[COMPUTERS] How far we've come.

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

It's simple: development time is more expensive than server farms. Hence, you can just have more servers instead of having better soft running on them. Same with desktop, a quick and dirty program is cheaper for the company making it, the user will eventually upgrade the computer anyways, right?

Speaking of which, in the unlikely case you did you hear, Youtube had a big problem with Gangaman Style view count. The count went over the 32 bit signed integer's limit they were using to count the views.

The first thing that comes to mind is, why did they use a signed integer instead of an unsigned one?! It's not like a video will have a negative number of views... Well, if you read Google's coding standards they basically say "if it stores a number, it's an Integer object". No thought process, no engineering, no nothing, number = 32 bit signed integer.

Me thinks, as is pretty common, they are probably using tons and tons of frameworks they didn't write (another "wonderful" contributions of the Java world, IMO) and that also use Integers, so calling those routines with anything but Integer class objects can be problematic: a programmer would have to think what to do and how his design interacts with the framework's... and that is, apparently, very expensive time to invest in such a thing.

Java is really something I'll never understand. It offers some very interesting things, but it also adds some of the most atrocious techniques the world has ever seen. The arguments ussualy is "but you couldn't have those cool things with a native compiled language". There is really no reason for that. You can have a 100% compiled language that offers the same things than Java, and one can argue that those languages already exist now and before Java was born.

But then again, software has fashion trends like anything else... and we end up with a highly demanding game engine written in C#.

im not sure if portability is worth the performance penalty. while programming my own game engine (in c++) ive probibly moved development back and fourth between linux and windows and vise versa about 4 times, and i think the only thing i had to do to my entire codebase was change my file system paths

Never wrote something as complex as a game engine, but my experience as well, and of many others: the open source community is FULL of projects that run Win/Linux/Mac and that are done in native complied languages.

[pxi]

I come from an age when many games were written directly in assembly. Nowadays that sort of thing seems to be nigh-on verboten because development teams have gotten larger, and it's seen as an acceptable trade-off to write code in a highly abstracted language that is more easily understood by those who didn't write the code at the cost of performance. In fact, in terms of 'how to manage your project' lectures I've watched, I've seen people actively warning against allowing people on to your team who would write such horribly efficient code, because it's seen as a sign that the person is looking for a way to make themselves irreplaceable.

But hey, there's always a faster processor on the horizon, right?

[Nuke]

before you know it we will be writing for virtual machines running on virtual machines.

[H2O.]

On the subject of Java: yes it is quick and dirty, but quick and dirty actually works. I know that such a statement is borderline heresy and I am fully aware that bad software can lead to disasters. What I mean is that for most business a software is just a way to save time.

Exemple: a program does an inventory verification in 5 minutes, while a human could do it in 10 hours. The program is horribly coded and could do the same thing in 1 min.

In the first case your business save 9 h 55. On the second case your business save 9 h 59. So already the difference is pretty much inexistant, although quite real. But actually in the first case you save more than 9 h 55: you save 10 h because your employee doesn't have anything to do anymore; and in the second case, well you save 10 h too. So there is actually no difference at all.

That is how a manager see the problem and actually I think he is right. As somebody with scientific and technical background it took me a while to understand and aknowledge that.

[pxi]

Up to a point that's true, but often the managers want everything to run on the same box to keep costs down. Eventually there's only so many clock-cycles to go round, but they still figure they should be able to shoehorn more software in.

[Lohan2008]

Mid 1980's = Commodore 64 (kilobytes) back then we had to use cassette tapes that took 3 hrs to load tiny programs & "floppies" that stored data. A Megabyte of storage was pure fiction & no one had a use for that HUGE amount of data. Currently using 450 GB of storage and the laptop has a Terabyte external box for the movies.

[H2O.]

but often the managers want everything to run on the same box to keep costs down

True, but this is bad calculation. An half-decent box cost 400 €/$ and can run for 5 years without any problem. You end up with a cost that is less than 100 €/$ per year, which depending where you live is the cost of 1 to 3 hours of work.

[Nibb31]

I remember working for a month to buy a floppy drive for my Amstrad CPC. Yes, a 3 inch *floppy* drive was that expensive.

But in those days, you had 64KB of RAM and the floppy disk could hold 180KB on each side, so it was basically like an interchangeable hard drive. You could put 6 games on it and they would load in seconds. Before I had the floppy drive, I had to use tapes, which typically took over 15 minutes to load a game.

[xyifer12]

Look at this man, bein' all fancy with his 80% empty hard drives!

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/--SPYI2zRyok/VNV2PWnCmyI/AAAAAAAAAlc/pUk4p0zSRns/s281/HDDSpace.PNG

Dang, you have a lot of free space, lol.

[FanaticalFighter]

People: "What is this? It's storing giant pictures! With brilliant resolution! Thousands of them! And what is this you're doing, a high-tech rocket simulation?"

You: "Uh, this is Kerbal Space Program. It's a game."

Oh my god I laughed so hard at that I spilled my coffee into my brand new Rubik's Cube. Looks like caffeine is a terrible lubricant. That was brilliant.

EDIT:

http://imgur.com/Ud2NbqQ.png

Dang, you have a lot of free space, lol.

Meh, I've had 216 kb left on my 1TB hdd once.

Edited February 11, 2015 by FanaticalFighter

[cantab]

On the subject of Java: yes it is quick and dirty, but quick and dirty actually works. I know that such a statement is borderline heresy and I am fully aware that bad software can lead to disasters. What I mean is that for most business a software is just a way to save time.

Exemple: a program does an inventory verification in 5 minutes, while a human could do it in 10 hours. The program is horribly coded and could do the same thing in 1 min.

In the first case your business save 9 h 55. On the second case your business save 9 h 59. So already the difference is pretty much inexistant, although quite real. But actually in the first case you save more than 9 h 55: you save 10 h because your employee doesn't have anything to do anymore; and in the second case, well you save 10 h too. So there is actually no difference at all.

That is how a manager see the problem and actually I think he is right. As somebody with scientific and technical background it took me a while to understand and aknowledge that.

For batch processing it is indeed not necessarily a problem. I've written quick and dirty bash scripts that took hours and hours to convert some data because no thought was given to efficiency, it only needed to work once and was still far far quicker than an attempt to do things manually would have been.

It's for the interactive programs that we use on a daily basis that the problem - and my irateness - rises. When I'm waiting for Word to respond, waiting for a website to download despite having a 40 Megabit connection, that sort of stuff.

[cicatrix]

It's for the interactive programs that we use on a daily basis that the problem - and my irateness - rises. When I'm waiting for Word to respond, waiting for a website to download despite having a 40 Megabit connection, that sort of stuff.

Have a shame, the interface designers struggle every day to provide you with 'even better user experience'. (Oh, almost forgot, they have to eat too)

[H2O.]

When I'm waiting for Word to respond

I'm totally with you on this. God I hate Word, or PowerPoint, the whole Office bundle actually. What was that c**** of an idea to replace a perfectly ok GUI with that ridiculous ribbon thing? And why is it so slow and ressource heavy? 64-bits, really? To send e-mails and write letters?

[Beowolf]

before you know it we will be writing for virtual machines running on virtual machines.

And somehow they'll still manage to crash the actual hardware. :/

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Ha, I just remembered... another achievement of modern computer sciences. Have anyone heard about Netduino? This is great I tell you. The Netduino is essentially an effort to run .Net programs on a board with the Arduino philosophy. Of course, Arduinos have tiny microprocessors and 1 or 2 KB of RAM, so the only resemblance to Arduino these boards have is the name and the pin form factor (and the fact that they are open-hardware).

Still, they run a .Net framework on a "microcomputer" running a hundred and something MHz and with some 60 to 100 KB of RAM... Talk about waste of resources! The benefits? None, of course, specially because there's no point in having multi-platform code that will only run in one single platform, ever. And even if it didn't, as you would do with Arduinos, you just recompile the C++/Ada code et voilà.

[Deadpangod3]

the simplest and maybe most astounding example of how far we've come is this:

look at a picture of the supercomputer NASA used to go to the moon/or whatever.

pull out your iphone/phone/android/potato/whatever.

that small rectangle in your hands has more power then that giant box almost as tall as a person.

(am i thinking of the wrong computer?)

[Pixel of Life]

XKCD has an interesting article on data density:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/31/