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Comment by haxel | Hacker News Reader

"Everyone gets a pocket supercomputer" - Slide 8

I see this idea repeated so often, but it's unfortunate that we don't also have the _value_ of a supercomputer in our pocket. The sole purpose of a supercomputer is to advance the interests of its owner, who has exclusive control over it. Whether the purpose is prediction, or simulation, or to advance the state of the art, the benefit goes to the owner.

Yet we seem to have less and less control over our smart-phones. With so much information about each of us being siphoned off through the Internet, it's easy to wonder whose interest they serve.

With all of the advances in computing power, you'd think we'd put a bit more imagination into capturing more value for each individual smart-phone user, and less into centralized capture and analysis of our digital activity.

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My parents both fairly recently bought iPads. Previously they used a Windows laptop and an Ubuntu desktop - both far more powerful and giving far more control. Or at least that's one way of looking at it.

Their iPads may have limits on their functionality, but as a result of their simplicity, they enable my parents to control a lot more of their computing experience.

They rent movies, read books, use RSS (!) via Flipboard, edit photos, install apps (previously they would never install software) and - most importantly - they experiment with new things. Unlike the old PCs, which they'd become more fearful of with every inevitable fault or virus, with their iPads they can just hit the home button.

For you and I, you're right - mobile can be limiting. But don't underestimate the power of mobile for those previously intimidated by computers.

I think the argument should be(or is) whether I can have a computing experience other than that provided currently by Apple, Google et all.

I think historically user has lost once, seriously Linux never delivered the promised land for more mass users. I would be more interested if users can have mobile experience which is not tainted by interest of big co-operations. Unless there is an alternative, I hardly doubt there will be any change in status quo.

firefoxOS to the rescue.

How would that be any different?

if it comes, the big corporate interest will have been "The shoulders of giants." Apple's iphone, the competition from Google and all the financial benefits from that have generated a lot of progress fast.

I use open office, and it's a good example I think. If we didn't have MS office, would we have open office? would it be as good?

If Firefox OS succeeds, would it ever have been made without the smartphone market having already been defined?

"if users can have mobile experience which is not tainted by interest of big co-operations"

This is impossible. All co-operation has biases, for profit or for another reason, everything comes with "strategy-taxes".

This is an important point that often seems lost when abstracting out concepts like "power" and "control."

There is some theoretical sense in which a user of free software has a lot of control, including the power to change it. Software being free can have a lot of indirect benefits to the user, but ultimately practical "power" is a function of what you can practically do with it, and that is very different from what the thing can theoretically do.

Apple probably has motives for the app store other than making user experiences simple. But, they also really have the goal (and the effect) of making the user experience easier, which puts more real power into real hands. If the below median user can install a photo sharing app to see her nieces photo collage, that's real power in users hands.

Also, I think being strict and abstract about "exclusively to advance the interests of its owner" is losing a lot of important texture. First, very few technological benefits go exclusively to anyone. They go to users, vendors, various other users and vendors. A lot of them get released into the ether as externality vapors, like productivity or ideas for new technology.

The reality of the current state of computing is interesting, but it's very hairy and hard to grasp and boil down to simple abstractions. When we use our phones, we are interacting with other people, generating data/content on other people's phones, in various databases to the benefit of a bunch of people/companies. When you are using your navigation app, generating data about traffic, you are benefiting the app, other osiers. Possibly future users. Possibly that data will be sued in other ways. Maybe a construction company will buys it to plan new roads (and win a contract) which will benefit the city… Maybe someone's girlfriend will one day have it beamed to her implant to estimate when Brian will arrive.

Is this bad because it's not to the exclusive benefit of the user? The benefit to the user would not even be possible with this mesh of stuff.

My mother bought an iPad at the age of 67. She's not remotely technical - before she got a mac, I'd routinely get support calls of the quality "help! microsoft isn't working!", where 'microsoft' meant anything from Word to a browser to, well, anything. Anyway, the ipad was used for about a month, then plonked on a shelf to gather dust as she went back to her macbook.

As a naif and something of a technophobe, she definitely did benefit from moving from Windows to OSX (back in the late XP days), but iOS left her cold.

Doing more and having more control are not interchangeable. Your parents reading more books on their computer means they do more. More control means they know what happens inside the software/machine and they can change something about that.

You are right that people don't care about control as much as an idea of it. And you are also right that giving control to someone else who can get a value out of you might result in you being able to do more, but at some point having no control over ones life will bite people in the ass. And that's what the control topic is about.

In a simple example Apple can decide to not show the books to your parents any more. There is nothing they can do about it. Getting your Linux computer to work right takes time but then it's much less likely that a software can delete your data or if they delete it you are more likely to have a backup because you put sweat into configuring your system that way.

> Getting your Linux computer to work right takes time but

It doesn't just take more time; once something is sufficiently difficult, it goes from incrementally time-consuming to insurmountable (for most people) -- it might as well not exist.

Did we just move from "What is control? How do I get control?" to "Linux is probably insurmountable so we don't even have to try"?

If my parents ask "How do I get control?" And someone answers "Getting Linux to work takes some time, but..." Their response should be that they won't even try. My parents have a hard time with the concept that there are things called "files". Directories are completely beyond them.

I never intended to convince you or your parents to use Linux. It's just, that you said that they are able to do more, therefore they have more control. If you understand that the opposite might be the case then my job is done. In some scenarios it's okay to have less control in exchange to do more. I do such exchanges on a regular basis myself. But one must be aware that one gives away control, not gains control.

Really? You could not use actual paper file and filing cabinet as physical world analogues of computer files and directories? Pretty much everyone understands those metaphors, so why don't your parents?

Why not simply set up and maintain Linux for them? Especially because if the only thing amateurs need is a browser, then Ubuntu is exactly the same as everything else.

They still won't have ultimate control, but you will. This is certainly a tradeoff (a personal relationship has more motives for violating trust), but depending on your relationship it can be a great way to distribute control away from ApplNSAoogle.

Directories and files have a real world analog that your parents are likely to understand, but I think the doofy interface obscures this to the point of confusion.

I think it's fallacious that deeper understanding of system would guarantee data safety. I have no idea what the most of the software and hardware on the n devices I use actually do. I know they are targeting large masses of end users so I can trust the industrial process that created them. What is needed, I suppose is educating that all data that is not backed up should be considered volatile, and digital goods such as kindle books are for consuming but not for collecting.

That said, I don't mind consuming digital volatile goods - there are very few books I re-read and I usually acquire paper copy of those.

I think that is too limited a measure of control - if you can use the iPad to do a budget, but not MS Excel, then with the iPad you can get an extraordinary amount of control over your own life.

Depending on what kinds of books his parents read those might result in more control too. Even if we account for a loss of control from the computer to the iPad (and I am not entirely convinced that a practical loss happens, given that they can barely use the computer) it isn't possible that the total amount of control, for his parents, go back up.

Modern cars take a tremendous amount of control away from you. You lose the ability to easily service your own engine. You rely on electronics to do everything from braking to steering to regulating the temperature. If one thing fails, the car is undrivable and will likely need a lot of expensive repairs you can't do on your own.

On the other hand, it gives us things like AWD, so people don't need to be afraid of when they should use 4WD or when doing so might damage their car. It's automatic. It allows people with disabilities to operate a car, since they don't need to shift or use both feet on the pedals. It's automatic. You can hook up your iPhone and play music from it without touching the phone. It's automatic. And even slippery weather isn't as deadly anymore with automatic traction control.

So no, I can't rip my car down to the chassis and count every bolt. But I can drive a car in a far more safe manner, a car with far more power and far more convenience. There's two types of "control" at play. One is a mechanical control where I could tear down my Toyota 4Runner SUV with 180hp (a small amount of power) and put it back together as a Tacoma pickup. The other is the knowledge that if I hit a slippery patch in my Nissan Murano with 260hp (a huge amount of power), I will continue on just fine even with more power under the hood while the Tacoma driver is in the ditch wishing he had known to engage 4WD at that second. The news will report that the Tacoma driver "lost control" of his car, whereas the Murano driver "stayed in control".

Now that's a bleak picture, sure. I'm just using it to illustrate a point. There are two types of control. You'd never give root access to an average user. So does the Linux computer actually give them any more control? Or are you just giving them a Tacoma and locking it in 4WD for their own safety? If you give them a Corvette and then tell them to be careful or they will spin out and die, they will never let the RPMs go above 2k.

I like your example. Let's say it this way: With more electronics in your car you lose control over the car, but you gain control over the road, and the traffic around you.

Facebooks also works that way, now that I think about it. It takes control away over your data, but it enables you to interact with more people, which may improve your control over your connections.

Could we agree on that?

Exactly. Everyone has different needs, it's not necessarily wrong.

For the record, I use a Linux laptop at work. When I get home, I enjoy sitting down with an iPad and an Xbox for entertainment. I have a 16 year old truck for the weekends and a brand new Fiat for my daily driver. I understand both sides of the argument, and they're both valid.

your parent's experiences just what PG pondered in 2008.

http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html

"2. Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you'd trade some of the power of a web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don't want the full web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox? If you built one now, who else would use it besides grandparents and small children? "

After 7 years, we know clearly now tablets/phones and mobile apps are the answers for that question for the present.

I just got my wife a Surface Pro 3 and now she doesn't use her iPad anymore. She rents movies, reads books, uses RSS via Flipboard, edits photos, installs apps and experiments with things. She also takes notes with the stylus, rips songs from YouTube and has Adblock installed in Chrome (edit: and after all that, she can throw it in the docking station connected to a 2nd large touch screen, keyboard and mouse) - things she could never do on an iPad.

So yeah, mobile is limiting but it doesn't have to be. Once you venture outside of Apple's cold embrace, many things are possible.

The Surface is a strange one, seeing as it is both a PC and a mobile device in one. There are upsides - as you've mentioned - but downsides too. I suspect my parents might not be quite as comfortable using a Surface than they are with an iPad. I'm glad your wife is enjoying it, though.

However, I'm really not trying to get into a war between platforms. My point is that adding limitations, which many of us see as reducing how powerful a device is, can actually enable the user to go further and do more than they could previously.

What a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. This isn't some Marxist struggle between the owners of the means of production and the smartphoneliteriat. The reason we don't realize the value is because we haven't concocted applications. Supercomputers crunch data & perform math. That's what they are good at, and their value (as I know it) is primarily rooted in their ability to advance math & science (& defense, as it relates to math & science). But nobody has really figured out what sort of massive scientific computation we should be doing with our pocket computers.

Some of it is there- for example, I wrote an app that performs geodetic math that was supercomputer-only in the 60's- but in general, folding proteins and simulating physics in your pocket is not useful to Joe Smartphone.

To the extent that smartphones are "supercomputers", they're mostly super at games and video. Otherwise they're more like dumb terminals than PCs.

As used today, yes. And that's kind of the point of the original observation. Smartphones are not true supercomputers. But they still smoke a Cray-1, and yet we use them as dumb terminals. What can we use that power for, that filled a room twenty years ago?

Their existing roles have value! But there is a sense of leaving something untapped, when you use them only as dumb terminals. A sense of, what am I missing?

It doesn't make sense to have a supercomputer as your phone. In your phone you value excellent long battery life. Better to offload the supercomputer part to central processing and pipe down a "viewport". Economics always wins.

But you already have the performance of a 1980s supercomputer in your phone. It doesn't have to make sense.

But you have a limited power supply.

I can easily carry a power brick. Or a hydrogen fuel cell like they use for power tools.

But most people either can't or don't want to.

"Phone" isn't really a term that makes sense for the future. It's just a somewhat anachronistic bundling of microphone/speaker/digital radio/battery (and the tiny bit of logic needed for that to work together).

It does make sense to carry the things that comprise a "smart phone" (as above, +powerful cpu that can scale down to conserve power, gpu, screen/hud/display, camera(s), low-power local-area digital radio (eg: bluetooth), touchscreen (or drawing surface/digitizer), text-input (keyboard), gps, interface for connecting 4k+ display, possibly direct-attached storage), along with a headset, preferably wireless.

I just don't see why this should all be forced into one unit. I'm not sure how much power miracast would require -- but could it really be more than what the led-lit touch-screen uses? Because surely it'd be easier to have big battery+wlan/miracast/bluetooth/cpu stuffed in your pocket, and a small display+touch+bluetooth device on your wrist, with the option to pull out a phablet-sized hi-res touch-screen with it's own battery, but only miracast+bluetooth (maybe a gpu)?

The "smart stick" (the smarphone less the camera/screen/mic) could probably be made to fit more nicely in a pocket if there was no need for a display.

Shape it like a rod, add a powerful vibrator and the thing would even be dual-use ;-) (seriously, though - if it's intended to be kept in a pocket, a vibrator might make sense, as well as a couple of status leds).

The screen is going to be a bit clunky anyway (unless it folds/rolls up) - so no real issue to add a dedicated battery for it.

Maybe I should file a patent for "smart rod".

I've always wanted an on-body cluster ;)

But how come heads-up displays have never come to market in a serious way? I'm not counting Glass, by the way, given the focus on sharing rather than using.

Beats me. I also wonder why OLED screens only seemed to be used for military HUD/goggles -- and not for the civilian market.

I recall one pioneer from MIT bashed glass, pointing to his experience with having a single image in a different focus area/off-center as being uncomfortable for prolonged used (or maybe even harmful).

So that might be one reason (similar to how everyone realized in the 90s that VR made people throw up -- no market).

As for a smart-rod -- I really liked Canonical's push towards a viable use-as-phone-use-as-computer OS. It's an obvious idea that I think is already "proven" by stick-pcs and chromebooks. The cpu of a previous-generation smart-phone is enough for many tasks.

Another "proof" is what's happening with Samsung's Gear VR IMNHO, eg: http://vrjam.challengepost.com/updates/3462-meet-your-mobile...

Not sure if VR might not actually be an area where going wireless might break down though -- Oculus has spent a lot of effort getting the latency down. Still it seems it should be possible to do a lot of the 3d stuff along with head tracking in the head-set, and do more complicated physics modelling on a more powerful device.

Either way, I'm hopeful that we'll see more meaningful separation of devices as bluetooth (as I understand it) keeps getting support for lower power in one end, and higher bandwidth in the other.

Because the truth is a HUD is useless most of the time. What are you gonna put on it? Walking speed? Time to lunch? Random Tweets?

I'd want the same stuff on it as I have on other PCs. Tools or access to tools. And yes, mobile-specific stuff too. Why work in/on wherever using a tablet, when you could instead have a full virtual work environment?

Maybe not walking speed, but perhaps biking speed? Text messages? Caller id (for screening calls)?

Noooooo. Mobile bandwidth is far more constrained that mobile CPU power. Furthermore, radios are the most power hungry components after the screen, another reason to try to avoid them. Data connections are not truly ubiquitous either, so what do you do when you don't have a connection? Lastly, from a data security point of view, if you don't want to hand all of your unencrypted data to a 3rd party, you would have to host the server yourself (in this model the server needs to be able to manipulate your data, which means that it must be able to decrypt any encryption you had on the data connection itself).

So no, I don't see that as ever being a desirable model for mobile computing. Maybe for some specialised tasks, but for general pocket computing, the power is better placed locally, not remotely.

> In your phone you value excellent long battery life.

No. You and I might want a long battery life, but 'the market' has decided that battery life is way down the list, below 'look like an latest iphone'.

The market has standardized on shiny glass brick, as thick as a pancake, and tiny batteries to match. Batteries that are less than 3,000 mAh and that barely last a day, two days, tops.

If the market thought an excellent battery life were important, there would be phones an inch thick, with a 10,000 mAh battery that lasted a week instead of the latest generation featuring 8-core, 64-bit, gigahertz+ processors.

Economics always wins. Unfortunately, economics is not always on your side.

For me, they're mostly missing privacy. That is, they're not securable from supposedly trusted providers. So for me, a precondition would be full control of the baseband, and running open-source software. Or maybe for now, using Android kernel to load Debian, and nuking the radio.

I'm sure that lots of cool distributed computing stuff is doable. But I'm not much interested until it's securable.

For those who think I'm crazy, consider what company would accept smartphone-like security for its servers. And OK, upon reflection, some apparently do. But my point stands.

For most people, computation isn't nearly as valuable as communication. Raw computation isn't useful to non-scientists; the smartphone computation power is put there to render games and web pages.

Unless I'm mistaken, a Cray supercomputer generally had a dedicated and consistent power supply, i.e. they're plugged in. Most phones aren't, and battery technology is still not at the point where you could achieve constant performance if you were using the phone all day.

Well one of those games is playing world championship level chess. Pretty cool for something that fits in your pocket.

Not at all. Even IBM Deep Blue chess computer relied heavily on opening and ending chess databases. It's a common thing.

Also does the app rely on a server to do the processing? As many F2P and online games do.

So information has no value? Why do we say that information is power? I suppose that idea could be just as wrong as saying we have a supercomputer in our pocket, but the idea that information is power is much, much older.

Information isn't being hoovered up at the cost of billions of dollars without a very good reason for doing so.

Still, it seems a matter imagination. If our personal computers have tremendous (and accelerating) power, there's few actual limits to where we can take them. The deck even has a slide that talks about pulling components off the shelf and playing lego with them.

I think it's prudent to consider whether the average person is, all things considered, empowered by our Internet-connected computers. If so, great. If not, or not enough, then how?

You're trying to tie together unrelated ideas. Beneficial utilization of a phone's incredible raw computational muscle is basically unrelated to the harvesting of your personal data, in which the phone is merely acting as a networked array of sensors. There is virtually nothing stopping you from harnessing the full computational power of your phone supercomputer-style to do whatever data crunching you might imagine. The challenge is the imagining (and implementing)

I'm speaking of value, which I view as the balance of risk vs reward. Your view may differ. On one side, it seems to me that the reward or benefit we're receiving isn't anywhere near proportional to the power increases we've seen. On the other side, what are the risks of exposing so much personal information?

Receiving information seems much more valuable than giving it. After all, information has a price. If giving is not so great, shouldn't we be a little concerned about the consequences of trading away so much of it? Information asymmetry strikes me as the root of many power imbalances.

So, if we want more _value_ out of our "pocket supercomputers", it seems we have to consider the overall value proposition. Then perhaps we can figure out how to do better.

Who's the "we" here? It's already possible to write your own smartphone apps that basically do what supercomputers do. If you work in the field that supercomputers were designed to help (scientists, basically), I'd imagine that they could be very handy, since you could plug your cell phone into a workbench and get results immediately rather than needing to do laborious data entry.

The problem with information is that it's only valuable in context. Scientific computing has given us wonderful breakthroughs, but it needs lab equipment, it needs data collection, it needs trained scientists, it needs theories and hypotheses to test. Computing was developed to break Nazi codes; the Enigma machine may have been the star of the show, but it also depended upon radio intercepts, field operatives, dispatch runners, generals, soldiers in the trenches, people who built fighter planes, etc. - and it obviously wouldn't have been useful had we not been at war. Similarly, most of the consumer data that's vacuumed up is only useful in the context of a task that millions of consumers want to do.

You're right that there's a power imbalance in the distribution of this information. The problem is that this power imbalance doesn't exist because of the information, it exists because of the context in which the information is collected and applied. Find a context where information can let you deliver a better product than competitors, and it's easily worth billions of dollars. But the information on its own - minus the product design, minus everybody else's information, minus the brand name and distribution channel and user adoption - is worth zero. It's already possible to siphon off and redirect all data that is being sent to Facebook & Google's servers on your behalf and save it to use on your own personal behalf. The problem is - it's useless. Without everyone else's data, there's nothing you can do with it.

If that information is useless to us, it's due to inadequate tools: software, hardware, algorithms, and philosophy. Facebook and Google are both able to extract value from an individual's information (even isolated) because they have both the software and incentive. Both can look at word frequencies and activity over time to develop behavioral prediction models that are then used to target ads at you.

I'd say the ability to make relevant predictions is a form of power.

Why is it a forgone impossibility for an individual to possess tools to capture similar value from their own information? Does self-knowledge hold no value? In my experience, changes in behavior (such as to better align with your own goals/interests) are often triggered by a clear and quantified message from a trusted source. Why not make this source your own information and your own computer?

Sure, what Facebook has is lower quality and harder to process than we might prefer, but there's nothing stopping us from collecting and structuring our own information in more appropriate ways, then layering on interfaces and algorithms, and then simply doing better than anyone else can. Because it's ours.

So the We is We hackers, who can design and build new information-contexts with different value propositions and power dynamics. And it's also We thinkers who can put together the reasoning behind such efforts. And We as regular people, who want more joy and less pain, with less effort.

You don't have to take it as far as science. Previously ,Google had a web search engine that searched discussion groups - a great tool, and an important one from the democratic point of view. Now it's gone. Why ?

One guess would be that no company wants to slap ads near a vibrant discussion - not a good place to sell lies. So in a sense this do fit the theme OP raised.

BTW, with connectivity - the distinction between smartphone and server is little. Even weak phones have supercomputers at their disposal.

One guess would be that no company wants to slap ads near a vibrant discussion - not a good place to sell lies.

Really? Is there any large discussion forum that doesn't have ads? Reddit, SomethingAwful, they all make their income slapping ads near discussions.

reddit just proves the point , huge traffic , bad monetization.

You can still search discussion google groups. They removed it because most people didn't want it.

It's the idea that the content available on our devices is shaped by the economic framework that supports it.

When the economic model is advertising and data tracking, the types of apps/services that are available are the ones that work best with advertising and data tracking. And it turns out that consumer-oriented social sharing services fit that model pretty well. So that's mostly what we have.

Those services do have value. But I think it's limited. When I walk into a cafe with a beautiful view and everyone is on their phones, or when people awkwardly scroll through Twitter at a group event instead of enjoying the world around them or interacting with strangers....I dont see people gaining value. Especially when it's children doing it. I see compulsive addictive behaviour that erodes human value for the benefit of advertising companies.

The economic model follows consumer desires, not vice versa. It's a lot easier for a startup to change their business model to fit what people will actually pay them money for than for them to convince people who aren't willing to pay to ante up.

If people would pay for value, startups would spring up to capture that. That's actually what we see in the SaaS business. Consumer entertainment has always been a hard sell, which is why the radio and TV businesses were also ad-supported.

> The reason we don't realize the value is because we haven't concocted applications.

Some of us realize the value. I just think it's impossible for most people to not take it for granted. If you're under 30, you inherently take it for granted because you know of nothing else, you simply cannot appreciate the technology as much as someone who lived a good chunk of their lives without it. You can "know" and imagine what life was like before our current internet culture, maybe even empathize, but there are still things that are unknowable and can't be experienced by just going off the grid. One such example is culture. The culture of society was different because of the technology (or lack of) at the time. Everything from how you interacted with your friends, to how you received and consumed media, to banking and your place of employment. Everything was different before our current technology.

The people who grew up with supercomputers in their pockets don't know of a world where 3-way calling was something magical and you'd get giddy when you used it (or horrified when it was used as a tool to trick you into admitting you liked someone and they were on the phone silently listening). Or a world where if you wanted to find an address or phone number, you had to go find a phone book. Wanted to go on a vacation and look up cool places to see while there? You were heading to the library. If you were on the road driving, and wanted to call someone, you had to stop off and find a payphone (and pay a fortune if you were out of the area). Good luck if you blew a tire. But back then, more people were inclined to stop off and help because of this very problem. Again, society was very different back then.

People take for granted the fact that you now have all the world's information and entertainment at your fingertips. I know because I take it for granted myself and I know what the world was like before our current technology. I'm in my late 30s. If I take it for granted from time to time, how can someone who never knew a life without internet & cell phones appreciate what they have?

I know this sounds a bit preachy, and I didn't really mean for it to come across that way, but I find myself echoing Louis CK sentiment on technology and today's youth. His bit here really struck a chord with me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEY58fiSK8E

We don't have the value of the supercomputer, because our supercomputers don't ship with compilers onboard.

Removing compilers - and indeed, software tools in general - from the requirements for a base operating system is the reason we have these disproportionate power cycles in our computing world. The compiler is the single most important application an Operating System can run - yet it is is denied first-class membership in the system image these days.

Alas, this circumstance came about in order to create an artificial scarcity of people who can make computers do things. If the compiler is onboard - anyone can learn to use it and then use it, and they don't "need developers". Removing the most powerful tool in an Operating System in order to create this condition, has crippled forward progress.

If this ever changes, I expect to be seeing a lot better software out there. But as it stands right now, developers of platforms don't want broadly-accessible and easy to use developer tools to be available to all and sundry.

This omission is really just a class battle in disguise.

Bring back the compiler as a first-class tool!

While I do agree that having a compiler accessible on a platform is a positive, I'm somewhat skeptical of the claim that anyone can learn to use it and then use it. It glosses over the enormous learning curve to develop software with the current mainstream tools (especially the ones that need compilers). If you look at e.g. Mac OS X, where the compiler can be downloaded and installed by anyone, very few do and even fewer develop software.

Our current systems are simply not designed to be extended and modified by non-experts. Even in a system like Smalltalk, where that was one of the explicit goals, it doesn't really seem to have worked out. Having the compiler and software tools accessible is only small part of the solution.

>Our current systems are simply not designed to be extended and modified by non-experts.

Yes, that is exactly the point - and it is by design, not nature.

>anyone can learn to use it and then use it

Well, this has been the case so far - or were those of us fortunate enough to have become software developers only able to attain such lofty states by chance, luck and/or good breeding? Because if that is your position: bollocks. Anyone can learn to read, and write, computer code. All it takes is the intention on the part of the learner to do so .. however when that option is denied them, because OS vendors do everything they can to profit from separated Developer tools, then it is a matter of one intention being greater than the other.

Certainly, anyone who wants to learn to write software, can. But don't kid yourself that there haven't been huge stumbling blocks put in their way in order to make the whole subject more specialized. That is a matter of economic reality at this point.

>Anyone can learn to read, and write, computer code

I agree that most motivated learners could pick up some very basic software skills, and those would be beneficial to them. In a utopian world basic programming skills would be treated the same as basic literacy and numeracy. However, at this point in time, it seems to me that most users don't care (maybe because they don't know what they're missing). As an analogy, most people could learn basic knife skills in a couple of hours and be much more productive in the kitchen with a chef's knife than they are now with the huge array of inferior point tools (cheap dull knives, garlic slicer, chopper, egg slicer, etc.). However there is obviously a big market for the latter. Similarly, I'm not sure extensible and modifiable systems have enough attraction to the average user.

Another reason for closed systems, one which I think is more important than the profit motive, is that designing extensible and modifiable systems is really hard and comes with trade-offs. E.g. Squeak (a Smalltalk dialect) allows you to inspect and modify almost everything in the system while it runs, but that also means that is really easy to screw up the system behind repair (e.g. you can switch every boolean in the running system by evaluating 'true become: false') and that supporting users of such systems becomes much harder. I am not aware of any system that has a solution to this.

Actually, all platforms have a compiler: a jit JavaScript compiler, ready to run whatever code you want by just typing it in a text file and opening it with your browser. (Incidentally, it's how I started back in 2000, on public computers).

There are also plenty of WebIDEs nowadays that people can use out of the box - we are not in the 90s anymore, when all software had to be "installed" to be readily available.

Yes, and you can't access the vast majority of services the phone offers without a hell of a lot of latency. If you can at all. JS is a joke compared to the capabilities of a c compiler.

If you're advanced enough you feel the need for more, you can get the compiler then - they're still available, just not bundled. JS is more than enough to learn programming and write some useful apps.

> If you're advanced enough you feel the need for more, you can get the compiler then - they're still available, just not bundled.

I don't believe you can acquire a C compiler for the iPad without buying an actual computer. At which point, why get the iPad again?

With just JS, it's a toy. A powerful toy, yes, but it's a small subset of what's possible with a computer, and one that leaves a very bitter taste in my mouth.

I agree, the iPad is a joke. But we were talking about mobile generally, and you can get a C compiler for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.n0n3m4.dro...

You can even run Debian -with plenty of its software, like Apache, Nginx and MySQL- on (some) Android devices.

You're correct and this may be why we see all of these people who say "I have a great app/website idea!" and then do nothing or look for developers to implement their idea. If the barrier to entry is lower there would be more people trying to implement their idea.

It's not enough to have a compiler, we need a simpler scripting language as well so anyone can create throwaway web apps. We need a Tcl or Perl for Android and iOS.

No, we see that because those people want to be rich, but not actually have to work. Seriously, the barrier to entry is stupid low, and yet they're not clammoring to implement their own idea. Why?

These tools are out there. We need to make it unacceptable that they are not included. The only way to do that is innovate on the open-source/free- operating system front. For as long as "major producers" set the standards, we will be in their traps.

Tcl/Tk for Android exists and works great.

http://www.androwish.org

Capturing data is cheap, local CPU is expensive. In terms of battery capacity, which is the real currency nowadays. It sounds impressive to talk about a supercomputer in your pocket, but its power comes from a battery that weighs only a few grams more than a lacy garter belt.

I have a feeling that the utility of the fast CPU is limited to providing responsive reactions to a moving finger. A bit disappointing really.

The ability to capture photos & video of my fast moving toddler in challenging situations is immensely valuable.

I shoot, edit, and uploaded video at least 100x faster than when I got started with Premiere and a $8000 PC. It's amazing!

Redecentralization is the next wave and that will put power back to the people as you are rightly asking for

Do you think that redecentralization will also depend on the public Internet or perhaps instead focus more on alternative networks?

There are hardly any alternative networks? GSM/3g/4g are illegal to run on an ad-hoc basis most everywhere. Which leaves cabled networks (which are generally not legal to set up as metro/internets -- or even link freely between different buildings if you need to cross community owned land) and wireless mesh-networks.

I think both are interesting, but I don't see them forming a global interconnected network capable of delivering symmetric gigabit to 10 billion people (not that the Internet of today does that either -- yet).

I suppose local 802.11-whatever community networks might be connected in metro-/internets with high-bandwidth point-to-point links -- but it seems likely that they'd end up connected to the Internet -- perhaps on the ipv6 Internet.

Either way, hopefully internet access will continue to evolve like a utility, like electricity and water.

>GSM/3g/4g are illegal to run on an ad-hoc basis most everywhere

Why? any specific reason?

Interference with 'official' networks, besides that spectrum use requires a license in just about every country except for some very specific low power unlicensed segments of the spectrum.

I hope you're right! I've wanted this for the last 5 years and it seems that more and more good solutions are popping up, sandstorm.io being the most prominent to my eyes.

While I appreciate the attitude so far I don't see too many applications redecentralization might be useful to. Yes, it's more fault-tolerant. Yes, it would for the most part avoid mass surveillance.

However, decentralized systems are also much more complex to build. So far, decentralized approaches in most use cases provide too little value for most users to really make sense economically. Privacy, fault-tolerance are certainly very important aspects. Unfortunately, in general most people couldn't care less. Despite some public outrage the NSA, GCHQ and the BND are still very much in business and doing as fine as ever.

Are there any applications particularly amenable to a decentralized approach? Quite likely. Is a decentralization a generally applicable model of the way we do our networking? I'm not so sure about that. Having a decentralized social network for instance would be some achievement but what benefit would it provide to the not-so-privacy-minded?

Unfortunately this is very right. There are certain services (moderation, antispam) which provide essential value and are much easier to centralise.

This is my hope as well.

One exciting technology I hope more app developers take advantage of is remoteStorage.

https://remotestorage.io/

It's basically an open spec for something similar to the Dropbox Datastore and Files APIs, with open-source implementations that anyone can host. The official client library has some fairly robust offline-first sync'ing capabilities, and also happens to be relatively backend agnostic, being able to act as an interface for either the remoteStorage API itself, or the actual Dropbox Datastore and Files APIs, as well as the Google Drive equivalents (although the latter two are under heavy development and probably not production-ready). This allows your users to choose the storage service they want to use for your app without you having to implement all 3 interfaces (and if they choose remoteStorage, be able to host their own storage instance or use one hosted by someone they trust).

I'm prototyping a distributed app right now that uses remoteStorage to enable multi-client sync and simultaneous logins. I believe this approach strikes a fairly good balance, giving users the privacy and service mobility offered by distributed software, as well as the usability and convenience offered by centralized software.

The only thing I feel they're sorely missing is a transparent encryption layer on top of the Datastore API (and possibly for Files too, though I'm not sure how feasible this is). I ended up implementing this part myself for the app I'm working on, but I feel it's unreasonable to expect every developer to reimplement something as essential and error-prone as cryptography.

For server operators it makes sense to toss more processing onto the client-side as it lowers cost.

The FreeNet model is just ahead of its time: fully encrypted and fully decentralized using separate apps/plugins on the client-side to make sure it's always decentralized.

One issue with client-side decentralization has been how to pass things around to other clients when your main machine/box/mobile device is off. So you need carriers/exchanges that pass them around; in SaaS the client and data are stored on one server; with decentralization the data is stored on the client and on an exchange. Instead of being a server provider, you'll be a client provider coupled with a data host and you can just outsource that to S3 or some other data host provider.

Often thought about all the walking GFLOPS in our pockets, thinking "man we have Cray just to swipe lolcats". This comment http://tek.io/1fwoxZH from this article http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/classics-rock/the-80s-super... explains how even old Crays are still more efficient for real work.

Still we have uber capable thingies doing nothing. We don't need faster, we need to teach what they can do to people and let them have it their way.

Yeah, it does seem like more a problem of philosophy or perspective than a lack of advanced technology. We have all of the ingredients for a variety of dishes, but it seems we're settling into one basic recipe: centralized lockdown.

Let's say that's how social human and culture/natural order is. Lots of people wanting shiny things to play with others. Everything else is irrelevant as long as people aren't deeply aware of it (which is often when things break in their/our face).

So is anyone building such a smartphone?

And if not, why?

My guess is that it would cost too much, without the commodification of our private information. Just like the web.

    >My guess is that it would cost too much, without the commodification of our private information.

Ask and ye shall receive. Uber, the darling of both the mobile world and the "sharing" economy is set to start tracking your every location so they can serve up fucking ads[1].

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/22/uber-ftc-p...

I will treasure my bicycle even more. I hear the birds singing, not some stupid jingle.

I predict that bicycles will join the IoT. It will be a feature. Like some bastard child of OnStar and medical alert systems ;)

What if our information stayed private and we used our "supercomputers" to do all sorts of data-mining, or AI, or data-science on it? Same stuff the big guys are doing, but for ourselves. Smaller, higher quality datasets.

If our smartphones worked like this, and we'd benefit more from better information, then we'd also have a pretty good reason to develop advanced information-centric UIs and focus a bit more on security and trust.

That would be wonderful. But I doubt that providers would ever bundle them. So most people would consider them to be too expensive. And so they would die, like Blackberry has.

Smartphones and security don't really go hand-in-hand anyway.

However, I am encouraged by the fact that people paid many thousands of dollars in the '80's and 90's to purchase PC's. They were much harder to use, much less powerful, and yet because these PC's represented either a competitive advantage or a novelty, the price was paid. No Internet, but a heckuva lot more control and trust than now.

If a similar value proposition pops up again, somehow de-commodifying or replacing the standard PC design (smartphone or otherwise), I suspect we'll see a similar willingness to pay a premium.

> So is anyone building such a smartphone?

Perhaps a more appropriate question is not so much if anyone is building a smartphone (from a hardware definition) so much as is anyone building an operating system which runs on commonly available smartphone devices which does not employ these tactics?

> And if not, why?

I'm certain there are efforts in motion which seek to establish a viable choice for many smartphone owners in what their devices run.

As to "the commodification of our private information", well, I have to ask: why accept this in the first place?

> Perhaps a more appropriate question is not so much if anyone is building a smartphone (from a hardware definition) ...

The baseband is a huge security hole. The provider in large part owns the device, regardless of what software it's running.

> ... so much as is anyone building an operating system which runs on commonly available smartphone devices which does not employ these tactics?

I can live with Linux ;)

You may be interested in the Neo900 [1] project, which is building a trustworthy mobile phone and will support a variety of free software operating systems.

It will be possible to run with completely FLOSS software (including drivers) and it even solves the problem of the baseband modem having full control over the main CPU/memory.

[1] http://neo900.org/

Thanks!

Now if they accepted Bitcoins ...

But hey, I'll ask.

> The baseband is a huge security hole. The provider in large part owns the device, regardless of what software it's running.

In the US at least, this is not the case:

https://www.fcc.gov/device-unlocking-faq

The cellular provider no more "owns the device" than the cable company "owns your TV."

> I can live with Linux ;)

But you are not living with Linux. You are living with Android ;-).

I don't do cable TV. Same reason ;)

I'm not living with Android. I'm waiting for Linux.

Edit: I don't mean "own" literally, financially. I mean "own" in the sense of access and control. So yes, I can root "my" device, but I can't root the baseband radio.

Then this might be what you have been waiting for:

http://kali4hackers.blogspot.com/2013/09/install-kali-linux-...

Oops, ran out of reply levels.

And yes, one can run Linux. But you're still running the Android kernel :(

The next X-prize should be for the best implementation of a smartphone OS/GUI where the "smartphone" has no I/O whatsoever except for the touchscreen and a charging/debug port.

If that couldn't crank up our creativity, nothing could.

For me, it's tough to say what value a smartphone would have if it could not leverage its hardware aside from being a form of a kiosk. Not harshing you or anything, I just can't see it.

I'm up for learning though :-).

I'd set it up as a behavioral mirror. Naturally I have a horse in this race :)

Inputs would be the actions you take in life (choices you've made) and how they relate to your goals (which depend on actions). Output would be an interactive visualization of past actions. The purpose would be to help improve the quality of your choices (actions you take) to better achieve your goals. Algorithms would work with the accumulated information to pull out correlations, patterns, and in general accelerate the process.

No Internet required, and so much greater security, privacy, and trust than usual. Which is freeing in many ways.

One of the biggest values I get from a smartphone, and I suspect the vast majority of otherse are with me, is the fact that it connects me to the global repository of human knowledge. Cutting off the internet would neuter it to me.

@s73v3r, Self-knowledge can be tremendously rewarding too.

Smartphones aren't going anywhere, but their value proposition is not the only one available. If we were to jump-start our creativity through tight constraints like the X-prize idea, I expect that we'd end up combining the best of our current technology with the best of the new. Or maybe the worst of both...

https://wiki.debian.org/ChrootOnAndroid may interest you.

Thanks. I've seen that, and plan to test with an old Nexus.

There is an expensive phone that isn't selling your private info as a commodity.

this is one of main reasons I moved to blackberry from android.

This is like complaining that you do not control each of the spark plugs in your car by yourself.

It's more like complaining about license plate readers, cabin voice/video recorders, hackable cars, GPS tracking, and being increasingly dependent on a centralized service for repairs and maintenance. The "good old days" were actually different.

Yes, there are some benefits to all of those "features", but it seems prudent to consider and expose their risks as fervently as we're promoting the rewards. Perhaps the current balance isn't ideal over the long term, and we'll only see improvement by actively exploring the whole picture (whatever it is).

I think the important part here is not to focus on "supercomputer" but rather on "pocket". Imo the big thing is that you essentially have what used to be a desktop then a laptop and can carry it around in your pocket and do similar stuff with it AND it's socially accepted. Noone blinks an eye if you use your smartphone all the time. Rewind a bit and people would have blinked an eye if you had used your (bulkier) laptop all the time. It's light and mobile yet sufficiently powerful. Locational context matters a lot more now and isn't tapped into fully.

+it's usually connected to the hive aka Internet so you essentially carry lots of information with you at all times. I'd argue that instant access to information (prices etc.) can be more enabling than pure access to the underlying computer. +some other gizzmos like an always available camera/voice recorder/music player

[don't get me wrong, I'm fully aboard the more free systems NOW train]

Another side of this is that we don't really have supercomputers anymore, just piles of PC servers with fast network cards - which are called supers for pr reasons. Supercomputer vendors mostly went bust in the 90s because it got too expensive to make custom computer architectures much faster than COTS.

(COTS = Common off the shelf)

Commodity-off-the-shelf, actually.

The supercomputer in your pocket statement is meaningless. A calculator in my pocket in 1991 was a supercomputer compared to an abacus or the Apollo 11 computer. A gsm or star-tac motorola cell phone in my pocket in 1997 was a supercomputer compared to that calculator. So what?

It is not meaningless, it is describing parallel (or at least comparable) revolutionary technology. Think about each you mentioned: How many industries where positively impacted by the advent of cheap pocket or desktop calculators? Would the Apollo missions have been possible (or as successful) if the astronauts had to calculate every azimuth with a slide rule? The slide deck seems focused on the point that mobile is the next major revolutionary technology, comparable to the introduction of super computers and the other revolutionary tech that you cite.

Really? You're going to dismiss the ability to pull up maps and be guided to your destination. Voice recognition, browsing the web, a music player, and having a video game console in your pocket.

Im not dismissing any of those things. Im saying the phrase has been used so much in vague contexts that it has become meaningless.

Yeah, every computer is a super computer compared to those that came before it.

Have you been following the Ubuntu Phone project?

http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

They're somewhat behind schedule, but there have been some news reports of a release this year of a fully convergent phone:

http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2015/06/first-ubuntu-phone-with-c...

Ubuntu phone already comes with a terminal, however using currently for apt-get requires disabling OTA updates.

I guess you can see it not as "You have a supercomputer in your pocket" but more like "You have - our - supercomputer in your pocket".

The value people often get from a locked down device [for popular definitions of "locked down device"] is of a kind with the value people get from a book or a television. The kind of potential value is below that of a general computing device, but there's still a lot of value in that space; e.g. books provide value despite being static.

The people I know who program super computers do it to

* simulate nuclear explosions

* model the internet [1]

[1] http://phys.org/news/2009-09-scientists-successfully-boot-mi...

Neither of which, nor similar activities, I need to do on the train.

Traditionally, supercomputers were used to do those things.

Currently supercomputers are used to do these things, because you can't do them on a mobile phone or desktop.

The "supercomputer in your pocket" discussion is somewhat disingenuous - an iPhone6 from 2014 wouldn't even have made the top 10 in 1993 over 20 years earlier. A million-fold increase in transistor density and it still wouldn't rank as a supercomputer.

There are a lot of fascinating things you can do with more computing power, but it's not really clear that doing so on a power- and heat-constrained mobile device brings a competitive advantage in a highly-connected environment.

Those examples benefit their owners, providing competitive advantage on a national or corporate scale.

What sort of example might benefit you as an individual?

I don't think there is any kind of example that would benefit me as an individual, not for my personal life anyway.

I don't need a render farm, I don't have complicated delivery schedules to calculate, I don't even want to use a spreadsheet solver very often away from my desk - and I study computational logistics.

* model and forecast the weather (over the next days to months) and climate (over the next decades to centuries)

* search/compare/cross-correlate DNA data

* simulate chemical reactions, folding of proteins, ...

* simulate materials, crystals, etc.

I don't know those people.

But again it only reinforces that I don't want to be doing those things in my pocket.

"Everyone gets a pocket supercomputer from past century."

One can not compare smart-phones power to modern supercomputer ! And like you say you can not do all the useful things that are possible with supercomputer and PCs !

Smart-phones for me is a looked consumer gadget.

> Yet we seem to have less and less control over our smart-phones.

An objective analysis of the two predominate smartphone OS's would suggest that we have never had control over the devices we wield.

> With so much information about each of us being siphoned off through the Internet, it's easy to wonder whose interest they serve.

See statement above.

> With all of the advances in computing power, you'd think we'd put a bit more imagination into capturing more value for each individual smart-phone user ...

I'm pretty sure this is the case, with Apple having a market cap of $735,165,038,300[1] and Google having one of $367,770,688,769[2].

1 - http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/aapl

2 - http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/goog

>An objective analysis of the two predominate smartphone OS's would suggest that we have never had control over the devices we wield.

Right, that's the state now. Back when blackberry and nokia were rocking things, it wasn't so grim.

>I'm pretty sure this is the case,

No, you're stock quotes prove that they are capturing the value of the user, it doesn't say how effective they are at capturing the value for the user. All they need to do is keep people interested in the phone to accomplish the former. That doesn't mean anything about actually providing the best for them.

> No, you're stock quotes prove that they are capturing the value of the user, it doesn't say how effective they are at capturing the value for the user.

It's gratifying to know I can convey significant meaning in the form of prose ;-).

> All they need to do is keep people interested in the phone to accomplish the former.

Excellent observation, IMHO.

> That doesn't mean anything about actually providing the best for them.

Unfortunately, this is generally not a concern for a 10-K[1].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_10-K

When Blackberry and Nokia were leading things, smartphones were far less popular, and the market for smartphone software far less so. Thus, if you wanted something to run on your smartphone, you paid for it. But nowadays, people aren't willing to pay money for smartphone software. So they have decided to pay in another way.

Wow, it looks like I agitated some Mountain View/Cupertino zip codes with my post.

Who knew that could happen here on HN?

Also, give us admin privs. (Yes, I know, on some devices one can root). I have admin privs on every other computer I own.

We are capturing value for those users. Those users have decided beforehand, though, that they don't want to pay up front for their apps to realize this value. So they have to pay in another way.

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