Re: OT: Good, free Malware?

ric zito <address@xxxxxx> wrote:
Mark <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You're not entirely wrong, but there are "reasons", which make sense for
most people...which I suspect you both know.

<snip>

I do indeed, Mark. I have watched hardware requirements grow and grow,
and I've always been interested in software/OS design, so I understand
why it is so. I've also watched RAM prices see-saw around over the
years; so the cheap and plentiful idea is a little misleading. It's
cheap and plentiful *now*, but I don't know how long it'll stay that
way.

Well, I suspect it'll be fine for quite some time. Most of the price
fluctuations were related to artificial excuses (market playing) and
that famous period after a fab plant burnt down. So much now depends
on it, I'm not going to lose too much sleep over memory costs rising
disproportionately.

No, to be honest I'm just being a BOF. :-)

I too remember 20mb HDs, and my first Mac SE30 had a huge 2mb of RAM.
And you know what? MS Word (v3 IIRC) started up in around 2-3 seconds,
and did probably 80% of the (real, useful) stuff today's version does...

Well, yes. That's my beef. When I started out, I could do a large
amount of what I can do now...just with very few frills.

Of course, the barrier to entry was much higher then. I just can't
imagine my Mum getting to grips with Ultrix or VMS on an ADM5 terminal.
Hell, she struggles with using XP.

A lot of the ornamentation - which is what's costing the majority of the
additional memory and CPU cycles - is precisely what lowers the barrier.

Okay, I think too much of it is just eye-candy rather than useful, but
what do you do?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not being shirty, but I worry that the cheap and
plentiful argument is the same one that's led car manufacturers to the
absurd place they're at today, where stupid, irrelevant 4-500 bhp 2-ton
cars are commonplace in traffic jams. It's where the Americans went
during the Hummer/SUV years, and look where that got them.

Too true.

Anyhow, I get the real feeling that what we actually do with our
computers hasn't changed that much in the last 5-10 years since the Web
exploded into everyone's lives. What has changed is that we need 4 times
the RAM and processor power we did back in 2000 to accomplish similar
things, and not necessarily 4 times faster. You only have to look at the
evolution of any Adobe or MS product to see how creeping software bloat
negates hardware gains.

I thought, somewhat naively, that Snow Leopard and Win 7 were indicative
of a new willingness to slim down, to focus on performance, to reduce
unnecessary hardware requirements. But they're both bloated, and both
pander to Joe Public's need for eye candy. Snow Leopard isn't
quantitatively that much faster than Tiger from 3-4 years ago, for twice
the RAM. Similarly, Win 7 sounds as if it's no better than XP in
performance terms, for 2-3 times the RAM.

Yeah, but XP is still sucky in all sorts of ways.

BOF I may be, but it bugs the purist in me nonetheless. There's a streak
of James May I-prefer-a-Panda in me that's bothered by this pointless
profligacy. But, as Paul suggested, of course I have to go with the flow
and adapt to the times - and I do. But there are times when it seems
absurdly wasteful.

Poor Mies - somebody should give him a break from turning in his grave.
He must be knackered... :-)

I am still happy to go back to a bunch of xterms under twm. I go pale
when I see that gnome-terminal now has eighty-seven shared library
dependencies. Okay, they're small(ish), but the explosion in complexity
and size is ridiculous.
.

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