Re: A chip too far? Where is your solution Mr Larkin?
- From: "Joel Koltner" <zapwireDASHgroups@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:37:45 -0700
"Guy Macon" <http://www.GuyMacon.com/> wrote in message
news:W4OdnTmVT--a8TbVRVn_vwA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Windows version Processor Memory Hard disk
Windows 95 25 MHz 8 MB 50 MB
Windows 98 66 MHz 24 MB 140-255 MB
Windows Me 150 MHz 32 MB 320 MB
Windows 2000 Server 133 MHz 64 MB 1 GB
Windows XP 300 MHz 128 MB 1.5 GB
Windows Vista 1 GHz 1 GB 15 GB
You should also list here what the average price of such a system is (in
inflation-adjusted dollars) -- I think you'll find that while the hardware
requirements of Windows have increased markedly, the price of the hardware
necessary to run it has fallen even more markedly.
As John Larkin points out, when CPU cycles are cheap, there's no good reason
to try to get really fancy and save them for "run of the mill" day-to-day
operations. This is exactly how software development has proceeded -- what
used to be a lot of low-level code in assembly and C is now "very high level"
C# or Python or whatever. Of course, now we've hit a bit of a wall -- hence
all the discussions about the new methods needing for productively creating
software for multi-core computers.
Hardware design hasn't "progressed" as rapidly, but it's certainly still
there: 10 years ago, a generic low-speed interface would have been RS-232,
right? Now it's USB, which requires perhaps 10,000 times as many transistors
to implement as the RS-232 approach, but it's more reliably, faster, and
easier to implement (in most cases) than the old approach.
Why should a business have to keep buying new PCs, to
support new bloatware when most of the workers are trying
to complete the same tasks?
Because if the new software -- bloated or not -- allows their workers to be
more productive, if they don't buy it, their competition will.
Meanwhile, I am running the latest version of Slackware
Linux on a box that has:
100 Mhz 486 Processor
100 MB RAM
2.1 GB HDD
...and it runs just fine -- in fact it runs faster than some
of the older versions of Slackware Linux do.
There's a huge market for OSes and software to run on "low end" hardwre -- the
specs of your (horribly power inefficient, BTW) 486 box there are comparable
to many, e.g., $50 wireless router boxes on the market today -- a huge market
(of which something like 4/5 seem to run Linux, 1/5 run VxWorks, and a few run
something obscure.)
I don't really care that much if software is bloated so long as the costs of
the hardware to run it at the same or greater productivity level as the last
version is dropping. What's much more important to me is how bug-free
software is, as a few bad bugs can completely cripple your productivity.
I would admit that there's a strong correlation between bloatware and more
bugs, BTW. :-)
---Joel
.
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