Performance-oriented development in the commercial computing world

----- Original Message ----- From: "Dave McGuire" <mcguire at neurotica.com> To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Tuesday, October 25, 2011 4:02 PM Subject: Re: Performance-oriented development in the commercial computing world Computers and software are no different then every other piece of electronics sold. You basically take the same model add a new feature and maybe some small styling changes and make people upgrade every few years for no real reason. If they don't follow along you start changing connectors or software requirements to make them upgrade. There is a whole advertising segment meant to make people feel like scum if they are not up to the current standards of the masses. If I had to guess the "rest of the world" is using 5+ year old machines and software they paid little to nothing for while western (and some up and coming Asian ones) countries pay to keep Intel, Microsoft, and the rest rich. Anyway I would suspect most programmers are counting on processors having more cores (and systems having more RAM) in the time it takes for them to complete a software project and get it out the door. Both hardware and software makers need to keep pace with each other just to make money. If Microsoft was still selling Windows 2000 the hardware side would be pretty much out of business. If Intel can't keep coming up with faster processors (or more cores) then software sales would plummet. As it is only a few companies are raking in the money while others just tread water. Nobody is jumping into the software/hardware selling field where margins are a few percent at best, all efforts seem to be in advertising and data mining. One of the reasons I like old hardware and software is in the single tasking nature of it all (yes I know you can multitask but things just seemed more like task switching). Most old software does one thing, there is no massive integration with the net or every other software package. If anything you might even be more productive since you don't have all those annoying popups, it is just more relaxing. The reason all this changed is because of market saturation. Everyone who you could sell a computer to had one (or more) by the year 2000, after that you needed to speed up upgrades. Sooner or later this constant upgrade cycle will fall apart and many more companies will go bankrupt until we are stuck using machines and software for a much longer time period and the few programmers left are stuck trying to relearn optimization techniques again.