14 Oct
2011
14 Oct
'11
2 p.m.
Dave McGuire wrote:
I suspect those sorts of problems won't go away, either - the downside
being that they aren't so relevant for the majority of computing problems
(which just involve a single-user machine, or single server on a LAN or
"out there somewhere")
Indeed it is - I've heard the same many a time. But at the moment I think
there are still a lot of folk who know that it shouldn't have to be like
that, but they're not the majority and they generally don't know how - or
can't - change things for the better. Give it a few years though and I'm
worried that group won't even exist - computers will just be accepted by
everyone to be slow and quirky.
Mind you, the sheer amount of data we cart around these days is pretty
staggering - and that's something of a new problem which didn't exist "back
in the day" (mp3 files, digital photos unheard of, mbox was well under 1MB
etc. - heck, my email takes up nearly 2GB these days)
cheers
Jules
On 10/14/2011 03:33 PM, Jules Richardson wrote:
Same here. Except that I *am* a perfectionist. :-/
I just keep an eye on the clock, I suppose; there are times when I want to
do a better job of something, but time constraints don't allow it. I don't
think many people are lucky enough to set their own deadlines all of the
time :-(
...which
is why I work almost exclusively in the embedded space now,
when doing software. It's the last refuge for people who care about
(sometimes to an obsessive degree, as in my case) the efficiency of
software.
Yeah, I got out of the full-time software game a decade ago because even
then it was getting hard to find people who cared about efficiency, and
throwing more hardware at problems was the norm. I'm not a perfectionist
by any means, but that just didn't sit right with me. Having said
that, it *was* quite good fun designing large distributed
systems and working out the interactions between them and how best to
place various bits of code, even when those bits of code in themselves
might not be as efficient as they could be. It was still an optimization
task, and in some ways involving some of the same analysis as would be
done at a much lower level.
Oh yes, fun stuff indeed! I love challenges like that. You might be
right. I think the thing I hate most is the thought that in
a few decades every computer user will have grown up with computers that
crash often and are bogged down with bloated software. Nobody will
really remember times ever being different, so there'll be no incentive
to change things.
That's happening *now*, at least with the crashing. Many people I've
talked to from the Windows world (no offense to Josh, who may be one of
Microsoft's only competent developers) honestly think that's "just how
computers are". :-(