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from the perhaps-providing-prompt-prompts-prompts-perceived-performance-primacy dept.
Have you ever had that nagging sensation that your computer was slower than it used to be? Or that your brand new laptop seemed much more sluggish than an old tower PC you once had? Dan Luu, a computer engineer who has previously worked at Google and Microsoft, had the same sensation, so he did what the rest of us would not: He decided to test a whole slew of computational devices ranging from desktops built in 1977 to computers and tablets built this year. And he learned that that nagging sensation was spot on—over the last 30 years, computers have actually gotten slower in one particular way.
Not computationally speaking, of course. Modern computers are capable of complex calculations that would be impossible for the earliest processors of the personal computing age. The Apple IIe, which ended up being the “fastest” desktop/laptop computer Luu tested, is capable of performing just 0.43 million instructions per second (MIPS) with its MOS 6502 processor. The Intel i7-7700k, found in the most powerful computer Luu tested, is capable of over 27,000 MIPS.
But Luu wasn’t testing how fast a computer processes complex data sets. Luu was interested in testing how the responsiveness of computers to human interaction had changed over the last three decades, and in that case, the Apple IIe is significantly faster than any modern computer.
https://gizmodo.com/the-one-way-your-laptop-is-actually-slower-than-a-30-ye-1821608743
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Monday January 01 2018, @03:16AM (2 children)
Yes, thanks, I mentioned Alpine in one of my posts here. I've deployed Alpine mostly for NAS and it's awesome. Package management isn't what I would like it to be. Not enough detail / info. For example after running apk update ; apk upgrade, it says there was an error, but doesn't tell me what went wrong. Can't find any useful logs. Haven't put in much effort or time on it either, it's just annoying.
In my 23+ years hands-on with Linux, I've consistently said that package management is the biggest / most important factor for Linux's widespread adoption. With Linux there are so many options, if you have good package management, you can build anything you want. I was never a huge fan of RedHat .rpm, but when yum and some of the yum gui stuff came out, then with the ability to add repositories, and some great ones at that, I was sold. But then came systemd with RH7, so I'm going to migrate away soon, when RH6 updates cease. Sigh. It may be Gentoo! I'll compile on a fast machine and rsync the servers.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 01 2018, @09:27PM (1 child)
I used to be hardcore into gentoo, but I prefer crux nowadays. It's source based, but the packaging scripts are much simpler than gentoo ebuilds, very similar to arch's source packages. It's very easy to set up and does a lot of stuff right.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday January 02 2018, @01:32AM
Crux looks interesting, but is 64-bit (well, and ARM).