I have some fond memories of getting into computers around 2000. Building PCs, installing Windows, re-installing Windows ever so often.
At some point Windows just crashed and couldn't be brought back to life, straight up refused to be installed on that disk again.
(Funfact: the crash happened while playing some opensource sci-fi game... Produced by Microsoft)
I had a Gentoo Linux partition back then thanks to a friend from school and used that for everything from that point on.
Interestingly I never really had major issues. Running Warcraft 3 on Gentoo, writing my thesis (theseses actually) on Ubuntu and later switching to Arch Linux just worked.
I still remember switching to Gnome 3 (from KDE) and being impressed by how fast the Shell felt.
...
Fast forward to two years ago and I am forced to use Windows for the first time in 20+ years, in a locked down corporate setting nonetheless.
Actually yes. It's been a while, but now that you mention that, that probably was the reason for somebody (me) bringing the reels to the cinemas for a single showing in the first place.
"buy twice" is one of those live advices I heard and adhere to since.
It's basically the optimistic interpretation of "buy cheap, buy twice":
When I consider getting into something I buy cheap first, the idea being that that is enough to get a feel ...
... then you buy the second time and don't cheap out. But this purchase is more informed and you really get to appreciate it more because you know the step up from the cheap thing.
And sometimes... maybe even most of the time... the cheap thing is just enough.
One of my student jobs was to transport film spools to theaters. They would arrive at my door in a box, I would walk them to the cinema on a small trolley and spend 2-3 hours in the projection rooms. The reels were spliced on site by a technician, projected, cut again and I transported them back home where they would be picked up again.
The job was less to transport the spools, but to supervise that there was no copying happening.
This was late 200x-ish, before digital protection became widespread iirc.
"Back in the day" people were afraid that pupils would create CS (beta 6.5) maps of their schools. Gaussian Splatting would have been very convenient for that :-)
My last serious GPU programming was with OpenCL. And if my memory does not fail me the API was quite specific about copying and/or sharing memory on a shared memory system.
I am pretty sure that my old 10th gen CPU/GPU combo has the ability to use the "unified"/zero-copy access mode for the GPU.
Yeah... We had those bulky TI Voyage 200 graphical calculators in school [1]. They could do everything the teachers could throw at us up to the point of having all but a few formulas build in.
I would say that definitely shaped me in a way where I rarely bother with the underlying details and tend to focus on how high level abstractions interact. [2]
[1] German "Mathe-LK", we could chose specializing in two things, for me it was math and computer science, the later being quite novel back in 2003.
[2] I _do_ tend to specialize in things, but e.g. for LLMs or GLMMs, while I do have the capability to understand the technical details, I just don't bother.
I am always a bit baffled why Apple gets credited with this. Unified memory has been a thing for decades. I can still load the biggest models on my 10th gen Intel Core CPU and the integrated GPU can run inference.
The difference being that modern integrated GPU are just that much faster and can run inference at tolerable speeds.
(Plus NPUs being a thing now, but that also started much earlier. Thr 10th gen Intel Core architecture already had instructions to deal with "AI" workloads... just very preliminary)
Can't confirm. We had students at university (18-20-ish) that had not used a mouse prior to our courses. That was at least 3-4 years ago now and not a single case.
My "only" experience here is designing ASICs for Neuromorphic Chips. We used sub-threshold exclusively for linearity and energy reduction. No standard cells for us
We have been running Ardour 9 for a while now during band rehearsals. Currently 12 channels that we record and monitor in realtime with some effects on top.
Started a comment to write basically what you said. I've been commuting like that for five years. At the end I didn't bother trying anything productive anymore.
Losing 2-3h per day commuting is not something I am gone miss anytime soon.
At some point Windows just crashed and couldn't be brought back to life, straight up refused to be installed on that disk again.
(Funfact: the crash happened while playing some opensource sci-fi game... Produced by Microsoft)
I had a Gentoo Linux partition back then thanks to a friend from school and used that for everything from that point on.
Interestingly I never really had major issues. Running Warcraft 3 on Gentoo, writing my thesis (theseses actually) on Ubuntu and later switching to Arch Linux just worked.
I still remember switching to Gnome 3 (from KDE) and being impressed by how fast the Shell felt.
...
Fast forward to two years ago and I am forced to use Windows for the first time in 20+ years, in a locked down corporate setting nonetheless.
... what a hot mess :-)