On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 09:28:16 -0800, Jack Johnson <fragment at nas.com> wrote:

> I remember being at MacWorld '97 and Apple touting their new "live 
> scrolling" Finder windows, something NeXT had been doing for nearly a 
> decade and countless others before that, and now Apple has come full 
> cycle back to a prettier NeXT OS, and somehow made a 1GHz G4 feel no 
> more responsive than a 25MHz 68040 (unless you're playing video).

I think there are a few things that cause this:

Back in the mid 80's, we were lucky to have a machine that had 8 bit color
with a 640 x 480 screen. That's about 300 KB of screen data to move around.
If you had a mono machine, like the Macs were, 640 x 480 is only 38 KB of
data.

Now, I run a 1600 x 1200 desktop, with 32 bit color. That's a factor of 25x
more data to move around. When you compare it to the mono 640 x 480, its a
factor of 200x.

Second, I think application programmers are lazier now because they can be.
If you look at state of the art games in 1985 and now, the new games are
breathtaking in what they do. Game developers have always been pushing the
envelope, and back in the 80's and early 90's games were basically written
to run on the metal. Now, most games (at least in the Windows world) run as
proper Windows applications, using services provided by the OS, and they
are definitely orders of magnitude better/faster (from a purely technical
perspective) than what we had 15 years ago.

Even game developers are getting "lazy", because most game engines are
written in C or C++, and the gameplay itself is often scripted in some
higher-level, interpreted language. Nobody writes game engines in assembler
anymore. 

If application developers spent as much time on algorithm design and tuning
as game developers do, our applications would scream. But, the simple
reality of the situation is, we don't. 

Another factor is we're doing more now than we did 15 years ago. Right now,
I think nothing of scanning a 4" x 6" photo on my wife's scanner at 600
dpi, with 48 bit color. That makes a TIFF file that is about 50 MB. I can
transfer that file to my laptop through a router over a self-configuring
wireless 802.11 card I can plug in and unplug anytime, in less than a
minute. I can open that file in a graphics editor, and not even think about
whether I have enough memory (half a gig on my laptop).

Another example -- back in the mid-80s, when Pixar did the first version of
Luxo Jr, I think they said it took something like 3 hours per frame to
render it. With a new consumer level graphics card like a GeForce 4 that I
can buy for a few hundred bucks, you can render that movie in real-time,
complete with totally dynamic lighting.

Anyways, I'll end my rant here...

Later,
Jon

--------------------------------------------------------------
   Jon Hylands      Jon at huv.com      http://www.huv.com/jon

  Project: Micro Seeker (Micro Autonomous Underwater Vehicle)
           http://www.huv.com