[lbo-talk] Vista

[Tayssir John Gabbour]

On 2/1/07, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Is this really true? I've got 768 megs of RAM running Mac OS 10.4.8,
> and I've got Mail, Safari, the Dictionary, Firefox, Word, Excel,
> TextEdit, Xtorrent, iTune, SoundStudio, Photoshop, Illustrator,
> InDesign, Preview, and the ActivityMonitor running. Plus all sorts of
> stuff behind the scenes. Sometimes it takes 15 or 20 secs to swap the
> virtual memory, but I could certainly watch a DVD too. How can there
> be such different performance?

Early adopters generally expect to be punished by both Apple and
Microsoft. And "minimum requirements" are codewords meaning "known to
install on this machine."

Software companies choose to allocate their resources among various
things. Such as new features, maintaining reverse compatibility,
performance, bugfixes, etc.  And many companies intentionally aim big
releases at computers more powerful than what is commonly available.
You can spend time optimizing your software, or just wait (pray) for
computers to increase in performance.

That said, that 2nd page of the review is pretty pointless. Upgrading
her current machine, and to a pre-release OS no less, is doomed to
failure. I'm personally fine with Win2k.


On 2/1/07, Chuck <chuck at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> The problem is that programmers and developers get used to computers
> which are incredibly fat when it comes to memory and speed. There is
> little incentive to develop lean and mean programs. Okay, maybe wireless
> devices have spawned a greater, profitable interest in lean programming.

True... And yet the flipside is that many programmers are stuck
building cathedrals out of toothpicks. They're overwhelmed with the
complexity of weak tools. The head theologians at companies like
Microsoft are perfectly aware of it.

"And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers;
we were after the C++ programmers.  We managed to drag a lot of them
about halfway to Lisp.  Aren't you happy?"
<http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/msg04045.html>


Tayssir