14 ms·

We've generated an awful lot of waste and not a whole lot of progress. For some to succeed, others must fail. It's not possible to keep every CPU design ever c

We've generated an awful lot of waste and not a whole lot of progress. For some to succeed, others must fail. It's not possible to keep every CPU design ever conceived in production. PowerPC lost. There's not an infinite amount of software engineering resources to support every discontinued architecture. I'd go back to one of these old machines in an instant if it didn't mean that reading articles on the web would be so painful. If you really feel strongly, this is an opportunity for you to get involved in Linux maintenance.

notalaser 10y ago
The underlying problem that the parent post was trying to point out is that the programs we run today largely do pretty much the same things that they did 10 years ago, but for some reason they require vastly more powerful hardware, with questionable gains. A modern browser crawls on my old iBook G3, even when all it has to display is the HN homepage. And it crawls on the web in general; it would be clever engineering if it were slow only on websites that use super modern features, like WebGL, but the whole things grinds to a halt when reading a newspaper's website, even though the website is fundamentally the same as it was ten years ago. The same goes for virtually every other kind of software. My computer is at least an order of magnitude faster than the one I owned ten years ago, but the quality, or at least the speed of my usage is pretty much the same. This sounds less like progress and more like running in circles :-).
- adrianN 10y ago
  Unfortunatly newspaper websites in particular are very different from how they were ten years ago. Newspapers for some reason deem it necessary to load every piece of Javascript ever written to display an article.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    I'll just leave this here: https://www.ublock.org/ https://www.ublock.org/
    - nine_k 10y ago
      uMatrix gives even more control.
  - LnxPrgr3 10y ago
    Browsing the Web from a Raspberry Pi (3) was an interesting experience. Browsing supposedly static content like news sites was often surprisingly painful, yet Google Docs was at least usable—alongside Roll20, which is also not exactly the lightest weight thing I use. (I also came to loathe even more videos I didn't ask for playing.)
- reflexive 10y ago
  A modern browser crawls on my old iBook G3 OK I agree in the browser space (as opposed to the processor space) the past 5 years have been a lot of churn and flabby software. It's a hard problem as web developers have incentive to use all the horsepower available to them. The only way forward I can imagine, is if everybody sandboxes their browser tabs to limit the resources available to them (e.g. using Linux cgroups), and web developers know they are forced to live in those constraints. "cgroups in the browser" turned up this proposal (March 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998210
  - dom0 10y ago
    > It's a hard problem as web developers have incentive to use all the horsepower available to them. Although it's not only the fault of the browser devs, but probably mainly of JS/frontend devs... the result is that leaving a browser window open easily halves battery time, because even innocuous sites eat half a core of CPU. Also, fan's always whirling. Qubes OS is quite nice here. Just pause the VM with the browser in it -> 0 % CPU, but can still read what's on the display.
    - technomancy 10y ago
      > Just pause the VM with the browser in it -> 0 % CPU, but can still read what's on the display. On a related note, how is "halt all execution and scheduled future execution of scripts in the current tab" not a solved problem for mainstream browsers? Or maybe it is and somehow I missed it?
      - caf 10y ago
        I'd be happy with "tabs not visible go into stasis".
        angry-hacker 10y ago
        Vivaldi hibernates background tabs natively. Can't remember the details. There are extensions, but they just swap the site with static page.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  The same criticism, that 'new software is just slower but doesn't offer much new', has always been made. Browsers in 2016 do vastly more than they did in 2006, websites are richer and are much closer to apps than static pages. The demand that "I want my browser to be exactly the same speed as it used to be, but also support all these new features" doesn't seem like a reasonable engineering ask. You optimize for the hardware that people will run, not the hardware of 10 years ago, and you also optimize for your slowest new use cases, not the old use cases which will be fast enough even without much optimization. The argument also doesn't make logical sense. Ten years ago, there was someone saying software 'largely do pretty much the same things' compared to 1996, and ten years before that I'm sure someone was comparing 1996 software to 1986 and saying something similar. But software today looks nothing like in 1986.
  - jff 10y ago
    I'd rather it stayed the exact same speed it used to be, even if that meant only providing the same features as I had in 2006. The web was pretty good in 2006!
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      That'll probably happen not long after hardware stops improving.
  - Gracana 10y ago
    > The demand that "I want my browser to be exactly the same speed as it used to be, but also support all these new features" Wait wait wait, hold up. I don't want my browsers to support those features. I just want to not need them in order to read a goddamn news article or access a web store. The problem isn't that these technologies are available, it's that they're unavoidable.
  - marssaxman 10y ago
    I don't see richer, more app-like web sites as a clear improvement. They often leave me feeling frustrated, like the designer's ego is more important than actual utility. Would you please, I sometimes want to say, just stop zooming around and show me the text already?
- greenshackle2 10y ago
  What's the first thing that's drilled into you as a professional developer? Don't optimize prematurely! Better hardware just moves the goalpost of where 'prematurely' is. From a business perspective, if it runs fine on modern hardware, why spend money optimizing it? This sort of means that better hardware should lower the price of software development. You should be able to replace devs competent at optimizing with cheaper mediocre devs, or the competent devs should be able spend less time on the same software. I get the impression this hasn't happened but I havn't looked at actual statistics. But also, software now has more features, there was nothing like modern web apps 15 years ago. (Note: I'm making guesses on why things are as they are, not as I think they should be. I share your frustrations, why is my 1 year old budget smartphone, that's 4 times as powerful as the 1st laptop I owned, so laggy that's it's nearly unusable?!)
  - majewsky 10y ago
    > software now has more features, there was nothing like modern web apps 15 years ago. You're confusing "features" with the technology delivering them. ;) > why is my 1 year old budget smartphone, that's 4 times as powerful as the 1st laptop I owned, so laggy that's it's nearly unusable?!) cough Java cough :) A friend of mine used a Nokia N900 smartphone (running Maemo Linux), with a single-core 600 MHz CPU and 256 MB RAM. When it finally died, he moved to a recent Samsung Galaxy model, and complained about how it is much laggier when performing the same tasks that the ancient N900 breezed through at buttery smooth 60 FPS.
- vkou 10y ago
  The problem isn't the browser - it's the newspaper's website. Between display ads, and the good dozen web analytics trackers, website bloat is the culprit.
- znpy 10y ago
  > The underlying problem that the parent post was trying to point out is that the programs we run today largely do pretty much the same things that they did 10 years ago, but for some reason they require vastly more powerful hardware, with questionable gains. Oh God, not this story again. I'll tell you what I told my uncle complaining his 200Mhz Pentium MMX with 64MB of ram, running Windows 2000 was slow when going on Facebook. Yes, we do (pretty much) the same things we used to do ten years ago (this is a lie, actually). What has changed is the volume of data that we generate, send, receive and have to store and process. The first digital camera I got for Christmas maybe 14 years ago took some nice photos. At high resolution, a photo would take 80 to 100 kb of storage. No metadata. And you could have up to 20 photo in high resolution. It was a kind of a "toy" camera, but still.. Nowadays kids with digital cameras can take photos that take 7-9 megabytes per photo. Your mail client does not send your username and password as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted. Your www browser does not send your forms (and your passwords too) as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted. Ten years there were no videos on facebook, no realtime chat, no realtime video streaming. There was no Dropbox, and most webmails used to allow up to 100MB of storage. Data grows, and this is why the industry puts out faster computers every year. And this is why computers become "old" and "slow". Get over it. ============================ Now, we could ask ourselves, why do many websites have to be so fat? I would really love to see websites supporting an "ultralight" version. Just like HN: the source is all tables, td and tr but... It renders well on mobile and works awesomely fast on a ten years old laptop (and I tried).
  - reflexive 10y ago
    I think you're on to something but I would like to point out > realtime chat hasn't really improved over the past 25 years. Someday we'll have federated chat servers, but that seems more of a social engineering problem than a technical one.
    - majewsky 10y ago
      But IRC was just plain text with URLs that you had to click on! Now you can post inline GIFs for everyone to see! ... Oh wait, that's actually not an improvement. :) Also, FTFY: > Someday we'll have federated chat servers again
- JeremyMorgan 10y ago
  I agree with you to a point. I'm doing the same thing I was 10 years ago, but my output is of much higher quality. in 2007 I was developing websites, the ones I build now are considerably better in almost every way. I used photoshop, but now the images I work with are far better resolution. Video production.. you get the point. So yes I'm doing much of the same thing, but my quality has improved significantly.
- WWLink 10y ago
  Some websites work fine on a 10 year old browser with a 10 year old computer. Others are so saturated in crappy javascript crap and auto-playing videos they'll give a modern high end machine a run for its money. I'd go out on a limb and say tons of websites got way worse over the past 10 years.
dom0 10y ago
PowerPC may be dead, but POWER sure isn't. My guess is that PowerPC will still hold some relevance for the time to come as a cheap and widely available testing architecture: if a piece of software works on ppc (BE), it most likely has no byte-ordering issues (that show in it's tests) and should work on POWER or SPARC as well.
- justincormack 10y ago
  Modern POWER is ppc64le so no use for this. On the other hand nearly every arm machine can run big endian.
  - dom0 10y ago
    I mostly referred to > PowerPC has lost.
- ajdlinux 10y ago
  I think you'll find most developers wanting to get stuff working on Power will just try and get their hands on a POWER8 VM rather than relying on an ancient PowerPC box.
  - angry_octet 10y ago
    I still use my PowerMac G5 and it works fine performance wise. I'd be willing to bet it would run POWER8 code faster than an interpreter running on x64. Although realistically I'd just log in to an instance somewhere in an IBM cloud. And now I feel sad, like the sad mac face.

notalaser 10y ago

The underlying problem that the parent post was trying to point out is that the programs we run today largely do pretty much the same things that they did 10 years ago, but for some reason they require vastly more powerful hardware, with questionable gains. A modern browser crawls on my old iBook G3, even when all it has to display is the HN homepage. And it crawls on the web in general; it would be clever engineering if it were slow only on websites that use super modern features, like WebGL, but the whole things grinds to a halt when reading a newspaper's website, even though the website is fundamentally the same as it was ten years ago. The same goes for virtually every other kind of software. My computer is at least an order of magnitude faster than the one I owned ten years ago, but the quality, or at least the speed of my usage is pretty much the same. This sounds less like progress and more like running in circles :-).

adrianN 10y ago
Unfortunatly newspaper websites in particular are very different from how they were ten years ago. Newspapers for some reason deem it necessary to load every piece of Javascript ever written to display an article.
- majewsky 10y ago
  I'll just leave this here: https://www.ublock.org/ https://www.ublock.org/
  - nine_k 10y ago
    uMatrix gives even more control.
- LnxPrgr3 10y ago
  Browsing the Web from a Raspberry Pi (3) was an interesting experience. Browsing supposedly static content like news sites was often surprisingly painful, yet Google Docs was at least usable—alongside Roll20, which is also not exactly the lightest weight thing I use. (I also came to loathe even more videos I didn't ask for playing.)
reflexive 10y ago
A modern browser crawls on my old iBook G3 OK I agree in the browser space (as opposed to the processor space) the past 5 years have been a lot of churn and flabby software. It's a hard problem as web developers have incentive to use all the horsepower available to them. The only way forward I can imagine, is if everybody sandboxes their browser tabs to limit the resources available to them (e.g. using Linux cgroups), and web developers know they are forced to live in those constraints. "cgroups in the browser" turned up this proposal (March 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998210 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998210
- dom0 10y ago
  > It's a hard problem as web developers have incentive to use all the horsepower available to them. Although it's not only the fault of the browser devs, but probably mainly of JS/frontend devs... the result is that leaving a browser window open easily halves battery time, because even innocuous sites eat half a core of CPU. Also, fan's always whirling. Qubes OS is quite nice here. Just pause the VM with the browser in it -> 0 % CPU, but can still read what's on the display.
  - technomancy 10y ago
    > Just pause the VM with the browser in it -> 0 % CPU, but can still read what's on the display. On a related note, how is "halt all execution and scheduled future execution of scripts in the current tab" not a solved problem for mainstream browsers? Or maybe it is and somehow I missed it?
    - caf 10y ago
      I'd be happy with "tabs not visible go into stasis".
      - angry-hacker 10y ago
        Vivaldi hibernates background tabs natively. Can't remember the details. There are extensions, but they just swap the site with static page.
smallnamespace 10y ago
The same criticism, that 'new software is just slower but doesn't offer much new', has always been made. Browsers in 2016 do vastly more than they did in 2006, websites are richer and are much closer to apps than static pages. The demand that "I want my browser to be exactly the same speed as it used to be, but also support all these new features" doesn't seem like a reasonable engineering ask. You optimize for the hardware that people will run, not the hardware of 10 years ago, and you also optimize for your slowest new use cases, not the old use cases which will be fast enough even without much optimization. The argument also doesn't make logical sense. Ten years ago, there was someone saying software 'largely do pretty much the same things' compared to 1996, and ten years before that I'm sure someone was comparing 1996 software to 1986 and saying something similar. But software today looks nothing like in 1986.
- jff 10y ago
  I'd rather it stayed the exact same speed it used to be, even if that meant only providing the same features as I had in 2006. The web was pretty good in 2006!
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    That'll probably happen not long after hardware stops improving.
- Gracana 10y ago
  > The demand that "I want my browser to be exactly the same speed as it used to be, but also support all these new features" Wait wait wait, hold up. I don't want my browsers to support those features. I just want to not need them in order to read a goddamn news article or access a web store. The problem isn't that these technologies are available, it's that they're unavoidable.
- marssaxman 10y ago
  I don't see richer, more app-like web sites as a clear improvement. They often leave me feeling frustrated, like the designer's ego is more important than actual utility. Would you please, I sometimes want to say, just stop zooming around and show me the text already?
greenshackle2 10y ago
What's the first thing that's drilled into you as a professional developer? Don't optimize prematurely! Better hardware just moves the goalpost of where 'prematurely' is. From a business perspective, if it runs fine on modern hardware, why spend money optimizing it? This sort of means that better hardware should lower the price of software development. You should be able to replace devs competent at optimizing with cheaper mediocre devs, or the competent devs should be able spend less time on the same software. I get the impression this hasn't happened but I havn't looked at actual statistics. But also, software now has more features, there was nothing like modern web apps 15 years ago. (Note: I'm making guesses on why things are as they are, not as I think they should be. I share your frustrations, why is my 1 year old budget smartphone, that's 4 times as powerful as the 1st laptop I owned, so laggy that's it's nearly unusable?!)
- majewsky 10y ago
  > software now has more features, there was nothing like modern web apps 15 years ago. You're confusing "features" with the technology delivering them. ;) > why is my 1 year old budget smartphone, that's 4 times as powerful as the 1st laptop I owned, so laggy that's it's nearly unusable?!) cough Java cough :) A friend of mine used a Nokia N900 smartphone (running Maemo Linux), with a single-core 600 MHz CPU and 256 MB RAM. When it finally died, he moved to a recent Samsung Galaxy model, and complained about how it is much laggier when performing the same tasks that the ancient N900 breezed through at buttery smooth 60 FPS.
vkou 10y ago
The problem isn't the browser - it's the newspaper's website. Between display ads, and the good dozen web analytics trackers, website bloat is the culprit.
znpy 10y ago
> The underlying problem that the parent post was trying to point out is that the programs we run today largely do pretty much the same things that they did 10 years ago, but for some reason they require vastly more powerful hardware, with questionable gains. Oh God, not this story again. I'll tell you what I told my uncle complaining his 200Mhz Pentium MMX with 64MB of ram, running Windows 2000 was slow when going on Facebook. Yes, we do (pretty much) the same things we used to do ten years ago (this is a lie, actually). What has changed is the volume of data that we generate, send, receive and have to store and process. The first digital camera I got for Christmas maybe 14 years ago took some nice photos. At high resolution, a photo would take 80 to 100 kb of storage. No metadata. And you could have up to 20 photo in high resolution. It was a kind of a "toy" camera, but still.. Nowadays kids with digital cameras can take photos that take 7-9 megabytes per photo. Your mail client does not send your username and password as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted. Your www browser does not send your forms (and your passwords too) as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted. Ten years there were no videos on facebook, no realtime chat, no realtime video streaming. There was no Dropbox, and most webmails used to allow up to 100MB of storage. Data grows, and this is why the industry puts out faster computers every year. And this is why computers become "old" and "slow". Get over it. ============================ Now, we could ask ourselves, why do many websites have to be so fat? I would really love to see websites supporting an "ultralight" version. Just like HN: the source is all tables, td and tr but... It renders well on mobile and works awesomely fast on a ten years old laptop (and I tried).
- reflexive 10y ago
  I think you're on to something but I would like to point out > realtime chat hasn't really improved over the past 25 years. Someday we'll have federated chat servers, but that seems more of a social engineering problem than a technical one.
  - majewsky 10y ago
    But IRC was just plain text with URLs that you had to click on! Now you can post inline GIFs for everyone to see! ... Oh wait, that's actually not an improvement. :) Also, FTFY: > Someday we'll have federated chat servers again
JeremyMorgan 10y ago
I agree with you to a point. I'm doing the same thing I was 10 years ago, but my output is of much higher quality. in 2007 I was developing websites, the ones I build now are considerably better in almost every way. I used photoshop, but now the images I work with are far better resolution. Video production.. you get the point. So yes I'm doing much of the same thing, but my quality has improved significantly.
WWLink 10y ago
Some websites work fine on a 10 year old browser with a 10 year old computer. Others are so saturated in crappy javascript crap and auto-playing videos they'll give a modern high end machine a run for its money. I'd go out on a limb and say tons of websites got way worse over the past 10 years.

dom0 10y ago

PowerPC may be dead, but POWER sure isn't. My guess is that PowerPC will still hold some relevance for the time to come as a cheap and widely available testing architecture: if a piece of software works on ppc (BE), it most likely has no byte-ordering issues (that show in it's tests) and should work on POWER or SPARC as well.

justincormack 10y ago
Modern POWER is ppc64le so no use for this. On the other hand nearly every arm machine can run big endian.
- dom0 10y ago
  I mostly referred to > PowerPC has lost.
ajdlinux 10y ago
I think you'll find most developers wanting to get stuff working on Power will just try and get their hands on a POWER8 VM rather than relying on an ancient PowerPC box.
- angry_octet 10y ago
  I still use my PowerMac G5 and it works fine performance wise. I'd be willing to bet it would run POWER8 code faster than an interpreter running on x64. Although realistically I'd just log in to an instance somewhere in an IBM cloud. And now I feel sad, like the sad mac face.