On Tue, May 31, 2005 at 03:08:09PM +0200, Pierre Habouzit wrote: > > > In any case, given the number of prospective ports waiting in the > > wings, 11 is probably a roughly correct estimate even if we *do* drop > > some architectures. (And since non-release ports are likely to stay > > in unstable, and adding a release port adds three w-b databases where > > dropping one only removes two w-b databases, it takes 1 1/2 dropped > > archs to balance one added arch...) > > in all those debates about the lack of buildds, sth seems odd to me. > I've always thought that moore's law was quite accurate... and my > understanding (I may be wrong, it's only how I understand the whole > thing) is that debian growth is quite linear, compared to the cpu > speed, disk size, BW ... growth, the time passing, we should have less > and less limitations. Moore's law is cpu speed. The effective speed of software roughly halves every 18 months (java, python, XML, SOAP, etc). In other words, the rate of hardware performance increase is almost entirely cancelled out by the rate of growth of software inefficiency; demands expand to fill available resources. We scrape together some new features, but aside from specialist/scientific stuff, the actual *functional* speed of computers does not increase much at all. If you sit down at a gnome desktop on a modern box, it's not actually all that different in performance or general behaviour to what'd you got on Acorn RiscOS or OS/2 ten years ago. Openoffice Write takes about as long to load from hard drive as Impression Style took to load from a floppy - and it doesn't do a hell of a lot more that you're actually going to use. This probably says something significant. [Note that trying *modern* software on an old box, and observing how much slower it is, just underlines my point. The comparison here is to the software you would have run on it when the box was new]. -- .''`. ** Debian GNU/Linux ** | Andrew Suffield : :' : http://www.debian.org/ | `. `' | `- -><- |
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