SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
IEEE is running a special report on "50 Years of Moore's Law" that considers "the gift that keeps on giving" from different points of view. Chris Mack begins by arguing that nothing about Moore’s Law was inevitable. "Instead, it’s a testament to hard work, human ingenuity, and the incentives of a free market. Moore’s prediction may have started out as a fairly simple observation of a young industry. But over time it became an expectation and self-fulfilling prophecy—an ongoing act of creation by engineers and companies that saw the benefits of Moore’s Law and did their best to keep it going, or else risk falling behind the competition."
Andrew Huang argues that Moore's Law is slowing and will someday stop but the death of Moore's Law will spur innovation. "Someday in the foreseeable future, you will not be able to buy a better computer next year," writes Huang. "Under such a regime, you’ll probably want to purchase things that are more nicely made to begin with. The idea of an “heirloom laptop” may sound preposterous today, but someday we may perceive our computers as cherished and useful looms to hand down to our children, much as some people today regard wristwatches or antique furniture."
Vaclav Smil writes about "Moore's Curse" and argues that there is a dark side to the revolution in electronics for it has had the unintended effect of raising expectations for technical progress. "We are assured that rapid progress will soon bring self-driving electric cars, hypersonic airplanes, individually tailored cancer cures, and instant three-dimensional printing of hearts and kidneys. We are even told it will pave the world’s transition from fossil fuels to renewable energies," writes Smil. "But the doubling time for transistor density is no guide to technical progress generally. Modern life depends on many processes that improve rather slowly, not least the production of food and energy and the transportation of people and goods."
Finally Cyrus Mody writes that it seems clear that Moore’s Law is not a law of nature in any commonly accepted sense but what kind of thing is Moore’s Law? "Moore’s Law is a human construct. As with legislation, though, most of us have little and only indirect say in its construction," writes Mody. "Everyone, both the producers and consumers of microelectronics, takes steps needed to maintain Moore’s Law, yet everyone’s experience is that they are subject to it."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:03AM
"What Intel giveth, Microsoft taketh away."
On my Mom's G4 iMac, OpenOffice's UI lags quite a lot. It's not simply noticeable it's really really slow.
Working Software's QuickLetter ran OK on a 2 MB 8 MHz 68000 Mac Plus. On a Mac IIci, QuickLetter ran like the blazes.
If you make your software run "fast enough" on the machine you use for development, then your code will be getting slower as your years progress.
You might think that's OK because we have faster computers. Consider the electricity that is consumed by your code. Test it on slow machines.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:08AM
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-beats-moores-law/ [nytimes.com]
The software just seems slower because your computer is doing a lot more. Although doing everything in JavaScript might be another story.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday April 15 2015, @04:11AM
You need an old version of Safari for this. Open the Activity window then load a few websites. You'll see lots of URLs load that are full of query parameters. Because all those URLs look different to a cache, it doesn't help at all to cache them.
There is also the problem of loading lots of stuff from multiple servers. It breaks the chunked content encoding, so we have to keep initiating TCP streams, doing more DNS &c.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday April 15 2015, @05:19AM
Yup, I've long maintained that every advancement in processing power has been absorbed by "look and feel".
Effectively, recalculating your spread sheet seems no faster today than when VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday April 15 2015, @10:50AM
Effectively, recalculating your spread sheet seems no faster today than when VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost
You might have a short memory. I remember even with Excel in Windows 3.11 it took 20-30 seconds to recalculate complex sheets and some earlier spreadsheets had an explicit 'recalculate' command so that you could choose when to pause the UI to update everything. Now, the most complex spreadsheets I have can recalculate fast enough that it's not an action that I notice.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 3, Insightful) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 15 2015, @01:53PM
Not even look and feel...Flash used to run fine but was a huge CPU hog on a 2GHz single core Pentium with one gig of RAM. Today it's a huge CPU hog on a 2.8GHz quad core i7 with 14 gigs of RAM. And the "look and feel" is identical.
I recently started playing with cpulimit and found I can crank it WAAAAY down on my browsers without *any* noticeable performance hit. Less so when using Flash, but even then I can still make some reductions. So...what's it doing with all those extra cycles? I think mostly it's just a lot of AJAX-y crap in the Javascript that refreshes way more often than it needs to. Which nobody notices because they only test if some eight core workstation can handle loading their one single website, rather than real-world use cases where you'd want a number of tabs open, a few other programs running, and all on a cheaper system to begin with.
(Score: 2) by kaganar on Wednesday April 15 2015, @01:31PM
It's true, newer software is almost always significantly slower on equivalent hardware. But I seem to remember older software at the same cost of today (especially once adjusted for inflation) almost always did less. And at the gratis price point it did a heck of a lot less. And at libre pricepoint -- well, that was hard to find unless you ran a libre OS until the millennium. People want low cost, features, and performance in that order, and developers seem to be delivering it in that order.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday April 15 2015, @09:11PM
A specific problem with OpenOffice on my mom's imac, is that if I grab the resize box with my mouse then move it around rapidly, the entire window lags behind by more than an inch. Imagine a physical window that was on the end of a rubber band, delayed by its momentum.
I expect that's because every single GUI widget is repeatedly re-rendered. What could be done instead is, during times when responsiveness is critical, to cache the widget pixels then render them from the caches. I've thought of doing just this myself for OpenOffice, but I have a lot on my plate.
Back in the day we used to do a lot of caching like that. Nowadays it's not done so much.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]