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Can "Page's Law" Be Broken?
theodp writes "Speaking at the Google I/O Developer Conference, Sergey Brin described Google's efforts to defeat "Page's Law," the tendency of software to get twice as slow every 18 months. 'Fortunately, the hardware folks offset that,' Brin joked. 'We would like to break Page's Law and have our software become increasingly fast on the same hardware.' Page, of course, refers to Google co-founder Larry Page, last seen delivering a nice from-the-heart commencement address at Michigan that's worth a watch (or read)."
All he has done is put numbers into Wirth's law.
I remembered this as "software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster", but Wikipedia has a slightly different wording: "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
In fact, that article also cites a version called "Gates's Law", including the 50% reduction in speed every 18 months.
K.
Make developers target a slow and memory constrained platform. Then you get stellar performance when it runs on the big machines.
Hardly. Have you never heard of space-time tradeoffs? ie, the most common compromise one has to make when selecting an algorithm for solving a problem? If you assume you have a highly constrained system, then you'll select an algorithm which will work within those constraints. That probably means selecting for space over time. Conversely, if you know you're working on a machine with multiple gigabytes of memory, you'll do the exact opposite.
In short: there's *nothing wrong with using resources at your disposal*. If your machine has lots of memory, and you can get better performance by building a large, in-memory cache, then by all means, do it! This is *not* the same as "bloat". It's selecting the right algorithm given your target execution environment.
Herb Grosch said it in the 1960's: Anything the hardware boys come up with, the software boys will piss away.