Re: Oh this narrow focusing on Moores Law

Michael Lorrey (retroman@together.net)
Tue, 07 Oct 1997 22:36:56 -0400

Max M wrote:
>
> Hal Finney wrote:
>
> > The real question is this: will we see a failing of Moore's law in the
> > next ten years? Will the performance per price of computers continue
> > to grow by a factor of two every two years? This would require five
> > doublings in the next ten years. I don't think it will happen.
>
> I think it's a fault to focus too much on Moores law. The funny thing is
> that nobody AFAIK has ever meassured the actual performance of a
> computer "system" instead of this focusing on the number of processor
> gates.
>
> How about in two years time when the new computer systems will be able
> to edit video in full broadcast quality, without any extra hardware. In
> two years more xDSL will probably be pretty common, so everybody will be
> able to have their own tv station. Well in theory at least.
> These things are not happening because of doubling in processor power,
> but because of changes in existing technology.

What changes are those? Your full media bandwidth would not be possible
without the processor power capable of handling that fat a signal in
realtime. Moore's Law is used by industry to plan release of both
hardware and software technologies to match consumer price expectations
without taking a bath.

>
> The Internet would have happened on a Commodore 64, if that had been the
> top level in computer sophistication possible.

BUt what then?

>
> I'm not saying that the effects of Moores law are not important but
> technology consist of two parts: hardware and methods. (In Danish theres
> a better way of putting it: Teknologi = Teknik + Metoder)
> I think that generally there's far to much focus on the hardware side of
> the equation.
>

Oh granted, bloatware is the biggest drag on the technology right now in
terms of speed. However, the only way to chop it down without giving up
capability is to dump all the filters that make it compatible with older
data and file formats. This is why its always better to keep your fonts
packed away, and not load so many file conversion filters except those
you actually use, as well as minimize the number that you do use. If you
don't like that, tough, thats the price of omniscience.

-- 
TANSTAAFL!!!
			Michael Lorrey
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mailto:retroman@together.net	Inventor of the Lorrey Drive
MikeySoft: Graphic Design/Animation/Publishing/Engineering
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