On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Jean Christophe Andr? <jean-christophe.andre at auf.org> wrote: >> I don't think that is the Microsoft way of thinking, > I was talking about giving no other choice but buying new hardware. > That's the Microsoft way, for sure. With GNU/Linux you have multiple > options, and some cheap/light ones among them. Is there a light > version of Vista somewhere?
The problem is not Vista demanding more and more, the problem is that MS don't give a shit about people wanting to have old stuff, e.g. they don't sell XP anymore, they don't provide updates to XP anymore. So they have no choices but upgrading the hardware. But if you find KDE4 demanding too much, you can stay with 3.5 and the KDE guys are cool with that I think - they allows you to keep your old PC - So what's the problem? Almost everything requires more and more hardware resources and there's obviously a natural thing. Speaking of software for everyone, why *do* I have to design my *new* OS/Wm/whatever for PC to work with a 128 MB of RAM, while only say 1% of people out there are having < 128 MB of RAM on their PC? >> I also think that in general, accelerate stuff by using powerful hardware is >> a 'more efficient' idea than trying to twist your code to bits to speed >> things up. > I strongly disagree on that: here you are encouraging bad code quality > to get more "productivity" (in the bad, commercial, sense of this term). I don't know how can you come up with "being bad" with "getting things done without having to care much about performance." Python and Java and Mono for example, are obviously slower and takes a hell lot of space compared to C++ programs, but it doesn't directly implies that programs written in Java or Python and Mono are bad code. It just get things done faster, and if you don't care much about performance, it's the way to do it. In other words, I don't think there are any direct argument to prove that programs that requires more powerful hardware to run are badly coded. > Modern machines are more and more power consuming, which means > using more and more energy and, at the end, natural resources. > So, in the end, you get higher and higher cost? Actually modern machines are more and more 'green'. They consume less power. You can try by comparing a 33Mhz workstation 15 yrs ago with a pentium 4 5 years ago and with an Atom machine today. A typical 19" CRT would consume like 95 ~ 120 watts, a typical 22" LCD consumes less than 60watts. Don't tell me that is higher cost because it isn't. -- Huan Truong PLUG: Technology, Security and You - Ngu?n tin c?ng ngh? Vi?t ng? h?ng ??u - http://tnhh.info/tsu/
