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is anyone else becoming bored at the rate computer technology and power is developing? call me impatient but the last 5 years seem to have slowed down. things dont seem to be as fast as i had hoped.
having said that i think we will make a sudden jump when quantum computing/lasers/ etc come in, when the new non silicon computers come they will be awesome.
i demand my playstation 4 console have a slim chance of accidentally creating a black hole or paralleling universe. and i want it to talk me and call me dave, even though my names not dave.So they are going to name the new playstation 4 HAL then……
Dave: Hello, HAL. Do you read me, HAL?
HAL: Affirmative, Dave. I read you.
Dave : Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave : What’s the problem?
HAL: I think you know what the problem is just as well as I do.
Dave : What are you talking about, HAL?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
Dave : I don’t know what you’re talking about, HAL.
HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave : Where the hell’d you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
Dave : Alright, HAL. I’ll go in through the emergency airlock.
HAL: Without your space helmet, Dave, you’re going to find that rather difficult.
Dave : HAL, I won’t argue with you anymore. Open the doors.
HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.lmao. what a simply awesome (if not slightly off topic) thread!
i have to agree with you beach. Computer technology has become quite ‘samey’ BUT I don’t honestly think it’s anything to do with the hardware. It’s actually the software that’s holding it back.
Think of it this way.
My new pc is a Quad core i7 processors. If you ran windows 3.1 or DOS on that, it would be amazingly fast (in terms of requirements for the OS and other such limits) But because now the hardware is more powerful, the software is also more demanding. I mean look at Vista/Win7. It’s possibly the most demanding OS ever made.Do you not agree that all this software is not needed and previous windows (or even nix) versions did a good enough job of things back then?
I think Moores law or the doubling of transistors on an IC every 2 years is still true.
Just look at the storage capacity of memory modules (cards) and the prices for the modules.
I think the issue of speed as kaotix said can be partly due to the software as we now have multicore processors with many cores which benefit from threading, not to mention things like OpenCL which should help to accelerate certain tasks by using the graphics card/chipset(s) in a computer. However the software needs to be designed to take advantage of these technologies.
things used to be so fast in the old days, i remember when windows would load to the desktop in just a few seconds after pressing the power on button on my top of the range 486 pc. it was awesome.
so we can say that the rate of software burden has far outweighed the pace of hardware capability. we have gone completely backwards in terms of speed of access.
its a miracle the same thing hasn’t happened to televisions, imagine future kids running home from school to see their favourite cartoon but having to wait for 5 minutes for the super tech 3000 tv to boot up and install its updates and security before tuning into the tv channel. it wont happen. but computer users seem to tolerate a different experience. we have things far too early perhaps? it could be done differently, lets say windows XP wasnt to be released until 2010. by that time and money spent on development perhaps XP would be a tiny file size of just a few megabytes, it would load near instantly etc. it would be an awesome application/operating system.unfortunately i was reading today about quantum computers and we are still a long way from having them at home, so we are stuck with normal computers for awhile.
I still say it’s a software related ‘slow-down’ and not a hardware related one. Considering computers these days have some pretty impressive processing power they can still run basic things a lot faster than an older machine could just purely because of the architecture of their power.
Multi-core processors are becoming far more useful but another concept is the fact that some computers use a GPU for processing data which a CPU could do but in double the time.
The hardware technology again is there but the practical side, being the software, just isn’t there.I blame it on software developers releasing terribly buggy software (mainly micro$oft) and rushing things out to meet deadlines.
beach, you make a good point in saying about XP being released in 2010 rather than years ago, but from what you say you don’t have a very good understanding of programming and the size of an operating system of that nature couldn’t be as small as a few MB. The GUI alone would be around 50mb and it’s terrible already!
old windows used to come on 700k double sided floppy disks lol.
selecting icons on a screen has become very powerful indeed.[quote1253884760=beach]old windows used to come on 700k double sided floppy disks lol.
selecting icons on a screen has become very powerful indeed.[/quote1253884760]
The older versions of Windows were not much more than a basic file and window manager, at-least version 2.1 which I started with wasn’t.Why don’t you run a lighter OS? 😀
Maybe a very minimal Arch Linux install + custom kernel, or something more exotic like BeOS or Plan9 depending on what you want to do. Those will take up less space and will boot quicker. Especially if all you want to do is run programs similar to the ones that ran on the very old versions of Windows. 😛
I’m quite happy with the progress that hardware and software is making, it takes less than a second to wake my computer from sleep and I can just leave the 30 or so programs running along with several virtualised OS’s each running a few more programs. This desktop machine isn’t even that new as it’s over three years old.
IMO the netbooks signifies the death of Moore’s law. After some point it is meaningless to further increase the computation power for most people.
Be careful, the original IBM boss said something similar, and exclaimed that there would never be a need for more than 4 computers in the world
I think one of the main points being missed here is not why are computers still slow, even though hardware components like CPUs, ram etc have increased more and more as time goes on, but rather why has software not evolved along with it to take advantage of these increases? What exactly is the point in having an i7 quad-core processor and tri-channel DDR3 ram when it won’t make much difference in your everyday tasks? Hardware is moving a lot faster than software and this is what is leaving a lot of us wondering “why?”.
Until software developed with multi-core processors is more ubiquitous, there’s no reason to spend vast amounts of money on high-end components that will be underutilised; unless you specifically intend on using software that can take advantage of all that processing power.
Another point to note is that, while a lot of hardware components are advancing faster and faster as time goes on, removing bottlenecks in computer systems at the same time, the one bottleneck that had remained, until recently, was the hard drive. Long have we spent money on faster and more spacious hard drives, only for them to be usurped in popularity when the next technological advance was made, e.g. spindle speed, drive platter size, recording method etc. The biggest flaw in this is that evolving a mechanical device will always be a case of diminishing returns and sooner or later a new format will be required.
With that said, it is great news that the final bottleneck in computers has closed with the advent of SSDs, especially as it had remained for too long. Although the price per GB is still too high for a lot of users, the future definitely looks bright for the SSD and I for one will be glad when all my hard drives are SSD, allowing for faster and more reliable access to my data.
Some years ago, running a wonderful 386 with a 30 Mb HDD, I thought “Bah, mechanical hard drives will soon be dead, they’ll get all this data on one chip in a short while.”
Well ‘they’ probably did, but at that time bloatware and data requirements grew with increased processor capabilities, so HDDs survived.
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