Re: Message from spinoza1111

"santosh" <santosh.k83@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
Malcolm McLean wrote:


Programs never wear out, and they don't weigh anything. That makes
programs rather different to mechnanical engineering constructs.

Programs do come and go. In fact some software have a shorter life cycle
than a cell phone. Are you still running Z80 with CP/M? How come you
went and brought Vista on the very day of release?

I'd put off buying new hardware and still had a 750 MHz computer with dial-up. So I decided to wait until Vista came out to get a new computer. Unfortunately Visucal C++ 6.0 broke, which I've been regretting ever since.

So the decision to purchase was driven by hardware upgrades.

In fact the immortality of programs hasn't had a marked effect just
yet, because the hardware they run on has changed so quickly. However
that will eventually come to an end, in fact there are signs that it
is coming to an end already.

Care to site some reasons for these wild assertions?

There is barrier at about 3Ghz which is difficult to overcome. The process of shrinking circuit sizes and thus getting extra speed, lower power consumption, and smaller fabrication costs comes to a limit at that point.
So now you buy dual core or quad core machines, often running at about 2MHz. By simplifying the processors but increasing the numbers of them we can probably continue to double processing power every 18 months for a while. It hasn't happened yet, but will probably occur in a rush as massively parallel desktop machines are rolled out. However from that point on, progress will be slow. Adding more cores tends to increase costs and reduce intra-chip communication speed, not the reverse. Manufacturing will get more efficient so prices will still come down, but in line with other consumer goods.

Another, I think unrelated aspect of the new economy is that resources
might become more scarce than they have been at present. We'll soon
realise that the cost of exporting all those manfacturing jobs to
China was that Chinese and British wages must equalise. The cost of
not exporting the jobs, however, would be even higher. Britian will
have a financial services industry which services China, France and
Germany, in attempting to protect their manufacturing industry, will
have nothing except obsolete factories.

You do have a tendency to jump to far-fetched conclusions based on a few
tenuous trends, don't you?

Yes, that's the working method. You make conclusions from the data you have, about things you cannot measure directly.

However we are seeing resource competition already. When an old lady dies of hypothermia in Edinburgh, that's because the oil that could have heated her home has gone to drive machinery in a toy factory in Shanghai. That's why China is trying to buy stakes in Australian mining companies. That's why our troops are in Iraq.

--
Free games and programming goodies.
http://www.personal.leeds.ac.uk/~bgy1mm

.

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