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Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd
Hammered by the finance of physics and the weaponisation of optimisation, Moore's Law has hit the wall, bounced off - and reversed direction. We're driving backwards now: all things IT will become slower, harder and more expensive.
That doesn't mean there won't some rare wins - GPUs and other dedicated hardware have a bit more life left in them. But for the mainstay of IT, general purpose computing, last month may be as good as it ever gets.
Going forward, the game changes from "cheaper and faster" to "sleeker and wiser". Software optimisations - despite their Spectre-like risks - will take the lead over the next decades, as Moore's Law fades into a dimly remembered age when the cornucopia of process engineering gave us everything we ever wanted.
From here on in, we're going to have to work for it.
It's well past the time that we move from improving performance by increasing clock speeds and transistor counts; it's been time to move on to increasing performance wherever possible by writing better parallel processing code.
Source: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/24/death_notice_for_moores_law/
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @01:38PM (17 children)
I am using 10 to 25 yr old machines with no all on one chip. Real hardware. So I can change what I need too. The death to computers started to me was the sound card modems. Make the cpu do all the work. Waste cycles doing work that was done else where. It is why computers whole machine was not gotten faster in the last 10 yrs. cpu wasting cycles not doing real work. Earle 2000 I had a k6 computer that out preformed the newest p4 machines with twice the clocks. It has acidic card and drives so cpu was wasting it time talking to and controlling the drives.
You are right is time to get back to real software design. But also REAL hardware design.
I am an old school programmer that started with machines that had 12k of memory and 2x 5M disks. Machine was the size of two refrigators. That ran a company of $1B dollars. Yes the new computers can put that to shame but it would not be replaced with but 100’s so in the end cost more be more waste full of time and money.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:01PM (10 children)
A kindred spirit you are. I wish you and others like you (positive contributors) would get and use a login here. I like having a conversation with someone I can somehow remember and chat with again.
Actually I have at least 1 16-bit ISA soundcard + modem that is _not_ "WinModem"- real sound and modem processors on the ISA card.
I do have an ISA "WinModem" - surprising thing- must hog up lots of ISA bandwidth. Otherwise they are PCI (DMA).
I was not a fan of WinModems when they first came out, but at some point CPU power got to the point of them being viable (IMHO).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Sunday January 28 2018, @02:25PM (2 children)
All the stuff being done by the CPU has more implications than just speed. If the code runs on the main CPU, any vulnerabilities are ways to compromise the computer. With dedicated hardware, all you would get access to by exploiting bugs in it would be that hardware.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @10:21PM (1 child)
and all memory you mean, since the hardware designers never bothered to compartmentalize or put security in. Just look at firewire. Heck, just look at meltdown, just letting an unpriviledged process read kernel memory "I'm sure we can fix it up later well enough".
That few people bothered to exploit dedicated hardware doesn't mean they had any fewer security issues. It usually means it's harder to do and it would affect fewer people. That doesn't make it a solution at all.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday January 29 2018, @05:18AM
I don't see how hacking a modem hanging on the serial port would in any way allow to compromise your computer. Unless there's an additional vulnerability in the serial driver that the attacker can exploit, of course. But that's a further line that has to be broken. Remember, security is not an absolute; there is no "secure", there is only "less secure" and "more secure".
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @03:07PM (3 children)
Actually I do have an account. Signed in the first few weeks. I just like AC since my history does not affect me. I am always one vote away from dropping off a discussion. It is both a plus andimus.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday January 28 2018, @06:49PM (2 children)
This ain't Slashdot buddy. You don't even need your Mulligan because you won't be modded down unless you get racial or insult Larry Wall.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @08:00PM (1 child)
Its been here too. Remember slash code holds this site up. My AC was blocked for a few more NTSB. But I pointed out they only blocked one machine me out 8 I use all the time. Then I have VMs to give extra access.
But again live on the bleeding edge. One vote and I am gone. One vote makes me relevant. This means having to be sure to make meaningful posts that may support or not the conversation. I started doing this once my account was untouchable was preset to post higher because of my points. I like the work to it.
(Score: 1) by linuxrocks123 on Monday January 29 2018, @12:22AM
You know you can just check "No karma bonus", right?
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Monday January 29 2018, @09:09PM (2 children)
And of course don't forget WinPrinters too. Printers that would only work on windows because the print engine was done in the driver software. The hardware was completely dumb and unusable on it's own.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday January 30 2018, @12:34AM (1 child)
Ugh. WinPrinters. I had completely blissfully forgotten about them. Why'd you remind me. I've never touched one. I remember when they came out I just felt like the world was going a bad direction. I was already running Linux and who knows what else. I don't remember if you could set up Windows as a print server in those days; regardless, it just seemed like a terrible thing to be bound to an MS product, and who knows if it would work in the next Windows update or version. I'm glad they faded away.
(Score: 2) by ilsa on Tuesday January 30 2018, @10:00PM
IIRC, Windows was capable of acting as a print server for as long as networking was a thing. As early as Windows 3.1 I believe. But that still meant you needed to have a windows machine sitting on your network, as networked printers were still very very rare and expensive.
But agreed. I'm glad all those Win-things were just a passing fad.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @06:26PM (4 children)
I bought an external modem since Linux at the time couldn't handle my winmodem; the best part was that the external modem had a physical off switch (an actual toggle switch!) that gave me the ability to shut down the connection whenever I did something stupid (like send an email that I instantly regretted - I could shut down the connection before the email was fully sent through the modem).
My first hard drive (on a 25MHZ 486 laptop) had 100MB capacity. Twitter for iOS is listed in the iTunes store as 189.6MB, almost twice the size of my original hard drive. Twitter for macOS is listed at 5MB. The difference probably comes down to coding style and frameworks and Swift's bloat. What can be done (by the same company) in 5MB is done in 190MB, because the iOS dev team just doesn't care.
There's plenty of space to optimize in the future just because our current generation is downright sinful in its wastefulness. MS knew this back in the early 2000's when they limited by edict MS web page sizes because they saw what absurd bloating was going on even back then.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 28 2018, @10:24PM (3 children)
How is a power switch a significant improvement for aborting a transfer over just pulling the phone cable?!
At least around here, the plug was similar to ethernet, so trivial to disconnect.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @01:06AM (1 child)
One is designed to repeative use. The other is designed for rare use. Break the little clip off then you break connection must easier.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 29 2018, @10:55AM
Progress eh? Sheesh, this is what the whole bitch-fest boils down to? A little plastic tab on a cable. Bitch moan waaah.
(Score: 2) by dry on Monday January 29 2018, @04:24AM
Here, the ISA modem's phone plug was around the back of the computer whereas when I updated to an external modem, it sat beside the computer with a nice accessible switch. Switching it off also saved power as those modems ran pretty hot.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday January 29 2018, @08:27AM
I'll second that. My main home computer is still an X61s Thinkpad, which is now over 10 years old. Running Slackware and XFCE, it's a bit beat up around the edges, but does browsing, light gaming and typing just fine.
The heavy number crunching is all done on the (far newer) work PC instead.