message de news: 47d31bb8$1@news.povray.org...

>>   Not true. Software *does more* at the same rate as computing power
>> allows it.
>
> But if you want to do the same simple thing you did before (ie. you don't 
> want it to "do more") with modern software, it's still slower.

Like Warp, I'd like to see hard data about that. I've been using computers 
for engineering and office work since 1983 (I even punched cards, just to 
show you how old I am) and the "modern software is bloated" meme goes 
completely contrary to my experience. If anything, I keep being amazed at 
the things I'm able to do now, particularly when I look at my archives and 
at the things I did back then that seemed to me, at the time, difficult and 
slow. I mean, lots of the stuff that people take for granted nowadays, like 
printing stuff, could be just painful then.

And I *** have *** metrics: for instance, I've been running on a regular 
basis a large and complex set of calculations and queries from a big 
database that I've been developing since 1989 (one year before you were 
born!). When I started, these processes took one entire day (often I let it 
run during the week-end). Sometimes I realised that I had done a mistake so 
I had to rerun it (or parts of it). Now this set of processes, expanded to 
much more complex ones, runs in less than two hours, even though the 
database is 10 times larger. In fact, I gradually increased the complexity 
of the queries over the years to take advantage of speed, RAM, disc space 
and software abilities. And that's just an example: most of the stuff I do 
routinely now would have been extremely difficult 10 years ago, and pure 
science-fiction (on a desktop at least) 20 years ago.

G.


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