Arms Race

This is the kind of arms race taking place on my apartment building's rear parking lot.

Spring Break

Even though the numbers don't look like it, spring is arriving in BT.

1K = 210

It is not something urgent, or something which happened suddenly. But still...

It occurred to me that since I entered the computing world in 1992 or 1993 - for some unclear reason, I got an i486DX/33MHz (later tuned to 40MHz by manually exchanging the oscillator, thus overclocking everything inside) with 4MB RAM (later extended to 8MB) and a 120MB Seagate hard disk (it headcrashed, same as a later 300MB Maxtor) as a gift back then; a high-end working machine (its OEM maker brand OKANO has all but vanished since then) - since that time, numbers have multiplied.

Core frequencies have risen 100-fold. RAM has grown by a factor of around 1000, or 2¹⁰. Hard disks have grown even beyond this scale - more or less 6000x. Even the size of the computer I use has shrunk to around 0.5%.

We can run more programs simultaneously - maybe ten times more. They are more colorful, compared to the 256 colors of SVGA. We can listen to more music and stream video from the Internet. Connecting peripherals is a breeze.

What is comes down to, though, is a perceived productivity gain of much less than 1000, or even ten. Where did this performance go?

Unless software development is closely coupled with hardware performance gains, this means that software complexity is rising by, say, a factor of 100 over the time in question, and if hardware won't keep pushing the limits the way it did, we'll face a slowing increase of software feature growth.

Maybe that's not too bad, even. At least for my own project, some time for a rewrite from scratch would be a good thing.

Bowling

Sunday-evening workgroup bowling.
Finding: You can't win on talent alone; when you run out of energy, you need to happen upon another surefire method to win. Then, you can.

Food Fight

This here is a short film I came across through, um, probably Wired.com. It is...

Food Fight is an abridged history of war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict. Watch as traditional comestibles slug it out for world domination in this chronologically re-enacted smorgasbord of aggression.

My personal recommendation: Watch the movie first, once.


Then, have a look at the The Official Food Fight Character Cheat Sheet.

Finally, treat yourself to a second screening of the movie, and see how much more sense it makes.

Awesome.

TED: Ideas worth spreading

Surfing my usual websites, I stumbled upon a link to TED.

Named "Technology, Entertainment, Design", it's a conference held annually in Monterey, CA, hosting talks for around 50 speakers over four days. They are encouraged to give "the talk of their lives" in 18 minutes each - and they do. Ranging from science to arts and music, they are fantastically breathtaking. There is no single talk to be recommended, instead, get yourself some twenty minutes and choose one of your liking.

You're going to be spellbound.