 PM or so.
Well.. in summer I will drink iced tea, in traditional "sweet tea" style. Lipton's, brewed from loose leaf with a tea ball to excruciating strength, modified with an excess of sugar. Absolutely no lemon.
Ken Dibble www.stic-cil.org _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
