Below. Abridged. On Dec 16, 2011, at 1:42 PM, Steve Dekorte <[email protected]> wrote:
> > FWIW, in my memory, my old NeXTstation felt as snappy as modern desktops but > when I ran across one at the Computer History Museum it felt painfully slow. > I've had similar experiences with seeing old video games and finding the > quality of the graphics to be much lower than I remembered. > > This is just a guess, but I suspect what we remember is strongly influenced > by our emotional reactions which in turn are shaped by our expectations. At > the time, my expectations were lower. This is an excellent point. At work I'm using a 32-bit single core machine that's 0.6ghz slower than my personal 64-bit dual core machine. Once in awhile, I notice that it's slower. I have a feeling, though, that this is a consequence of slower hardware *compounded* by expensive software, because most of the time, I can't tell the difference at all. What I'm saying is in part that the computational power of modern computers typically eclipses my personal need for computing power. When things are suddenly slow, I suspect algorithm/datastructure. Whereas: it used to be that everything seemed to take a long time. Some things are just expensive. No one has found an acceptable solution. These are things we should avoid in the infrastructure underneath a personal computing experience:) _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
