Breaking backwards compatiblity

[H. S. Teoh]

On Sat, Mar 10, 2012 at 04:08:28PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> My Apple IIc literally had more responsive text entry than at least
> half of the textarea boxes on the modern web. Slowness is *not* a
> hardware issue anymore, and hasn't been for a long time.

Ugh. You remind me of the early releases of Mozilla, where loading the
*UI* would slow my machine down to a crawl (if not to a literal stop).
Needless to say actually browsing. I stuck with Netscape 4 for as long
as I could get away with, and then switched to Opera because it could do
everything Mozilla did at 10 times the speed.

Sad to say, recent versions of Opera (and Firefox) have become massive
memory and disk hogs. I still mainly use Opera because I like the
interface better, but sometimes I have the misfortune of needing Firefox
for some newfangled Javascript nonsense that the GUI team at my day job
were arm-twisted to implement by the PTBs. Running *both* Firefox and
Opera simultaneously, with some heavy-duty Javascript going on in
Firefox, routinely soaks up all RAM, hogs the disk at 99% usage, and
renders the PC essentially unusable. Exiting one (or preferably both) of
them immediately solves the problem.

And people keep talking about web apps and the browser as a "platform".
Sigh.


> You know what *really* happens when you upgrade to a computer that's,
> say, twice as fast with twice as much memory? About 90% of the
> so-called "programmers" out there decide "Hey, now I can get away with
> my software being twice as slow and eat up twice as much memory! And
> it's all on *my user's* dime!" You're literally paying for programmer
> laziness.

Or worse, "Hey look! We can add goofy animations to every aspect of our
UI to hog all CPU and memory, because users love eye-candy and will be
induced to upgrade! We get a kickback from our hardware manufacturers
and we sell more software without actually adding any new features! It's
a win-win situation!"


> I just stick with software that isn't bloated. I get just as much
> speed, but without all that cost.

I'm constantly amazed by the amount of CPU and memory needed to run a
*word processor*. I mean, really?! All of that just for pushing some
characters around? And I thought word-processing has been solved since
the days of CP/M. Silly me.


> (Again, there are obviously exceptions, like video processing, DNA 
> processing, etc.)
[...]

And povray rendering. :-) Or computing the convex hull of
high-dimensional polytopes. Or solving the travelling salesman problem.
Or inverting very large matrices.  Y'know, actual, *hard* problems. As
opposed to fiddling with some pixels and pushing some characters around.


T

-- 
Tech-savvy: euphemism for nerdy.