Breaking backwards compatiblity

[Nick Sabalausky]

"H. S. Teoh" <hsteoh at quickfur.ath.cx> wrote in message 
news:mailman.439.1331415624.4860.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> 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,

I couldn't beleive that Opera actually *removed* the native "skin" (even 
what joke it was in the first place) in the latest versions. That's why my 
Opera installation is staying put at v10.62.

Which reminds me, I still need to figure out what domain it contacts to 
check whether or not to incessently nag me about *cough* "upgrading" 
*cough*, so I can ban the damn thing via my hosts file.

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

Yea. There's even an entire company dedicated to pushing that moronic agenda 
(*and* tracking you like Big Brother). They're called "Microsoft Mark 
2"...erm...wait...I mean "Google".

>
>> 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!

Yes, seriously! "And let's not bother to allow anyone to disable the moronic 
UI changes even though we (*cough* Mozilla) *claim* to care about being 
super-configurable."

> 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!"
>

That's one of the reasons I despise the modern-day Epic and Valve: 
*Complete* graphics whores (not to mention Microsoft sluts, particularly in 
Epic's case), and I don't believe for a second that what you've described 
isn't the exact nature of...what does Epic call it? Some sort of "Alliance" 
with NVIDIA and ATI that Epic was so *publically* proud of. Fuck Cliffy, 
Sweeny, "Fat Fuck" Newell, et al. Shit, and Epic actually used to be pretty 
good back in their "Megagames" days.

Portal's great (honestly I hate myself for how much I *like* it ;) ), but 
seriously, it would be *so* much better with Wii controls instead of that 
dual-analog bullshit. But unlike modern game devs I'm not a graphics whore, 
so I don't give two shits about the tradeoff in visual quality ('Course 
that's still no free ride for the lazy crapjobs that were done with the Wii 
ports of Splinter Cell 4 and FarCry - it may not be a 360/PS3, but it sure 
as hell is no N64 or even any sub-XBox1 machine, as the "modern" gamedevs 
would have me believe).

>
>> 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.
>

Ditto.

>
>> (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.
>

Yup. Although I like to count non-realtime 3D rendering under the "video 
processing" category even though the details are very, very different from 
transcoding or AfterEffects and such.

> Or solving the travelling salesman problem.

That's aready been solved. Haven't you heard of eCommerce? j/k ;)