Browsers and Internet explorer

[AbraCadabra]

Honey, I'm more concerned about the constant required hardware updates & changes, having to throw good equipment into the rubbish because SW update dictates it.

There is no "free hard ware" for all I know... yes?

SW update always pushing for HW updates, that's the issue - IMHO

Axélle

[Artemis]

I somehow totally missed Microsoft's DOS and Windows? I usually can repair it for others but please don't force me to use it, my autism and windows really hate each other: Windows is loud, noisy, busy, distracting, etc.

I started on an Amiga, then some open source unixes, I used to love Emacs, and finally ended up with MacOSX: Quiet, calming, not getting in the way, gentle, soft, etc. My only point of frustration: The way video buffers are handled on the new intel systems is worse then it ever was on the old powerpc systems *sigh*

And then this year I'm noticing that I'm using my iPad more and more? Somehow it just works without frustrating my sensory difficulties and the Mac has become the fall back whenever the iPad can't handle it or something requires a bit more privacy ;->

I'm using Safari on the iPad and Chrome (dev channel) on the mac.

[spacial]

Honey, I'm more concerned about the constant required hardware updates & changes, having to throw good equipment into the rubbish because SW update dictates it.

There is no "free hard ware" for all I know... yes?

SW update always pushing for HW updates, that's the issue - IMHO

Axélle

That basically is it and that's the real money spinner.

If it were any other industry, there would be laws against it.

I was well up on computer technology in the 80s, having been grounded in electronics, again, from an interest point of view.

The simple reason I got out of computers was because of the numbers of otherwise intelligent and certainly knowledgeable people who seemed incapable of understand the preposity of the constant and totally unnecessary hardware updates.

My first computer ran at a huge 1 MHz. My current computer is quad core and runs at 2.4 GHz. My current computer is reaching the end of its useful life! 

[Artemis]

For the programmer the issue is a bit different. If some action (like search?) takes more then 1 minute then you will have to use it sparsely. When the same action takes only a fraction of a second [on new hardware], then this changes everything. Then stuff like e.g. "realtime search while you're typing the query" or "realtime updated folder view" become possible and that requires totally different user interfaces, totally different designs, etc.

So yes, we could still have computers with only monochrome command line text interfaces but I personally am very happy with my iPad ;-)

EDIT: edited for clarity, added text between []

[spacial]

With the greatest respect Artemis, that doesn't make a lot of sense. No-one is suggesting we have monochrome command line interfaces.

But as a programmer and I'm sure that like most programmers, you will have been studying your subject for a number of years, so will be fully aware of the changes that have taken place. We are all aware of the difference between the graphics of the 80s, where the best was 640x286 with 16 colours and today. That isn't the issue.

It's  that demands from hardware are being continually extended, without any real benefit?

But it's academic, because, much like taxes and company bosses paying themselves a load, there isn't a lot we can do about it. And Uncle Bill is still the richest man in the world.

[tekla]

Software is always more valuable than hardware.  The hardware you might buy once, but the expendables eat constant money.  They all but give the printers away given how much you are going to spend on ink or toner.  You buy one stereo, one DVD player, but how many CDs/DVDs?

And I've been running through both since my first Trash 80, but greater hardware and better software have made a lot of stuff possible now that wasn't before.  The reason that long-time users don't often see it is because their needs/wants/demands are set so they are not out shopping around for new applications and programs.  But editing software/and photo software with the increased speed of the hardware are just two areas where things were expanded to at least some benefit.

[spacial]

I don't doubt that Tekla, but the suspicion by many is that, while there have been enormous improvements, many of the increased hardware demands are intended to make machines obsolete.

[Artemis]

It's  that demands from hardware are being continually extended, without any real benefit?

Well, I'm sure that you're right at least to some degree with regard to Microsoft. Note that the end-user isn't really Microsoft's costumer, MS makes most of their money from two types of costumers: OEMs and large enterprises. So Windows, Office and MSIE are written mostly with the needs and wants of these costumers in mind and this is clearly noticeable in the software, the end-user needs and wants are often marginalized by the priorities of the first two. And the OEM main priority is to sell NEW hardware? Especially because the PC market is mostly a low-value/high-volume commodity market maintaining the value of the old hardware is considered BAD for business.

In the long run however, advancement of technology does matter, it makes software possible that could not be work before. In Mac OS X Lion Apple added "(near) realtime autosave" which actually gives the user a lot of benefit, but this feature would have been impossible on slower hardware. The same applies to "smart folders", which are more or less "saved search queries, (near) realtime updated", which are only posible because a more RAM, faster CPUs and faster storage devices. Stuff like SSD replacing HDDs will also change the way software works because what would be logical and optimal on the HDD is stupid and wasteful on SSD? The same can be said of the move from single core systems towards multicore and maybe even the blending of the CPU with the GPU.

Note that while these advances do generates a lot of benefit, those benefits usually end up somewhere else: doing something new that wasn't posible before? There advancements only very rarely add any benefit to the things we where already doing before on much slower systems. So it's not really about improving whatever we where already doing... it's more about being able to do what was imposible before.

So I think we'er both right, each in our own way ;->