Re: How to make money fast (in science fiction)

On Wed, 2 Apr 2008 19:30:02 +0000 (UTC), cgoodin@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Chuk Goodin) wrote:
> Theoretical improvements or improvements in some small 
> areas are not better. An off-the-shelf PC, pre-loaded
> with bloatware and a copy of Windows, does not usually
> boot as fast as a 486, even though it's crunching
> numbers thousands of times faster.

Microsoft software has deteriorated.  This may reflect
the retirement of Bill Gates, who was a pretty damned
smart guy, and his replacement by the usual run of bean
counters, lawyers, and suits.

However, irrespective of the particular events at
Microsoft, software tends to get slower with time.  The
reason is that anyone who introduces a feature that
makes things very slightly slower for everyone and all
software gets credit for particular benefits of his
feature, but does not get discredit for the very slight
slowdown, which mostly affects the vast majority who are
entirely unaware of this feature, and have absolutely no
interest in it.  Multiply this by ten million
programmers and ten million features, and pretty soon
the computer is wading through cold mol*****.

We really need to re-architect the operating environment
so that

1:  Programs are protected from each other, making
viruses and trojans difficult, rather than users
protected from each other.

2:  Resources are protected from programs, resource
consumption is accounted, so that someone cannot easily
and invisibly add a feature that slows down everything
for everyone, without bothering to even know he is doing
so.  Rather, all resource use has to get billed to some
end user activity, so that the end user can check the
bill and say "@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
 - that program is a hog!  I will
stop using it", and when he stops using it, the resource
usage eventually goes away - and when lots of people do
that, the engineer who wasted resources goes away.

--
  ----------------------
We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because 
of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this 
right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state.

http://www.jim.com/
     James A. Donald