Re: Odd Group ( or Google ) Behaviour...???
- From: Ian Gregory <foo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 30 Sep 2007 17:18:34 GMT
On 2007-09-30, The Translucent Amoebae <transamoebae@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The only reasonable reason is that Amazon and all the computer
companies and Everyone that sells stuff on the internet has formed a
conspiracy to sell you a new computer every 6 months, and require you
to constantly update your software weekly.
Software people always want new faster hardware to make amazing
new apps possible (there is no way that Google Earth for example
could be stripped down to run on a 286 in any really useful form).
Hardware manufacturers need to sell new machines to maintain the
development cycle. Even if there were never any new software
written there would still be hardware advancement in terms of
reduced price, smaller size, reduced power consumption etc, but
the ability to run new compute intensive software is one of the
major drivers of the hardware market.
I don't think it is a bad thing that for the 10th of the price
of a 286 I can buy a machine 10 times as powerful.
With the current pace of change I figure that the average expected
life of a new machine is about 3 years (the building I used to
work in had 3,000 PCs, the oldest thousand of which were replaced
with new machines every year). I do not consider this to be
particularly unreasonable. I kept my iBook for about three and
a half years before replacing it with an iMac last year, and I
expect to still be using the iMac in a couple of years. Of course
there are people still running 10 year old machines and others
who change their machines like they change their socks.
A popular software package is most likely being actively
maintained by developers who are constantly refining it,
eliminating bugs, making it more efficient, yes, adding
features too, probably in response to some percieved demand
for those features, removing (less often) redundant or little
used features, and occasionally revamping it to make use
of new software technologies, web services etc. Why
shouldn't I always have access to the best version available?
I don't want to have to wait a year for improvements when I
could be pulling nightly builds off a CVS server and using
the same system as the developers within 24 hours. So I don't
see any problem with software that is updated as infrequently
as once a week.
Ian
--
Ian Gregory
http://www.zenatode.org.uk/ian/
.
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