14 Oct
2012
14 Oct
'12
1:56 p.m.
On Sun, 14 Oct 2012, Liam Proven wrote:
Software bloat continues to be a serious problem. The
thing is, chips
stopped getting massively faster about 5-6y ago now. Things doubled
every 18mth up to 2005 or so, then it was 50% for the next generation,
then 25% for the one after that, then ~12% for, say, 2nd-gen Core i5/7
over the 1st gen, and <10% for 3rd gen over 2nd.
All we're getting is more and more cores and smaller and more
electricity-efficient chips.
The programmers have not caught on to this yet.
The other issue I've begun to notice are companies building their software
so that it won't function unless the processor has the SSE2 instruction
set. With Intel CPUs this rules out anything pre- Pentium 4, including all
the otherwise perfectly usable Pentium M, III, II, and Socket 7 based
systems. This also prevents the use of AMD chips such as the Athlon,
Athlon XP, any of the K6, etc (anything pre-Athlon 64).
One of the worst offenders that I discovered is the Adobe Flash plugin.
They "can't reproduce the issue" because they _won't_ test with anything
older than a Core Duo. It is just plain pitiful.
http://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3161034
http://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3155858
http://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3154276
http://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=bug&id=3158108
...and I happen to like the Pentium III (the Tualatin -S variants in
particular) and Pentium M.