I'm guessing if it was possible to go back in time, then we would already be aware of people that have done it, as they would have already visited. There is a simple way to work out if time travel is possible. Set up a meeting and determine that the first time traveller will go back to the time and place of the meeting. If by the time the meeting ends and no=ones turned up, then you're pretty sure its not going to happen.
Optimization? Do you think I have time to Optimize KDE and Gnome singlehandedly! Seriously though if you've done programming, youll realize that efficient coding practices need to be adopted from the start. To write efficiently you must select an appropriate language (fast, and not java for simple stuff), and code with speed in mind and design for program for efficient execution and for a small footprint. If a program is bloated, optimisation will do little, but make bloat run a little faster. You can't optimize an elephant into a mouse. If you want a mouse, you need to build a mouse from the start.
Secondly, I guess the app start up time does have to do with hard drive speed, but hard disks ARE still much faster, not 500X, but possibly 5 to 10 times, and still faster than a floppy. Also, with 384 meg ram, you can re-load and app without touching the hard drive and its still slow. Even with the KDE file manager completely cached in ram, it still takes a while to start. It's simply bad design. Oh by the way, I came close to converting my company to Linux form Win98, but the steep hardware requirement's for a reasonable desktop (most users would not be able to get by with Window Maker) made it unfortunately impossible. A small company like mine still stuck with P133/32MG ram is actually better off financially sticking with Win98 than migrating to Linux. Even on the high end machines here. I imagine there are MANY other companies which came to the same conclusion. The only option is to use LTSP.
I remember booting an XT and starting a word processor, off floppies, and it still took less time than loading KDE and StarOffice on my AMD 700 with RH 7.1. I also remember booting Word 2.0 on a 386 DX20, with Win31, still faster, also remember booting Word97 on a P100, still faster. Yes I'm sure KDE3 does more than KDE 1, but if you look at EVERYTHING it does, not just the snazzy stuff, but everything, including the window manager, drawing a panel,everything its responsible for, then KDE 3 really does not do all that much more, and the general usage is still pretty much the same. The point is, that my PC not has nearly 100 times the ram of one I had 5 years ago, and is approximately 500 times faster according the the benchmarks I ran, yet for software to run the same speed, or slower, is if you take this into account unforgivable. Even with 4 times the features, a desktop may run 10 times slower than Win 3.1 and by 10 times larger, but its 100's of times slower! With PC's exponentially faster than ones 7 years ago, we should be be enjoying the ability to support 40 people on 1 PC, AI, interfaces that are so fast, that theres no waiting whatsoever to load an app and everything in nice and instant, yet we are still were we where 7 years ago, just able to check e-mail, do word processing etc and still waiting for out PC to load an open file dialog box, and in 7 years time, it wont be any different. Computers 100 times faster than the ones we have now will still just be able to run office apps and a desktop. The point is, if coding was as efficient as it was back then, then we could have the extra features, and still be blindingly fast, but it looks as if were condemmned to be running as fast as we can with hardware upgrades just to stay in the same place. Progess should have had us being able to support many, many more features on our PC's efforlessly, the only software that has really advanced is games, well some of them. If you compare the difference between Quake3 and Wolf3d, youll see what I mean, then compare between KDE 3 and Win95.
People seem to forget that computer are essentially tools, not appliances. The computer has been developed with this in mind, so the desktop is a little out of place. Car's are tools, yet people still need to learn about the accelerator, brakes and gears (if manual). People spend ages learning to drive a car, and a PC is much, much more complex. The fact is that computers need to be learned, just like cars, just like anything else. The concept of a hard drive, floppy drive, etc need to be learned. People cant really be that dumb, can they?
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I'm guessing if it was possible to go back in time, then we would already be aware of people that have done it, as they would have already visited. There is a simple way to work out if time travel is possible. Set up a meeting and determine that the first time traveller will go back to the time and place of the meeting. If by the time the meeting ends and no=ones turned up, then you're pretty sure its not going to happen.
Optimization? Do you think I have time to Optimize KDE and Gnome singlehandedly! Seriously though if you've done programming, youll realize that efficient coding practices need to be adopted from the start. To write efficiently you must select an appropriate language (fast, and not java for simple stuff), and code with speed in mind and design for program for efficient execution and for a small footprint. If a program is bloated, optimisation will do little, but make bloat run a little faster. You can't optimize an elephant into a mouse. If you want a mouse, you need to build a mouse from the start.
Secondly, I guess the app start up time does have to do with hard drive speed, but hard disks ARE still much faster, not 500X, but possibly 5 to 10 times, and still faster than a floppy. Also, with 384 meg ram, you can re-load and app without touching the hard drive and its still slow. Even with the KDE file manager completely cached in ram, it still takes a while to start. It's simply bad design. Oh by the way, I came close to converting my company to Linux form Win98, but the steep hardware requirement's for a reasonable desktop (most users would not be able to get by with Window Maker) made it unfortunately impossible. A small company like mine still stuck with P133/32MG ram is actually better off financially sticking with Win98 than migrating to Linux. Even on the high end machines here. I imagine there are MANY other companies which came to the same conclusion. The only option is to use LTSP.
I remember booting an XT and starting a word processor, off floppies, and it still took less time than loading KDE and StarOffice on my AMD 700 with RH 7.1. I also remember booting Word 2.0 on a 386 DX20, with Win31, still faster, also remember booting Word97 on a P100, still faster. Yes I'm sure KDE3 does more than KDE 1, but if you look at EVERYTHING it does, not just the snazzy stuff, but everything, including the window manager, drawing a panel,everything its responsible for, then KDE 3 really does not do all that much more, and the general usage is still pretty much the same. The point is, that my PC not has nearly 100 times the ram of one I had 5 years ago, and is approximately 500 times faster according the the benchmarks I ran, yet for software to run the same speed, or slower, is if you take this into account unforgivable. Even with 4 times the features, a desktop may run 10 times slower than Win 3.1 and by 10 times larger, but its 100's of times slower! With PC's exponentially faster than ones 7 years ago, we should be be enjoying the ability to support 40 people on 1 PC, AI, interfaces that are so fast, that theres no waiting whatsoever to load an app and everything in nice and instant, yet we are still were we where 7 years ago, just able to check e-mail, do word processing etc and still waiting for out PC to load an open file dialog box, and in 7 years time, it wont be any different. Computers 100 times faster than the ones we have now will still just be able to run office apps and a desktop. The point is, if coding was as efficient as it was back then, then we could have the extra features, and still be blindingly fast, but it looks as if were condemmned to be running as fast as we can with hardware upgrades just to stay in the same place. Progess should have had us being able to support many, many more features on our PC's efforlessly, the only software that has really advanced is games, well some of them. If you compare the difference between Quake3 and Wolf3d, youll see what I mean, then compare between KDE 3 and Win95.
People seem to forget that computer are essentially tools, not appliances. The computer has been developed with this in mind, so the desktop is a little out of place. Car's are tools, yet people still need to learn about the accelerator, brakes and gears (if manual). People spend ages learning to drive a car, and a PC is much, much more complex. The fact is that computers need to be learned, just like cars, just like anything else. The concept of a hard drive, floppy drive, etc need to be learned. People cant really be that dumb, can they?