7 Nov
2006
7 Nov
'06
1:52 p.m.
On 7 Nov 2006 at 3:03, Jules Richardson wrote:
It's a very bad thing - it's why most apps
(and OSes too) are very
resource-hungry and buggy. Taking someone else's module might speed up time to
market, but that module always comes with a few extra features which you don't
really need, and patching in stuff from all over the place makes it really
hard to keep on top of the bugfixing.
I don't know--I'm kind of ambivalent on the subject. Old hardware
was generally much less reliable than the humblest modern PeeCee.
And while it seems to be a rule of thumb that doing the same task
requires ever-increasing amounts of hardware resources, consider what
we CAN do with modern systems.
I was reminded of this ever-increasing resources business yesterday
when I was getting a couple of extra systems ready for the Freecycle
crowd. One system happened to be a Cyrix PR233+ Socket 7 Mobo with
32MB of memory and an old 1GB hard drive (a very shaky MTS Champ).
The first surprise was that the installation program informed me that
32MB was insufficient to run installation without first activating
swapping. The second was that 32MB is insufficient to run the
graphical installation script. And the default install required
almost the full GB.
Step back and think about it for awhile--put yourself back 20 years
to 1986 and consider what you could have done with a gig of disk
space and 32 megs of RAM. Think about where such resources would put
you 30 years ago...
So, bloat is everywhere. Probably in 10 years, if I live that long,
I'll be mumbling the same thing about OSes that require 1TB of disk
and 32GB of RAM. :)
Cheers,
Chuck