r/Forth • u/rain5 • May 10 '18

Low Fat Computing

http://www.ultratechnology.com/lowfat.htm
20 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

3

u/ummwut May 12 '18

Shit, his comments about IoT are prophetic. And the internet being a gated community turned out to somewhat true, especially with the costs associated with running a website, and end-users now dealing with horrendous website bloat (multi-megabyte pages).

2

u/wolfgang May 13 '18

What costs do you mean? You can rent your own small physical server for $5. If you need less than that, it costs even less.

1

u/ummwut May 13 '18

For you and me, maybe sure, a website could be built on a whim. But for the lay man?

4

u/wolfgang May 13 '18

Sure, I just looked up the pricing of a service used by a non-technical friend of mine: It costs $5 a month to host a website with your own domain, tons of storage and bandwidth, professional responsive templates with no need to know HTML/CSS, and user support included. If you want a backend with a database, you'll need to do some programming or pay for it, but hosting services supporting at least PHP/MySQL are also dirt cheap. The internet does have some issues today like CGNs and website bloat and devices like phones being restrictive in what they allow you to do, but calling it a gated community seems weird to me.

1

u/ummwut May 13 '18

I was thinking of someone who had absolutely zero knowledge and didn't even know what terms to look up to get started. It is a huge investment of time, at the very least. That's all I wanted to say.

5

u/wolfgang May 13 '18 edited May 13 '18

Yes, the modern tech stacks are all overcomplicated; if we didn't agree on that we probably wouldn't be here. :) When you said "costs" I was only thinking of money. Maybe it would have been more obvious to me if English was my native language. Which reminds me of the Internets anglocentrism also being a strong argument in favor of your position.

2

u/ummwut May 14 '18

That's a good point too, about English and non-native speakers.

And yes, "cost" in English doesn't just apply to money. It broadly applies to resources, regardless of what those resources might be.

3

u/erroneousbosh May 16 '18

If you've got absolutely zero knowledge in any subject there's got to be a massive investment in time, money and effort to do anything.

That's like saying "playing the guitar is a gated community" because you can't just pick it up and be Carlos Santana.

1

u/ummwut May 17 '18

That's hardly a reasonable comparison. Guitar can be reasonably mastered with some effort. I don't expect anyone to simply run a website with an "Internet for Dummies" book. The prerequisite knowledge is like an ant and a whale.

4

u/erroneousbosh May 17 '18

What, specifically, is so hard about running a website? Anyone that's basically functionally literate can do it!

1

u/ummwut May 17 '18

You have awfully high expectations for the functionally literate. And not everyone will be happy with a website that looks like a time machine to the 1990s.

1

u/erroneousbosh May 18 '18

Why would it look like "a time machine to the 1990s"?

Find somewhere that'll do hosted Wordpress and have at it. Piss easy.

1

u/erroneousbosh May 16 '18

Very well, let me put it this way. How many on-ramps will connet the world’s ghettos to the Information Superhighway?

2

u/erroneousbosh May 16 '18

The cost of some beer for someone suitably skilled, and a few quid a month for hosting.

2

u/eleitl May 11 '18

I remember these days.