3 ms·

So basically hardware improved 1000 times, but out of that improvement, corrupt programmers took 999 for themselves, to make their lives easier. The end user go

• mrweasel 5y ago
  Perhaps not corrupt programmers, and hardware improved much much more than 1000 times, depending on your reference. It is a valid question though: "Did we spend the speedup the hardware gave us wisely?" It's reasonable enough, in my mind, that we spend some of the speed to great higher level language, so that we could solve problems faster. Besides that, in all honesty, did we spend the remaining speed all that well? Most of the problem we solve are still data input, some calculations and an output. Some times we skip the calculation bit, and just retrieve our data a little later, other times we skip that part too, and just store stuff. With the exception of video and gaming... what have we actually build in the last 15 years that couldn't be done before. Sure, we can scale to more users, but we use more servers that ever to do so. For the average office and home usage, we wasted so much speed, and it's not clear where it went. The chat applications are the best example, my Google Chat eats 700MB of RAM, yet the only added a "Create video call" button and inline images, as compared to IRC or other platforms from 2000 and earlier. Don't get me wrong, there are stuff like neuroimaging, better weather reports, climate models, simulations, CAD, all that good stuff, but that's not helping the average computer user who just wants to check Facebook and read spam.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
    well, ICQ from 1996 did have chat, emojis, inline images, file transfer etc. Voice and video added a little later.