[wplug] (OT) 32 more bits

[Michael Semcheski]

Michael Semcheski wrote:
> Personally, I think software bloat is overrated.  For many things, I can
> not tell the difference between a Pentium 3 and an Athlon 64.  Both are
> fast enough for normal GUI use that processor tends to stay idle.
> 
> Here are a few things I do that make me appreciate my processor and RAM:
> 
> Using portage and gentoo or BSD/ports.  Downloading, compiling and
> building is fast enough to be comparable to finding the right package on
> the web and installing via a package manager.  On an older machine, this
> would take way too long.

I just wanted to expand on my position here.  The fact that so much
software exists is great, and part of that is because there are great
tool kits out there for creating GUI software.

These tool like GTK or qt have their share of bloat, but in general, if
you look at writing a GUI application now vs. writing one 15 years ago,
its much easier.  There is a deep layer of abstraction you can work on
top of.

No thunderbird is not as fast as pine, firefox is not as fast as lynx.
But software bloat is really just a way to get things out the door
faster.  Its like scripting languages vs. C.  Sure, C is generally
faster, but if somethings needs 10 lines of perl or 100 lines of C, and
they both run REALLY fast, who cares that C is faster?  Same thing with
software bloat.

...Not sure if that explains things better, but I have to get back to work.

Mike