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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

In terms of the hardware you hold in your hand, you're right. Progress is slowing down as the challenges to moving forwards become harder to solve, and as the reasons to move forwards change (e.g. power consumption over raw speed).

However, in terms of the accessible hardware I think we already have that practically limitless supercomputing power in our hands. The paradigm shift is in the realisation that "your computer" is a device that computes things, regardless of where it computes things, rather than being the beige box in the corner. With a little code and enough cash I can access millions of CPUs and terabytes of RAM from my phone. The fact that computing power isn't actually in my phone doesn't matter in the least.

The computing revolution is the network, not the CPU.

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Reminds me of Sun over 20 years ago: "The network is the computer".

I agree. I remember seeing that slogan and thought it was backwards or mixed up, but in truth it makes sense.

It's a pity that the networks we currently use cannot be guaranteed to be secure and that there is strong emphasis on undoing decades of good work in microcomputers by shoving data to the other side of the world instead of using it locally!

Consider who owns the networks which form the Internet and their motives, as well as who end-users are paying for Internet access.

Dare to say the same thing from the Tube (or simply from a tunnel)?

Sure. Availability is a different problem to computing power, but they'll both be solved by network improvements. Underground metro systems will need cell towers (or just repeaters) in order to solve the lack of signal problem, but that's relatively simple. I imagine it's just a matter of cost and politics that stops them now. Alternatively, tube trains could have their own wifi that connects users to the internet.

Further into the future it's possible (although unlikely in my opinion) that we could use a mesh network to relay signals along series of other people's devices until it gets to a place where there's a connection to a cell tower available. The power requirements would be a problem, and there's the issue of data privacy, but it's theoretically possible.

> but they'll both be solved by network improvements

We won't ever have a 100% coverage (with a free roaming and all that). It's impossible.

> Underground metro systems will need cell towers

You'd have to wait few more centuries for this to happen. They still can't get rid of the signalling system from the 1890s.

> Alternatively, tube trains could have their own wifi that connects users to the internet.

They can't even consistently communicate with the train drivers at the moment.

> a mesh network to relay signals along series of other people's devices

In a middle of a desert, in an open ocean, in a taiga, on a spacecraft light seconds away from the Earth?

No way. We still need to cram as much compute power into as little space as possible. All the cloud fancy stuff is nowhere near a substitution for it. And no network improvements would ever overcome the speed of light limitations on latency.

In a middle of a desert, in an open ocean, in a taiga, on a spacecraft light seconds away from the Earth?

I'm sure there'll be edge cases where it won't work and we'll need other options. That's fine. It doesn't detract from the point that having a connected device that can access a cloud computing platform is exceptionally useful in 99.99% of cases. I'm not suggesting that means we can stop all mobile device innovation.

> I'm sure there'll be edge cases where it won't work and we'll need other options.

This is exactly the unfortunate attitude of most of the mobile apps developers. Exactly the reason why I can't use most of the apps, even the high profile ones like the BBC News. They must understand that it's not anywhere close to 99.99% of cases, that a good connection is available more like 10% of an active time, and, therefore, a great deal of caching and prefetching is mandatory. If most of the time most of the functionality of my mobile device is not available I'd rather stick to the tiny subset that is available consistently and ignore the rest.

And I suspect that most big cities got a similar patchy coverage pattern as in London.

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