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February 16, 2005
As Computers Evolve, Our Standards for Computing Don't
I came across an article the other day by Peter Seebach entitled Where Does All the Processing Speed Go that articulates something that really bothers me. It starts out:
Computers are getting faster all the time, or so they tell us. But, in fact, the user experience of performance hasn't improved much over the past 15 years. Peter looks at where all the processor time and memory are going.
The crux of the article, if you don't feel like reading it, is that while computers are constantly getting faster, our experience with them isn't. Although our experience may be improving in other ways (aesthetics, features, portability, etc.), the day to day experience of sitting down and doing something relatively simply can still seem excruciatingly laborious. I typically use a 1 or a 1.25GHz PowerBook G4 with a gig of RAM, and my impression is that these are about half the resources I actually need to give me the experience I really want. I have an IBM ThinkPad next to me running Windows XP Professional which, in many ways, is faster, but is less consistent and reliable. Sometimes it just hits me that it's 2005, probably 20 years since I got my first computer, and:
- Computers still seem slow.
- A great deal of software is still unstable.
As the article points out, computers are doing a lot more today than they used to, which is certainly the case. At this particular moment, I'm running Dreamweaver, Quicksilver, Xnippets, multiple terminals with connections to multiple servers, Proteus, vim, Eclipse, NetNewsWire, a VPN client, Stickies, Calculator, Mail, and Firefox with several tabs. And that's just in the foreground. In the background, I'm running JRun and CFMX 7, MySQL, Apache, a firewall, and probably tons of other stuff I can't think of right now. I'm very good at maxing out and optimizing my computer's resources, however (I'm constantly watching CPU and memory usage), so even at half or even a quarter the number of processes, it wouldn't really feel much faster. The issue is not so much all the applications I'm running as it is our standards. We simply don't expect our experience to get much better, and therefore it doesn't. We expect features and aesthetics more than we expect performance. The best experience I've had with a computer was spending four years using Linux as a Java developer. In my opinion, Linux is the fastest, most pleasant OS to use on a daily basis, but of course, unless all you do is software engineering, it doesn't support enough applications to make it feasible for most people (including me these days).
I'd like to see hardware manufacturers and software engineers start treating performance as a feature. I'd like to see our standards as computer users go up a notch. As I sit at my computer all day just about everyday, I'd like to start feeling like it was 2005 rather than 1985. Am I alone here?
Posted by cantrell at February 16, 2005 10:45 AM | References
Comments
In 1985, it took me 3 seconds to turn off my computer and I could never type faster than the screen could display. This is 2005 and it takes me over 400 seconds to turn off the computer. Also, I can occassionaly type faster than the screen display. Who said computers are getting faster? They are getting cheaper. I could rant a lot more but then I'd be pegged a nuisance.
Posted by: madcream10 at February 16, 2005 03:10 PM