16 Mar
2005
16 Mar
'05
3:17 p.m.
On Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:18:58 -0800 (PST)
Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
Performance tends to follow Moore's law.
But "need" for performance follows Boyle's law,
(particularly with MS software)
and usually exceeds what is conveniently available.
I used to agree with this, that 'MS software' is more suceptible to
'featuritis' and the 'bloat' that bogs down old machines. There was for
a long time the example of Linux as an OS that 'made better use of older
hardware' by being cleanly designed and more tightly optimized.
These days the bloat seems to have crept into the 'alternatives to
Microsoft' in depressing ways that make it harder all the time to blame
Microsoft. Office 2000 runs much smoother (and in a nominally usable
fashion) on my old 486 laptop than the 'OpenOffice' alternative. The
new 'Free' desktops bring old hardware to it's knees. I suspect it's
all the C++ and suboptimal 'modern coding techniques' which foist off a
LOT of the work to the hardware. I just can't feel honest anymore
subscribing to a 'blame Microsoft' attitude.
Of course, the proper approach is to run something clean and tight like
NetBSD on the 486 laptop with a simple environment like good old tab
window manager (now old enough to be on topic here!), and use the
Classic UNIX writing/typesetting/composition tools.