News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Mobile Changes Everything by SixSigma on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @02:53AM (#9763008)
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.

Re:Mobile Changes Everything by haxel on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @02:59AM (#9763027)
Those examples benefit their owners, providing competitive advantage on a national or corporate scale.

What sort of example might benefit you as an individual?

Re:Mobile Changes Everything by SixSigma on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @06:29AM (#9763701)
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.

Re:Mobile Changes Everything by taejo on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @08:26AM (#9764155)
* 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.

Re:Mobile Changes Everything by SixSigma on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @08:47AM (#9764240)
I don't know those people.

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

Re:Mobile Changes Everything by noja on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @02:57AM (#9763020)
Traditionally, supercomputers were used to do those things.
Re:Mobile Changes Everything by moconnor on Tuesday June 23, 2015 @03:56AM (#9763201)
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.