[mdlug] What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away

[Brian Hurley]

On Saturday 17 November 2007, Wolfger wrote:
> On Nov 17, 2007 9:44 AM, David Lane <dcl400m at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Microsoft and other companies are looking to make development cost
> > effective in so doing it takes computing resources and the ultimate cost
> > is passed onto the endusers THAT is not fair.
>
> I think there's more to it than that. Maybe I've been wearing a
> tinfoil hat too long, but it seems to me that there's some sort of
> agreement between computer makers (who distribute Windows on every
> machine... until recently) and Microsoft, who constantly drives the
> need for more powerful computers.

I forget where I read this, but some book defined the GUI as "The hardware 
manufacuturer's best friend."

You don't need a tinfoil hat and a conspiracy theory to deduce that CPU makers 
want to increase CPU usage, its an explict goal of Intel. They have admitted 
it is what's behind them pushing multimedia PC use since at least the mid 
90s.

While software bloat is arguably bad* its definitely not restricted to MS 
alone. I've read more than one benchmark showing that OO is much worse at 
both speed and memory use than even the currently uber bloated MS Office. 
Here's one example: http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=480

I also recall ESR arguing in the Art of Unix Programming against spending 
programming time on software optimization vs adding new features, especially 
when the answer to most complaints about slow software is just wait till the 
next CPU version.

* Software bloat is also arguably NOT bad. Not many of us still run Windows 98 
or Slackware 4 these days.

-- 
Brian Hurley
Detroit Industrial Underground
www.detroitindustrial.org

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out 
the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them.
--Frederick Douglass