Post-post PC: Materials and Technologies That Could Revive Enthusiast Computing 128
Dputiger writes "Given the recent emphasis on mobile computing and the difficulty of scaling large cores, it's easy to think that enthusiast computing is dead. Easy — but not necessarily true. There are multiple ways to attack the problem of continued scaling, including new semiconductor materials, specialized co-processor units that implement software applications in silicon, and enhanced cooling techniques to reduce on-die hot spots."
So, enthusiast computing switches to ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Doesn't really matter - how many companies cater to 'horse-and-buggy' enthusiasts, after all?
Re:Nope (Score:0, Insightful)
Except for LadyAda and her company, Adafruit!!!!
http://www.adafruit.com/
Geek toys, workable prices, n the gaping void that the old "build 20 electronic devices at home!" kits used to fill. Bless her black flabby little heart for this business.
owning your machine (Score:5, Insightful)
An enthusiast wants to own his hardware, he doesn't care about 5.1 GHz uber-core machines. What the enthusiast wants is open specs, common interfaces, accessible GPIO, non-DRM memory or hardware, and open source code. Someone who buys the latest stuff from Intel and slaps Win 8.1 or Ubuntu on it so that they can run WoW is not an enthusiast they're just a rich consumer.
Re:owning your machine (Score:2, Insightful)
What the enthusiast wants is open specs, common interfaces, accessible GPIO, non-DRM memory or hardware, and open source code.
Unfortunately, enthusiasts like you and me are in the minority. The fact that people buy locked-down video game consoles for ease of use [slashdot.org] is evidence that the majority don't care about owning their devices. It's unclear whether there are still enough enthusiasts to sustain a market for such owner-respecting computing devices.
Re:Nope (Score:4, Insightful)
The funny thing is that when lightning bolt like breakthroughs hit people almost never know from whence they come. Somehow I get a pic of a kid with a handful of Raspberry Pi units somehow feeding in and out of a multicore processor with a smartphone somehow involved crunching magical equations that leave my jaw hanging down. It is almost like the mathematicians at Oxford getting mail from an unknown person in a mud hut in India with solutions for equations that nobody has ever been able to do before. Genius is a sneaky quality. It lives where it likes and resides in unlikely meat bodies.
Re:High and mighty? (Score:5, Insightful)
Historically speaking, helping out doesn't help.
It sounds like you're a cunt and have no idea how to help people.
IME, helping out nearly always helps.
Re:Arsenide is a material? (Score:4, Insightful)
The writer, having done the research, would be unlikely to make a mistake like that. It's more likely a 'correction' performed by the editor, who mistakenly interpreted the sentence as a gramatical error. Easy for someone to see 'gallium arsenide' and misinterpret it as the list 'gallium, arsenide' with a missing comma.