Just like moth colors, it's back to evolution and survival of the fittest. In this case, more work has become "homeland security" colored/camouflaged becuase homeland security-related work has a competitive advantage when finding funding and people find a way to work it into their proposals:-)
The (I think correctly) author argues that for many tasks we over stress optimization in places where it isn't necessary. Well and fine for tasks that it's not necessary such as the example he gives.
However, as available processing power increases, some tasks change. Many technologies follow a trajectory that starts at "unthinkable" then move to "if you have special hardware" and then move gradually to software. Often along the way, features and computational complexity are added that keep a technology barely in reach (of both HW and SW implementations). It can be many many years before some technologies settle into a stage where they can be comfortably supported in SW at acceptable performance.
Examples include: sound (which started with clicks and beeps and moved through to multichannel 3D audio), graphics, games (text-based to ever-more-complex 3D) and video codecs (simple RLE moving to ridiculously complex stuff like the H.264 codec).
In games, for example, there are often preference panels controlling which features should be disabled for performance reasons. This seems evidence that the authors/publishers feel they can't count on their customers having enough power to run the games without cutting features to gain performance.
I think for those applications where processing power trails needs and desires of customers and where optimization can make up the difference, developers will need to optimize or be eaten by the competition. In my experience, in things like codec and graphics development, you can get many-times performance increases over solid but poorly optimized implementations (sometimes even when you're just feeding HW).
Slashdot Mirror
http://animals.about.com/cs/evolution/a/aa090901a. htm
:-)
Just like moth colors, it's back to evolution and survival of the fittest. In this case, more work has become "homeland security" colored/camouflaged becuase homeland security-related work has a competitive advantage when finding funding and people find a way to work it into their proposals
The (I think correctly) author argues that for many tasks we over stress optimization in places where it isn't necessary. Well and fine for tasks that it's not necessary such as the example he gives.
However, as available processing power increases, some tasks change. Many technologies follow a trajectory that starts at "unthinkable" then move to "if you have special hardware" and then move gradually to software. Often along the way, features and computational complexity are added that keep a technology barely in reach (of both HW and SW implementations). It can be many many years before some technologies settle into a stage where they can be comfortably supported in SW at acceptable performance.
Examples include: sound (which started with clicks and beeps and moved through to multichannel 3D audio), graphics, games (text-based to ever-more-complex 3D) and video codecs (simple RLE moving to ridiculously complex stuff like the H.264 codec). In games, for example, there are often preference panels controlling which features should be disabled for performance reasons. This seems evidence that the authors/publishers feel they can't count on their customers having enough power to run the games without cutting features to gain performance.
I think for those applications where processing power trails needs and desires of customers and where optimization can make up the difference, developers will need to optimize or be eaten by the competition. In my experience, in things like codec and graphics development, you can get many-times performance increases over solid but poorly optimized implementations (sometimes even when you're just feeding HW).
I think those gains can be critical.