Maybe it was never reviewed for obsolence. Or maybe two sources in the reference section aren't enough. Either way, there are only two direct references in the article body, which seems lacking. I'd assume the last two paragraphs could use some citations and sources.
> I think "without anyone really noticing" should really mean "without anyone in the general public really noticing".
I think that's implied when a mainstream news outlet writes about it, and not some tech magazine.
> In general I think that the press and the general public only becomes aware of these things long after they have reached a dominant market position and are employed almost universally.
which seems evident, here. ARM becomes dominant -> Guardian writes about it -> the general public learns about it.
Intel has attempted brand awareness for years with its "Intel Inside" campaign. Stickers, ads, leaflets... They do strong comarketing campaigns with PC OEMs to make sure their brand is somewhat pushed to end customers. In the most unscientific statistic ever, my mother knows what Intel is, but never heard of ARM. The bad news for Intel is that nobody ever is saying "does this device have Intel? If not I'm reluctant to buy", which is possibly what they were aiming at.
It does matter to them, though, because if the computing market turns towards ARM tablets (tablets seem to be what Microsoft is pushing), and they get one without realizing it, they won't be able to run any of the stuff they used to be able to on Windows. Windows has a long history of backwards compatibility and if ARM becomes dominant, it will end up being pretty much pointless. CPU architecture isn't a huge difference when they are compatible, but this time it is a big deal.
Still, it's not something the GenPop will know or care about. From their POV, it's a product issue - this tablet does or does not run some software. It's easy to paper over 99% of those differences by... writing new software. I mean, people don't complain that iPad doesn't run vanilla MS Office.
Which boils down to the old "consumers view computers as black boxes" argument. The question is whether we should care about that or not, and whether the pain of not being able to run GenPop's favorite software grows too big. Being locked into the respective device's app store hides that pain to a degree. And whenever it becomes noticable, GenPop rather considers switching to a different vendor than considering the tech in question. As long as people put band-aids around the architecture, I'm not sure why any consumer would want care about the underlying hardware in question.
Thats because the computer as a mix of hardware and software is something fairly new. The home/personal computer didn't really happen until the 80s. Before then every device had a defined purpose, and if there was any software it was living as "firmware" inside the hardware.
Damn it, i still recall when people got hot and bothered about getting updates for their Nokia Series 40 phones over the air. Before than you only got it done if it was obviously broken, and to do so you brought it to the service desk of a nearby store or some such.
Personally I like using my Windows laptop-tablet hybrid for old games from GoG, and I'm sure a fair amount of other people run old programs that aren't going to be updated for new architectures on these.
Saying you want your circadian rhythm match the outside light, then adding that you generally can't get to sleep while being steamrolled in the morning, sounds an aweful lot like you're not sleeping in accordance with your biological clock. Are you aware of delayed sleep phase syndrom?[0]? I have the same "issue" and it took me years to find a name for it, so I'd rather throw this at you, even if you knew.
You don't have to. When I first found out about the suckless project, it seemed completely inaccessible, due to the lack of in-depth documentation. After reading around a bit, it seems intentional. My impression was that suckless doesn't aim for quantity, but for quality, even among its userbase, hence the lack of documentation is an entry barrier, a minimum of technical literacy required to get in. Look at the source and you don't need a wiki. My gut reaction says, that's quite elitist - which itself is negatively connoted when everyone aims for widespread adoption and usability. In the end, I agree with this idea. Software is supposed to serve a purpose. It doesn't have to suit everyone. It can be for a selected few, and still be a great project. What changed my mind was that dwm doesn't use configuration files. I came from openbox and more than once broke the menu because of a syntax error in the xml-based config. In dwm, you change the source config and recompile. This way, any and all errors are returned to you, you can fix it and try again, without ever risking any configuration issues or breakages. They do the same with st, their terminal. I'm absolutely convinced by this approach.
> University computing centers can donate storage space to the project
If we leave the publishing-as-a-business area, I wonder how much university libraries currently pay annually for their subscriptions. And I do wonder, if it would make sense for universities to let their libraries take care of archiving and publishing the respective uni's publications. Open-access everything, host it at home.
... and we still need to understand what these "costs of peer review" are! We are never paid for reviewing papers and most editors work for free. There is free software to handle the peer review process (e.g. http://myreview.sourceforge.net) which are used by some serious journals for years (e.g. http://ecj.fhv.at / http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco).
A few more points:
- people outside of computer sciences (and maybe physics) do not want to deal with LaTeX. As a result, they want to submit ugly word files and get a nicely formatted paper out of it (this has a cost, but not in CS where we submit nicely formatted LaTeX papers)
- most journals do not do copy-editing, but the big ones actually work on the figures, the text, fix the references, etc. Again, this is not common in CS.
What if you don't care? If I were terminally ill, dying in a few months, I would definitely be interested in trying the latest experimental drugs. I mean, what's the worst that can happen? (Although legalizing euthanasia would help too.)
But that brings us back to mbillie and "if <x> were so great, everyone would already use/do <x>". Does popularity necessarily imply superiority? Adoption just means it's easy for anyone to get aboard. But that doesn't mean it's implicitly good, in any other way. Worse is better works, for example, if one option is more approachable than the other. Decentralization is good, as a rule of the thumb. Not having everyone on the same network, but having the ability to set up your own network or service based on the technology, is a good thing. Why would you want to have everyone on the same network? Networks are often topic-related. For example Freenode for programming-related topics. Minecraft is pretty focused on EsperNet. Quakenet used to be the place to online gaming. This is usefull and good, since communities sort themselves by interest, views, tools or what have you, by default. So why not encourage self-sustainability through means of decentralization?
