Re: Intro to Programming w/ Machine Language

From: Randy Howard (randyhoward_at_FOOverizonBAR.net)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 01:21:00 GMT

In article <7z8Ud.6572$873.4868@newsread3.news.pas.earthlink.net>,
randyhyde@earthlink.net says...
>
> "Randy Howard" <randyhoward@FOOverizonBAR.net> wrote in message
> news:MPG.1c8abf5543a4c98e98a0ca@news.verizon.net...
> > In article <GX4Ud.6262$MY6.453@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net>,
> > randyhyde@earthlink.net says...
> > > Yes, but then the programmer has taken the imperative to
> > > produce high-performance code that doesn't waste the end-user's
> > > time, haven't they?
> >
> > And watching the load average on my system, they seems to be
> > doing it fairly well. I wish the hard drive manufacturers
> > felt the same moral imperative not to waste my time.
> >
> > :-(
>
> The argument isn't about bypassing the laws of physics.

> if your disk driver manufacturer has
> produced disk drives that are as fast as current technology allows
> (at a given price point, of course), then you can't hold them
> responsible.

Excuse me, but could you please explain why disk drive manufacturers
have a get out of jail free card on price, but software does not?

Should a free browser perform as well as a commercial one? Or
should you get world's best browser performance without having to
pay a price equivalent to that of a 14-drive RAID 0 U320 Scsi
enclosure with a big hardware cache accelerator in a PCI-express
x16 slot?

> > The whole reason browsers are slow is because of the web
> > admins turning their websites into saturday morning cartoons.
> > Any web browser you pick is smoking fast on a well-designed
> > web page. It's bandwidth, not CPU use that is slowing down
> > those page loads on reasonable modern client systems.
>
> Bandwidth is one issue. But rending speed and clever algorithms
> are another source of low performance in browsers.

Bandwidth is THE issue. I can't remember ever seeing rendering
a web page shoot my CPU load off the rev limiter. There may
be some variances having to do with opening multiple connections
to a web site to load pages faster (overlapped I/O), but
again bandwidth becomes the overriding throttle on this technique.

Once everybody has a full DS3 to their house, it might be better,
but odds are even then webmasters will just have cluttered up
the sites more to take up the extra bandwidth.

> > How does a programmer have the "social obligation" when his
> > boss sets the schedule and the feature list? :-)
>
> Because now you have *conflicting* obligations. And how one
> resolves such conflict is the stuff great philosophical discussions
> are made of. However, the fact that there is a conflict in no way
> suggests that the social obligation not to waste user's time doesn't
> exist.

Why does the boss not have a social obligation not to waste the
user's time? Does a programmer's responsibility to his employer
have any weight at all, or is he to act independently of his
company's (and perhaps stockholder's) wishes? What color is the
sky in your world?
  

-- 
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)
"Making it hard to do stupid things often makes it hard
 to do smart ones too." -- Andrew Koenig

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