Mike Magee at the Inquirer has been chatting to some hardware guys - serious hardware guys, the one who design and make chips. He says that they are muttering that all the software indstry has done with the power that the chip manufacturers have given them is use it to allow them to make stupid software. I think they've got a point, but I'm not sure that the software companies are the villains here.
I'll use storage for the following argument, since it is easy to compare like with like - it is a lot harder for processors, although similar logic applies. I am old enough to remember when 2GB of storage took up the space of a large wardrobe and cost £100,000. I just checked and today 2GB of storage can be had for £0.61 as part of a 200GB disk, and if you put it in your wardrobe you'd probably lose it. At the time, as a programmer, I was paid about £8000 a year. On that basis, it was worth spending quite a lot of my time making my software as smart as possible if that saved hardware spend. 2GB of storage=12 man years of effort. I reckon an equivalent junior programmer today gets about £25,000 p.a. which makes 2GB of storage worth approximately 3 man minutes of effort. This fundamentally changes the economics of software development and means that the advances in hardware are just used in an attempt to do the same stuff more cheaply, rather than to innovate and really take advantage of what is possible.
To go back to a familiar theme for this blog, we once again see how a focus on price alone has negative consequences for the society and individuals alike. Just imagine what we could have achieved if we had decided to explore the possibilities of the computing power we now have - HAL 9000 could have been a reality in 2001. On second thoughts, perhaps that wouldn't have been such a great idea.
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