9 ms·

The cheapest laptop I could find on walmart.com right now has 4GB of RAM. "Low-end" isn't what it used to be! Only techies care about things like how much RAM a

by allo37 6y ago

The cheapest laptop I could find on walmart.com right now has 4GB of RAM. "Low-end" isn't what it used to be! Only techies care about things like how much RAM a program is using. End users, from my experience at least, don't really care - as long as it works.

possiblerobot 6y ago
You might be right with respect to non-techie users. But, it's not about whether it merely works. It's about what we could be doing with modern hardware if we used it as efficiently as old software had to use its hardware. What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?
- qayxc 6y ago
  > What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat? Not that many: An early 1990s PC platform could be thoroughly described in a 200 page book and you could write a boot loader for the CPU, a VGA driver, and drivers for the most common peripherals from scratch in a few weeks. In fact, games of that era shipped with their own audio drivers, (C/E/V)GA libraries and peripheral support. Today this would be a) impossible because many manufacturers (cough NVIDIA cough) don't even release OSS drivers and specs and b) individual programs don't own the hardware anymore - the OS does. Also the multitude of target platforms (CPU types, -core counts, and -speeds, graphics cards, peripherals, etc.) makes it virtually impossible to ship code that it optimal for each of even the most common combinations of hardware. The final nail in the coffin of the "super lean no bloat why-not-just-unikernel-everything-for-maximum-performance" idea can be summed up in one word: cost. Development costs would be insane if we started optimising every aspect of every program for performance (on every possible platform, no less), memory use, and (binary-) size. And that's even ignoring the fact that it's more often than not outright impossible to optimise for binary size, runtime performance, and memory footprint all at the same time. Plus interactions between programs (plugins, {shell-}extensions, data formats, clipboards, etc.) require "bloat" like common interfaces and "neutral" protocols. Most of the myth of great "old software" comes from the fact that functionality was severely limited compared to modern apps and that many folks simply weren't around to actually see and feel how much some of them actually sucked. Sure, Visual Studio 6.0 runs incredibly fast on a vintage 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 2GiB of RAM using Windows 2000 - but when it released in 1998 many PCs had a 60MHz Pentium 1 or a 100MHz 486DX4 with 64MiB of RAM and it ran like a three-legged dog with worms on these machines compared to the DOS-based Borland-C... Speaking of which, remember when sometime around the 2000s all Borland Pascal program stopped working, because CPUs had become too fast (>200MHz IIRC)? That was because their runtime used a loop to determine how fast the CPU was, which caused a divide-by-zero on fast machines IIRC. Good times indeed...
  - ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
    I have a one word counter response. Winamp.
    - qayxc 6y ago
      Funny you mention Winamp - I stopped using Winamp ages ago precisely because its 2002(?) rewrite was garbage and didn't support the one feature I was actually using at the time (SHOUTcast) The whole AOL/Time-Warner sellout debacle didn't help either.
  - anthk 6y ago
    Eh, BIOSes had an API-like interface under ASM assembler macros under DOS. It was relatively easy to do stuff directy with hardware. >many PCs had a 60MHz Pentium 1 or a 100MHz 486DX4 with 64MiB of RAM and it ran By 1998 most people switched to a Pentium because of the huge performance gain. And by 2000, everyone had a Pentium2 with ~96mb of RAM.
    - qayxc 6y ago
      > And by 2000, everyone had a Pentium2 with ~96mb of RAM. That's a bold claim! The PII was released around 1998 and you basically just asserted that everybody buys the latest CPU as soon as its released. The reality is that most PC users never upgrade their machine and buy a new one instead. The average age of a PC is about 5 years and no, aside from enthusiasts nobody buys the latest and greatest as soon as gets released. Businesses in particular hold on to their assets for some years due to depreciation (which incidentally is 5 years for PC class devices). So in 2000, the average PC was 1995-level hardware.
      - anthk 6y ago
        I was there. In 2000 the average PC was 1997 era hw... with a Pentium2, AMD k7, or a Celero overclocked to ~450MHZ? making a great alternative to a Pentium2 and a Pentium III@450. Windows 98 was on its peak and the Pentium MMX often was horrendously slow to start up things. Good with Windows 95, but by 2K everyone was onto 98/SE because of good additions and an easy PNP support. W98SE was used even when XP got released and a few years more. Also, your statement about the P4 with that huge amounts of RAM (2GB) is even more unusual than a PII in y2k. When I had an AMD Athlon in 2003, I barely had 256MB of RAM. I stayed with that up to 2009 with Debian 4 DVD's.I tried some Fedora releases and they where a huge no-no in my machine, and Solaris was impossible.
- emodendroket 6y ago
  Probably fewer because we'd be spending more time pulling our hair out on trying to make cross-platform C++ apps work instead.
tluyben2 6y ago
As a techie I mostly do not care as long as it works either, if I am not writing it myself (and sometimes even then but I care more now than years ago). However; things do not work a lot of the times; my wife is a writer, almost all my friends are non technical and they complain a lot about how crap everything is. And when I check the culprit is always lack of memory and it is always chrome (the browser and in Electron) that is eating all of it. It is miserable imho; techies can pretend the enduser does not care; maybe they should ask. I know how to fix it for myself (I have scripts to do it automatically) but most people do not and just reboot when the system becomes too unresponsive. Not so great for 2020.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  Does the end user care enough to switch? As if all you are doing is complaining but it does not alter behaviour (specifically usage or purchasing behaviour) then for all business purposes they do not care.
  - emodendroket 6y ago
    They don't know enough to even know what to blame, so there's little benefit to resolving the issue, I think.
  - pgcj_poster 6y ago
    Agreed, companies often make anti-user decisions for good "business purposes."
- qayxc 6y ago
  > And when I check the culprit is always lack of memory and it is always chrome (the browser and in Electron) that is eating all of it. Are you sure it's not the "150 IQ I-have-20-tabs-open-at-any-given-time" usage pattern that's actually causing this? I just checked out of curiosity and Edge (for lack of an installed Chrome) used "just" ~380MiB for a rather big website. Sure, websites (and especially ads!) taking up unnecessary amounts of memory and performance play into this, too, but the expectation that you can just leave 10 bloated websites open on a glorified netbook from 2014 is more to blame than anything else.
fuball63 6y ago
They may not care about how much RAM it is using, but the blatant disregard for resource usage manifests in other ways. Most people I know are just resigned to believe their 4GB RAM laptop will be obsolete in a few years. When things "get slow" it means chuck the whole computer. I do think that the recklessness to which we use our virtual resources contributes to e-waste, which is a physical problem.
- allo37 6y ago
  Sure, but why can't I replace the battery in my phone easily? Why does the computer that controls my fridge cost as much as a new fridge to replace (if you can even get one)? Why is a cheap printer about the same price as the cartridges? Our throwaway, built-in-obsolescence approach to product development is definitely a problem, but I think it's pretty obvious that the causes reach far beyond the use of resource-intensive UI frameworks.
pgcj_poster 6y ago
Normal users don't care how much RAM their programs use, because they don't know what RAM is. They think that computer hardware has a single one-dimensional property called "speed" and that if their software performs badly, it's because their computer is too slow, not because the software is bloated. My daily driver has 4GB of RAM, and it's possible only usable because I'm extremely frugal with my software choices. I run Debian with XFCE and pipe memory usage to my panel so I can always see whether I'm in danger of swapping. I use a Firefox extension that prevents me from opening too many tabs. I stick to the terminal for as many tasks as possible. I categorically refuse to use electron apps. And despite all that, I still ending up OOMing and having to hard reset every few days. For a normal person who doesn't know what RAM is and has an antivirus constantly running the background, the 4GB are going to be used up almost immediately, their machine will start swapping, and then they'll get the impression that their 4GB machine is "slow," despite being faster than high-end computers people used to do exactly the same things ten years ago.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Any tips on getting stuff to run fine on low end machines. I'm currently running Lubuntu on a very cheap laptop and while its usable, most applications are get pretty irresponsive. I've also tried running some BSD's on it whith very bare bones wm's (i.e. ctwm) and that became unusable quickly. Although, I think the issue there was lack of proper graphics drivers and being stuck with the framebuffer driver.

by allo37 6y ago

possiblerobot 6y ago

You might be right with respect to non-techie users. But, it's not about whether it merely works. It's about what we could be doing with modern hardware if we used it as efficiently as old software had to use its hardware. What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat?

qayxc 6y ago
> What kinds of wild things could we accomplish on this hardware if we weren't bogged down in gigabytes and teraflops of bloat? Not that many: An early 1990s PC platform could be thoroughly described in a 200 page book and you could write a boot loader for the CPU, a VGA driver, and drivers for the most common peripherals from scratch in a few weeks. In fact, games of that era shipped with their own audio drivers, (C/E/V)GA libraries and peripheral support. Today this would be a) impossible because many manufacturers (cough NVIDIA cough) don't even release OSS drivers and specs and b) individual programs don't own the hardware anymore - the OS does. Also the multitude of target platforms (CPU types, -core counts, and -speeds, graphics cards, peripherals, etc.) makes it virtually impossible to ship code that it optimal for each of even the most common combinations of hardware. The final nail in the coffin of the "super lean no bloat why-not-just-unikernel-everything-for-maximum-performance" idea can be summed up in one word: cost. Development costs would be insane if we started optimising every aspect of every program for performance (on every possible platform, no less), memory use, and (binary-) size. And that's even ignoring the fact that it's more often than not outright impossible to optimise for binary size, runtime performance, and memory footprint all at the same time. Plus interactions between programs (plugins, {shell-}extensions, data formats, clipboards, etc.) require "bloat" like common interfaces and "neutral" protocols. Most of the myth of great "old software" comes from the fact that functionality was severely limited compared to modern apps and that many folks simply weren't around to actually see and feel how much some of them actually sucked. Sure, Visual Studio 6.0 runs incredibly fast on a vintage 3.2 GHz Pentium 4 with 2GiB of RAM using Windows 2000 - but when it released in 1998 many PCs had a 60MHz Pentium 1 or a 100MHz 486DX4 with 64MiB of RAM and it ran like a three-legged dog with worms on these machines compared to the DOS-based Borland-C... Speaking of which, remember when sometime around the 2000s all Borland Pascal program stopped working, because CPUs had become too fast (>200MHz IIRC)? That was because their runtime used a loop to determine how fast the CPU was, which caused a divide-by-zero on fast machines IIRC. Good times indeed...
- ilrwbwrkhv 6y ago
  I have a one word counter response. Winamp.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    Funny you mention Winamp - I stopped using Winamp ages ago precisely because its 2002(?) rewrite was garbage and didn't support the one feature I was actually using at the time (SHOUTcast) The whole AOL/Time-Warner sellout debacle didn't help either.
- anthk 6y ago
  Eh, BIOSes had an API-like interface under ASM assembler macros under DOS. It was relatively easy to do stuff directy with hardware. >many PCs had a 60MHz Pentium 1 or a 100MHz 486DX4 with 64MiB of RAM and it ran By 1998 most people switched to a Pentium because of the huge performance gain. And by 2000, everyone had a Pentium2 with ~96mb of RAM.
  - qayxc 6y ago
    > And by 2000, everyone had a Pentium2 with ~96mb of RAM. That's a bold claim! The PII was released around 1998 and you basically just asserted that everybody buys the latest CPU as soon as its released. The reality is that most PC users never upgrade their machine and buy a new one instead. The average age of a PC is about 5 years and no, aside from enthusiasts nobody buys the latest and greatest as soon as gets released. Businesses in particular hold on to their assets for some years due to depreciation (which incidentally is 5 years for PC class devices). So in 2000, the average PC was 1995-level hardware.
    - anthk 6y ago
      I was there. In 2000 the average PC was 1997 era hw... with a Pentium2, AMD k7, or a Celero overclocked to ~450MHZ? making a great alternative to a Pentium2 and a Pentium III@450. Windows 98 was on its peak and the Pentium MMX often was horrendously slow to start up things. Good with Windows 95, but by 2K everyone was onto 98/SE because of good additions and an easy PNP support. W98SE was used even when XP got released and a few years more. Also, your statement about the P4 with that huge amounts of RAM (2GB) is even more unusual than a PII in y2k. When I had an AMD Athlon in 2003, I barely had 256MB of RAM. I stayed with that up to 2009 with Debian 4 DVD's.I tried some Fedora releases and they where a huge no-no in my machine, and Solaris was impossible.
emodendroket 6y ago
Probably fewer because we'd be spending more time pulling our hair out on trying to make cross-platform C++ apps work instead.

tluyben2 6y ago

As a techie I mostly do not care as long as it works either, if I am not writing it myself (and sometimes even then but I care more now than years ago). However; things do not work a lot of the times; my wife is a writer, almost all my friends are non technical and they complain a lot about how crap everything is. And when I check the culprit is always lack of memory and it is always chrome (the browser and in Electron) that is eating all of it. It is miserable imho; techies can pretend the enduser does not care; maybe they should ask. I know how to fix it for myself (I have scripts to do it automatically) but most people do not and just reboot when the system becomes too unresponsive. Not so great for 2020.

MattGaiser 6y ago
Does the end user care enough to switch? As if all you are doing is complaining but it does not alter behaviour (specifically usage or purchasing behaviour) then for all business purposes they do not care.
- emodendroket 6y ago
  They don't know enough to even know what to blame, so there's little benefit to resolving the issue, I think.
- pgcj_poster 6y ago
  Agreed, companies often make anti-user decisions for good "business purposes."
qayxc 6y ago
> And when I check the culprit is always lack of memory and it is always chrome (the browser and in Electron) that is eating all of it. Are you sure it's not the "150 IQ I-have-20-tabs-open-at-any-given-time" usage pattern that's actually causing this? I just checked out of curiosity and Edge (for lack of an installed Chrome) used "just" ~380MiB for a rather big website. Sure, websites (and especially ads!) taking up unnecessary amounts of memory and performance play into this, too, but the expectation that you can just leave 10 bloated websites open on a glorified netbook from 2014 is more to blame than anything else.

fuball63 6y ago

They may not care about how much RAM it is using, but the blatant disregard for resource usage manifests in other ways. Most people I know are just resigned to believe their 4GB RAM laptop will be obsolete in a few years. When things "get slow" it means chuck the whole computer. I do think that the recklessness to which we use our virtual resources contributes to e-waste, which is a physical problem.

allo37 6y ago
Sure, but why can't I replace the battery in my phone easily? Why does the computer that controls my fridge cost as much as a new fridge to replace (if you can even get one)? Why is a cheap printer about the same price as the cartridges? Our throwaway, built-in-obsolescence approach to product development is definitely a problem, but I think it's pretty obvious that the causes reach far beyond the use of resource-intensive UI frameworks.

pgcj_poster 6y ago

Normal users don't care how much RAM their programs use, because they don't know what RAM is. They think that computer hardware has a single one-dimensional property called "speed" and that if their software performs badly, it's because their computer is too slow, not because the software is bloated. My daily driver has 4GB of RAM, and it's possible only usable because I'm extremely frugal with my software choices. I run Debian with XFCE and pipe memory usage to my panel so I can always see whether I'm in danger of swapping. I use a Firefox extension that prevents me from opening too many tabs. I stick to the terminal for as many tasks as possible. I categorically refuse to use electron apps. And despite all that, I still ending up OOMing and having to hard reset every few days. For a normal person who doesn't know what RAM is and has an antivirus constantly running the background, the 4GB are going to be used up almost immediately, their machine will start swapping, and then they'll get the impression that their 4GB machine is "slow," despite being faster than high-end computers people used to do exactly the same things ten years ago.

the_only_law 6y ago
Any tips on getting stuff to run fine on low end machines. I'm currently running Lubuntu on a very cheap laptop and while its usable, most applications are get pretty irresponsive. I've also tried running some BSD's on it whith very bare bones wm's (i.e. ctwm) and that became unusable quickly. Although, I think the issue there was lack of proper graphics drivers and being stuck with the framebuffer driver.