There is no “war” on general purpose computing. There is a clear realization that the vast majority of people cannot securely run and maintain an open computer.
Perhaps more importantly, they just don’t want to.
People want appliances like smartphones. That’s it.
The more computers there are the more dangerous bad actors becomes and the higher the cost of negligence. Botnets, DDOS attacks, etc. the only real way to combat these is at the source and that’s by taking away management of those devices from most users.
Your assertion would be worth considering if any alternative had been given even 1/1000th the effort the prevailing corporate-run paradigm has been given. Confident assertions we are where we are because this is what people want, when no alternative has been presented or tried, is ridiculous.
Then you go on to assert that authoritarian control is the only viable option. Here we have counter examples! Systems like Pop!_OS are parallel efforts to desktop systems like mac or windows, not designed for masterful smart supernerds but just to ne viable desktops for all, without fiddling, with safe-enough defaults. It didnt take suborning users under corporate whip to get here. Windows & Mac also show general purpose computing is in the broad possible- would that phones have at least this much freedom. But they dont.
Right - you can't make conclusions that people's choices are the result of some revealed preference when there aren't viable alternatives readily available.
I'm reminded also of our car-dominated cities in the US. In our current built environment, cycling isn't considered as an option by most because it doesn't feel safe. But cities around the world have shown that if you change the infrastructure such that it does, people will start cycling. The high car usage isn't a revealed preference, it's the result of a lack of other options.
So too with tech. The only options typically available for smartphones are Android with Play Services and iOS, and while it's possible to have Android without Play Services, you won't find phones sold that way unless you're technical enough to know what to look for, in which case you can probably install it yourself. (And things break in weird and wonderful ways without Play Services, because much of what we now consider core functionality for a phone has been moved into it.) Effectively, for the typical user, it's not an option.
Likewise with Linux desktops; they're more available than the phones mentioned above, but they're still not likely to be found where people typically buy laptops and desktops. You have to specifically go seeking them out, meaning the typical shopper doesn't even see them as an option.
Oh please, general purpose computing used to be all that was available, it used to be the mainstream. Mac, Windows, Linux, all of them are losing marketshare (or didn't have marketshare to begin with) and are locking down to match the UX of the newly favored mobile platforms.
Even on mobile, you have locked down iOS vs open Android and what do consumers choose? Android used to be incredibly open and was badly losing to iOS (outside consumers who just couldn't afford it) as it was open to viruses and fragmentation. Google has since learned from that mistake.
But there's always some other excuse. It's like communism, it's just never been tried, all those tries don't count because some aspect of reality got in the way. So what will it be this time? You don't like Google? Linux too hard to maintain? Say all the reasons that you consider way more important than general purpose computing and you'll have proved their point: users just don't want to.
You know why companies put so much effort into locked down platforms? Because users pay them for it. Anyone, including you, is free to dump their effort into making general purpose computing great again, so why don't you do it? Say why you're not doing it back to yourself, it's the reason why no one else is.
The notion that corporations would turn down a lucrative profit opportunity in order to 'give people what they want' is rather naive. For example, the talk discusses the farmer who wasn't given root access to their John Deere tractor, to disable a faulty sensor - because that sensor was collecting data, sending it back to the tractor manufacturer, who was using that data as part of their crop futures trading strategy. If the farmer wanted that data themselves, they had to buy seeds from Monsanto!
I can't imagine any farmer not wanting the option of shutting off remote updates and remote access, and just having complete control over the equipment they bought. This is particularly true for older hardware... i.e. many old computers will run Linux just fine even if Windows support was ended years ago.
Farmers also want free money, they want blackjack and hookers too. Can you give it to them?
What farmers want means nothing if they don't pay for it. If there is some hidden wellspring of farmers who really want those options then any manufacturer who makes tractors with those options will easily steal lots of customers and profits from John Deere. That's what you might call a "lucrative profit opportunity".
But it won't happen, because farmers don't actually prioritize it when buying tractors, they prioritize tool efficiency and are content to idly complain about this issue without putting any money where their mouth is. Go ahead, start a root-access tractor business, then customers will suddenly tell you 99 reasons why John Deere's tractor is still better than yours because these telemetry options are some of the least important things when buying a tractor and practically no farmer will actually reward you for it.
But sure, they want it. They'll even go as far as writing an internet comment complaining about it!
As a Brit this is one of the things I find so strange about US culture, there seems to be a real fear of government and authority. It seems (to me) that people in the US fear their government will do things that damage their freedom and rights through malicious intent.
I feel that here in he UK most people don't fear the government, they just think they are a bunch of useless muppets who have no idea what they are doing.
And yet you can be jailed for a mean tweet and can't own firearms more or less. You have barely avoided (for now) a backdoor being forcibly installed onto every chat and messaging service, though you may still see required snooping on semi public platforms.
It is the tyrants favor to be seen as useless and weak.
No you can't. It's far more complex than that, you have to be a very bad person (or very VERY stupid repeatedly ignoring warnings) for that to happen.
> can't own firearms
Good! We don't want people to have them. (Only somewhere between 1-4% want weaker firearms regulations)
> You have barely avoided (for now) a backdoor being forcibly installed onto every chat and messaging service
True, and it was quite right for the intelligence services to lobby for that, that's their job. But our democratic system worked and it was prevented by the multiple levels of government. They will try again, but I trust the system will prevent it.
> you may still see required snooping on semi public platforms
And I wouldn't be surprised if there is general support for this in the UK.
The US at least has provable history that it's intelligence organizations aren't completely incompetent and have already setup mass surveillance on it's citizens.
I used to be someone who was happy to maintain multiple open computers. But as computers proliferate in our lives, it became ridiculous. I have between 10-15 full fledged computers I personally operate on a daily basis. I no longer have any interest in carefully tending to the needs of each one twice a week.
> Personal Application Omnipresence, PAO. It's a theoretical computing model where your applications are available to you from any device.
> My ideal for computing consists of applications that run on a central application server that I own. I want each application to be a single running instance to which I can connect and then interact with, from anywhere, from any device.
The worrisome thing is that a remarkable number of smug, self righteous elitists share your disgusting views of how certain self-appointed betters should herd the rest of humanity along "correct" lines. It's been a disgusting bane of our species for millennia under different guises and it only shifts its talking points over time. Never mind that this minority is no less prone to all the human shittiness and stupidity that anyone else suffers, only more damaging because they apportion power for themselves over many more things.
I'm sorry, I didn't think I needed a /s at the end of this. I assumed it would be clearly understood to be a criticism of the parent's argument and not an endorsement of it.
Do another one, this time about free exchange of money and how people can't learn how to spend it only on approved things. Add something implying an equivalence between porn and terrorism.
Which is why the HN crowd buys Apple trinkets, and claims to use Brave, because it makes them feel good about their stance on privacy. Yet that same crowd abhors cryptocurrency, but doesn't seem to mind increasingly strict US reporting requirements of practically any meaningful monetary transaction.
Perhaps if all that tracking was instead sold to users as way of preventing countries from bypassing embargoes or to ensure nobody is learning how to order drugs online that we'd all abhor Brave for the energy that it wastes or bad behaviour it allows.
Perhaps more importantly, they just don’t want to.
People want appliances like smartphones. That’s it.
The more computers there are the more dangerous bad actors becomes and the higher the cost of negligence. Botnets, DDOS attacks, etc. the only real way to combat these is at the source and that’s by taking away management of those devices from most users.