Re: [asa] Sense and nonsense

Merv wrote:

> Moore's law, unfortunately has a nemesis: Microsoft's law, which
> states: "For every doubling of hardware capacity and speed, the demand
> placed on it by the OS alone will triple." (I don't know if anyone
> actually has quantified this -- but it should be a law.) Remember
> when DOS based computers used to do things lightning fast from the
> command prompt? So here would be the Trekkie conclusion: Commander
> Data may be sort of like the Idiot Savant, who, when he does answer --
> says something brilliant, but he spends most of his time frozen and
> staring at the corridor wall, still booting up his thousands of support
> routines and trying to stay ahead of the new batches of ad-ware
> multiplying in his system. Every once in a while, La Forge comes by
> and presses his reset button hoping that a reboot will make him
> responsive again. (& more episode possibilities: "The Borg --- meet
> ad-ware" ... and have never been the same since.)
>
> Captain: "Data -- how much time 'till anti-matter containment fails?"
> Data: "I'm sorry -- please wait while I finish my upgrade install of
> Adobe reader v.842 after which I will need to restart." (resumes
> comatose state)
>
> --Merv

Actually it probably is worse that Merv says as most of the cpu
improvements, right at the moment are going into multi processors per
chip or chip carrier and the OSs and associated applications are not
good at using extra processors beyond two or four. Under Windows, two
is really nice as if something cpu intensive soaks one processor then
the other one is free and you can still work.

Stability, bloat, cost(I run 4+ systems)... are among the reasons I hope
to explore Linux and BSD offerings this fall. I have a couple of
applications eg Dream Weaver and PhotoShop that need winders and I will
either run them as dual boot or more likely as virtual guest machines
under some flavor of Unix. This machine that I am running right now
mainly runs Thunderbird (browser), Firefox (mail client), Boinc (for
distributed public computing such as malaria control or climate net) and
view dvds, all of which I think is possible on other operating systems.
  If anyone else is interested is seeing how this goes, has experience
and possibly converting let me know offline. A long time ago I was the
system programmer for large main frame systems so this conversion should
not be too difficult, however, my time is limited.

Dave W

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Received on Sat Jun 23 15:50:28 2007