On Thu, 3 Jan 2002, Bob Miller wrote:
> What is First Night? Did I miss a Eugene thing?
Yup, First Night was this big new year's party downtown with Bands, Art
Fireworks a masquerade dance and stuff. Also Alcohol and Drug free.
>
> > Also why Moore's law does __NOT__ apply to software.
>
> Are you sure? Moore's law, as originally stated, is that the number
> of gates on a chip doubles every 18 months. It looks to me like the
> number of {lines of code, function points, bytes of memory used,
> whatever} is increasing at a similar rate.
I was thinking more in terms of the performance increase, measured as
MIPS, which is a squishier metric yes. But software is not on the same
path of increased performance, an algorithm of O(n) is conceptually the
same whether it's executing on a z80 or the latest SPARC.
>
> My personal belief is that the "natural size" of software is much
> bigger than current machines will support, and that we software
> writers are happily gobbling up all the hardware advances we can get,
> and are nowhere near sated. There are zillions of things that
> computers could do if they were a lot faster and smarter.
>
But how much of that demand is cultural, I haven't done even a cursory
census but from my experience I'm guessing that a clear majority of the
software on my box is devoted to conversions between different data
formats, encoding schemes and High-level instruction sets. IOTW much of
the growth in software is dictated by cultural imperatives rather than
purely logical constraints.
And now of course I'm thinking about that quote, "Software is a Gas it
expands to fill the space available."
http://www.efn.org/~laprice ( Community, Cooperation, Consensus
http://www.opn.org ( Openness to serendipity, make mistakes
http://www.efn.org/~laprice/poems ( but learn from them.(carpe fructus ludi)
http://allie.office.efn.org/phpwiki/index.php?OregonPublicNetworking
