Record locking

[Bill Vermillion]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2004 at 11:32:14PM -0800, Bill Campbell thus spoke:
> On Thu, Apr 01, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
> >Simon--er, no...it was Brian K. White--said:

> >> Nowadays, (at least in the windows world) it seems like
> >> every new machine with specs that say it should run twice
> >> as fast as the last, actually runs slower than the last.
> >> It's not just windows either. Linux distro's all tend to
> >> install enough gnome or kde stuff in their default "desktop"
> >> installs to bog any machine down in the finest windows
> >> tradition. Even if you "clean out the crap" from your new
> >> factory windows install, or re-install fresh leaving out the
> >> crap, it's still never exactly "fast" just "not as slow".

And the operative word there is 'desktop', where the default seems
to be "someone may want to run YYY so let's include it".  The
concept of installing only what a user asks for seems to be a thing
of the past.

> >I can attest to what you're saying.

> >On -exactly- the same P166MMX/128MB with a Barracuda 2.1Gig
> >as my linux drive, I just went from RH 5.2 running 2.0.36 to
> >SuSE 9.0 running 2.4.21-199 (which is probably equivalent to
> >2.4.25).

> You had to do some serious trimming to get SuSE 9.0
> Professional crammed into a 2.1GB hard drive. When we were
> runnin Caldera OpenLinux 1.3 with the 2.0.36 kernels,
> everything fit nicely in a 1GB partition leaving room for
> applictions. Now we're doing 5.0GB for the OS, and it will
> probably get larger (I don't spend a lot of time trying to
> trim things, preferring to have everything I normally use
> available).

A while back I found a 800MB drive from awhile back and stuck it in a
tray and installed and old BSD on it - just for kicks.  I took the
'minimal' install.  That means no desktop aps but good enough for a
server of some thing, DNS, etc. When I was done I had 400MB of free
space left for applications.

OTOH in one of the lists I frequent one poster had just finished
building OpenOffice from sources.  A 30 hour compile that consumed
2GB of space during the build.

As someone in this group commented the other day on some
ways of doing things, with faster machines and cheaper memory you
don't have to worry about doing things for performance.   That
approach is how MS got us to where we are today.

...

> I do find it interesting that Apple's OS X has been getting
> faster with each new release while adding new features such as
> expose. Panther is considerably faster than the first version
> of OS X I used about two years ago on the same machine, a
> 450MhZ G4.

THere is a reason for that - something that is gone from other OSes
- and does have to do with the fact that there is one man who
dictates how things should be done.

Jobs was adamant that any new feature addes to OS/X could not
impact performance.  The machine had to be as fast after the
addition as it was before, and there were to be no exception.

So the code gets optimized every step of the way, and along the
line some old pieces get improved.   He seems to take the opposite
approach of the rest of the industry thinking that power and memory
is so cheap you can afford to program in a sloppy manner.

Gates vs Jobs has always shown two different approaches, Gates with
the code taken via dumptster diving to build the first BASIC for
the Altair to make money, and Jobs finding more elegant and cheaper
ways than traditional hardware approaches.  One started with
software and the other with hardware.

Jobs is about one of the only visionairies left in this business.
>From his NeXTStep through his wildly successful Pixar - which took
a while to get where he saw it going to new products.

His Newton [which most people have forgotten] was the first
handheld/plamtop - only 10 years ahead of it's time.  Remember the
Doonesbury cartoons poking fun at it. 

And his philosphies are different.  I still remember when he hired
Scully from Pepsi to run Apple and one of his arguments was [and
the quote is approximate] 'Would you rather to something
significant with your life or continue to sell sugar water to kids'

The goal is to make money and vision seems to be something that is
not wanted - especially if it gets in the way of making money.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com