Anyway, the apocryphal story goes, Krushchev is visiting a Western washing machine factory. He sees all the different models coming off the line, this one has two agigtators, that one has three speeds, whatever. He sees the churn of factory equipment. All that hustle and bustle to try and sell more washing machines.
He laments, "Oh, you capitalists, you're so inefficient. Look at how much time and effort you waste on with all this competition! We soviets made one washing machine, and it works!"
Experiments, by nature, require expendable resources, but an finished appliance intended for a consumer, with no end-user-servicable internals is not the sort of thing you want to have spewing garbage in all directions.
The reality though, is that we're all being railroaded down strict paths of planned obsolesence that are integrated into business models from day one.
Yours and my waste should not be interpretted as an unforced error. It's carefully planned, with the intent to fund more plannings sessions to forecast more waste.
...at least down among these lower eschelons we inhabit (speaking for myself, so as not to make assumptions about who reads this), and then there are those who ride above it all and skim from the fruits of our obesity.
You really can still buy refrigerators that will last 30 years. They just don't have built in ice makers etc.
PS: The 50-200% premium may seem steep, but if it lasts 5x as long then you more than break even.
Most apartment building were I've lived have these washing rooms, yes. Yeah, those machines are built like tanks and probably last at least a few decades. The size and weight of these machines are also more like a tank than what you'd normally consider a washing machine, so you wouldn't want one of those in your own apartment.. :)
Past that, Arctic Air for example has commercial refrigerators which will last 30+ years if you do some occasional repairs. Though, they really don't look like home units.
* Well, aside from the indirect effect, where the needing-the-hotness leads to dumping toxic waste in far off countries we don't care about.
I'm far more concerned with the churn in phones than I am in desktops, though some laptops are particularly bad long term devices.
I don't know what they do with all of the returned phones, I assume they sell them on refurbished, but I also assume that a percentage of those that are not broken will fall into the telecom's basket of not cost-effective to refurbish. Those are phones that would have remained in use and continued to be used. Even then, the amount of new phones being manufactured just because consumers want to consume the latest thing with little to no real benefit is wasteful.
For some to succeed, others must fail. It's not possible to keep every CPU design ever conceived in production. PowerPC lost. There's not an infinite amount of software engineering resources to support every discontinued architecture.
I'd go back to one of these old machines in an instant if it didn't mean that reading articles on the web would be so painful.
If you really feel strongly, this is an opportunity for you to get involved in Linux maintenance.
A modern browser crawls on my old iBook G3, even when all it has to display is the HN homepage. And it crawls on the web in general; it would be clever engineering if it were slow only on websites that use super modern features, like WebGL, but the whole things grinds to a halt when reading a newspaper's website, even though the website is fundamentally the same as it was ten years ago. The same goes for virtually every other kind of software.
My computer is at least an order of magnitude faster than the one I owned ten years ago, but the quality, or at least the speed of my usage is pretty much the same. This sounds less like progress and more like running in circles :-).
(I also came to loathe even more videos I didn't ask for playing.)
OK I agree in the browser space (as opposed to the processor space) the past 5 years have been a lot of churn and flabby software.
It's a hard problem as web developers have incentive to use all the horsepower available to them. The only way forward I can imagine, is if everybody sandboxes their browser tabs to limit the resources available to them (e.g. using Linux cgroups), and web developers know they are forced to live in those constraints.
"cgroups in the browser" turned up this proposal (March 2016) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11998210
Although it's not only the fault of the browser devs, but probably mainly of JS/frontend devs... the result is that leaving a browser window open easily halves battery time, because even innocuous sites eat half a core of CPU. Also, fan's always whirling.
Qubes OS is quite nice here. Just pause the VM with the browser in it -> 0 % CPU, but can still read what's on the display.
On a related note, how is "halt all execution and scheduled future execution of scripts in the current tab" not a solved problem for mainstream browsers? Or maybe it is and somehow I missed it?
Browsers in 2016 do vastly more than they did in 2006, websites are richer and are much closer to apps than static pages.
The demand that "I want my browser to be exactly the same speed as it used to be, but also support all these new features" doesn't seem like a reasonable engineering ask. You optimize for the hardware that people will run, not the hardware of 10 years ago, and you also optimize for your slowest new use cases, not the old use cases which will be fast enough even without much optimization.
The argument also doesn't make logical sense. Ten years ago, there was someone saying software 'largely do pretty much the same things' compared to 1996, and ten years before that I'm sure someone was comparing 1996 software to 1986 and saying something similar. But software today looks nothing like in 1986.
Wait wait wait, hold up. I don't want my browsers to support those features. I just want to not need them in order to read a goddamn news article or access a web store. The problem isn't that these technologies are available, it's that they're unavoidable.
Certainly. What does sound like a reasonable engineering request is "I want my browser to be roughly the same speed as it used to be when using these same features that it used to have". Some speed penalty is obviously to be tolerated because of the larger infrastructure (I was about to say boilerplate, but let's keep it civil, there's a legitimate need for it) required to service the extra features, but I think I'm being reasonably lenient even here, considering that this larger infrastructure runs on vastly, vastly superior hardware.
Better hardware just moves the goalpost of where 'prematurely' is.
From a business perspective, if it runs fine on modern hardware, why spend money optimizing it?
This sort of means that better hardware should lower the price of software development. You should be able to replace devs competent at optimizing with cheaper mediocre devs, or the competent devs should be able spend less time on the same software.
I get the impression this hasn't happened but I havn't looked at actual statistics.
But also, software now has more features, there was nothing like modern web apps 15 years ago.
(Note: I'm making guesses on why things are as they are, not as I think they should be. I share your frustrations, why is my 1 year old budget smartphone, that's 4 times as powerful as the 1st laptop I owned, so laggy that's it's nearly unusable?!)
You're confusing "features" with the technology delivering them. ;)
> why is my 1 year old budget smartphone, that's 4 times as powerful as the 1st laptop I owned, so laggy that's it's nearly unusable?!)
cough Java cough :)
A friend of mine used a Nokia N900 smartphone (running Maemo Linux), with a single-core 600 MHz CPU and 256 MB RAM. When it finally died, he moved to a recent Samsung Galaxy model, and complained about how it is much laggier when performing the same tasks that the ancient N900 breezed through at buttery smooth 60 FPS.
Between display ads, and the good dozen web analytics trackers, website bloat is the culprit.
Oh God, not this story again.
I'll tell you what I told my uncle complaining his 200Mhz Pentium MMX with 64MB of ram, running Windows 2000 was slow when going on Facebook.
Yes, we do (pretty much) the same things we used to do ten years ago (this is a lie, actually). What has changed is the volume of data that we generate, send, receive and have to store and process.
The first digital camera I got for Christmas maybe 14 years ago took some nice photos. At high resolution, a photo would take 80 to 100 kb of storage. No metadata. And you could have up to 20 photo in high resolution. It was a kind of a "toy" camera, but still.. Nowadays kids with digital cameras can take photos that take 7-9 megabytes per photo.
Your mail client does not send your username and password as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.
Your www browser does not send your forms (and your passwords too) as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.
Ten years there were no videos on facebook, no realtime chat, no realtime video streaming. There was no Dropbox, and most webmails used to allow up to 100MB of storage.
Data grows, and this is why the industry puts out faster computers every year. And this is why computers become "old" and "slow".
Get over it.
============================
Now, we could ask ourselves, why do many websites have to be so fat? I would really love to see websites supporting an "ultralight" version.
Just like HN: the source is all tables, td and tr but... It renders well on mobile and works awesomely fast on a ten years old laptop (and I tried).
> realtime chat
hasn't really improved over the past 25 years. Someday we'll have federated chat servers, but that seems more of a social engineering problem than a technical one.
... Oh wait, that's actually not an improvement. :)
Also, FTFY:
> Someday we'll have federated chat servers again
Youtube was around in 2005, realtime chat hasn't changed, cloud services and facebook suck anyway, and I had file sharing long before then.
"Everything is encrypted" is fine as well.
I hear you on "everything is bigger now," but I don't see much benefit from it.
> Get over it.
Pff.
1080p? Your point is invalid.
> and I had file sharing long before then
Oh, and how much storage did the typical user have ready access to?
…that and a depressingly inefficient playback path. (It is not necessary to spin up my fans to play 1080p30, but it is from a Web browser.)
Come on, people!
I am clearly stating that pretty much everything is bigger today, and old PCs hsve become slow because they weren't designed to handle such s volume of data.
My post was only an explanation.
Developers are expensive, and getting pricier. CPU cycles get cheaper every year. Spending more cycles in order to spend fewer developer hours is better from the perspective of rational allocation of resources.
Just compare mobile to desktop. Apps abound in mobile because the extra performance inefficiency actually matters enough that it's worthwhile to put in the engineering effort; on desktop the web app is feature-rich and fast enough.
There's a reason people use FB in a browser on desktop but the app on mobile.
I think there's a generation of people who, since they've never done it, have no idea how hard it is to ship an executable that will reliably run even across multiple patch levels of what is nominally the same OS. Let alone across different OS versions or even OSes. And then even knowing of crashes that happen on end-user boxes, let alone debugging them, is another pile of suck. And upgrades.
The web browser is a light-years better target, because it lets you run the servers yourself. And you can do things like only have one version deployed at a time! No more trying to make different client versions backwards and forwards compatible with multiple server versions, etc.
Depends on how much mail you keep.
I use GMail's storage as it's intended, I don't delete anything other than spam. Over the course of however many years I've been using it my mailboxes have expanded to the point that simply keeping track of the current state of things causes Mail.app to drag my '08-era Macbook Pro to a crawl. That's a native app built by the designers of the platform. Thunderbird wasn't much better. Simply opening either one up basically maxes out 4GB of RAM, and unfortunately the model I have doesn't like 8GB.
I stopped using a local mail client and went back to webmail pretty much because of that.
I don't think this is true. The volume of data that a regular user generates, sends and receives has changed, but if this were the root of the problem, I'd expect to see CPUs stalling while waiting for the damn network to roll. What we see instead is CPUs spinning hot in order to display the latest list of hotties in your area.
> Nowadays kids with digital cameras can take photos that take 7-9 megabytes per photo.
And ten years ago, default settings in scanning software would result in 20-megabyte JPEGs that were processed just fine.
> Your mail client does not send your username and password as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.
I think I first used SSL for email in mutt 1.4 (I might have been using it in Evolution before that, but mutt being mutt, it was a little painful to get it working, so I remember it well). That was more than ten years ago. OpenSSL itself is almost twenty years old, has been quite extensively used throughout its history, and it's the successor of another project.
> Your www browser does not send your forms (and your passwords too) as cleartext anymore. Everything is encrypted.
And yet wget-ing a page over HTTPS works fine on a 600 MHz, single-core, low-power i.MX6. So does browsing it on a 600 MHz PowerPC with a 2003-era browser, at least until the banner-carrying JS cavalry comes in.
(Not to mention -- again -- that HTTPS worked just fine ten years ago, it just wasn't as common; but it's well within the processing possibilities of a relatively modest CPU, and it's not like now your CPU is continuously spinning encrypted data for umpteen websites at the same time).
> Ten years there were no videos on facebook,
This one might be true, but videos, real-time chat and real-time video streaming were certainly available on the web, even though not on the (still recently-launched) Facebook.
Dropbox wasn't launched yet, but they hardly invented file storage and distributed access, and I am not going to start explaining why the amount of storage that a webmail provider offers should have no impact over the speed of the client-side code of their webmail interface.
Lots of javascript to get ad dollars.
in 2007 I was developing websites, the ones I build now are considerably better in almost every way. I used photoshop, but now the images I work with are far better resolution. Video production.. you get the point.
So yes I'm doing much of the same thing, but my quality has improved significantly.
I'd go out on a limb and say tons of websites got way worse over the past 10 years.
My guess is that PowerPC will still hold some relevance for the time to come as a cheap and widely available testing architecture: if a piece of software works on ppc (BE), it most likely has no byte-ordering issues (that show in it's tests) and should work on POWER or SPARC as well.
> PowerPC has lost.
Although realistically I'd just log in to an instance somewhere in an IBM cloud.
And now I feel sad, like the sad mac face.
It almost makes me hope that arches like the Mill don't pan out - if there's nothing obviously better, boring compatibility will win and bring with it the opportunity to build higher on narrower, more stable, base.
Honestly, I'm optimistic. Technological progress is plateauing (at least single-threaded CPU speeds), and this will naturally need to more stability.
I think the last few decades of rapid technological change has led us through a dark ages of sorts, and the next few decades will hopefully be a maturing of platforms and standards, at least as far as desktop/laptop computing goes.
To put it another way: Moore's law has led to a multitude of sins, and once we can no longer rely on Moore's law to make our computers faster, we're going to really think through past decisions and make smarter choices going forwards. It'll be the only way to keep making progress.
To bring this back to your comment specifically, I think computers will take longer and longer to become obsolete, as these technologies mature. I think this is already happening: I can quite happily use a 5 year old computer now for most current computing tasks, whereas this would not have been true a decade ago.
That's a surprisingly narrow perspective on technological progress (although convenient for your argument).
> once we can no longer rely on Moore's law to make our computers faster
Moore's law is still making our GPUs faster as planned. Our only hope is Amdahl's law. :)
> I think computers will take longer and longer to become obsolete
No need to look at the future. The average lifespan of a computer is already 4 years and maybe even more. We are starting to see the same larger lifespan for smartphones. (The biggest issue with keeping my phones for longer is actually the availability of Android updates.)
Finding a replacement for my note 4 with a replaceable battery has been tough. Hopefully in the next few years someone will offer it.
Things like streaming HD video on YouTube for hours on a single battery charge?
CPUs seem to have only about doubled in speed in that time. This thing has an i7 860 from 2009 that gets a PassMark score of 5083. The top-of-the-line i7 975 from that time has a score of 6215. A present day i7 6700K has a score of 11011.
Graphics cards have advanced a bit more strongly. But swap out an old disk drive for an SSD and PCs are really staying viable for a long time.
Also, "prettier" has a cost... it takes a lot of memory to pump that much data to a screen at a usable rate. Hell, even a modern powerhouse with a top of the line video card still cant play modern games at 4k with higher quality settings at a playable framerate, so there's room to grow.
Also, prettier has value, as does some of the interactive pieces that we tend to take advantage of. It isn't like things have stood still. Also, most of the work is about delivering overall value, not optimal performance, so there is still room... but not on very old hardware that doesn't have a lot of support.
Yeah, there's a few powerpc users, but how many of them are contributing to upkeep... not many would be my guess, and maintaining testing labs is another issue entirely. I'd much rather get a great ootb experience on an under 5yo macbook in a current linux distro than hardware that is much older.
In fact, my set of normaly-user essential local software is shrinking - I expect it to become just "a browser" within a few years. (As a developer, now that's a very different story)