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Where Have All The Cycles Gone?
Mai writes "Computers are getting faster all the time, or so they tell us. But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years. This article takes a look at where all the precious processor time and memory are going."
Mr. Seebach points out that "computers are, in fact, doing more than they used to. A lot of the things computers do are fairly subtle, happening beneath the radar of a user's perception. Many functions are automatic and, as discussed in last month's column, you could probably do without some of them."
This recalls an analogy drawn by a recent Economist article. Unlike most automobile analogies popular among Slashbots, this one is actually rather appropriate: "By the 1930s, ... the car had become more user-friendly and ready for the mass market. ... [T]he makers' increasing skill at hiding the technology from drivers ... meant that cars got hugely more complex on the inside, because most of the tasks that had previously been carried out by drivers now had to be done automatically. This presented drivers with a radically simplified surface, or 'interface' in today's jargon."
Given this lesson drawn from history, I disagree with Seebach's conclusion that "the worst is probably over" in terms of code bloat and complexity. Computers still have a long way to go before they can approach the ease of use and stability we demand of every other consumer appliance in our lives.
The aforementioned article requires a paid subscription to view, so in the interests of convenience, I'll reproduce it here.
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SURVEY: INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
Now you see it, now you don't
Oct 28th 2004
From The Economist print edition
[Image]
To be truly successful, a complex technology needs to "disappear"
THERE has never been anything quite like information technology before, but there have certainly been other complex technologies that needed simplifying. Joe Corn, a history professor at Stanford University, believes that the first example of a complex consumer technology was clocks, which arrived in the 1820s. Clocks were sold with user manuals, which featured entries such as "How to erect and regulate your device". When sewing machines appeared in the 1840s, they came with 40-page manuals full of detailed instructions. Discouragingly, it took two generations until a trade publication was able to declare in the 1880s that "every woman now knows how to use one."
At about the same time, the increase in technological complexity gathered pace. With electricity came new appliances, such as the phonograph, invented in 1877 by Thomas Alva Edison. According to Mr Norman, the computer-design guru, despite Mr Edison's genius for engineering he was a marketing moron, and his first phonograph was all but unusable (in fact, initially he had no particular uses in mind for it). For decades, Mr Edison fiddled with his technology, always going for the most impressive engineering solution. For instance, he chose cylinders over discs as the recording medium. It took a generation and the entry of a new rival, Emile Berliner, to prepare the phonograph for the mass market by making it easier to use (introducing discs instead of cylinders) and giving it a purpose (playing music). Mr Edison's companies foundered whereas Mr Berliner's thrived, and phonographs became ubiquitous, first as "gramophones" or "Victrolas", the name of Mr Berliner's model, and ultimately as "record players".
Another complex technology, with an even bigger impact, was the car. The first cars, in the early 1900s, were "mostly a burden and a challenge", says Mr Corn. Driving one required skill in lubricating various moving parts, sending oil manually to the transmission, adjusting the spark plug, setting the choke, opening the throttle, wielding the crank and knowing what to do when the car broke down, which it invariably did. People at the time hired chauffeurs, says Mr Corn, mostly because they needed to have a mechanic at hand to fix the car, just as firms today need IT staff and
Some good things that have eaten more memory and cycles (all of which have improved the user experience, as opposed to what the summary states):
1 Programs that check your work as you go (e.g.: autocalculate on spreadsheets)
2 More help dialogs, things watching for cameras, and whatnot to smooth the user experience.
3 More use of IM and other software in the background much of the time.
4 Services running so that it's faster to sort and search files, open your favorite programs, etc.
In short, lots of stuff running to make your experience smoother, even if it doesn't look like it's doing much more.
Some bad things:
1 More viruses, etc.
2 The mandantory virus scanner that has to run in the background all the time because of (1)
3 All the crap adware that installed more than it used to be.
These are just a few of the trends I can think of . -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
for crying out loud, why does a 5 MB MP3 take 60+ MB of memory to play?
because that's the size of the uncompressed waveform. You don't play the MP3, you play the waveform that is compressed inside the MP3. iTunes just decompresses the file all at once, and puts that into memory, instead of a bit at a time like some players.
Well you have to be careful.... some file systems have minimal increments in file sizes. For example, on my NTFS formatted system, a plain text document with one "a" in it is officially 4KB, even though there is onlt one byte of data in it.
This is not an excuse fro a BLANK MSWord document being 19,456 bytes of course. But there is "useful" data in there...
I'm running Win2K, and if I right click on the file and sepect "Properties", there is a summary tab that displays all the info stored in that 19k. (You might have to click "Advanced")
The data includes:
-Title
-Subject
-Category
-Keywords
-Template name
-Page Count
-Word Count
-Character Count
-Line Count
-Paragraph Count
-Scale (No idea what this means)
-"Links Dirty?" (No idea what this is... maybe it's true if there's porn links in it?)
-Comments
-Author (From computer info)
-Last Saved By... (From computer info)
-Revision Number (Number of saves?)
-Application
-Company Name (From registration info)
-Creation Date (Seperate from file system creation date)
-Last Saved Date (Seperate from file system modified date)
-Edit time
Now is this ACTUALLY useful? I dunno. It might be in some situations. There should be an option for not saving this metadata though, for security if not for file size.
=Smidge=
I think it's a bit of both.
Apple pushed to get OS X released to the public and so they followed the belief of "make it work then optimise". Today we can see the fruits.
An example of this is Quartz. Quartz basically had all the components you needed in 10.0 to do some great on screen rendering and it was reasonably fast. Through each iteration of Mac OS X though it has improved. In 10.1 the speed of the code was improved. In 10.2 we had partial acceleration via the GPU. In 10.3 more optimising. In 10.4 we can see they have completely pulled apart sections of Quartz and rewritten it as well as buffering it all onto the graphics card. That is but one example though, there are plenty of others.
On the other hand, apps like iPhoto and GarageBand were really sluggish and the system reflected that. Mac users cried foul and now you have iPhoto 5 which is blazingly fast and literally all the apps have been following that trend. I know as a developer myself I spend a good 20-30% of my time optimising code simply so users get the speed that they are now used to. It's good, we needed it, especially when we were stuck on the G4's. Now with the G5's it's just icing on the cake.
Actually, I was stuck with a 486DX266 for quite a lot longer than I would've liked to have been. It was a brand name one from an era where brand name meant quality components instead of fake cache chips and was actually rather fast for what it was, but in order to decode an MP3 I had to use players which would allow me to decode in mono and in some cases only decode at 22050.
This is of course long before I had ever used linux, and for all I know the experience of playing MP3s on a 486 in linux could be entirely different, but MP3s + 486 + Winblows = glitches, skips, crackles, pops and not a whole lot of CPU left to do anything else.
There is. I'm running Slackware 10.0 (can't wait to get my 10.1 disks! w00t!). I use vim+LaTeX for all my document prep needs on the command line (use an xterm if you so choose). As others have mentioned, LyX isn't bad.
I'm a physics major at UW, so I do a decent bit of scientific work on my computer. I use GNUPlot, XFig and the Gimp to generate drawings for lab reports and whatnot.
I'm typing this from Firefox running on the Xorg6.7.0 server+WindowMaker 0.91. The key here is to use a lightweight window manager. Blackbox and fluxbox are other good choices (light, usable, not fugly (cough, fvwm, cough)). If you have to have that desktop environment, go with Xfce.
The only gap that I occasionally feel in my user experience is a good spreadsheet. I haven't found one. KSpread, OpenOffice Calc and Gnumeric either are or require the use of heavy GUI software which we are trying to avoid (KDE and Gnome are not as big as XP, but far too big to run comfortably on my system). I've glanced at Siag, but haven't really tried it out (I don't know scheme and don't have the time to figure it out right now--see physics undergraduate work).
I use mutt or pine, depending on which email address I'm checking. Thunderbird looks promising for being light and good, if you want a GUI based email client.
Recompile your kernel to match your hardware (trim the fat and optimize for your processors), and turn off any extra servers that you don't need (don't need telnetd, ftpd, &c. running? Turn off inetd--it's also more secure). Customize your boot sequence to only start and load that which your system needs and those things which you use.
I also boot to the command line and don't run xdm or the like. I do a lot of work from the command line, and X+light WM doesn't take long to start. It is, again, one less thing wasting clock cycles on my machine.
For reference, I'm running my Slack 10 system on an Abit BP6 with two PIII 866MHz processors underclocked to 650MHz (long story... Has to do with the fact that the BP6 doesn't technically support the PIII). I've got 384MB of RAM and a GF4 video card. It is lightning fast. The only exception to this is when I'm running X with the closed nVidia drivers (damn thing has a 3MB kernel module... grrr...), but that only adds a hang of a couple seconds when switching between X and the consoles, and that's it. If I'm not playing Quake or dealing with 3D visualization stuff, I can use the OSS driver (2D accel only), and get rid of even that performance problem.
So, yes, the middle ground is there, and it rocks. My computing experience is awesome, my slightly dated hardware is rock solid and perfectly responsive. Take a good, customizable Linux distribution, run light weight software, turn off stuff in the background and run a lean, mean, customized kernel, and you'll reclaim those lost cycles as interface responciveness. I suggest Slackware for this. FreeBSD, Debian, and any other Linux distro which is aimed at power-users will be good for setting up a configuration like this.
Mandrake, RHAT (RHEL & Fedora), SuSE and any other user-friendly type distro is ill-suited to this, IMO. Not that you can't, but my experience with these distros and their high-level admin tools is that if you try to do something too different from the default, it gets extra hard. So, Slackware and the like just end up being simpler, and now you know what Slack users mean when they say "it's simple." So stop giving us funny looks when we say it.
Jeff