| ??? 08/05/09 15:49 Read: times |
#168183 - Wait a minute, pilgrim! Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Andy Peters said:
Raghunathan said:
I have a real concern : With vendors making thier software more and more user friendly ( or try to )and aim to recah the market NOW, nobody seems to bother about the size of the code. If you want to load a OS you need 2GB memory and tons of RAM.( I don't know about Linux. So excuse me here ) If you want a Office package add another 2 GB. The list is endless. I really am convinced that most software that gets developed today is just a mix of ready made universal routines, that have so much of stuff that many do not use in their life time. Why on earth should I have some 100 odd printer drivers on my PC and anyway have to install another 90MB of driver for the new printer ?? You have 100-odd printer drivers on your hard disk, but not actually running, because the average user expects to plug in his printer and have it work out of the box. Sure, the printer drivers (and all of the other drivers you don't use) take up disk space. I'd bet it's "bells and whistles" of the OS that aren't needed. Yes, the old Windows worked better than the new, and DOS was more reliable. With the old Windows, they finally fixed the bugs. With the new stuff, there are so many bugs, it takes less effort to write a new (and buggy) release. The 90 MB printer-driver install gives you all sorts of crap HP thinks you need, so don't install most of it. The way the stuff is written and distributed, you don't have the option of excluding what you don't need. In fact, its nearly impossible to get rid of all the "rubbishware" that both hardware and software vendors distribute with their products. Oh, yeah, there's no intelligence in the printer, so the driver does all of the low-level rendering. But, hey, your printer costs fifty bucks.
Maybe my expectations are wrong.
10 years back my 486 and DOS loaded in a matter of seconds. Today my 2.4Ghz Centrino and Win_XP need 3 minutes just to come out of hibernation. Progress ??? Oh, jeez, let's not confuse the issue. When you booted DOS, you got a single-tasking operating system and just a command line. Want to switch between OrCAD and TurboC? Well, close OrCAD and open TurboC. Want to read a data sheet for your 74LS74 flip-flop? Go find the TI TTL Data Book and open it to the appropriate page. Want to send e-mail? Open a terminal window for your modem so you can dial into the server. But where's the advantage in the "modern" OS? It lets you open several tasks, none of which have to be open concurrently, but it uses 10x the processing bandwidth and 10x the memory, and cost, and ... and in the end, it is so much slower, even running only one task, you finally decide to go back to DOS-before-Windows. The old OrCAD386+ stuff works 100x as fast as the Windows version, allows you to redo a task that took a team of three weeks, by yourself, in under half a day. I've had DOS running for months at a time without a crash. Try that with Windows! THe old, admittedly MUCH simpler PLD software that AMD gave away for free would do the job 100% in just a minute or two, while todays $50k tools take much, MUCH longer. Sure, there's more to do, but you get the picture. On a modern machine with a GUI OS, you can have your HDL sources open in several editor windows, ModelSim in another, the FPGA tools in a third, the e-mail program in a fourth, a web browser in a fifth, PDF data sheets open too. It's doing gigabit-speed networking and accessing hard disks at SATA-3 speeds. So, sure, this all requires more resources, but you are asking the computer to do more.
As for coming out of hibernation, that's NOT the same as booting into DOS. Instead, the computer reads a large (size-of-RAM) file which contains the system state at hibernation. How long does it take to open a 2 GB file? -a RE |
