In the good old days of the old Republic machines doubled their speed yearly. My three-year-old 2GHz laptop is getting slow, so checked the new machines. To my surprise, the low-end is almost the same. Something fundamental has changed while I didn't look.
This post is being written on AMD Athlon 2600+, and here they sell AMD Athlon 3000+. For the first time in my life, a memory upgrade may be enough to transform and old machine into a modern one.
Eclipse takes 100MB, Firefox takes another 100MB and the app I run on Tomcat takes 100MB. And then you should compile. Not something that fits to 500MB.
5 comments:
I don't think those MB:s are that big a deal. Lack of memory does slow things down, but my laptop has 512MB of memory and I can run stuff that on aggregate gobbles some 1.2GB of memory without even noticing the swapping (except when something major changes take place).
It has been my observation that Windows (at least XP) is terrible in managing memory, but somehow I doubt you as a sensible person would be using that.
In fact, I'm using Windows XP. Previously there wasn't any specific reason to install Linux. In the few cases when I've tried it, I've had driver problems.
Now that the app I develop is deployed on Debian Sarge, installing Linux is more appealing because then the development environment would be identical to the deployment environment.
One more reason to get a new machine.
I am running Ubuntu 6.06 with all the patches that come with it on my home PC with 256MB memory. There is no sign of slowdown, except when launching or switching between multiple memory-heavy applications. Running firefox and acrobat reader plus some minor applications that take some 50MB each, I don't even notice any lag.
XP is inferior technology, by far.
Let's say that Linux is more suitable for low-memory conditions, or that XP has inferior memory paging. In other fronts XP is superior, like availability of device drivers or international fonts. In most respects both operating systems are good enough to let the applications play the main role.
Most of today's software would never have been written with a license that demanded source to be opened and no restrictions on copying. Even mainly open-source companies like Red Hat and Mysql rely in their business on restrictions that make parts of the software proprietary.
Your argument is valid but not against the point about technology.
The technology which Linux is based on is superior in fundamental ways as it comes to design and implementation.
I was not referring to the social network effects which do bring added value to XP and other MS-Windows-products. This is a social phenomenon and it has very little to do with technology per se.
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