beware the hardware/software time warp

[Dick Dunn]

kemnitz at POSTGRES.BERKELEY.EDU (Greg Kemnitz) writes:
> X now has been elevated to the status of "Standard"...
> ...it seems that machines like the Sparc II and DEC 5K have finally gotten
> enough moxie to run X well and their prices will be in the "easily affordable"
> range in a couple years or less...

I think Greg's assessment is correct about where we stand on hardware capa-
bility:  Realistically, we're just at the point where existing "workstation"
hardware can handle the resource demands of X; it's somewhat unrealistic to
say that X has been "usable" until very recently.

[some complaints about effect of X on earlier machines]
> ...But it appears that it is easier to wait for fast
> machines rather than to design standard graphics protocols that aren't bloated,
> politically acceptable masses.  Also, it appears that the de facto trend in
> industry is to hope hardware improves fast enough to let poorly written
> software run well rather than writing software properly, and it is hard to
> argue that this strategy has been a complete failure,...

All well said, but there's still a trap.  Greg's premise is that in a
couple years, sufficient hardware to run X will be cheap...but that skews
the timing, because in a couple of years we won't be running today's soft-
ware.  Instead, we'll have what we've got today plus two years' accretion
of features/chrome/goo/crap...and it's likely that the cheap machines then
will still be not quite able to keep up!  If you're going to project two
years in the future on the hardware (price, capacity, performance), you've
got to project two years out on the software too...and that makes the
future look rather less rosy.

I think this points up a trap:  Too many people are "designing for the
future" in counterproductive ways.  They're not planning ahead so much as
fudging ahead--counting on future hardware advances to save them from bad
implementation decisions and bloated code.  It leaves us with the Red
Queen's warning--roughly "you have to run as fast as you can just to stay
in one place; if you want to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that."

Another way to look at the practice is "deficit spending"!  We keep
spending performance we don't have (yet).  The only reason we've gotten
along this far is that UNIX started us off "in the black."
-- 
Dick Dunn     rcd at ico.isc.com -or- ico!rcd       Boulder, CO   (303)449-2870
   ...Lately it occurs to me what a long, strange trip it's been.