Speaking as someone who just found out the hard way that Gnome3 requires
accelerated graphics, I'm with you ;-)
Jim G
On Sat, 2011-06-11 at 11:05 -0800, Arthur Corliss wrote:
> Guys:
>
> Caught this article on /.:
>
> http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2011/06/mozilla-launches-memshrink-eff.html
>
> in which Mozilla is now going to dedicate a team to targetting memory
> utilization. One of the statements in the article struck me as pertinent:
>
> There are plenty of people out there at have 1 GB or less of RAM. As
> I'm writing this post now, Firefox 4.0.1 is consuming 633 MB on my
> machine and that's not abnormal. Simply put, it's just waaay too much
> RAM for a web browser. Then again, if you've got 8 GB of DDR3 RAM,
> you likely aren't all that worried about using 633 MB for Firefox. So
> maybe it's just a question of focus. Is Mozilla still interested in
> the mainstream consumer?
>
> Obviously, I expect a great deal of debate over what a "mainstream consumer"
> really constitutes in terms of memory consumption. Even so, it highlights a
> problem some of us have been bitching about since the '80s: with all of the
> magnitude increases in system resources over the years why is it that all of
> our actual gains are only incremental?
>
> Ultimately, our incremental gains are entirely the fault of the developer.
> While some of our ambitions can only legitimately be done on a bigger/faster
> machine, the fact that we're targeting more "modern" hardware in general
> allows us to take shortcuts and less aggresively optimize that we'd
> otherwise do.
>
> Ironically, while I have both harped and groused on this subject for as long
> as I've been using computers, I've been just as guilty as anyone else.
> Having recently made my primary personal computer a 700MHz toughbook with
> 256MB of RAM that point has been driven home. My missteps as a developer has
> consequences. Having a development system with such meager resources
> amplifies any frivolous use of CPU, RAM, or I/O, and it's something I now
> more actively try to counter since I have to live with it. Even minor
> missteps can cumulatively hurt.
>
> All of which brings forth a good question: how much better a computing
> situation would we all be in if *developers* were forced to be at the tail
> end of the upgrade cycle, rather than the forefront? If we, as a matter of
> routine, had lower-spec'd hardware than the majority of the users we have to
> support?
>
> I know my developmental process has become slower, but more deliberative. I
> actively try to anticipate system resource utilization beforehand. I test
> and benchmark multiple approaches to solving the same problem to see which
> one taxes the system the least. Sometimes it pays to be poor, eh? ;-) (Side
> note: I'm not really poor... cheap, yes, but not poor. And I've definitely
> been blessed...)
>
> So, let's start a movement to cripple developers with old machines! Who's
> with me? ... Well, I suppose I should have seen that one coming... ;-)
>
> --Arthur Corliss
> Live Free or Die
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Received on Tue Jun 14 20:10:51 2011
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