[Discuss] ten more years

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

On 02/14/2018 12:23 PM, Rich Braun wrote:
> But your assessment is rather glass-half-full, wouldn't you say?
> [...]
>
> Dig that phone out of your pocket, or evaluate the cloud services that sit
> behind it. Can you seriously make the claim that this stuff doesn't "work
> particularly well" compared to the '80s or '90s?

I'm not saying that there aren't some impressive and useful things going 
on, I'm saying that for what the stuff in the '80s and 90s attempted to 
do and how much of that they accomplished (reach vs. grasp), they were 
more successful and more reliable. No one had to reboot his/er car in 
the '80s--yes there were computers in cars, and they worked.

Airlines have been computerized for decades, but recently have major 
carriers had multiple global ground stops because their computers don't 
work--how many in the last couple years? (There aren't that many global 
airlines anymore either...)

And for all the hardware power we keep throwing at our work, latencies 
go up. My early Macintosh Powerbook--a desktop OS merely adapted for 
portable use--woke up from sleep faster than do my Androids (which never 
really sleep long, and were designed for waking and sleeping from the 
start).

Amazing the number of decimal places of hardware power we have thrown at 
at our software, yet the hardware can't keep up.

A Rube Goldberg cartoon is an impressive thing. An "OK Go" video is 
impressive, too. A computer system built that way can frequently do 
impressive and useful stuff. That doesn't mean it is a sensible way to 
build practical things.

But Google's Calendar app can't reliably give me notifications of 
events... (Oddly, it seems to work better if I say "send me an e-mail, 
too", then I'll probably get the regular on-device notification.)


-kb