> Perhaps all of this will come to fruition regardless with Google Docs
> and Spreadsheets?
>
> We are making hardware that continues to operate faster and faster, but
> surely there will be a time where the demand for blazing fast processors
> levels out when it comes to your average home PC and the non-gaming
> crowd? After all, your average user doesn't need an eight core rig to
> type up stuff, get their email, instant message, and access the web...
The processor people work with the OS and application people to try
to find neat ways to require more processor power. This has been going
on for several years now.
Only when people step outside of the commercial world do you get the
option to slow the upgrades. Otherwise they're forced to buy newer
hardware to maintain compatibility with their friends whose new
hardware came with the new version of X that doesn't play quite nicely
with older versions.
Free software has a tendancy to support old hardware for a long, long
time. Even when it isn't supported in all applications, you find things
like text-based applications that use the same data-formats as GUI
cousins. The open nature allows for competition, and the competition
finds a way to work on the available hardware -- old and new alike.
Truthfully, the processor speed has been quite nice for some time now.
It is really other components of the system that need more work. We may
even see a more radical rethinking of human/computer interaction once
there's no where else to go.
> I'm hoping that 3 year product upgrade cycles will slowly become 4, 5,
> or even longer product upgrade cycles for your average computer user in
> the coming years. There is planned obsolescence, but nobody is forcing
> upgrades either. How much crap can you cram into a word processor or
> spreadsheet app anyway before people start to realize that they don't
> really need to upgrade?
This is really about marketting. Marketting is all about convincing people
they need a product that they didn't need yesterday.
It's been 15 years or more since word processors actually added any new
features that 90% of the population really needed. Hopefully the growing
trend towards office documents with open formats will also help slow
this down.
> I'm also thinking that we may have to gut the way we think of
> programming web apps and start over. AJAX is a pretty sloppy hack that
> attempts to work around the fundamental idea that HTTP retrieves entire
> pages. Maybe we need a new version of the HTTP standard that will handle
> partial fetches and sending of data? If this was handled at the protocol
> level, it would certainly take pressure off of browser and web
> developers in developing cross browser Javascript?
The HTTP protocol does, actually, handle partial fetches. Not all
webservers honor them, and it doesn't work with generated pages due
to the lack of state. (Check 'man wget' and search for "--continue".
It is a real-world example of a product attempting to use partial
page fetches and some of the problems it encounters.)
Ultimately you have to have a solution that accepts the unreliability of
the Internet, and the totally unknown number of people that may connect
at once. This would appear to be one of the primary factors for the
HTTP protocol being totally stateless. The stateless nature is also why
it is so hard to program for it.
Cheers,
Steven Black
_______________________________________________
BLUG mailing list
BLUG@linuxfan.com
http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
No comments:
Post a Comment