> - a factory's line can be brought to a standstill if one of its > elements breaks;
one would hope that software elements do not break so much > - a factory 's line is at least as slow as its slowest worker a slow part of the line can be split / duplicated to use multiple workers > - if all the workers at a car factory came to work at the same time > they wouldn't be able to get through the door. and yet people do come to work, car factories do exist, and they are obviously more powerful and efficient than a whole lot of people building individually. > if the jobs aren't big enough, the workers are underutilized. That's fine, you can switch off processing units that aren't needed, or use them for another task. Software systems are much more flexible than factories. > The mediators (supervisors) that keep said workers efficiently running are > paid more than the workers, and it can be deduced that their job is more > critical overall. Yes, a parallel system might need significant resources dedicated to organizing and optimizing the rest of the system. > also, one more thought: near 100% factory utilization only occurs when the > assembly steps (pipeline) and division of assembly (divide and conquer) is > tailored for the exact product (task/instruction/process) to be made. Yes, it is much more difficult to reconfigure a factory than a software system. It is easy to configure a software system for a specific task, it may even be reconfigured it at run time. Sam
