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Less Might Be More
Quantum Skyline writes "Most of us are running on a newer Pentium 4/Athlon 64 box with lots of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive and a uber-sweet graphics card that pushes 100 FPS in Doom 3. Our parents are probably running an old Athlon 700 with half the RAM and a Rage128 videocard, and some think that's overkill while the parents think its not enough. Why debate this? DevHardware has an opinion piece on 'leaner computing' and the author thinks that less might be more." This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
Reminds me of the mad rush to get computers on everyones desk, back in the late 80's. What did they run? An ADDS Viewpoint 60 emulator.
ADDS Viewpoint 60: ~$200
PC and Monitor: ~$1,500
One of the first things I recommend to people who've bought a new PC is to go through and uninstall all the crap they don't use/need. Many storebought boats are half sunk by the amount of crap which comes pre-installed, without, I might add, any damn instruction on how to get rid of it if you don't need it. A friend had a top o' the line PC and was having serious problems with video editing. I dropped by and uninstalled a massive amount of sh!t and his video editing took about half as long. It don't be amazin', neither.
Those of us who build our own rigs usually have a pretty clear idea what we want and what we don't, thus our smokin' Athlon with Gig o' RAM and Video Card el Luxo can smoke through apps. I've got a PC at work with a faster clock, but it does SETI sets ssssllllooowwww, while my de-clocked home system zips right through them (declocked for stability, never nailed it down, but don't really care since it's plenty fast enough.)
I have wondered what kind of terrible timing conflicts happen on a PC when all the devices are extremely fast, but on their own clocks. Seems having more things in sync would improve even more, but the last hardware I saw work like that was over a decade ago. I can't seem to get straight answers on tuning, either, as most people can't seem to be bothered with it. i.e. which clock and CAS is best for your machine? Storebought usually are whatever's cheapest (though may actually be faster since some engineer at Dell knows what they're doing.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I have a brand new high end box that I play doom 3 on. Windows 2000, gig of ram, radeon 9600, etc. I also have a 5 year old viao that's about the thickness of 2 magazines stacked on top of each other. It's running a pared down redhat 7.2. If I only needed mail and web the vaio would be all I need. It's what you do that dictates what you need.
Recently, during a home improvement trip to Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse, I noted that the terminals their employees use are running some version of Linux with WindowMaker as the X11 interface. They of course mainly use an IBM TN3270 application to access inventory and supply data, but I'll bet that their version of Linux is not a full-blown distro.
In any case, they definitely subscribe to the less is more principle... Have you seen the crappy PCs they have there?
I am a geek and I am looking for a useful life. Hell, I was running my machines with 128MB of RAM until I found some on the side of the road (no joke) and my father gave me some of his slower RAM when he upgraded MBs on my mother's machine.
:)
I have been using a Abit BP6 2x400 Celeron w/128 (and now 384MB) since the boards were released (sometime in 1999?)
I don't want to upgrade. This machine runs XP just fine and it is only feeling slower now that I use a 2.66ghz w/1024MB at work. I wouldn't have noticed the slightest difference if I was only using a P3-700.
I am all for using a machine until it's dead. My machines aren't for games or graphics. They're for work and they do that well
glad to see someone bring thing topic up. For the "normal" computer user, think about it, you play MP3s, use some type of IM, web browse, check email... All things that work fine on anything higher than lets say a 500MHz... As far as I've noticed, the average user's complaints of a slow computer is actually the disk access, and not the actual processor.
It just seems lately they just have been coding software to be so bloated you need a faster computer to run it.
A REAL geek is running a web server on a 386SX. Personally, I don't understand all of this dick waving about fast computers. Any moron with a few hundred bucks can buy a fast computer. Big fucking deal. I'm always impressed by somebody using ancient, ancient hardware, held together with duct tape. Geekiness is all about resourcefulness, not running out to Best Buy every week like a fucking lemming.
Leaner is more. Leaner is cooler. If you can get done what you want to get done by being smart as opposed to throwing soon-to-be-overpriced hardware at the problem, all the better.
I don't respond to AC's.
My desktop is a dual processor PIII 750 that I built a few years ago (upgraded from a dual Celeron 400). For all practical purposes, it's not really all that much different than the dual Celeron box, except that I've added more RAM and a faster drive. All my apps run smoothly, my games (albeit limited) run well, and it's a super Web-browsing machine. I even run a small website from it, simultaneously.
Now, I did have a mini-ITX machine awhile back. P4 2.4ghz, 1 gig of RAM, 7200 RPM HD. I did not notice a single bit of difference between the two machines except my framerate was a bit highter on the P4 (better graphics card installed). So I sold it. I'm still using the dual PIII.
Earlier this year, I picked up a used iBook G4 800mhz. Ancient CPU technology, by most PC standards. And yet, it is also 100% sufficient (enough to say it's not DEFICIENT) for anything that do. A Voodoo or Alienware laptop would be more than enough machine for me, at a higher price tag. Performance I don't need. Performance I suspect others don't need, as well.
I also agree with the author of the article. CPU's are growing faster and faster, and are consuming more and more power. I'd really like to see more "Power consumption" aware options (like a desktop based on the P-M), because frankly I don't like my computer to be a space heater (actually, the 2 21" CRT's in front of me are probably more to blame than anything). It really has gotten to the point that buying a new machine today is not really all that "special" as it was a few years ago. (With the exception of the G5 in the Apple lineup, or maybe the Opterons or Athlon64 machines, but the general public doesn't seem too enamored with the latter 2).
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
My mom was using a 1998-vintage Quantex (remember them?) PII/266 with 128 MB of RAM quite happily until last month when her DSL modem died. BellSouth sent out a new modem, but the software accompanying it decided that her computer was too slow. After a couple weeks of back and forth with them we just gave up. (I'm a Mac guy and 1000 miles away, so I couldn't help her with XP that much over the phone.)
;)
So I started shopping and found some pretty good deals on Dell's refurb site. I ended up getting her a 2.6 GHz machine with 512 MB of RAM, 40 GB HDD and a 48x CD-RW for $490 shipped. Yeah, it's a Celeron with integrated graphics...but it doesn't matter. She just surfs the web, prints out house plans and stuff and plays solitaire. The 266 MHz machine was more than capable of doing all of this, but the "industry" forced her to upgrade.
I really wanted to get her a Mac so she wouldn't have to deal with viruses and spyware, but couldn't justify spending twice as much for an eMac. I wish Apple made a cheap "pizza box" G4/G5 machine for people who already have decent monitors. (Try telling a mom that she should get rid of a perfectly good 17" monitor....)
Hear, hear! I just replaced my wife's P2/233 box. It was coming up on it's 7th birthday, I believe. All she uses it for is browsing and email and the very occasional Word doc. Iicked up an Optiplex off eBay for a couple hundred that's got a lower end P4, with 256Mb RAM & a 5400 rpm disk. I'll bet this one lasts her almost as long. Me? The Linux box is 2xP3/600 with 1Gb of RAM and 7200 rpm scsi disks. The Windows box is a P3/1500. Neither are going anywhere any time soon.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I have a NeXT Cube, along with it's N2000 laser printer running just fine. It's serving the printer on my network. Not only is it running just fine, it's only replaced part was a 2 gig drive to replace it's dead 400 meg one.
//c is still connected and functional, and so is my Lisa 2... but only for amusement...)
My 3rd Gen iMac (slot-loading DV/SE 400Mghz) not only runs all but one of the applications my kids use, it also runs software I regularly use as well. So dooes the dual 450Mghz G4 tower wich handles all photoshop QuarkXPress and accounting for my wife's businesses. That machine, too, is close to 5 years old.
My near-top dual 2ghz G5 tower is more than my current software development needs require. But I expect to hold up for a number of years as well.
Sometimes, paying a premium pays off. But you must pay a premium only if it's for premium components. Dont get ripped off paying for crapy expensive hardware.
(Oh... and my Apple
Yes...but...I have NEVER had a system die. Right now, I have a 2 year old Dell(I was too stupid to custom-build), a 6 month old custom system, and a 7 year old custom K6-2 system. I have had two parts fail. EVER.
1)The old 13GB drive in the K6-2
2)The Radeon 9800 in the new system, which was replaced under warranty.
Oh, and I've bought bad RAM but never have had any that worked to start with fail.
"I've had at least 15 PCs over the last 20 years, usually have 4 or so in service at any one time. Not one of them have I had to replace because it "wore out". I've replaced many worn out cars in that same period."
You've replaced the computers because they became useless before they wore out. But computers do wear out. Typically the motherboard fails first because manufacturers use cheap electrolytic capacitors that leak (because they don't expect anyone to be using the hardware after 5 years).
Two Quantum hard drives, a Seagate, a Sony and Apple monitor, Microsuck ergo keyboard and intellimouse all failed. My point was the the Mac itself isn't a problem and if I were less tech savvy I would have thrown out a perfectly good computer long ago, which likely adds to the Joe six pack need to buy a new comp when the previous one conks out after warranty.
It comes down to software bloat, really.
Joe-sixpack wants the latest and greatest blinding fast computer now. The problem is that with all the increases in speeds and capability in general of computers, software doesn't really run any better than it did 1, 2, 10, etc years ago.
Software expands to fill the available hardware capacity. I still remember running Word 2 on Windows 3.11 on a 386/40 with 8M RAM. It was just as quick for most things as Word XP on Windows XP. Just Word/windowsXP is so much more bloated that it needs more computing power than my old 386 had just to run the OS and draw all the eye candy they've added.
The only place where modern computers excel now is high resolution graphics, video, and high quality audio processing. We can do all these at almost real-time on current commodity hardware. I would never have thought of doing them back in the days of old. But Joe six-pack doesn't _need_ to do these things. He only does them because he can now.
I pine (also my usual mail reader) for the days of slow hardware. The only thing my 386 had to set it apart was a "blazingly fast" Paradise video card with 1MB (yes, one) of memory on it. The only reason I had that was for CAD work. As most people know, CAD work requires a lot of redrawing of a lot of primative elements, regularly. That really was painful on large designs. The Paradise card took care of drawing lines, circles, curves and other simple primatives and all was well.
I still have that old 386. It has finally failed. I tried to get it to power up, but the ISA-bus IDE controller is no longer operational. It may be the 80M IDE disk that has failed. I am not sure, and the availability of suitable replacement parts is very limited these days so I'm giving up on it finally.
I drink to make other people interesting!
Compared to gamers, people who encode video streams or compile code are very few, and as such pretty in significant. I'm aware there are those and that they need better computers, but I see no reason why such computers shouldn't be the niche, instead of the mainstream.
As the article suggest, I would love to see a desktop PC running on a Pentium M (or any other mobile version of a CPU): less heat, less power, reasonable performances.
It would be also very good if desktops' MB and CPU may implement frequency and voltage scaling on the CPU (as is done in notebooks).
Unfortunately most desktop systems do not allow it (but I heard that some newer models will).
I use Linux on my notebook, and I have instructed the daemon "cpufreqd" to scale down on voltage (when the CPU is not very busy) *even* when I am on AC. This way, the CPU operates at an average of 60Celsius (compared to the 70C that I see under WindowsXP): saving the heat is very nice, the fan operates much less, less noise; and you can really keep your laptop on the lap.
Moreover: do you know that CPUs evaporate? Yes, they run so hot that the tiny metal strips forming the VLSI circuitry do evaporate, (or if you prefer, diffuse) : if you keep your desktop on 24/7, in ~2 years, a Pentium or Athlon at 3000Mhz will stop working....
But if I could scale it down when I do not need the CPU full power (and this means, most of the time) the problem would be much diminished.
Summarizing: CPU scaling = less heat, less power, less AC bill, more life of CPU
It came with 9 drives, I added three and haven't done anything else except fill up the hard drives. This old stuff can work fine for a long time depending on what you need it for.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
In the early 90s, when everyone started to have a computer, you could tell who the REAL geeks were because they were running slow, ancient machines held together with glue and rubber bands. If you had a shiny new 486 you were a newbie; if you had a 16 mhz XT you had some geek cred.
At our local Train station they just invested in about 50 (possibly more.. didn't count) displays, which are bolted to lampposts etc. and are about 10 feet off the ground.
They display text (yellow on blue, at about 20x15 resolution) 24/7. The page updates maybe once every 3 or 4 minutes.
Every single one of these displays is run from a separate Windows XP installation. Some gimp at the Train company was suckered into paying for licenses for all of them.
They don't even use terminal services FFS!!! At least if they did that it might be *slightly* excusable.
Every day one or two of them will bluescreen, or put up a bizarre dialog box (the one in the ticket office has a large dialog complaining about something to do with the serial port, which obscures 2/3 of the screen, so you can't see anything on it anyway. It's been like that for weeks - yes they spent a shitload on unneccessary hardware/licenses then couldn't afford to hire an admin...).
"She was very upset because the one that had just 'died' was only a few months old. The way she described the 'deadness' reminded me of whatever the Windows virus was that rebooted your PC right after you started up."
This is an excellent point. Of all the clueless users I have ever met who had told me about their plans to buy a new computer, the primary reason that most of them had for wanting to do so was because thier old one was "broken", where broken=infected with virus's, spyware and broken apps. It didn't seem to matter at all to them when I explained that the computer was not broken, but only the software was. To clueless users, there is little definition between hardware and software in their minds. To them it is all just part of a homogonous whole called "the computer"
Thay almost all ended up goiing out and buying a new one (and unless the person was a close friend or relative, I didn't go out of my way to dissuade them. I just gave them some good advice and promptly left them to their own devices)
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
Everyone in the IT industry needs money. Unfortunately, the company that needs it the most is Microsoft. Release a new OS every 3 years and a new Office suite every 2 years, price them insanely high (well, at least the Office suite), rewrite the platform to use a higher-higher language, which requires a faster CPU to process what really amounts to someone typing in the letter 'a', and pressure everyone to believe that yesterday's computer just isn't good enough for today's "software innovations."
...
Or perhaps instead it might be the little guy, you know, the independent tech consultant, promising you the "latest and greatest platform" to support your every need as a business. Really what he is doing is playing on your ignorance, buying the biggest and baddest machine he can get his hands on (so that a $800 consultants fee won't look as large compared to the $5000 server your company just purchased), and then playing your stupidity to lead you to believe that (for $120/hr), he's the only guy in the world who can support the platform for you. And all this time, he's just trying to feed his own business.
Our school district has these old IBM PC 315 Pentium Pro servers. Their idea was to throw them away. Well, all I did was take the RAM and HD from one computer, stick it in the other (64MB and 4GB doesn't really cut it anymore, but 128MB and 8GB still do), load them with Win98, Firefox, Thunderbird, Office 2000, and one of the teachers asked me if it was a new computer. Really, all it needed was more RAM and a reformat.
There are quality PC parts out there that are being thrown in the bin because people are led to believe that you absolutely have to have a 3 GHz, 1GB of RAM, 120GB hard drive system just to run multimedia apps in Internet Explorer. The only thing I told the staff at my school is that it won't play DivX. Then everyone looked at me and asked, what's DivX?
I love it when the last consultant hired convinced the district to buy a dual G5 XServe w/ 2GB RAM & 180GB SATA storage just to set up a file server for a total of 400 students and staff at the school. Love it even more when we already have a dual PIII, 1GB RAM, and RAID-5 140GB system doing that job already (and we're only using 22GB of hard disk space right now).
The problem is this: people want money, and they'll use as much FUD to sell you what you don't need. If a 5-foot high fence keeps the dog out, there ain't no reason to tear it down and build it higher.
I even encode movies to DivX with it. It takes quite a long time, but I'm not that eager to see the final product as I have already seen the movie before.
"I haven't seen a solid state part of a PC die. I always use a UPS, dust the insides once a year, and never overclock."
In fact, I often underclock the firewalls I build. I've found that if you take something like a Pentium MMX 200 and underclock it to something like 1.5x50Mhz (75Mhz) you can drop the vcore and run it without a CPU fan at all. Stick a "silent" fan in your PSU and you can have a perfectly adequete Smoothwall box that is damn near silent. 75Mhz is more than adequete to serve up packets over your typical ADSL line. Even when you are maxing out your bandwidth, CPU usage barely ever makes it over 15% (assuming you are using PCI NICs, old ISA NICs are more CPU dependant, so CPU usage will be higher but even then it won't ever hit 100%)
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
As a test for the s(h)ituation described anecdotally at the end of the initial post, my company has tested a Neoware device for just this purpose: to use RDP5 to connect to a Terminal Services server. They are well built, inexpensive (not cheap!) boxen that do the job. They also have a great management interface.
Although we did not go with them (we are doing a technology refresh and pushing apps back out to desktops... sigh...) I did wish that I could keep the box.
It's core is linux / running an X client to enable RDP. 1600x1200.
(And, no, I don't work for Neoware, just think that their product is most cool.)
--
WWJD? JWRTFM!
When you're running Windows XP and it seems to think the average user needs to turn on every conceivable service at boot time.
It makes me crazy that computers don't boot any faster than they ever did. In fact, I think my 3.2 GHz may boot *slower* than my old P1... with a bare bones system tray and startup folder too (and no spyware).
Freedom: "I won't!"
Oh, come on! "It's corporatism not capitalism that says "try to keep the dull consumer buying what they don't need anyway"?
This is one of the most pig-ignorant comments I've ever read. Capitalism says nothing about marketing; it's just who owns the means of production. "Corporatism" is something that you just made up.
Capitalist organistions exist to make money, by whatever means available. They will exploit the poor, deceive consumers, and even kill those who oppose them, where those acts are legal.
If you knew anything at all about history, you'd know that.
Our local library had an awesome catalog system built on monochrome dumb terminals to search for books using a simple and efficient text interface. You could even dial it up via a BBS and get all the info from home almost as fast as if you were there.
A couple years ago they adopted P4 Dells. At the library, an internet connection and Internet Explorer serves as the means to access their "enhanced" database with all sorts of cross-entries, duplicates, missing information, etc. So now you have these gigahertz computers running a full version of Windows that run slower than the terminals and that you have to worry about locking down and protecting for a wider variety of threats. (viruses, hackers, users changing settings, etc.)
It seems now that people get the best, most expensive technology feasibly possible and downgrade to their needs. I think it's much more efficient to build up to your needs.
A newbie at something tends to go all in. A beginning cyclist buys the most expensive bike, or a beginning painter the best brushes thinking that he'll be able to jump right in with the pros, but that is not the case. They have to train UP to that level, and I think now people are finally starting to realize this the hard way, as far as technology is concerned. Time will tell if everyone's learned their lesson.
Here's mine:
webserver - P233 w/198MB RAM, 10GB HDD
2 external nameservers - P166s w/64MB RAM, 4GB HHD (one is also running NTP)
mailserver - Dual PP200 w/128MB RAM, 2x2GB SCSI and 16GB IDE HDD
Firewall - P60 w/48MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD
Internal DHCP/nameserver - P133 w/128MB RAM, 4GB HDD
Internal nameserver/NTP/management server - PII450 w/256MB RAM, 20GB HDD
Build server - Dual Celeron 400, with 512MB RAM, 200GB HDD
Test server - Celeron 300, with 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD
I also have two old Alpha servers (300mhz) one running Tru64 and the other OpenVMS.
And of course an old SparcStation 20 with Solaris 8.
Now if I can just get the rest of the parts I need for the PDP I'm set.
My laptop - PIII700, with 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD
Toss in a couple of cisco routers and some 3Com switches and there you have it.
As Microsoft says "Do More with Less", of course if you want realize that dream, try FreeBSD.
The really nice thing about all this is that with the exception of my laptop, it was all free, throw aways from my or friend's clients or employers over the years.
my old sig is obsolete, and I haven't come up with a stupid enough new one yet
"Seriously, go back about 7 years in computer hardware, and there is just about nothing useable in old computer parts."
As I said in another post, I have a 10 year old computer running a firewall perfectly happy right now, and I don't expect to have to replace it in the foreseable future, unless it fails, at which point there are plenty of other similar spec machines laying around that I can scavenge for parts.I've been playing with PC's since before IBM came out with their first version, and one thing I have noticed is that in the last few years, the usefull lifespan of PC's is actually growing. I remember back in the eighties and early nineties when the migration from 8086/8088 to 80286 was a quantam leap in performance. Likewise the step up to the 386 and then the 486. Each iteration was a major step forward. When the Pentium came along @ 66Mhz and 100Mhz, we already had a 100Mhz 486, and there was not a huge reason to move along. It took about a year for the Pentiums to become relatively attractive, and today it is quite possible to use old computers for far longer than you used to be able to if you just want to do office apps and the like. Even longer if you relegate them to low utilisation server duties. I myself am writing this on a 5 year old 700Mhz P3 laptop, which is still perfectly serviceable, while the current state of the art is 3Ghz, more than four times faster in the "Megahurtz Stakes".
And it is only gonna get better in this regard, because in recent years it is primarily the release of a new Microsoft OS that is the spur to drive the market forward. But it is still several years before we will see Longhorn, so with the majority of folks still nursing along their Windows XP machines with static system requirments, there is little other than the minority who buy the latest and greatest games to motivate people into upgrading their PC's.
Think about it, by the time Longhorn comes out in 2006/7, people will be still happily chugging along with PC's running XP that they could conceivably have purchased in 2001, making them 5 or six years old, which is coming close to your "7 years old" above. As I mentioned elsewhere, the primary reason I see today for people buying new computers for home use is because they are "broken", which usually means they are infested with browser hijackers and IE no longer works. Other than that, there is usually nothing wrong with their "broken" computer at all.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
I was similarly startled by a non-techie friend planning to buy a new PC when his 1GHz desktop obviously just needed a clean OS install. Then I noticed the service fee schedule in a computer store: Spyware Removal, $100; Virus Removal, $120 + cost of AV software; Reinstall OS without data backup, $100 + cost of OS. Another friend of mine just bought a brand-new Dell P4 2.8GHz 533 FSB with 256MB dual channel RAM, 80GB HDD, 48x CD-RW, with XP Home Edition for only $320 after $150 rebate, sans monitor. I can't custom build anything to compete with that. Heck, OEM XP Home by itself costs one third of this system's price. If your not technically inclined and have to pay for support, you might as well save some money by buying a new computer. Joe Sixpack just wants to minimize his TCO.
I use a ThinkPad 760XD (166MHz Pentium with 80MB RAM), Red Hat 7.3, lightweight windows manager, vnc connection via wireless to a 3GHz machine residing the cellar. In fullscreen vnc it is fun to point people to the fullblown ximian evolution, firefox, gimp etc. which are very responsive: "What? this runs on this old machine?". Yes, sometimes I forget, that this stuff actually doesn't run locally. Even the harddisk stops spinning!
The growing computing power of modern PC's opens new uses. I work in the GIS sector and until a few years ago you needed very expensive Unix workstations. Cartographic datasets usually are very large (GBytes or even TBytes). Even the working sets usually are in the range of hundreds of MBytes. Thanks to the power of modern PC's you can put GIS functionality on the desktop of a secretary.
Wow - this article is right on the money! I've been running an AMD 700Mhz for the last four years, and the only reason I'm not still running it is because it died (actually, I did the math and found that it was on for something like 80+% of it's lifetime, so it's demise was not unexpected, especially given the environment in which it spent those years). That machine did everything I needed it to - I'm even a software developer, and it still compiled with plenty of speed. I'm kind of batting around the idea of trying to find some old used parts just to reassemble the same machine.
This feeling carries over into laptops. The main reason I haven't bought a new machine yet is because I'm thinking of moving to something portable instead. However, it seems my desires are a bit out of line with what Intel/Dell/etc. wants to sell me. I'm really only looking for two things: small size and lots of battery life. The size search does have limits, as I don't want the keyboard to be too cramped, but mainly I really don't want one of these new laptops that has a good 2" on either side of the keyboard. I know battery life is mostly a factor of the screen on a laptop, but you can't tell me that just scaling back the other stuff a bit won't help.
I've actually been expecting for a couple of years now that we'll start seeing machines that are more dedicated to specific purposes again. For a long time we've been talking about how "one commodity piece of hardware can do everything." But, the simple fact is that most users don't need it to do everything. Thin clients are excellent machines for surfing the web. I expect someone will soon come out with a media PC that makes sense. I can't say I'm all that surprised that no one is marketing a word-processing machine any more, but that application is so lightweight that it could execute on any of these other systems.
Alright, I've ranted/rambled enough. Time to stop this post before I really do begin to sound stupid. ;P
One project of mine is a little php/mysql app to manage my dvd collection. A friend of mine suggested that the program should also control the DVD player, selecting the proper DVD.
Then he started specing out the machinery. Nothing short of an ITX machine seemed to satify his desire. A desire, I might add, which consisted of nothing more than accepting network input and outputting IR.
All told, we were talking about $300-500 to run an IR Blaster off a serial port.
But that's the mentality. Software guys are so used to starting with predetermined hardware and then writing whatever code they want to on top of it, and if it's too slow, you just add more metal.
It's just a matter of perspective. You're looking at it from "I need a to talk to a server" and the hardware supplier is looking at it from "How do I connect a PC to this server?"
:wq
I don't believe that my example was faulty. In fact, you have just reinforced my argument. Software is now a LOT more bloated.
First, why does your word processor run half-a-dozen processes in the background? How much does it really need to do?
Second, the document model is now overly complex. I can cite some examples where a WordXP document would load one one computer but not another. There is too much machine specific information in the the document these days, including information about the installed printers on every machine the document has been edited on.
Third, this thread wasn't about how much more stable word XP is over word 2 (or the other way about if you live in the real world). It was about how software has become more bloated as computing power has increased.
Word 2 ran just as fast as Word XP. Word 2 had all the features that probably 95% of the population would have ever needed (let-alone used). The software just became more bloated because the hardware could handle the bloat and the only way to sell a new version is add some feature and push the issue.
It is important to keep in mind how much of the bloat that your average user really uses. Much of it is eye candy; 3d rendered buttons, anti-aliassed text, fancy window decorations, annoying paperclips that watch what you do and pop up at most inconvenient times (same sort of thing is in Office, and Open/Star office, alike), graded title bars, drop shadows in menus, etc.
Sure, it all adds up to a prettier desktop, but it doesn't increase the functionality at all, and it slows down the general operation of larger tasks.
I've had enough. I'm off to the pub!
I drink to make other people interesting!