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A 2nd Core to Keep Windows Chugging Along?
Eh-Wire writes "Almost every hardware junkie I know would give most anything to take a spin in the new dual core hot rods from Dell or one of the custom system builders. But what if you actually needed that second core to run your anti-virus, spyware detection software and firewall just to get a little gaming or Internet surfing done on the first core. Would that really be a good reason to bring home a shiny new machine? I can think of a couple of different things I could use a second core for but running an iron lung on it just to keep the machine chugging along just isn't one of them. Curiously enough, PCMag thinks that's a perfectly good reason."
More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...
Am I the only one who can't open the first link in a new tab in Firefox? It wants me to open it with "FirefoxHTML", which opens it in the current tab.
Who wants to waste all that power running virus software? I don't get it.
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
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I am a linux fan, but I am not so blinded to know that over the last couple of years, Mac OS X has been the only operating system that has been getting consistently faster for general workstation usage. So I'd say if you really want extra performance that you can use, and won't get wasted by bloat, wait until a Macintosh is released with a dual-core processor.
really, it is that bad.. take a look at some of these power consumption figures for intel's "dual module chip."
3 89
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2
Insane.. 244watts under full load. Should be interesting to see amd's numbers in this regard.. (which should be out very soon, the release date is the 21st IIRC.) This would be an expensive upgrade if you choose Intel's dual-module chip. You'll need a new motherboard & a pretty hefty power supply.
Yeah, Windows users need the second core to run all that spyware. It'll probably help a lot!
...most of us are quite intentionally using multi-tasking OS's. A new chip comes along that helps that multi-tasking, and people are seeking reasons not to use it?
"Derp de derp."
It's like having a seperate harddrive for all your apps and essentials than all your media. That way the core you are really using can do 100% what you want (ie play games) I don't know enough about the technology to really say for sure, but this seems like it is just a more efficient division of labor, and you could get excellent performance out of it. An another note, though, I can't believe people have that much bloatware that they actually NEED an ENTIRE second core to run it all. I hate modern software. I can't believe people waste their harddrive space and clock cycles on shit like virus protection.
Good god. More seriously, just seeing people put ideas like that out makes me cringe, not because it's not necessary but because it seems to me that thinking like that will only lead companies like Microsoft to dedicate the second core to nothing but fixing problems that shouldn't be there in the first place. I suppose it's inevitable, though. Programming, especially of the bad, lazy or bloated variety, always seems to expand to fill and tax whatever hardware is available to it.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The example of being able to play games smoothly with anti-virus scanning in the background was just that... an EXAMPLE of a situation where a dual core system might excel. The author mentions a ton of others, like encoding tv input in the background. I think it's rather sensational to say that the author thinks that's the only use or the primary use. The story submitter really needs to get a grip. The article was just trying to make the point that general responsiveness of a dual core system in the face of multiple tasks should be better, and I don't think anyone would disagree with that.
Seriously, what in the world is this article about?
Amazing revelation: dual core processors can do two things at the same time?! You must be kidding me. Any properly threaded application can take advantage of dual cores--there's no need to dream up scenarios where someone could be *gasp* doing multiple things at once.
I don't mean to sound harsh, but I'm confused as to why this is newsworthy.
But Windows really does have truly horrific levels of fug (in the Pratchettian sense of 'air so full of toxic waste you can cut it with a knife') in it.
What's worse, though, is the people who think that kind of fug is inevitable and somehow desirable, and don't believe that other systems are less messed up.
I don't do PC's anymore outside of work where we have everyone clamped down pretty tight so I had kind of lost touch with how bad it really was out there. Last week I had one of my users bring in his PC that was locking up on him and doing the usual "strange stuff" that users talk about. I really never did get around to trying to fix anything though.
I sat in awe as the thing, with no programs open and nobody touching it spent most of the day fighting it's own little virus/spyware battle. Between Symantec and the (easily) half a dozen anti-spyware programs he had installed the computer sent a constant stream of pop-up windows coming at me warning me about assorted files and registry keys it thought suspicious and busily scanning it's ass off.
I wondered how he got any work done on the thing with it spending so much in the way of resources on "self defense". This is the answer in Windows world, they're going to eventually sell you a PC that's really two in one with the first one dedicated to just running the OS and all this crap you have to buy to keep from being bent over by the virus writers and the other virus writers who create spyware/adware.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
One Core for me and one Core for all my dead homies.
I run XP on a 850 MHz P3, with 384MB of RAM.
It can't run games, but that's not due to excess spyware and crap, but because it's old.
I honestly don't know why someone would want to run anti-spyware, anti-virus software all the time when a tiny bit of awareness about what runs on your system keeps it completely clean, much less buy a dual-core machine just to run the crap on.
But then this is PCMag. I bet they all run IE and Outlook...
http://www.getfirefox.com/
If you want to use Wordperfect 5.1, go for it. But I like a word processor to do a little more for me now a days, and that includes all the nifty things OpenOffice and Microsoft Office can do for me.
Maybe you don't write system documentation or work with complicated spreadsheets, but I do, and I welcome the feature rich applications available today.
Stop spreading your FUD. You don't need a 2Ghz machine to run a word processor. A 350Mhz Pentium II will run Open/Microsoft Office just fine, assuming you have enough memory.
But since we HAVE 2Ghz+ machines, everything runs faster. I mean, hey, you don't NEED a car that can go above 65MPH, but it's sure nice to have one huh?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Actually, I think the PC mag article hits the nail right on the head. The point of of a dual core machine is to run simulanious processes that need to execute side by side.
Now, we all know that most of our processes are input bound, not compute bound. They spend the vast majority of their time waiting for user input. Game are an exception: they both continually process changing data and wait for user input (that's why they are such good benchmarks). Most everything else, however, is input bound. However, many of the processes that run in the background are compute bound, input has little effect on them.
Now in my mind the best way to use a second core is to a) lump all your input bound processes on one core, and your background compute bound processes on the other (like anti-virus, firewall, maybe music, etc.) or b) run compute bound processes on each at the same time (game on one, factor large prime numbers on the other). Either way, there is almost no point in placing seperating the input bound processes between the two cores. This means that unless you are clever about how you divide the work, you aren't going to get much out of it.
...En að Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað Er Nýr Dagur
Windows XP is multi-threaded. Without this it would be much more painful to switch between multiple tasks running on your windows computer.
... "I won't let information get in the way of the fight against terrorism" .. a direct quote of Bush recently while he was trying to place the blame of his bad decisions on the intelligence agencies that he refused to listen to in the first place.
... "in the way of the fight against windows"
When hyper-threading came out, we all found out the benefits of multi-threaded windows with the virtual second CPU. Systems ran much smoother, I found it much easier to get more done at my GIS / CAD / programming job, where I no longer had to wait 10 minutes to switch between a large ACAD file, and a ArcMap application running at the same time.
Dual core turns that virtual second CPU into a real second CPU. The average computer user who multi-tasks constantly, probably without even realizing it will not only feel a much smoother system, but more of his applications will be getting real work done at the same time.
There's a great review and multi tasking test at www.anandtech.com which proves the advantages will be huge.
But, as always, its much more important for slashdot to twist any great new technology into some way to prove windows is the devil.
Me thinks slashdot now runs very much the way george bush runs
Or in slashdot's case
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
hint: web sites should not need instructions.
A lot of the systems folks that I've been hearing from and things that I've been reading have suggested that, like it or not, multi-core systems are the way of the future. The argument is that the clock-speed aspect of Moore's law has been slowing down for the past couple of years and that we've seen single processors that are as fast as they'll go with current chip design and fabrication technology. (Barring fundamental breakthroughs, of course.) Hence parallelism and multi-core systems.
I think the point is that it's not really a choice between clock speed and parallelism. You may still have a choice at the moment, but don't expect that to continue. Developers will have to start learning to deal with parallelism if they don't want to fall off the performance curve. I expect we'll start seeing methods, tools, languages and libraries to help developers manage it easily while avoid the common dangers of deadlock and inconsistency. There's some interesting research in the area and we may start seeing some of that find its way into production systems. And of course once developers start adopting parallelism, consumers will in turn begin to see the benefits of it.
In some ways its an obvious message if you look at supercomputers. No one's running serial code on petahertz machines! They're all just systems with large numbers of fairly pedestrian processors with custom fast, low-latency interconnects. As always, this is just the natural trickling down of that to the desktop level.
>> Or get a router
You can buy a router, and it is a really good idea, but most users will still click "yes" on whatever dialogue pops up on the screen. Your average user doesn't know what a "binary" is...
It might I think if you did devote a second core purely to spyware/virus/babysitting it would only reduce the problem but not remove it.
smarter PC usage is the answer, not more hardware...
http://request-header.info
yes, but to get a dual core computer, you wont have to spend an extra $400 on a special mother board, you won't have to spend the full price for a second CPU.
Instead you will pay the usual price for the motherboard, and around $80 more than the cost of a single CPU.
Intel and AMD need to sell the dual core CPU's cheap to get them in the market fast, so that all those lazy programmers will actually take advantage of the new hardware out there.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
I'm running Firefox 1.0.2 on FreeBSD and I get asked if I want to download an .html file. I've seen this before on a couple of occasions with Firefox - even on Windows. Their Apache is misconfigured.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
He probably has 25+ pieces of unnessesary crap running at startup.
Why does every coder that writes a Windows app think it has to run at sartup?
The only things that should ever run at startup, in the background, are: AV, mobo, video, sound, and anti spyware. Anything else is a waste of resources.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
maybe it's just me, but I like having gaim start up when I login.
Wait a couple months til when you can buy the processor and motherboards and assemble yourself.
You will only be paying ~$80 more for the dual core CPU, and the usual price for the motherboard.
But if you're the kind of dumbass who buys crappy Dell systems filled with their borderline functional generic parts, with tremendous price markups, then maybe you deserve to be separated from your money.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
Not True, get with the times.
... Oracle is an example.
... one socket, but takes full use of hyperthreading .. a second virtual CPU, and will do the same with two cores in one socket.
... 2 dual core processors.
Microsoft said 6 months or so ago that one socket = one CPU. Other software vendors that license based on CPU did the same
XP Home will take one physical CPU
Similarly, XP Pro will make full use of two sockets
Loose some of your hate for windows, and you might just get to take advantage of all this tasty new technology.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
What was said was not FUD. FUD is what you try to instill in another's mind if you want to discourage them from choosing a competitor's product or service or point of view, even.
The original comment was about proper, concise coding. That doesn't happen often because programmers typically build upon older legacy code because there's no time, money or organizational will to start from scratch.
Funny you should say that on today of all days. I spent a big chunk of the afternoon finalizing some of the documentation for launchd.
The traditional UNIX startup model calls for a lot of tasks to be fired off at boot time, one after the other. Whether you use init scripts or rc scripts or whatever, the model is the same.
In Panther, we created a fairly sophisticated system for firing off these tasks in parallel instead of serially. The net result was a decrease in cold-start times of about 100%.
Now we've got launchd. The idea now is that instead of making the user wait for a bunch of services to start, we let launchd fire them both in parallel and asynchronously.
I don't want to get extremely specific here for reasons I hope are obvious, but on modern (i.e., dual-G5) hardware, the time from the end of power-on tests and the initialization of Open Firmware to the menu bar and dock appearing and the system accepting user input is as little as four seconds.
Four seconds to cold-boot the operating system.
Pretty impressive, no? All it takes is a willingness to look at the traditional way of doing things, recognize massive stupidity, and correct it.
In fact, Windows XP SP1 with AVG *and* a software firewall ran office and home apps faster on my old C433/256 than Mandrake 9.2 *or* FreeBSD 4.3 with no A/V or firewall. But, since I dare say so on Slashdot, I'm either a liar or a paid Microsoft shill.
-
Inventor of the term 'pardon my French'.
"Of about 100%?" I'm way too sleepy. Obviously I meant of about 50%.
I like to have my servers start up automatically, vsftpd, sshd, apache, etc.
I mean, hey, you don't NEED a car that can go above 65MPH, but it's sure nice to have one huh?
Considering the speed limit on the freeway I take to work every day is 75mph... yes, I do need a car that can go above 65.
Also, running a car at its top speed isn't good for the engine. Running a processor at its top speed doesn't really affect it one way or another.
More power just gives developers an excuse to use more resources. There is no reason a word processing program should lag on a 2+ ghz processor... but there is so much bloat in the program because software vendors feel the need to use up all that extra processing juice that it does...
Using up all resources can be good, for example games will eventually want all of both cores. The second will have extra eye candy. For example extra smoke and dust particles in a racing game. Yes, that example was stolen from a GDC lecture. Here's another GDC example, single core: static sky clouds, dual core: procedurally generated sky, clouds forming and breaking up.
What the PC Mag writer neglected -- or was oblivous to -- is the fact that those other processes occupying the second (or hereafter known as "wasted") core use a hell of a lot of I/O. A virus scanner scans everything going into the secondary storage. Sure, you have effectively two processors, but that doesn't do you any good if one of those processes is constantly scanning stuff on the hard drive. You're not going to be able to run Norton and Half-Life at the same time, no matter how fast the processor.
The point is that you shouldn't have to have all of those I/O bandwidth-hogging "crutches" (such as virus scanners, spyware scanners and the like) stealing your machine's I/O bandwidth. The title of this article has it right: you already do need a more powerful machine just to keep Windows "chugging" along.
If it's not one thing it's your mother.
People bitch about the 20% or so worst case overhead for a secure microkernel, and then they want to tie up a processor running anti-virus software. This is like dealing with a roof leak by install a sump pump.
Rather than bitching, why not spend a little time figuring it out? It's pretty obvious, if you think about it. Here we go. First, choose the Tools menu, because Tools always contains configuration menu options. Next, choose Customize under tools, because Customize in is where you customize menus and toolbars in Office applications (and many other Microsoft apps as well). Click over to the Options tab, because you're looking for options (the other two, Toolbars and Commands, are obviously not what you want). Looky there! I see a checkbox for "Always show full menus"! I wonder what that could do?
Yes, it's "buried", but it's buried in a logical place if you're familiar with Office products. (disclaimer: The above steps are for Word 2003. They may be different on older versions, but probably not.)
Yes, but office 97 ran just fine in a non-laggy way on my old p166. Now that developers have 20 times the clock cyles (and probably 100 times the effective speed) my PC runs about the same. Now, what features can account for that? New style browsers? New exporters? The ability to track changes? I mean, I know that Office XP has a metric assload of new features, but I can't account for any of them that should make it slow down so much... probably its just the process of loading all those unused features into memory and keeping track of them.
"Yes, it's "buried", but it's buried in a logical place if you're familiar with Office products."
I think it's also worth mentioning that one DOES need to learn to use software. It's really strange that people think the computer should know exactly what they need, display it on the screen, and nothing else.
And when they want to change something, they shouldn't need to learn to do it.
What happened there? Everything in life takes some learning, and software is certainly no exception.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Office 2003 runs just fine and non-laggy on one of my P3 500's.
The P166 came out around 1995, and Office 97 in 1997, that's 2 years lead time. The Pentium 500 came out in 1999, and Office 2003 in 2003 - that's four years lead time.
Considering those numbers, I still don't see where all this bloat is being factored in. Office 2003 has a smoother looking interface and it sports a shit load more tools, features, and UI enhancements over Office 1997 that I can see why it requires a more powerful machine.
As hardware gets better, new software utilizes it. Sure, the end result of a word processor is to put shit down on paper, usually. But that's a really simplistic way to view such a widely used and powerful peice of software.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Well since Intel is throttling back to 3.2 for these things I guess we'll have to suffer marketting crappola for a while.
Amd is releasing at 2.4 (Their fastest) as well as a 2.6 and 2.8 dual core within weeks of their first announcement. So they will just be faster and dual core so um sweet!
Well, at least I know what you mean even if the other two people that replied have no clue.
I've installed a lot of software that insists on putting something in startup. Network tools that want to put a menu in the systray, adobe software (like photoshop) that puts all this Adobe stuff in startup, and even a video encoder I have (a very nice one too) drops something in startup. Most of the media players do it, too.
It's not necessary, for the most part. While some applications have an option to turn these features on and off, most don't. It's silly.
On my workstations it's not really a big deal, but it does make startup slower and you never know what kind of instability these programs can cause while using the computer.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
As far as I can tell, it's a problem that was created from both sides. Users are always lazy (for anything and everything -- for instance, if you didn't have to pass a test to get a driver's license, nobody would ever take driving lessons and learn how to drive properly), but the industry is just as much to blame for humoring such beliefs. For example, this menu-hiding functionality was spawned directly from the belief that, "The user shouldn't need to learn how to use the software." Menu items that a user never uses, or uses rarely, will get hidden in an attempt to simplify the interface (hide functionality from users that don't use that functionality). Of course, it then pisses off the user the one or two times they do need to use that hidden functionality. I wonder how often this causes a user to believe that the software can't do what they want (when it really can, but the option is hidden), so they switch to a different application? Probably not a big problem with Word or Excel, but if TurboTax hid the option to itemize how many people do you think would switch over to TaxCut? (obligatory tax-related example, given the time of year)
In my opinion, this mind set needs to change. If you don't know how to work on your car, and you don't want to learn, then you go pay a mechanic to do it for you. The same thing should apply to softare. If you don't know how to user Word and you don't want to learn, you should be able to pay someone to do what you need. If you're too cheap to pay, then you'd better be willing to learn.
On a related topic, we geeks need to stop doing free tech support for friends and family simply because we're the people they know who "know computers". If you must help your friends and family with their computer problems, charge them money. Even better, you should refuse to help unless they've exhausted all their options. Otherwise, they'll never learn and just keep coming back every time they get a popup window they don't understand. It's the age old, "Teach a man to fish," problem.
I work regularly on a real SMP system, I and consequently I've been drooling for dual core since I first heard the x86 CPU vendors were (finally) getting around to adding it.
SMP makes a massive difference on a system - if your workloads benefit. Mine do - I spend a lot of time compiling things, and the compiling (on the right codebase) tends to scale in an almost linear way with number of CPUs. Not only does SMP make this vastly faster, but it leaves your system so much more responsive that it's hard to believe.
Even if dual core CPUs have only half the benefits (I imagine the Intel ones will, given their memory bandwidth needs) I'd still be really tempted. The power consumption is a nasty issue though.
so, file a bug report. sheesh!
Personally I'd rather see more innovation on the I/O side of the PC house. PCI-X is still only 133mhz. I'd rather see technology that would improve thing such as:
- If doing a large file transfer - requiring high disk I/O, my machine shouldn't make me walk away because it's unusable during the transfer.
not to mention that many of the programs that allow you to turn them "off" at startup just add a switch to the registry key so that they are actually just hidden. or at the very least they still slow down start up so that they can at least start to run the program, only to be shut off by the switch...
"Alcohol, cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems" -Homer Simpson
Yes, it's just you.
home
Using the second CPU for background tasks makes sense, whatever the reason the background tasks run. The reality is simply that if you have independant processes they will benefit from a second CPU - it has nothing to do with not caring about quality or going for more profit. There is also a lot of quality stuff outside of GNU as well, for example: BSD, linux, solaris, AIX etc etc - and then a lot of applications.
Why aren't you just running X instead of VNC if you want it to go fast? A few signals is going to be a lot less traffic than sending bitmaps down the wire at a high refresh rate. VNC is what you use when things that can't do X are involved. There are extensions to X that have been around for a long time that let you compress the traffic, and if your X server is old then ssh can do the compression for you.An old helldesk hacks opinion:
.exe's?) as the pure CPU.
The slowing effect of protection stuff is as much diskaccess, the growing size of binaries (ever entered a directory with a few 100MB self extracting
The main problem with protection stuff is that nowadays people seem to develop software to be able to run stand-alone on todays hardware. People that run a bit more, or use yesterdays computer are left in the cold.
However it is pretty much also the customers fault. They buy the new versions while pretty much nothing changed except the versionnumber, a new desktop theme, and something to make it up to date with buzzwords. (wifi/xml).
Stick to your old versions of aviri as long as the signatures are still on. Kill the firewall, it is useless anyway if you are patched correctly. I know that the avg user is paranoid and thinks every FW event is a threat averted, but in reality they are just a few scanning bots and nutters.
I'm only lukewarm to security (do my patches every so and so many months, and use the oldest still support McAfee engine), and no firewall, while I'm in a totally open university net. Despite that I had more dataloss and trouble from protection software than from actual malware.
Oh, and btw, if you reinstall your Windows, PLEASE disconnect the network, and install the SPs and a select few (worm) hotfixes from CD. Half of the hacked machines are hacked during install, not use.
- Develop software. Building Mozilla will quite happily consume most of your CPU for the good part of an hour.
- Burn CDs or DVDs. Burners are very CPU sensitive. I've burned a DVDs before now, absent mindedly launched something like OpenOffice, and discovered the act has turned the DVD into an expensive coaster because the buffer was emptied.
- Run a virus / spyware / Norton system check. Damn, these things are slow on a modern OS with a large disk and drag down everything else while they running.
- Run a VMWare / QEMU / DOSBox / CoLinux session. By design these things simply eat the cycles while they're running.
- Run Seti or other distributed computing apps. Two CPUs mean these things are less frequently pre-empted.
- Play or rip music. Especially Ogg format, but it applies to anything else too.
- Recode DVDs. Another CPU intensive and very long operation.
- Play games. Yes, believe it or not games often spawn secondary threads for the background music, networking and housekeeping operations.
- Run any kind of multi-threaded intensive application whatsoever. If your machine runs a Firefox, a DB, Apache, Java for example. Even a seemingly innocuous Java app like Puzzle Pirates spawns 20+ threads and consumes > 100% CPU on my dual CPU mac.
If you do any of these things more than occasionally you would benefit from a second CPU or core. Does that mean I'd pay the prices that a dual core Intel costs now? No chance. The prices are a rip off. But once the cost becomes more realistic, I'd certainly pay some more if it effectively doubled the performance of my machine when doing any of the tasks above.A decent operating system can run multiple processes at once efficiently on the main processor (and if it's got multiprocessor support, either with discrete processor chips or just multiple cores, it can do a reasonable job of spreading the load.) Doing the job right includes managing the caches of user programs and user data and the caches of system-utility programs and data, and the right way to do that is to use an operating system that's good at managing such things. And if monitoring the user's application for safety takes as much horsepower as running the user's application, that's sometimes an indication that either the user is running really really simple applications, but more often an indication that the operating system is fundamentally not very good at protecting processes from each other and needs all the help it can get.
There may be occasional interesting research applications where it's worth wasting most of the horsepower of the second core or second processor having it monitoring the rest of the system by having it run as a trusted security monitor that's outside the primary operating system. Some of the DRM systems do things like that, though their trust-enforcement chip is a lot lower in horsepower than the main CPU, because it's basically just checking on file I/O and running checksums on the IOS and the operating system used to boot the machine.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I'm tired of hearing the argument that no one NEEDS this much computing power. If we went by need, Intel would've stopped developing new chips about 3 years ago. Besides, the definition of "need" changes as people find new ways to use the extra power. Games get better looking. We can put more widgets on the desktop. We can quickly manipulate those LARGE uncompressed photos. And if we can do it all the same time? Why the hell NOT?!
Also, often times, technology progresses forward just because we CAN do it; we CAN create it. We'll figure out how to utilize that power later. But sometimes just having it is...fun! Do we really need a better reason?
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
Running a virus checker slows down your computer because of the amount of disk accesses, not because it's using up your computer's CPU power. Adding an extra core isn't going to help.
We're a small ISV. Most of our clients use Windows (certainly not because it provides a "damn good out of the box experience", it most definintely doesn't, half of our clients' machines are so screwed up with spyware that they often can't even use them anymore, half of our support calls are related to spyware in some way. They use XP because they honestly and literally don't know any better, it's absolutely the only thing they know about, it just 'comes with the computer when they buy it', and 'everyone else uses it'). I would love to work on, and develop our software for, better platforms such as OS X. However, we would not sell enough to cover our costs, because the market is too small. Thus we are effectively forced to either go out of business, or develop for Windows. If that isn't forced, I don't know what is. And so I'm still stuck using Windows most of my time, battling with crappy APIs and a rubbishy OS that's full of, as the OP said, "fug".
Of course this is the core of the real reason for the OS monoculture. People use Windows because ISVs write software for it. ISVs write software for it because most people use it. Chicken and egg.
Fortunately there are now some good cross-platform APIs, like wxWidgets, that allow a significant reduction in the costs of targetting multiple platforms. But it still ultimately costs some money to target another platform, and the sales on that platform must bring in enough income to cover those costs. In a mainstream software market this might happen, but in niche markets it's tough.
To what are you alluding? The meaning of your comment eludes me.
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
As for spreadsheets, I see them more as a rapid prototyping tool (if even that). When I want to get anything done that involves large lists of data, I write a Perl script to do the job. Mind you, Perl is a lot more powerful than spreadsheet programs, and it, too, takes a lot less system resources than any given contemporary spreadsheet program.
Of course, every (wo)man has his/her own preferences, and I don't write this to encourage everyone to use emacs/LaTeX/perl, but rather to spread the fact that you don't need even a 350 MHz PII or even 64 MBs of RAM to be productive, and that it is most certainly program design that makes Open/Microsoft Office take much more resources than really necessary. While you may not need a 2 GHz machine like the GP said, you do certainly need a lot more because of the fancy GUIs and stuff.
Meh, I regularly make spreadsheets that are full of calculated cells that depend on another spreadhseet. . . the idea being that since I generally only need to perform XXX analysis on a spreadsheet once, I can set up a system where I give the original some pre-defined name, open the analysis spreadhseet, wait for it to do the calculations, then copy and paste the analysis to save it.
Only problem is, to do, say, seven calculations per row (simple ones, like "=B2-C2" and "=LEFT(D4, 10)" ) on an external spreadsheet that has maybe 500 rows can literally take a full minute.
I shudder to think what the formula-evaluating routines in Excel must look like in order to make such a small number of calculations take so long on a computer that can theoretically perform ~three billion operations per second with the pipelines full.
In my simplistic view, a word processor should process words. I haven't noticed any inrcease in quality of writing over what was done back in the 80s with Wordstar, and no faster (in words/day) today. It reminds me of parents who think that giving their kids a more powerful computer will help them with school reports.
I'm not a kid; I've been using computers since 1977. I edit and do DTP for a living, so your assumption is wrong, and I'll thank you not to be so patronising.
There's a lot there that Word and OpenOffice Writer can do for you - advanced formatting, template based styles, automaticlly adjusting contents and indexes, liking to other documents, linking to other applications... plus a whole crap load of other things.
I know how to do all that. But when I need to, I use a real DTP app. One that does them right, not in the fucked up way Word does.
Tables of contents and indices aren't advanced; the were standard in DOS word processors.
That's totally fine, but there's a lot of folks that do use the stuff.
No one I've ever met in the last 10 years. I get dozens of Word files every year that I have to edit and turn into books. The style feature alone is impossibly fucked up. Because some users found the concept difficult, it's been made "friendly" and "intuitive", so that style definitions change automatically, when Word thinks you might want to WITHOUT ASKING YOU. Maybe you know how to turn this off, but it's certainly not the default behaviour. I spend hours removing the cruft before I can expose the structure in a file and export it to a sensible format when I can forget about Word till the next time someone sends me a file.
Thus my deep hatred for Word. I use it, I know how to, but I do so only from necessity.
A modern word processor has a lot more features that you'd find in a desktop publishing application, and one of the great things is that you can seperate the content from the formatting.
I've been doing that with Ventura and PageMaker snce about 1989.
And while theoretically you can separate content from presentation, in Word it gets harder every year. I also see the awful results when people actually do use Word for publishing.
Do you think that these people spend money and/or time to add features to the software that absolutely nobody wants?
They add features that look good in the reviews. Not in real life. It's a truism (I think Gates said it) that features sell, not fewer bugs and more efficiency. And I'll say that the quality of writing and the documents produced has not improved one iota despite all these vaunted improvements.
I subscribe to that same belief but damn it's hard. And unfortunately, even when you charge (unless you're really mercenary) it's still far cheaper than what a consultant/shop would charge so most of the time friends/family just go "Cool. Here's your cash now fix it."
Interestingly enough the one person who I've been "teaching to fish" and has actually been absorbing it is a mechanic. I believe they have the logical mindset needed to memorize instructions and follow procedures - unlike the family who are housewives, clerks, dogwashers, managers, chemists etc.