jesus X wrote:
> I frequently see people with 200 MHz Pentiums (and even the occasional 486)
> complain about Mozilla (among other apps) running slowly on their machine.
> Ditto with people who have 16 or 32 megs of RAM. I don't mean to offend, but
> expecting modern apps to run on hardware that is 5 years old is unreasonable.
> Yes yes, 5 years isn't that long, but that's in the real world. In the computer
> technology world, it IS a long time. Relating to the Internet it's FOREVER to
> most people. When the net hit the mainstream public, it was 1995. Netscape was
> king, Yahoo was a college dorm side project, Amazon.com wasn't even around to
> lose money, and MS was touting Win95 and the CDROM as the future of computing.
>
> This is the end of 2000. We have retail CPUs running significantly in excess of
> 1,000 MHz. In 1995, MMX technology was the latest buzzword, Intel was still
> reeling from the FDIV bug, and 200 MHz was all you could get. 128 MB or RAM
> costs $45 (at Pricewatch), while in 1995 you'd have to mortgage your house to
> buy that much RAM (fitting it in your computer was another matter). HDD
> companies are selling 80GB hard drives for $250 (Pricewatch again), while in
> 1995 Seagate had a HUGE 9GB drive for a mere $10,000. Things have change QUITE
> a lot.
Yes, it is indeed a controversal statement and I don't agree with it
(and not only because my personal computer falls into that 233 Mhz
category :-)).
For one thing, not everybody pays as low prices as you say. I, for
instance, bought 128MB RAM here in Sweden and paid nearly 200$ a couple
of months ago (25% VAT!).
For the second: I don't want/need a high end computer at home. For these
means I can use one at work or at University, but at home I need a
computer to type letters, to read e-mail and to browse the web. So why,
should I invest in the edge of the technology 1Ghz CPU to achieve this?
My computer is three years old, and I am not gonna throw it away just
for the reason that I can't type a letter anymore with it, while 10
years ago, I'd never even had dreamed of such a fast baby. I can't type
faster with a newer machine.
The third and for me much more important argument is more of idealistic
nature: I hate the attitude of people who consider it naturally and
normal that programms get bigger and bigger with time, just because
technology manufactures faster CPU's and bigger HD's.
Heck, independent of what CPUs can achieve or how big HDs are nowadays,
is no justification that e.g. a simple notepad program should take more
than 30KB code.
We could achieve a lot more with our current computers when programmers
wouldn't say: "Why bother with optimization, in one year faster CPUs
will have the same effect."
In the end we are not talking of an high end CAD/CAM program here, we
are talking about an everyday commodity which should be able to run in
the background while a couple of other programs are in use.
Sebastian
