I'm young by most coder standards (only 25), but I remember doing punch-key coding of hex that represented assembler instructions, and toggling boot code on a PDP-11.

The amount of computing power on the average desktop never ceases to amaze me -- and neither does the mentality I see where someone who plays Solitaire, uses Word, and surfs the 'Net decides a 2GHz machine with 1GB of RAM is "too slow" and drops $2K on a new box.

At home, I have a 2.4GHz box w/1GB of RAM -- I've turned swap off, because I wasn't using it. Granted, that's Linux. But at work, I have a 600MHz box with 512MB and WinXP that I've been happily using to develop Perl (using Eclipse, no less!). Most people have far more computing power available to them then they will ever need. My PHB's PDA has a 400MHz processor -- 400MHz in a glorified address book, my GOD!.

I blame two groups: marketing and development. Marketing is responsible for what they usually do: "but, you need the newest stuff, or you won't get laid!" But "new-world" developers who learned to code at universities that used dual-Xeon boxes with 4GB of RAM don't appreciate optimization and conservation of resources. It is the "well, it will be slow on anything under 1GHz, but who uses that anymore?" attitude that drives the rush to faster, hotter, more power-hungry devices.

Now, to a certain extent, processor time is cheaper than programmer time: no one needs to optimize Word for a 33MHz machine anymore. But when a 500-user web application that merely displays rows from a (separate) database needs a quad-processor Xeon to perform acceptably, we have problems. Especially when someone else (yeah, toot, toot, it was me) can re-write the thing in a week, using an Interpreted Language (Perl) via CGI and move it to a single-processor 333MHz machine.

The big question is this: "what can we do about it?" I don't think anything, except refusing to buy/use software that is needlessly bloated. But that even excludes Gnome these days...

<-radiant.matrix->
Larry Wall is Yoda: there is no try{} (ok, except in Perl6; way to ruin a joke, Larry! ;P)
The Code that can be seen is not the true Code
"In any sufficiently large group of people, most are idiots" - Kaa's Law

In reply to Re: multi-PC tasking by radiantmatrix
in thread multi-PC tasking by samizdat

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