Re: Intro to Programming w/ Machine Language

From: Randall Hyde (randyhyde_at_earthlink.net)
Date: 02/27/05 

Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2005 01:53:54 GMT

"Randy Howard" <randyhoward@FOOverizonBAR.net> wrote in message

> >
> > 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?

Because they *do* provide alternatives that are high-performance.
And you're forgetting a crucial point here: there are manufacturing
cost differences between low-performance drives and high-performance
drives that affect the final cost. In general, the manufacturing costs for
software, high or low performance, are the same: zero (or sufficiently
close). Certainly, there isn't much of a difference in cost (download
bandwidth, space on a CD/DVD?) between the two. Indeed, it is
a paradox that the more efficient one is probably smaller, and the
manufacturing cost is actually *less*.

By the same token, programmers get a "get out of jail free" card
on the issue of *features*. That is, you pay less for a lower-featured
program (in theory) than you do for a highly-featured version.
And if programmers offered a "slow" version at a lower cost
and a "fast" version at a higher cost, that would be okay too.
Because then you're letting the consumer (end-user) make the
decision. However, if you provide only one version of the
program, then the end-user has to live with that.

In theory, competition could also provide this. Want a faster
browsing experience? Then use XXXX browser rather than
YYYY browser.

> Should a free browser perform as well as a commercial one?

The cost of manufacturing both pieces of software is essentially
the same: zero.

> 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?

See the argument above.

>
> > > 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.

I have. For example, when browsing local files rather than
browsing files over the internet.

>
> 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.

DS3 still doesn't match local file speed. And I've observed that
IE doesn't do well on a lot of stuff I look at locally.

>
> 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?

Because the boss typically doesn't know squat about what it
takes to write efficient software. The boss doesn't make the
design desisions (or get lazy and not bother to write great code)
that lead to bloated, slow code. Now if the boss explicitly tells
the programmer to write "quick and dirty" code, then the boss
definitely takes the responsibility. But for the most part, it's the
programmers making this decision, not their bosses.

Perhaps you would feel more comfortable if we changed the
argument "programmers have a social obligation to write
fast XXXX programs" to "programmers have a social
obligation *not* to write crappy, slow, code?"
Unfortunately, both statements turn out to mean the same
thing. Because if programmers aren't diligent about writing
efficient code, they usually wind up writing crappy,
inefficient code, even if not on purpose.
Cheers,
Randy Hyde

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