5 ms·
"There is no Moore's law for software." That's because software comes from the realm of biology, not physics, improvements are path-dependent, historically det
by olefoo 14y ago
"There is no Moore's law for software."
That's because software comes from the realm of biology, not physics, improvements are path-dependent, historically determined and can quite easily get stuck at local maxima rather than finding globally optimum states.
- bigiain 14y agoIsn't there a "reverse Moore's Law" for software? None of my multi-GHz, multi-core, multi-gigabyte machines boot up anything like as fast as my old AppleII or Osbourne portable. None of my text editors launches as quickly as WordStar used too. Moore's Law has _never_ quite kept up with the speed that software slows down.
- haydenchambers 14y agoThere is a Moore's Law. Every year there are twice as many To Do Apps that are twice as irrelevant.
- sskates 14y agoModern browsers are fast relative to their historical counterparts.
- nathan_long 14y agoDo you mean that they're faster if given the same pages to render and run on the same hardware?
- robyates 14y agoYou might be thinking of Wirth's Law. Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
- DannoHung 14y agoPeople like to use this sort of thing to bemoan how bad software is, but to be really accurate, we should change it to "Software gets MORE than hardware gets faster."
- Retric 14y agoHow long does it take to boot an AppleII? My system boots in around 15 seconds (i7 +SSD), but you can boot to a command prompt in less time. PS: It actually look less time to install windows 7 ~15 minutes than it took to boot one of my old windows 95 machines with far to little ram and a antivirus software.
- batista 14y ago>Isn't there a "reverse Moore's Law" for software? None of my multi-GHz, multi-core, multi-gigabyte machines boot up anything like as fast as my old AppleII or Osbourne portable. This might be true for machines that held the OS in ROM, but most current computers load much faster than an IBM PC loading the OS from a floppy disk. These comparisons don't mean much, because the software can do thousands of new things that it could't, like connect to the internet, wirelessly, at high speeds, play multimedia at millions of colors and huge sampling rates, etc. It's not like the exact same programs got somehow slower, just the same category of programs. A modern text editor is so much more advanced that WordStart that it's not even funny. And you might not remember that loading a simple game in a 8-bit home computer from tape (a cassette tape, such as used by Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, ZX Spectrum, etc) took ages (5-20 minutes), and involved 1/1000000 of the data of a modern game. None of my text editors launches as quickly as WordStar used too. Try an SSD drive and you'd be surprised.
- Ygg2 14y agoI wouldn't say biology so much as psychology. Simply put hardware has laws of physics to bound it. Software doesn't such strictly defined limits. It's only bounds are metaphors and underlying mechanism to implement it.