I have only 1 criticism of your graph. Vista needs more than 10 GB HDD
space unless you are knowledgeable and turn off a bunch of stuff!
This reminds me of an article I read a while back in some computing
mag that showed that as each generation of software comes out, the
computing horse power to handle them has to be more just to keep you
flowing at the same rate as you were before. According to the
article, this is due to Applications & OS’s becoming more and more
bloated with each generation, each generation of programmers becoming
more and more “sloppy” code writers compared to programmers of the
past that had pride in the streamline architecture of their code and
the big move today to have all applications and OS’s as “Suits”
instead of focusing. With that, what use to take a task 5 seconds to
do on an 8088 machine and software of that day still takes the same 5
seconds today with today’s software even though the system’s
processing speed is now light year’s ahead of what is was in the 8088
days. The article gave specific examples of well known applications
and OS’s today and yesterday to back up some of its comparisons.
I guess someone has a real way to measure this and I have no idea if
the article holds water or not but it “sort of” made sense to me. I
can’t measure tasks in nanoseconds but I do know that it takes around
30 seconds for my 2.0 GHz machine with 1Gig memory to load XP-SP2 and
that it took my 8088 machine with 256K of memory around the same 30
seconds to load windows 3.1
There will be those that argue that we can do so much more today with
our systems than we did yesterday. True and the article was not
arguing that… it was showing that the speed with “comparable” tasks
has not changed that much even though we are now running processors
light speed ahead of what we had back in the 8088 days.
Let’s say you have a car that weighs 3000lbs with a 200 HP engine to
make it do 0 to 60 in 10 seconds. Now you get a car that weighs
4000lbs and it needs 250 HP in order to achieve the same identical 0
to 60 in 10 seconds. You got more horsepower but it still takes the
same 10 seconds to get from 0 to 60 because the car has become bloated
with extra weight. BUT… the car is bigger (more bloated) because it
has a Suit and more bells & whistles instead of a seat and just a few
knobs so… one could surmise that yes, it still takes you 10 seconds to
go from 0 to 60 but look at the style with which you are doing it in.
In closing, I think Jay Leno on the Tonight Show said it best when he
said that he finally went out and bought a computer twice as fast as
his last computer… problem was, it came with an operating system twice
as big as the one before so… he was back where he started except a
little more light in the wallet (not that Jay Leno would ever feel
lighter in the wallet).
Regards
