Reports of the PC's Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

Palmpilot

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Richard Palm
I remember the breathless predictions that the PC was dead or dying. I also remember thinking, in essence, that people's ability to predict the future was "greatly exaggerated." ;)

The PC was supposed to die a decade ago. Instead, this happened

"Back on January 27, 2010, a very Big Thinker declared the PC dead. A decade later, the PC is very much alive, although a time traveler from 2010 might not recognize it. Here's how this endangered species evolved and survived."
 
At one of my jobs, we used Apple products. Every time some dimwit presenter of the latest greatest way to waste time and resources with technology in a classroom would exhort us to "choose the Chooser," I couldn't decide whether to laugh or cry.
 
The PC might not be dead but I can’t handle Windows 10 calling programs “apps”. That’s just not right.
The full name for those thingies, even pre-Windows, was 'application program'. So ... either moniker is correct. I call stuff for the big screen programs and stuff for the phone and pad apps.
Ken, former DoD code monkey.
 
If they are "apps" now, that'd be a good thing, because most of them would either be free, 99 cents, $1.99, or a rare one or two near the $10 range... instead of hundreds of dollars or more for "programs." I'm all for it.... ;)
 
The full name for those thingies, even pre-Windows, was 'application program'. So ... either moniker is correct. I call stuff for the big screen programs and stuff for the phone and pad apps.
Ken, former DoD code monkey.

Yes, this. I’ve been calling what’s on mainframes and desktops “programs” for 40 years. “Application” is also acceptable. But “app” refers to something I carry around in my pocket that I might use to summon a driver. It’s small. It’s limited. It’s cutesy. It certainly doesn’t calculate the resonant frequencies of a mechanical oscillatory system.
 
If they are "apps" now, that'd be a good thing, because most of them would either be free, 99 cents, $1.99, or a rare one or two near the $10 range... instead of hundreds of dollars or more for "programs." I'm all for it.... ;)

LOL! I might get behind it in that case.
 
I think the PC as "box and monitor on a desk" is on life support. Most people I know use a laptop as primary now, a thing that would have been marginal 10 years ago.

I feel like my heavy box with custom loop and giant multiple monitors is akin to an Urbanite driving a King Ranch F250 around (with a matching tonneau cover of course), which I suppose is "un-ironically retro"
 
Any business with non mobile users is still buying plenty of box and monitor. It’s also still the best way to have four monitors. :)

The boxes are tiny now though and basically just have smoking fast laptop guts inside. The little Dell mini PCs smoke everything Apple has to offer and do it for less than $1000 with on site repairs, no data ever leaves the building, and a new one instantly provisions off of AD and is ready to use without any need for someone’s cloud ID, in about 20 minutes max. Boot times after that are pushing less than 5 seconds from SSDs that are actually removable and upgradeable and are as encrypted as Apples silly ass T2 chip and soldered in crap, using the trusted platform stuff and Bitlocker.

We’re pretty impressed with them. They even fit a VESA mount if we cared.

We looked at chromeOS for those users and it blows and still doesn’t understand what Apple doesn’t. Central admin without cloud required. AD still accomplishes that and has for decades.
 
If they are "apps" now, that'd be a good thing, because most of them would either be free, 99 cents, $1.99, or a rare one or two near the $10 range... instead of hundreds of dollars or more for "programs." I'm all for it.... ;)
99 cents and half the screen is ads and you have to watch a video before you save your work. Either that or 99 cents per month for life until the app just goes away with all your data.
 
I do love my little Optiplex 9020s. Same job as a NUC for 1/3 the moneys. :D

The NUC is insanely popular amongst the mostly clueless Home Assistant home automation crowd.

Which I say “insanely” for because they’re complete crap up against just picking up a couple year old off business lease micro PC from the Optiplex or Lenovo lineups for a third to half the price, and firing up a VM to run HassOS and HassIO in.

But there’s an “easy button” install on the HA website for the NUCs so people keep using them... LOL.

NUC is outdated by a long shot over these little beasties. They’re screamers for what you pay for them. Basically top of the line business laptop motherboards slapped in a tiny little box. Really tiny. Even use laptop power bricks.

Will admit the four monitor thing you need the physically larger optiplex case but for the typical business use two monitor setups they smoke right along.

I mean you know, something has to keep up with Chrome’s bloat! LOL. Chrome is slowly approaching emacs levels of almost being its own OS... oh wait. LOL.
 
Many are great functionable machines at a very affordable price, the latest wizbang processors and memmory dont change a lot about checking hotmail and basic weather checking and such. Put a new one at the airport for under $200 w a 2 year warranty, perfect.
 
Many are great functionable machines at a very affordable price, the latest wizbang processors and memmory dont change a lot about checking hotmail and basic weather checking and such. Put a new one at the airport for under $200 w a 2 year warranty, perfect.

Okay that makes sense. For $200. I see folks spending $500 on later models and they’re just not worth it up there. Better options now.
 
If one wants an IT job one must start with a properly written app. A solid resumé is a bonus. ;)
 
Well, the headline is true at my workplace for every Windows 7 box that was infected with the Windows 10 upgrade virus. Bricked ‘em, every single one of them.
Way to go, Windoze!
 
Well, the headline is true at my workplace for every Windows 7 box that was infected with the Windows 10 upgrade virus. Bricked ‘em, every single one of them.
Way to go, Windoze!

That sounds horribly mismanaged. Who upgraded all of them at once, for one thing. Nobody does that unless they want to be job hunting by the end of the week.
 
Oh it’s not been one massive air strike. More like sniper fire... one or two a day. After the first one bricked, they cancelled the auto update and ran the next one manually and monitored, so they said. Another dead pc to ship back to NJ. And then another and another. Just today they suspended the upgrades until further notice.
I keep reminding them of a stash of Customer Support clients they’re not allowed to touch as we have to keep systems to match our customers environments and some of them refuse to upgrade. (Good call, in my opinion, but I’m only a little biased).
 
Oh it’s not been one massive air strike. More like sniper fire... one or two a day. After the first one bricked, they cancelled the auto update and ran the next one manually and monitored, so they said. Another dead pc to ship back to NJ. And then another and another. Just today they suspended the upgrades until further notice.

Facepalm. What did they DO to those poor things to need to ship them to New Jersey?! LOL.

So you’re serious they’re really hardware bricked?! I was going to ask but I figured you know the term well enough...

Good lord. I haven’t seen machines bricked in... forever. And the only ones in a couple of decades were the result of an untimely power outage during writing flash firmware.
 
Facepalm. What did they DO to those poor things to need to ship them to New Jersey?! LOL.

So you’re serious they’re really hardware bricked?! I was going to ask but I figured you know the term well enough...

Good lord. I haven’t seen machines bricked in... forever. And the only ones in a couple of decades were the result of an untimely power outage during writing flash firmware.

About the only excuse I’ve heard is something about some network security setup on our laptops that if they don’t join the network within a certain timeframe they’re locked out and have to go back to the mother ship for reimaging.
The tech running the upgrades that failed really did say it bricked them. No boot to fail safe mode ... dead.

And the new mothership is in NJ after they bought us up a few years ago. I visited one of the data centers in PA shortly after the buyout.
 
About the only excuse I’ve heard is something about some network security setup on our laptops that if they don’t join the network within a certain timeframe they’re locked out and have to go back to the mother ship for reimaging.
The tech running the upgrades that failed really did say it bricked them. No boot to fail safe mode ... dead.

And the new mothership is in NJ after they bought us up a few years ago. I visited one of the data centers in PA shortly after the buyout.

LOL. Ahh the joys of large corporate IT.

Because taking the SSD out here in CO and slamming an image on it hooked to another machine... is less secure than doing it in NJ. :)

I love some of the silliness companies come up with in the name of security. Truly is impressive how far off of logical it can go off the rails.

Somewhere ten people sat in a conference room and nodded their agreement that it sounded like a great plan. And next quarter they’ll wonder why the department shipping costs are so high. Won’t even make the connection. Hahaha.

I bet they’re using the TPM module to store/encrypt WiFi credentials. Heh. Whole bunch of ways to kick yourself in the head really hard with TPM settings and Bitlocker.

“It’s so secure it doesn’t work anymore.” Which is kinda what you want if it’s stolen, but not so smart during an OS upgrade. Or worse, set to self destruct for something as completely normal as... a network being down. LOL LOL LOL

It’s funny. One of my biggest pet peeves are IT people who write code or design systems that assume the network is always available and working properly.

Of course I bought a couple of vacuum robots that literally can’t be operated without internet, because their data for where NOT to go in the house to destroy things is ONLY stored in the “cloud”. Not a single reviewer of the damn things mentioned this in at least ten reviews I watched. Just said the no-go feature “worked great!” #^*!%*+=!!!!!

Product reviewers apparently have fiber internet and not rural jackass microwave internet. Should have known. They upload video... lots of video... damn it. Ha.

Here’s today’s fun. Walking up and down my stairs six or eight times trying to get the robot back on the internet so I could run it... to save myself time and effort. And not walking my stairs. Or vacuuming. LOL.

And what did I eventually find? The robot company managed to get themselves added to a DNS Real Time Block list for malicious network behavior! Hahaha. My firewall was like, “Nope. These ass hats don’t belong on the internet. They’re that bad.” LOL.

Sigh. Whitelisted. Someone else will have to fight the good fight on that one. I need the stupid carpet vacuumed. Hahaha.

What moron doesn’t just store the no-go data into the robot after it’s created on the phone? Sheesh. No. It makes more sense to have the vacuum cleaner ask a server farm for it every single time it runs.

Brilliant.

It’s embarrassing to be in the same industry as people that stupid. A vaccuum that can’t operate without internet. Not a vacuum that uses internet to add nifty features that will work when the internet is down. No. It literally won’t work without it.

And sadly the things are better designed and engineered than anything else on the market. And do a pretty damn good job... when there’s internet. LOL. They even... get this... have a LOCAL API which is another reason I went with them. No internet needed to control them, right???

Wrong. You tell them to start with the flag set to use those no-go zones when the internet it down, they fail. Because they can’t download the data. Again. For the five hundredth time this year.

Gah. I swear Steve Jobs was correct to throw things at these types of people and tell them to think harder and do it over.
 
on a similar rant, my brother tells me that his company recently migrated all their office apps to Microsoft Office 365 (do I have that label right? Everything on the cloud?) ... decided by office/corporate IT group. Sounds good, right? Because every one is always connected?
Well yeah, they sort of "forgot" that this company operates boats ... that are required to respond quickly to oil spills ... and operate out of sight of land ... so, poof! No office apps! And their primary job, oil spill response, depends on their apps!
 
Everything on the cloud?) ... decided by office/corporate IT group. Sounds good, right? Because every one is always connected?
365 can save to the local drive. What differentiates it from the standalone version is the licensing model. It's a subscription to a continuous upgrade rather than having to re-install a new version every so often. Plus, access to the web version.
 
365 can save to the local drive. What differentiates it from the standalone version is the licensing model. It's a subscription to a continuous upgrade rather than having to re-install a new version every so often. Plus, access to the web version.
Yep, I always save from Office 365 to my local drive, at home or at work. (In fact, at work, we cannot store on the cloud.)
 
365 can save to the local drive. What differentiates it from the standalone version is the licensing model. It's a subscription to a continuous upgrade rather than having to re-install a new version every so often. Plus, access to the web version.
And a way for Microsoft to mine your data and increase their revenue at the same time. Office 2003 and 2010 both more than meet my needs, period. I'll probably pickup 2019 just because doing it every 10 years keeps the security support current. But not because I need any of the other updates. And the one-time purchase version delivers better value. I'm sure that the folks in Redmond look at Adobe and turn green with envy.

I was reminded this week of what a pain it is to do a clean install of Windows 10 - might as well do Linux. More time spent turning off as many "phone home" options as I could (all on by default) and setting it up to my liking.

Apples not much better - at least with a PC one can add memory or drives, where Apple has it locked down. No third-party service for Apple, either.
 
What do they do with it? I don't see any significant advertising revenue in the quarterly reports.
Oh, lots of things. Their goal was advertising (on your desktop...) but selling the data can be as lucrative. And it makes it easier for the govt to get rhough FISA. Plenty of stuff they can do with the data beyond advertising.

Just ask the automakers. Pretty much all of them. They collect data on you, where you go, driving techniques, etc. you don't own it and can't see it. And can't turn it off.
 
365 can save to the local drive. What differentiates it from the standalone version is the licensing model. It's a subscription to a continuous upgrade rather than having to re-install a new version every so often. Plus, access to the web version.


It's Word. I still have Word 2010 versions that work just fine.

I understand why this is great for the company and for Microsoft. For the end user it blows.
 
on a similar rant, my brother tells me that his company recently migrated all their office apps to Microsoft Office 365 (do I have that label right? Everything on the cloud?) ... decided by office/corporate IT group. Sounds good, right? Because every one is always connected?
Well yeah, they sort of "forgot" that this company operates boats ... that are required to respond quickly to oil spills ... and operate out of sight of land ... so, poof! No office apps! And their primary job, oil spill response, depends on their apps!

LOL. Used the wrong version of O365 and set it up wrong. You can get local licenses still for Office that run locally and as others have mentioned, store locally if that’s what they configured wrong.

Unfortunately AFAICT no version of O365 will run “forever” disconnected from the Net. If you’re headed out into the backcountry to write the new Walden Pond (and brought a generator with you to charge the laptop) O365 eventually stop working after a while of not being able to phone home.

So yeah, wrong product for a boat. :)
 
It's Word. I still have Word 2010 versions that work just fine.

I understand why this is great for the company and for Microsoft. For the end user it blows.
That's why they sell both Office 365 and Office 2019. You still have a choice.

...for now ;)
 
Oh, lots of things. Their goal was advertising (on your desktop...) but selling the data can be as lucrative. And it makes it easier for the govt to get rhough FISA. Plenty of stuff they can do with the data beyond advertising.

Just ask the automakers. Pretty much all of them. They collect data on you, where you go, driving techniques, etc. you don't own it and can't see it. And can't turn it off.

THIS.
 
I'm not sure I'll ever fully migrate away from the desktop. There is something about the finesse of a mouse and cursor that a touchpad nor a touchscreen can change. I have a touchscreen laptop running Windows 10, but have so much trouble fat fingering buttons in Office and other programs I still use a mouse with it even. I also like having a 20+ inch monitor, which makes for a rather unwieldy mobile device.
 
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