When first released in 1984, the Apple Macintosh shipped with a black-and-white 512 x 342 display. Fast forward 30 years to the release of the iMac with Retina 5K display, which ships with a 5,120 x 2,880 display with support for millions of colours. That’s an increase from 175,000 pixels to more than 14.7 million – an 8,400% increase. 80 of the original Macintosh displays fit within a single Retina 5K display.
The picture really does speak a thousand words. This post turns everything around.
it is so fascinating. One 68k ran with 8MHz (yes, Mega) compared with for cores @ 4GHz. Or 128K (yes Kay) RAM compared to 8G or even 64G RAM.
But, believe it or not, we could _work_ with these machines.
The sad thing is, while modern machines are much faster at pure computing, they’re starting to feel just as slow as these old computers due to bloated operating systems (OS X Yosemite, I’m looking at you).
Explain to me what bloat is, and why Yosemite (or Windows or Linux) are “bloated.”
Is bloat anything more than simply “Features Darknexus doesn’t use?”
“bloat” are gimmicks, that are nice for games but not for a tool. Sure a hammer with LED-light is nice. But does it do its job – nailing – better? And for the one time in its life where there is not enough light to see the nail it is simply overkill.
I really wonder, does Microsoft, Apple, the KDE developers ask the users what they _really_ need?
I do not need jumping icons or dock/task bar preview, but multiple desktops (even with 2 screens).
Jumping icons are useful visual feedback, and cost next to nothing, especially with hardware-accelerated composited desktops.
Live window previews are also useful, as not all applications are or should be tab-oriented. It lets me pick the correct window more easily. Those are features I use, and lots of people use. Again, with modern hardware-accelerated composited desktops, the actual performance hit is next to nothing – the graphics hardware has the required functionality built-in.
You’re only reinforcing my point that “bloat” is nothing more than a euphemism for “Features I don’t use”
That’s it: “Next to nothing” here and there eats up all the nice extra power the new CPU has.
The problem (to me) seems to be, that even Microsoft and Apple really use the potential of multi-core CPUs.
When I check the CPU info, I see that most of the work is done on one of my 2 (real) cores. Only if I run parallel “make”s really all cores (real+virtual) get to work. But the GPU still idles around.
Bloated OS or antiquated hardware?
Give up HDD and use an SSD, you’ll feel the difference!
I have an ssd. Nice try. What is it with idiot commenters who assume they know everything?
“Going from a megabyte [of RAM] to eight kilobytes was an improvement in stability, an improvement in usability, and it was a helluva lot more fun.” — Doug McIlroy, on switching from MULTICS to Unix
Believe it or not, we could ride horses instead of driving fancy automobiles. We used to use abacuses instead of fancy calculators. We used to live in huts made of crap instead of apartments/houses. We used to wear animal skin instead of fancy clothes. We used to write on walls instead of fancy paper. Old doesn’t mean any good.
I do not say “old” equals “good” or even “better”.
But it is like it it is: Most people wonder, why their new computer (with more Hz, more MB, more anything) runs slower than their old one.
Or why the new car does not need much less gasoline than their 10year old car.
My 2-yr old laptop certainly feels faster compared to every computer I’ve had previously. of course, I also understand I’m doing much more complex stuff on this computer than I used to.
Even the tasks I’ve always done are done better now. For example, playing NES games.
FCEUx might not be as fast as, say, Nesticle (Which only ran on DOS), but it automatically deflickers sprites when there are too many on a scanline, it uses one of several techniques to intelligently smooth the image when it scales it to full screen, and sound effects sound much more like what they do on an actual system – It’s been a while since I’ve come across effects that fail.
I can play multiplayer over the internet, open ROMs from zip and 7zip files directly, and record movies to AVI.
Certainly, what “most people” think about whether or not their computer runs slowly shouldn’t be the metric, especially if it’s a situation when most people are wrong.