Re: Bloat, bottlenecks and free tools (was Re: Ridin' Through Gateway Country, Roundin' up details.... (fwd))

["Robert G. Brown" <bob@xxxxxxx>]

>>>>With the volume of data a lot of people are handling today....
>>>Volume of data?
>>Yeah, volume of data....complete with video clips of tax experts 
>>telling you how to save money on your taxes.
>As long as the installation leaves it up to the user as to whether to copy
>the video clips to the hard drive... 
Each year they've rigged it so that the system is a little more churlish and 
suprised when it doesn't have all the latest stuff, but it's still optional.
In three years I'll wager it won't be.

>Bill Gates claimed years ago that someday, computers would be so fast that
>programmers could get away with writing inefficient software.
Lotsa people have made this claim, lotsa times, and when Bill Gates was
still using those little pads to clean ut his pimples. A LOT of WORK (and
very little of it done or paid for in Redmond) has brought us very far along
that path, with numerous approaches.

>The skyrocketing performance jumps we keep seeing are great, but too many 
>idiots use it as an excuse to write bloated, inefficient code.
Sure. A couple of the very best programmers I know learned how to program 
in the Soviet Union on machines that were about the equivalent of an 8080,
with about 16 Kb of memory (that's Kilobytes, not Megabytes, folks). While
standing on food lines, and suffering through winters with fuel shortages,
they were told to write the equivalent of DOS and a language interpreter in
under a year. This was not some elite, crack team of software engineers;
they were undergraduate students.  If they flunked out, the State found 
real secure jobs for them, somewhere, but not in Moscow, and not interesting
jobs, like writing code to compute train schedules in the Ural mountains.

So guess what? They became REALLY GOOD PROGRAMMERS!! :)

Most training environments don't have this sort of, um.... motivation. It's
hard to give to people, they either have that fire in the belly, or they don't.

>The open source community, among other things, is showing
>how much faster hardware can be when its software is written right.
Open Source assets that if you can't solve the problem well enough, let
someone else give it a shot. Eventually someone will, especially if the 
problem is bad enough. Since ANYONE can look at the code, eventually some
perfectionist will do so, and then the code will be perfect [right?]....
More or less... of course, software is never perfect, since the world con-
tinues to change.

>> A lot of the bandwidth I'm talking about is embedded, not only coming down
>> your phone line but also across the bus and out to the speakers and display
>> screen.  Think about the data movement, and tell me that people aren't moving
>> A LOT MORE DATA than they did in 1990.  Go Ahead, I dare ya! :)
>Heh. As long as you have enough bandwidth (and lack of latency), you can
>still get away with using less computing power than the industry would have
>you believe.
That's right, but they're not in the businessss of seeling you *Less* hardware.

>I'd be perfectly happy with even a 386-based Linux system as
>long as it had...
That's fine, many other people would *not* find such a system worthwhile.
I have projects that take 3-5 minutes to compile. How long would that run 
on a 386? If it were my own [hobby] work, I wouldn't care, but there are
times when I have a client on the phone and an open ftp onnection to his 
site, so I can put the resulting code out there....

>The most important thing to know about any system is where the worst
>"bottleneck" is -- what part of it slows everything else down the most?
>At least, that's been my experience. It allows you to upgrade as cost-
>effectively as possible.

>"I got it one piece at a time,
> And it didn't cost me a dime..."
>  - Johnny Cash
>
>[snip]
>> >But for home PC's I have a hard time imagining that Word Processing or your
>> >personal budget would require more than a 486.
>> As a user of WP 5.1 and quicken on an AT, I certainly agree.
>But even without "official support", hardware and software like this still
>finds widespread use, partly due to informal user groups....
And here we are, a user group!

>Just because something is old (or new) doesn't make it better (or worse). 
>All the average buyer needs is better access to objective information.
That's right. The notion of a free market is based on (among other things)
access to honest and objective information about all available products.

>>>But then I haven't really ran M$ since the Wfwg days.  I know that I
>>>had three X-terminals hooked to my 486DX33 w/ 16Mb RAM and three users could
>>>use....
>>Oh, I believe you; the fact is that you really can't set up that kind of 
>>system on anything M$ based.....
>I found TCP/IP for WfW for free downloading on Microsoft's FTP site. I've
>gotten a lot of little gems from there that make their stuff more pleasant
>to use. Other than the lack of a decent telnet daemon, I was able to get
>WfW to do everything I needed it to do -- although if I had required true
>multiuser capability, I wouldn't have hesitated to switch to Linux.
Exactly! What Adam was saying is that it doesn't take a lot of computer (by
the standards of today's market) to build what amounts to a personal time-
sharing system for the home. The catch is that you need the right software,
and that stuff don't come from Redmond.

>One of my favorite examples of free tools for Windows is the Cygnus port of
>the GNU development kit....
Sure, there are lots of those, and Open Source is not confined to Linux or
the Unices. OpenDOS is probably a fine product, but it fills the same niche 
the MS offering does here. Maybe I'll cut over to OpenDOS, but I doubt it.
Not because I particularly want to keep DOS, but more because those systems
aren't going anywhere anyway ('cept out the door), so why put more work in-
to them?

>"There's no way the federal government could oppress the citizens, because
>the populace is armed to the teeth, and the officials would just get their
>heads blown off."
 - James Madison....
Yes, The right to own weapons is the right to be free.  Similarly, the poses-
sion of source code and the licence to distribute it empowers each of us to 
innovate, and be independent players, and part of a team, if we want.

                                                      Later!
                                                         ---> RGB <---