James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote:
> For many day-to-day operations the responsiveness of systems like MS > Windows has actually decreased. > That is because they keep adding bells and whistles. It is feature-itus run amok. When I installed recent versions of Windows I went through and turned off a bunch of features and it went back to working quickly again. The features that slow down my computer the most are ones that display all kinds of useless clutter on the screen. I think Windows was going slowly because of a bottleneck between the CPU and the screen display, rather than bad programming *per se*. It may be a problem on my computer in particular, because it has an old, 2-port screen display card attached to two large screens. > There are real advances in software but they're generally buried in the > noise. > I think there must have been some astounding advances in software recently, judging by the results at places like Google and IBM. I mean, for example: * Self driving cars. Many experts predicted this would take another 20 years, but here they are, and they are reportedly safer than human drivers. * Google's uncanny ability to recognize faces, which is beginning to exceed the human ability. * Google's ability to translate documents. This is still way behind human abilities, but it is far ahead of where the technology was 10 years ago. * The Watson computer and its superhuman ability to win at Jeopardy and diagnose diseases. They could not have done these things with hardware alone. Nor do I think they could do them by brute force methods. Watson and the Google-Plex are MPP computers, so however difficult it is to write MPP software, apparently they are making progress in doing it. Google has published papers describing its MPP techniques. - Jed
