[extropy-chat] Optimal computer configurations [Was: Commentary: Does Karl Schroeder's opinion reallymatter?]

[Samantha Atkins]

On Apr 29, 2006, at 3:37 PM, Russell Wallace wrote:

> On 4/29/06, Robert Bradbury <robert.bradbury at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Memory is cheap, don't worry about it."  Bad, bad, bad!
>
> Good, good, good!

No matter how much memory there is it still takes system resources to  
manage it and access it.  Doing so inefficiently is a waste and in  
some cases can drag even a very powerful system to its needs.  Plenty  
is not an excuse to be grossly sloppy.

>
> Back in the days when you had to time share 256MB between ~30 users  
> (Harvard's undergraduate Science Center circa 1974-6) you had to  
> really pay attention to such things as memory usage and paging/ 
> swapping efficiency.
>
> Fettered limbs grow lame. As someone who learned to program on a  
> Vic-20 with 5k including system and video memory, I sometimes  
> wonder if progress will only really get going when those of us who  
> were thus mentally scarred have died off :P
>

On the contrary,  it was those limits that taught us efficiency and  
the pain of those limits that caused many of us to work diligently to  
overcome them.  We computer oldsters dreamed a deep dream of power to  
the people through technology.  And lo, it came to pass.  More or  
less.   Now there is truth in what you say in that premature  
optimization and languages designed to be easy on von Neumann  
architecture predominate in and limit software progress to this day.

> A significant limiting factor on continued progress in computer  
> hardware is demand going down because too much programming effort  
> is spent wasting computer capacity (by leaving it lying idle)  
> rather than using it to improve reliability (for a start, by  
> switching to languages other than super macro assembler! :P),  
> functionality and usability. Serious workloads like simulations  
> always need more computing power, but the people running them don't  
> have the money to pay for chip factories at several billion a pop.  
> It all comes down to the people writing programs like Firefox and  
> Doom 3 to put the power to mass use - let them be praised, not  
> criticized.


What is broken in even praiseworthy efforts MUST be criticized and  
fixed if we are to progress.  It is the hacker way from which many of  
these efforts were born and brought to fruition in the first place.

- samantha


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