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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, @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.