23 Jan
2012
23 Jan
'12
5:58 p.m.
On 23 Jan 2012 at 20:01, David Riley wrote:
Of course, most of this is due to the fact that a 2
GHz Core 2 Duo
runs its generation of software just as slow as a 486 did its
generation. To the user, it might as well be the same, modulo some
graphical improvements. Software engineers pissing away the results
of Moore's Law, all of 'em...
Not just Moore's law as I understand it, but it seems that storage is
expanding at about the same rate. Multi-terabyte consumer hard
drives today; multi-gigabyte 15 years ago; mult-megabyte 15 years
before that.
Take a look at some of the "lightweight" Linux distros and see what
they want in hard disk storage (e.g. The web site for Puppy Linux
indicates that 4.5GB would be appropriate). 15 years ago, defining a
4.5GB storage requirement as "lightweight" would have sounded
ludicrous.
So, it's happening in that area too. So 15 years from now, will we
have Petabyte notebook consumer drives on systems with a terabyte of
memory with a thousand cores?
Not criticizing, just reflecting on how far we've come.
--Chuck