3 Jun
2013
3 Jun
'13
1:43 p.m.
On 3 June 2013 20:43, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
But, there are things that you can do now that
weren't possible, or at
least not feasible, back then (whenever THAT was)
Such as:
A routine meeting schedule announcement with dancing kangaroos and
yodelling jellyfish, or
More to the point, run, in a cross-platform manner that works well on
Linux, Mac and Windows plus phones, a web-based app that everyone can
use to schedule meetings and perform online collaboration, using FOSS
on the client and freeware online services.
That is a rather big deal, actually.
Boyle's law predicts that software will expand
faster than hardware, to
occupy all available resources, and then some.
:?) Interesting usage of it.
Some "software developers" use Moore's
law not as a design limit, but as a
relied upon tool - "You don't think that it's fast enopugh? Get a newer
computer! 18 MONTHS old?? I'm amazed that it would even run on something
that ancient!" ("user inadequacy" defense against performance
complaints)
The thing is that Moore's Law stopped delivering 100% more CPU power
every 18mth in about 2007 or so. Since then, we just got more cores
for a few years, then incremental tweaks: the return of
Hyperthreading, better cacheing, better branch prediction, improved
MMX, etc. - small, incremental improvements. It's gaining maybe 10-15%
every 18mth now.
In its place, we have Koomey's Law, which seems to be delivering
something like twice the power efficiency every 18th. Which is nice,
and why I predict lots of thin, lightweight, wireless, battery-powered
gizmos, but which are not massively more powerful than we have now -
they're just talking constantly to vast back-end servers in cryogenic
vaults, using massive parallelism and brute force to deliver something
that looks and feels a bit like an intelligent computer that
understands you. It won't, but it will feel sort of like it.
Yeah, old hardware can't run new resource hogging
software.
But, if the needs are stable, newer hardware can sometimes do wonders with
old software.
True.
--
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