Announcing the Feedster Public Wiki!

Here you go.  This is a public forum for documentation about Feedster.  Not much there but its public so anyone (not just me) can contribute.

7:46:18 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This   

You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin -- Or Use Too Little Ram

aka "Why Longhorn Scares the Crap Out of Me"

How's that old statement go?  You can never been too rich or too thing?  Well the computing equivalent has to be this:

You can never use too little RAM.

And that, dear reader, is why Longhorn scares the crap out of me.  But let me start with a fragment from an instant message exchange yesterday:

(16:28:59) fuzzygroup: lol.  yep.  interesting
(16:30:39) fuzzygroup: i just caught frontpg using 250 MEGS to edit 3 maybe 20 K files
(16:30:56) scottstjohn102: what ver?
(16:32:08) fuzzygroup: office 2K
(16:32:34) scottstjohn102: incredible
(16:33:15) scottstjohn102: highest on my machine right now is MSN Messenger at a whopping 30 megs
(16:33:17) scottstjohn102: for IM!
(16:33:50) fuzzygroup: lol.  yep.  IE has 47 megs right now
(16:34:39) scottstjohn102: perspective:  MSN Messenger needs 5 times the memory that my Apache WEB SERVER needs
(16:35:23) fuzzygroup: lol
(16:35:24) scottstjohn102: and that is development so I have every freaking php extension on
(16:35:42) fuzzygroup: Longhorn: Just Say No
(16:36:01) fuzzygroup: Its a fact of the high tech world that software never, ever, ever gets smaller and more efficient.
(16:36:11) fuzzygroup: 1st 2 lines of an essay that I should write

That's right -- Frontpage from Office 2000, running under Windows 2000, was using 280 MEGABYTES of memory (I typed it wrong in the IM session).  Don't believe me?  Well how about these proverbial apples:

So here I am running literally two generations behind on Microsoft software -- Windows 2000 instead of Windows XP and Office 2000 instead of Office XP.  And even so I still have troubles with memory.  Do I really think that if I upgrade to Longhorn that there will be more memory available?  Will Longhorn be faster and more efficient?  I think not.  Software never gets smaller and more efficient.  N E V E R !  I've never seen this in my 17 years of experience (well maybe once or twice -- but never in a Microsoft product).

Now in this age of multi-megabyte machines, people might think I'm making too much of a big deal about this --- I don't think so.  Even as our machines get more powerful, our dependence on them also gets more powerful.  And the more dependent we are on computers, the more important it is that they're stable -- and when you run out of memory, things crash.  Period. 

Now I don't know about you, but for me IM is actually more important than the phone.  With the exception of one person I talk with regularly, I'd rather have my phone shut off than my IM.  So when my machine runs out of memory and crashes due to crap like that above, its a big deal.  For that two to 5 minute period when I shut down, reboot and restore all my applications and windows, I can't get any "calls".  I ***hate*** that. 

So that's why Longhorn scares me -- it will just be bigger and eat more memory.  And I don't see that it will really make things better.  It will make them different certainly but not better.

6:19:03 AM  | Permalink:   | comment []  |  IM Me About This