20 Sep
2011
20 Sep
'11
6:34 p.m.
On 20/09/11 3:47 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
This is very true and may be the only realistic way of turning back the
tide of bloat, poor design and poor architecture. Programmers should be
on SLOW machines! Otherwise what we get is a kind of software-enforced
hardware obsolescence, which is just wrong.
(The problem isn't limited to Microsoft, though. The rant might have
reasonably focused on them in the 1990s, but are they even relevant any
more?)
--Toby
Yeah,
that's true. What you can buy today is gigantic compared to what
was available not so long ago but now everything is digitized so stuff
we used to keep on paper and video tape or 8 tracks and film negatives
is now on the hard drive. There's never enough room any more and there
probably won't ever be again.
Boyle's Law states that a gas will expand to fit the available space.
Data, software, and commercial software products do, also.
Moore's Law (which is an observation, not a law) holds that speed
and capacity will double every 18 months.
That isn't enough when content (and size of MICROS~1 products) doubles
every 17 months. ...
Seriously though, part of the problem is that MICROS~1 seems to believe
(or at least used to) in treating programmers well. Programmers always
use current state of the art, rather than using machines representative of
what the customers have. ...
If MICROS~1 were to trade computers with us, the next round of
software would be more efficient (faster and using space more
effectively), and significantly less buggy, since they would have to put
up with slow performance, running out of disk and memory space, and would
experience the bugs of the real world.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com