Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cturner | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Computing has changed. For CAD, games, a/v production, you still need a workstation. But the workstation is now obsolete in major fields that it once dominated.

Industrial simulation: these days the optimal approach is to get access to CPU is to crunch on headless servers, ideally in the cloud. Expand and contract computing power on a needs basis.

Front-office development: Objective C and Interface Builder was much better for prototyping ideas than C. Modern python/perl/racket/go/c#/etc are much further ahead. There were no mainstream dynamic programming tools more powerful than awk when NeXT was launched. Now the most common expression of hackers is dynamic programming on fabulously powerful free tools. High-quality operating systems are also free. Documentation is free. And it's all far better than what people used to pay for.

Deployment: interactive user interfaces are now delivered through the a web browser. Previously a lot of workstations were sold to run custom internal apps.

Save your money! Get a digital ocean account, and run your macbook until the power supply dies. Perhaps in another ten years google-style web-browser laptops will be ubiquitous.

I was agreeing until this point:

> There were no mainstream dynamic programming tools more powerful than awk when NeXT was launched

Maybe I'm missing something, but:

1950s: Lisp and Fortran

1972: Prolog

1977: Bourne shell and Icon

1978: C shell

1979: REXX

1980: Smalltalk-80 (on Macs, even!)

1983: Korn shell

1983: C++

1987: Perl 1.0

1988: Modula-3, and NeXT computer is launched

Having dug around a bit with Awk that might be a true statement. Awk has an entire ocean of features that mere mortals are completely unaware of hidden behind the 1960s teletype optimized interface. So the statement that there were no tools more powerful than Awk might be true, but only because we don't know if there is a full fledged AI hidden under the layers of impenetrable interface.

What if I'm one of the tens of millions of people who do CAD, photo editing, and A/V production?

What are your thoughts about the parent question? Is there a machine in the 15k price range that would give you remarkable edge over a macbook pro? I don't know anyone who's in these professions. Perhaps a NT desktop box with niche io cards?

Maybe something like this...

https://www.icc-usa.com/blackhole-hpctower.html

The "standard" for high end audio processing is Pro Tools HD/HDX, which does cost this much in its fully-fledged form.

Users can run a CPU-only version of Pro Tools called HD Native which (along with its competitors like Logic, Sonar, etc) are useful and powerful programs. However they lack the power and depth of plugins available for the hardware-accelerated version of ProTools (and other hardware-accelerated plugins like UAD).

I think the Holy Grail is and has always been to "go native" and get rid of these sorts of accelerator cards as money is better spent on the general-purpose devices that retain their utility better. But we still aren't there yet - when you load up even the best CPUs with lots of convolution processing, too much latency is introduced. So yes, I think there's at least a niche market for the $15K general-purpose computer that truly represents a "bottomless pit" of audio processing power.

I haven't even touched on video editing or 3D rendering, both of which can be even more CPU intensive. When you add all these niches together, they still look like the original power-creative niche Apple was targeting 10 years ago with the Mac Pro and the Macbook Pro, and we still want more power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com