[MUD-Dev] Sockets

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

On 03:24 AM 5/13/99 -0500, I personally witnessed Cynbe ru Taren jumping up
to say:
>
>We all learned to program when CPU bandwidth was much more expensive
>than it is now:  We're habituated to credit it with far more importance
>than it now deserves.

This is the realisation which migrated me to Windows in the mid-nineties. I
didn't like Windows for the longest time, because it was wasting a lot of
time and effort on drawing the screen when it could have been actually
sorting and searching and servicing the 16 modems I had hooked up. 

Well, these days, my system uses most of its RAM and most of its CPU. Sure,
it's mostly used to draw pretty pictures, but at least it's being used.
Remember the virtual memory systems that used to swap things out of memory
just because you didn't use it for a while, leaving lots of empty memory
but taking two minutes to swap your graphics program back into RAM when you
task switched back to it? What a waste!

>Efficient use of today's CPUs means applying that 98% idle time to
>do something useful for the user, not upping it to 99% idle time.

Bingo! This is the paradigm shift that needs to happen: we have left the
economy of scarcity and moved to an economy of abundance. We just have to
recognise this and apply it. If my machine isn't half-loaded at all times,
then I have too much machine. 

Something I got in my email today applies: 

	To the optimist, the glass is half full. 
	To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. 
	To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. ;)

-----
| Caliban Tiresias Darklock            caliban at darklock.com 
| Darklock Communications          http://www.darklock.com/ 
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