Inline and greatly abridged. On Dec 14, 2011, at 5:09 PM, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr." <[email protected]> wrote:
> About Joss, we normally like to plot computer improvement on a log > scale. But if you look at it on a linear scale, you see that many years > go by initially where we don't see any change. So the relative > improvement in five years is more or less the same no matter what five > years you pick, but the absolute improvement is very different. When I > needed a "serious" computer for software development back in 1985 I > built an Apple II clone for myself, even though that machine was already > 8 years old at the time (about five Moore cycles). That's just so cool. Someday I want to make an Apple IIgs clone because that thing rocked and the emulator I have is dog-slow:/ but we've talked about that before! > The state of the art > in personal computers at the time was the IBM PC AT (6MHz iAPX286) which > was indeed a few times faster than the Apple II, but not enough to make > a qualitative difference for me. If I compare a 1992 PC with one from > 2000, the difference is far more important to me. Okay so this is where stuff gets funny to me. My computer, if you look at the clock and the cores, is blazing fast. You can see it once in awhile: when doing something graphically intensive (the GPU is also really fast) or something straightforwardly computationally expensive, like compiling C code with all of the optimizations on. But in general... my computer is only a tiny bit faster than the one I had in the early nineties. In terms of day to day stuff, it's only gotten a tinsy bit faster. Sometimes I sit there looking at an hourglass or a beach ball and think to myself "this only used to happen when I was waiting on a disk to spin about. There isn't even a disk in this thing. What the hell?" Hypothesis: Mainstream software slows down at a rate slightly less than mainstream hardware speeds up. It's an almost-but-not-quite-inverse Moore's Law. Unless someone else has called this out directly, I'm calling it Joe's Law, because I don't want to deal with the backlash! > Cheers, > -- Jecel > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > [email protected] > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
