14 Mar
2005
14 Mar
'05
5:52 p.m.
From: "Jules Richardson"
<julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk>
On Mon, 2005-03-14 at 23:51 +0100, Nico de Jong wrote:
HI
Hardly. The requirement for more space will continue. Serial
data, such as CDROM's have some limits coming up but not
the hunger for more data space. Access time is becoming a
limiting factor that technology will sortly overcome( or we
are doomed ).
Dwight
The fact is, that the development of drives is so
quick, that even if you
_could_ save a tape or disk or CD or whatever for 30 years, you wouldnt find
the proper drive, and even if you did, it wouldnt be supported anymore.
Let's go back 30 years; what were the dominant media at that time ? 1600 bpi
reel-to-reel tapes, 7.25 or 30 MB harddisk (IBM 2311/2314), and 8" floppy
discs. Some of my customers _still_ accept 8" disks and reels for financial
transactions.
Philosophical question. As performance of a device goes up, does the
need for more performance (by the average user) go down?
In other words do we hit a point where the storage technology of the day
is so good for what the typical/power user needs that there is no
incentive for manufacturers to built anything better?
Curious as to what people think. I'm sure they'll always be innovation
in the lab and on specialist high-budget projects, but maybe one day
they'll just be nowhere left to go for Joe Public. 
14 Mar
14 Mar
6:18 p.m.
>Philosophical question. As performance of a device
goes up, does the
>need for more performance (by the average user) go down?
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.
16 Mar
16 Mar
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.
10:09 p.m.
On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 18:17:20 -0500, Scott Stevens <chenmel at earthlink.net> wrote:
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.
Well, yes and no.
Yes KDE and GNOME both are bloated. If you ever had the misfortune to
run them on a P100, you'll know what I mean.
If you're on a 486 lower system, you still can install Slack or
Debian. Strip off X and all the libs completely and run in console
mode.
For paperwork, you can use troff (hey! it's ontopic), or Latex
(ontopic too!) or sgmltools (I think ontopic but not sure).
FWIW, I used to prepare papers and reports using DECdocument
(precursor to SGML) on a uVaxII/GFX. And it didn't felt slow at all.
Surely trying to open a document via OpenOffice on a P100 will be
slower...
/wai-sun
17 Mar
17 Mar
12:21 a.m.
Wai-Sun Chia wrote:
If you're on a 486 lower system, you still can
install Slack or
Debian. Strip off X and all the libs completely and run in console
mode.
I used to run Slackware in X on my 386/40 so don't give up hope yet. Just
don't run a bloated window manager like KDE or GNOME or Enlightenment, etc. I
ran twm and Afterstep and was very happy, had a 1024x768 screen, too, and this
was back in 1994.
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/
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participants (5)
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chenmel＠earthlink.net -
cisin＠xenosoft.com -
dwight.elvey＠amd.com -
trixter＠oldskool.org -
waisun.chia＠gmail.com