Why Your IT Spending Is About To Hit the Wall

CowboyRobot writes "For decades, rapid increases in storage, processor speed, and bandwidth have kept up with the enormous increases in computer usage. That could change however, as consumption finally outpaces the supply of these resources. It is instructive to review the 19th-century Economics theory known as Jevons Paradox. Common sense suggests that as efficiencies rise in the use of a resource, the consumption goes down. Jevons Paradox posits that efficiencies actually drive up usage, and we're already seeing examples of this: our computers are faster than ever and we have more bandwidth than ever, yet our machines are often slow and have trouble connecting. The more we have, the even more we use."

Comments

I know what you're talking about

[SpaceCadetTrav]

Despite technological advancements, it takes forever for Slashdot to load on my phone.

Re:I know what you're talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

In light of technological advanvements, better bottlenecks are being implemented.

Re:I know what you're talking about

[hairyfeet]

Which shows it isn't the OS or the hardware, its the networks. i have to wonder if the whole "buffer problem" we've been reading about here is about to hit the tipping point as it seems like everything now has big fat buffers built in and as we know the Internet model simply wasn't designed for having large buffers throw the timing all to hell.

Personally I think it is high time we use an old solution to fix a new problem...bring back the WPA. a lot of our bandwidth problems would disappear if we had nationwide FTTH or at least fiber to the neighborhood. It seems like a great way to put all those sitting at home on unemployment to work and you build it right and just as many bridges built by the WPA in rural areas still work fine so too could a well built fiber network last us for ages. this would also give us the benefits of new businesses springing up to make use of this new resource and finally kill the duopolies that have been hamstringing growth in so many areas of the country because the lines would be open to competition.

I truly believe if we don't do something radical like bring back the WPA we will end up staying on the short bus to the info superhighway because the corps can make more money by throttling and cherry picking than by actually growing their businesses and in our short sighted corp climate the quarterly reports are all that matters. i know that even though my home town has grown by more than a third neither the cable nor DSL has moved an inch in a good decade or more. They would rather just add caps and sit on the big wads of money than actually add new customers. If we don't change this situation we are gonna end up being left behind so its high time we put those unemployed to work building us a new broadband infrastructure.

Re:I know what you're talking about

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not the networks, it's the morons in charge of the content.

Slashdot should load 10X faster than it does, but the uneducated developers and designers put in a lot of crap that is not needed to add in "pretty" that does not add to the content at all.

So slashdot now takes over 10X in bandwidth and processing power to deliver the same content it did 8 years ago. All so I can gave some web 2.0 crap that does nothing at all.

But it's not just slashdot. ALL websites are bum rushing the add more crap idea. Facebook takes 10X longer to load from 5 years ago, CNN, ESPN, etc.. all of them have went from hiring competent people that understand that adding more data to send to the viewer is bad , to a bunch of morons that use every JS toolkit known to man so I download 40mb of libraries before the page loads. Some JS is useful. Good programmers put in the libraries only what is needed, posers put in the whole damn library. This same trend is on Desktops and phones. android and IOS suffer from this as well.

It is about to hit the wall because low paid low skill developers are what companies hire compared to highly skilled people that will do it right.

Re:I know what you're talking about

[jmorris42]

> But it's not just slashdot.

No it isn't. If the average visitor isn't impacted the devels don't care. But if the average user were impacte dthey would. Which is the problem with the concept under discussion. The belief that bloat MUST be therefore there being nothing that can be done we are all doomed to spend ourselves into poverty fighting a problem that will never exist.

Because as soon as it becomes a problem, suddenly the average pageview will suddenly be able to shrink in half without impacting usability at all and if that doesn't do it it can cut in half again with minimal impact. And it isn't just webpages, most everything suffers the same bloating. Does a simple little game that was a 50K download on Palm OS really need to be a 1MB app on Android or iOS? Nope. But because users don't care the developers don't care either. And again, if the first part of that statement changes you can bet yer butt the second one will.

Short version: This is a self correcting non-problem.

Re:I know what you're talking about

[crutchy]

programmers can keep trying to make their software idiot-proof, but society will forever continue making better idiots

Re:I know what you're talking about

[dgatwood]

Does a simple little game that was a 50K download on Palm OS really need to be a 1MB app on Android or iOS?

Depends on the app. If we're talking about an all-text game, that's a little extreme. On the other hand, if it contains any image assets at all, that is probably not unreasonable.

Remember that the original Palm hardware had 240 x 160 resolution in black and white. A current-generation iPhone has 960 x 640 resolution in 24-bit color, and it is usually bundled as dual-platform for iPad, which is 2048 x 1536 in 24-bit color. So if that 50k app on Palm were nothing but uncompressed image data, you would expect the iPad/iPhone version of the app to be a whopping 96 megabytes.

Obviously image compression helps with that, and obviously an app contains content other than image assets, both of which contribute to that being something of an overestimate. That said, using that as an upper bound, a mere one megabyte doesn't sound bad at all.

There are two schools of thought

[bigredradio]

From my own observations, there are two schools of thought.

1. People who think anything older than 6 months is ancient and obsolete.
2. People who say, "if it ain't broke don't fix it!"

Seems the former spend their time fixing things and the later spend time bitching about "damn kids" and their lawns.

Re:There are two schools of thought

[HapSlappy_2222]

My lawn's obsolete! Fix it, you damn kids!

slow where

[magarity]

My work Pc is slow and has trouble connecting because of the n layers of Corp security whatnot. My home Pc is reasonably fast and always connects quickly.

Re:How things change, how they stay the same

[DarkOx]

Its still all you ever needed its just not all you'd ever want.

Re:Your mileage is not my mileage

[ColdWetDog]

... you have to realize it could be because, in the war between Urban America and the rest of the country, Urban America with its more efficient energy usage and lower distances traveled - basically won the war.

Good. Then you can eat all the Internet you want. We'll keep the food.

Yours Truly,

Rural America

(I'd expand this comment but it takes a long time to get stuff uploaded on our 300 baud lines.)

That was the stupidest thing I've read in a while.

[Brannon]

I'm not even sure where to start other than to say--technology is only ever adopted broadly if it is cost-effective to do so. The printing press wasn't successful because of some incontrovertible march of progress--it was successful because it was cheaper to make books that way than by having monks transcribe them by hand. Yes, that caused more people to read which drove up the demand for books. And I'm sure some jackass back then wrote an article saying that demand for books was accelerating at a rate that we weren't going to be able to afford enough printing presses anymore.

Human perception

[Dan East]

There are limits to what will be demanded, and we have reached them in some areas already. Audio is a good example of this. The storage and bandwidth requirements for good (as in good enough for 99% of the population) audio is now a very small drop in the bucket. How many songs can you fit on a 16 GB micro SD card the size of your fingernail? How many songs can you stream real-time at once on a typical broadband connection? We have surpassed the technical requirements for audio by such a massive margin that it isn't even a consideration when purchasing hardware or bandwidth.

There are limits to video too. These so-called "retina" displays are a good example of the resolution limit of the human eye (we passed the color depth perception limit a good decade ago). The eye cannot discern individual pixels within the normal focal range (by the time you bring it close enough to the eye to make out individual pixels, the eye can no longer keep it in focus). We have a long ways to go to be able to store and stream video at such high resolution. However we will reach it before too long. Then it's a matter of how many hours / days of video do you need to store on how small of a device, and how many video streams do you need at one time over your internet connection.

One day we'll be moving and storing movie-length retina-resolution video with the same flippant ease as MP3s today. When we've reached that point, what would we need more bandwidth and storage for? Not for anything by human consumption - and that is the key factor.