Linked by Bob Marr on Thu 10th Jun 2004 05:48 UTC
Consider these memory requirements for Fedora Core 2, as specified by Red Hat: Minimum for graphical: 192MB and Recommended for graphical: 256MB Does that sound any alarm bells with you? 192MB minimum? I've been running Linux for five years (and am a huge supporter), and have plenty of experience with Windows, Mac OS X and others. And those numbers are shocking -- severely so. No other general-purpose OS in existence has such high requirements. Linux is getting very fat.
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Decius raises a few interesting points.
First of all, I agree completely with accountability and poor quality of software. I never understood why a software company can't be held responsible if their product causes damage.
Yes, programs were written to be more efficient previously. There is a reason for this: computer time was more expensive than human time. This meant that it made sense to spend lots of manhours making something run faster or use less memory.
But that is no longer the case. Computers are dirt cheap compared to human resources. Today it makes good business sense to increase the productivity of the programmer by letting him write in higher level (and slower) languages at the expense of requiring more computer time.
I for one am not going to sit around and handoptimize assembly code to make it run faster. A clever programmer can always do this, but it takes a lot of time, it will likely introduce some new bugs and it hurts portability.
Programs can be written much faster today than they could only a few years back. They may also require more resources and that is exactly the tradeoff we're seeing.