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The PC market may have stabilized and could see its recent declines reverse:
The PC market is forecast to return to growth next year according to Gartner, as buyers come to the end of their evaluation periods for Windows 10.
Worldwide PC shipments are expected to hit 267 million units in 2018, a 1.9 per cent increase on 2017, when shipments are forecast to reach 262 million. By 2019, shipments are pegged to hit 272 million units.
This year's PC sales are however expected to fall yet again for the sixth consecutive year, with shipments dropping three per cent when compared with 2016.
[...] Elsewhere, smartphone shipments will also continue to grow at a healthy rate, the market watcher claims. Shipments are expected to grow 5 per cent year on year to nearly 1.6 billion units in 2017. Gartner claims that the market is experiencing a shift away from low-cost "utility" phones, towards higher-priced "basic" and "premium" smartphone devices.
PC components are becoming slightly more expensive at the same time.
Also at EE Times.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:25PM (22 children)
Why the fuck does an operating system have an evaluation period?
It's not optional to have an OS on your system. If you're getting a shitty pack-in OS, like windows, why would you want to try it as if it's going to make a huge difference in your life?
Why does every piece of tech news depress me and make me wonder when our industry will die and go away forever, instead of excite me?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:34PM (4 children)
Our industry is basically constant chaos. So much changes just to change. Have to either keep up with it or be okay with being "legacy". The money is good though if you can stay on top of it.
Win 10 eval was crap. If you didn't like win10 it's not like you could roll back and keep your old OS forever. Windows users will all move forward or join a botnet (or possibly both, unfortunately).
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @08:47PM (3 children)
on your purchased but not-so-fully owned (or: soon to be pwn3d) computer system thanks to clipper chip on steroids (Intel ME, TrustZone, AMD PSP (rebadged TrustZone, although pre-PSP was LM32, or Xtensa for your AMD GPUs (Look up 'UVD Xtensa HD2400') and possibly others...)
A lack of privacy would be fine if light was shined in every crevice and nook of *EVERYONE'S* lives, but since it isn't, and there are the haves and the have nots, our digital devices *MUST HAVE* comprehensive security, ideally unbreakable without physical access, in order to ensure personal liberty remains.
Sadly most of the populace is perfectly happy in chains, so long as they have their reality TV, or their kids, or their church, or just those people they hate that they occasionally get to make derisive comments at, burn crosses on their front laws, or murder.
Do I seem cynical much?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:01PM
No, I think you seem far too optimistic about the current state of society.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:02PM (1 child)
You left out a closing parenthesis.
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Friday July 07 2017, @06:03AM
You must be a LISP programmer. :-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:04PM (12 children)
Why does every piece of tech news depress me and make me wonder when our industry will die and go away forever, instead of excite me?
I remember feeling excited about the future of the tech industry and new technological developments (particularly in software), back in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Not any more. With very few exceptions, software is getting worse and worse, most of all the user interfaces and design. There's really nothing pleasurable about using modern software at all.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Wootery on Friday July 07 2017, @08:47AM (7 children)
And the bloat. Oh, the bloat.
Want to write a small desktop application? Well, the first thing we'll do is pull in an entire Chromium-based browser...
A rant you may enjoy (welll, I liked it at least): Electron Considered Harmful. [github.io] See also the Hacker News discussion. [ycombinator.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @04:08PM (6 children)
Those are design decisions... if the designers choose to bloat with Chromium in a simple desktop app... that seems like a really good case for shared libraries and an integrated suite of desktop apps ala KDE.
Whatever happened to KDE? it had such potential for greatness.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday July 07 2017, @04:52PM (5 children)
that seems like a really good case for shared libraries and an integrated suite of desktop apps ala KDE.
Yeah, that's the whole idea of shared libraries and an integrated suite of desktop apps: consistency, sharing memory, etc.
Whatever happened to KDE? it had such potential for greatness.
AFAICT, three big things:
1) Thanks to GNOME stealing its fire, it just never got that much traction. There was a giant fuss raised about the licensing of the Qt libraries it relied on (leading to Miguel de Icaza and co. creating Gnome), and by the time they finally relicensed Qt to GPL it was too late as Gnome had too much mindshare. For some odd reason, most of the distros also jumped on the Gnome bandwagon, and continue to do so today as seen with Ubuntu switching to Gnome3. It doesn't help that Gtk+ is a miserable set of libraries for other developers to use as the Gnome team constantly changes APIs and deprecates things, plus it's all in C which is pretty lousy for writing desktop apps.
2) The KDE team lost focus and went after too many crazy ideas like with the Nepomuk and Strigi search/indexing systems which absolutely killed performance, and their "Activities" feature, all of which almost no one really cared about or used. So instead of making a stable, reliable DE and quashing bugs, they pursued "advanced" features of dubious usefulness.
3) The whole KDE4.0 debacle: they released KDE4 too early with tons of bugs and missing features, the distros that used KDE adopted it wholesale without having a fallback for KDE3, users got royally pissed because KDE4.0 was such a disaster to use and so broken, so tons of them abandoned KDE for other DEs (namely Gnome, though Gnome did a lot of the same stuff too).
It'd be really interesting if you could go back in time to 1997 or whenever, meet with the Qt people and show them all these events to come, convince them to license Qt as LGPL, and avoid Gnome even being created. Would Linux on the desktop be any farther ahead in 2017?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @07:30PM (4 children)
Qt has had so much unrealized potential, my big disappointment was that Nokia never built (real, mass marketed) phones with it.
It's not perfection, and maybe it's not even the best thing out there (depending on your perspective), but it was the first really good cross-platform toolset I ever saw. That was one of the amusing things about KDE being based on Qt: KDEWin.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday July 07 2017, @08:01PM (3 children)
AFAICT, it really is the best thing out there, for what it does. All the alternatives have giant negatives:
1. Gtk+ - C-based, controlled by Gnome devs, very unstable, generally low quality
2. .NET/C# - Microsoft-run, not FOSS, not really meant to be cross-platform in a meaningful way, slower performance than C++
2a. Mono - Not 100% compatible with #2, never really adopted by Linux distros that much
3. Java - Slow performance, doesn't really succeed in being "write once, run anywhere" as claimed, never looks like native applications
4. Boost - Doesn't provide cross-platform UI toolset, much narrower scope than Qt. Also rather ugly.
5. Python - Terrible performance compared to C++, really horrible at multi-threading which is pretty critical for UI code, library management is ridiculous
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @09:35PM
Yep, I don't claim to know everything about everything, but your list mirrors my experience. The only time I've seen other toolsets decisively "win" a selection process is when the developers have previous experience with them and the scope of the project is limited to a specific OS. Or, I've also seen a case of "management loves Python, so we're doing it in Python because the last project got so moribund before it reached requirements coverage that we really learned a lot and will do better this time...." I actually saw a group go in for three tries with Python, each time making a bigger more tangled unextendable unmaintainable mess than the previous. That's something I've been pleasantly surprised with by Qt, even when you make implementation mistakes (a mainwindow.ui with 1000+ widgets in it, for instance), it's pretty easy to refactor and correct.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:09PM (1 child)
Modern Java and Java FX aren't too bad, are they?
About Boost: parts of it may be ugly/bloated [catnapgames.com]/whatever, but for some things it's great. It's not a complete multi-platform GUI development environment, but it's not intended to be.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:52PM
Modern Java is still Java: verbose. No thanks. And it doesn't look native, at least not that I've seen. That makes it a deal-breaker.
Boost is useless: as you said, it's not a GUI development environment, so it's just as useful for creating GUI applications as any random non-GUI library. The whole subject here is what can you use to make GUI applications, which Qt is excellent for? Something which doesn't do GUI development doesn't compete with Qt.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @04:06PM (3 children)
Nobody is forcing you to use the new stuff.
For instance: you can still play Zork, if you want.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Wootery on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:19PM (2 children)
What a completely pointless non-response.
Not only is your sentiment wrong on the face of it (there isn't always old software around to do the job of new software), it's also completely missing the point.
If we were discussing unwelcome developments in modern cars, would you waste our time with Yeah? Well no-one's forcing you to use a car?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:48PM
To continue the bad car analogy: nobody is forcing you to drive around with in dash navigation, airbags or fuel injection, either. You might want to pay the price of those modernizations to reap their benefits, but you can also buy, maintain and use older cars without these things.
I had an ASUS net-top for years, ran great on Windows XP when we bought it, as XP was "upgraded" through the years it turned to a useless pile of wait. Re-install XP from the discs that shipped with the system and it's back like it was when new, unable to run some software that requires the OS updates, but still able to do whatever it did "back in the good old days" just the same as it did back then.
If the new software bloat bothers you that much, running old systems is still possible. In Linux land, you can even run most of the old software on modern OSs and hardware. Generally speaking, the new bloaty software comes with just (barely) enough good to make it preferable to the older, leaner stuff, but that's not always the case.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 12 2017, @02:51PM
Valid. If you want to browse the web with 25 year old software, you're gonna have a bad day.
But, if you're complaining about bloat and inefficiency in things that didn't exist before the bloat and inefficiency became ubiquitous, that's a big wish for something that never has existed, and never will if nobody cares enough to make it.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 06 2017, @09:52PM (2 children)
Except in cases of specific need, I don't use Windows anymore.
There are still a few applications where it is "required" - but since a licensed copy of Windows boosts the cost of the average PC that I buy by 15-20%, it's really not something I include without a specific need.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday July 07 2017, @01:44AM (1 child)
15-20%,
Boosts costs, and reduces performance.
First windows takes their 20% of your bandwidth.
Then the bloatware installed by the manufacturer takes 50% of your processing power.
Then anti-virus takes another 20%.
Its just astounding how much shit we put up with.
Picked up a mid tier laptop the other week because the owner bought a new one.
The old one didn't survive the journey from Windows 8 to Windows 10. (A journey that took 6 hours - then died). So he dutifully ran down a bought a new one, with windows 10 preloaded.
You should see his old one (my new one now) run LXDE. Astoundingly fast.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 07 2017, @04:13PM
Yeah, I'm liking LXDE / XCFE more and more these days... they used to be a little on the weak side for me, but I think they're approaching a sweet spot of functionality now.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday July 06 2017, @11:02PM
Elementary my dear. Read this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford