Sony to ax 10,000 jobs in turnaround bid: Nikkei - (via Reuters)

On Wed, 11 Apr 2012 03:15:30 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote:

Alan Browne writes:

They should have been king of MP3 in the Walkman tradition. Apple
scooped that market. And they weren't first (or even 3rd) to try.

MP3 postdates Mr. Morita.

I see too many Sony products trying to embrace (forcibly sometimes) the
customer with "do all" solutions. Jack-of-all-trades, Master of none -
with entrapment to their standards.

Sony isn't the only company trying to do that.

hp is just as bad in a narrower context

I opened an HP computer not long ago to replace a disk. What I saw had nothing
in common with the way HP computers looked inside 20 years ago. It was
depressing. Of course, if HP still built its own computers and still built
them the way it used to, the disk never would have needed replacement.

And you would never have bought it in the first place as it would have
been far too expensive. :-)

Regards,

Eric Stevens

On Sat, 14 Apr 2012 17:32:11 +0200, Mxsmanic
wrote:

Eric Stevens writes:

And you would never have bought it in the first place as it would have
been far too expensive.

Not so. I still have one of those expensive HP computers (a dual Pentium Pro),
and it still runs. And it's about seventeen years old now, I think.

I had one of those once, about 4-5 computer generations ago. Now I run
an I7.

Regards,

Eric Stevens

In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

I had one of those once, about 4-5 computer generations ago. Now I run
an I7.

The old machine would be usable if it weren't for software bloat, which has
absorbed all hardware performance improvements in the past few decades.

no it hasn't. my systems today run *much* faster than what i had just a
few years ago and *way* faster than what i had 10 or 20 years ago, and
that's *with* the bloat.

On an old IBM PC, it took five or six seconds to open a document. On the
latest PCs, which have hardware a million times faster, it takes fix or six
seconds to open a document.

if that's the same document, something is wrong.

In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

no it hasn't. my systems today run *much* faster than what i had just a
few years ago and *way* faster than what i had 10 or 20 years ago, and
that's *with* the bloat.

The major source of delay in modern computer systems is disk I/O,

depends on the task and with ssd, that's no longer the case.

and while
disk I/O increases with each new version of software,

not necessarily

disk access times have
hardly changed at all since the 1970s.

oh yes they have, as have disk speeds. sata is *way* faster than the
crappy ide that existed 10-20 years ago and certainly what existed in
the 1970s.

Thus, almost all the waiting you do in
front of a desktop PC is either waiting for disk I/O or waiting for network
I/O. Very few processes are CPU-bound these days.

actually a lot are.

if that's the same document, something is wrong.

What's wrong is that the software has bloated just as much as the hardware
speed has increased. Worse yet, disk speeds have not improved,

they've dramatically increased.

and modern
software does a lot more disk I/O.

actually it does a lot more cpu/gpu for the fancy graphic effects.

In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

I have seen it consistently. Something like a browser might do 1000 disk I/Os
as it starts up.

what matters is after it starts up.

oh yes they have, as have disk speeds. sata is *way* faster than the
crappy ide that existed 10-20 years ago and certainly what existed in
the 1970s.

No, they have not. I'm not talking about capacity or transfer rates, I'm
talking about access time, which has hardly changed at all and is by far the
major bottleneck for disk performance.

access time is *much* faster now, especially on ssd.

Most I/Os are very small transfers, so they hardly benefit from faster
transfer rates at all. What holds them back is the access time, and it's
terrible.

it's not terrible.

they've dramatically increased.

No, they haven't. In the 1970s access times were around 30-40 ms. Today they
are around 7-10 ms. That's only a four-fold increase in speed, compared to six
or seven orders of magnitude for CPU speeds.

in the 1980s, drives had 60-80ms access times and today, ssd has
effectively 0 ms access time.

actually it does a lot more cpu/gpu for the fancy graphic effects.

Desktops can spend 80% or more of their total processor time generating
visuals, but they nevertheless are not normally CPU-bound.

depends on the task.

nospam wrote:
In article , Mxsmanic

I had one of those once, about 4-5 computer generations ago. Now I run
an I7.

The old machine would be usable if it weren't for software bloat, which has
absorbed all hardware performance improvements in the past few decades.

no it hasn't. my systems today run *much* faster than what i had just a
few years ago and *way* faster than what i had 10 or 20 years ago, and
that's *with* the bloat.

Well, I've used word processor on computer systems of 30 years ago
and have been exposed to current "Word" on current computers.
I see little if any speed increase in e.g. spell checking.
It should be 2^20 (over 1 million times) faster. OK, maybe
today's spellchecking does more, but not 1000 times the slowdown
more and it's still not 1000 times faster.

On an old IBM PC, it took five or six seconds to open a document. On the
latest PCs, which have hardware a million times faster, it takes fix or six
seconds to open a document.

if that's the same document, something is wrong.

Yep: software bloat.

How long does it take to boot and shutdown your computer?
Especially when it's a long used XP with lotsa things
installed, that can take minutes.

Guess how long it takes to boot a C64 ...

-Wolfgang

nospam wrote:
In article , Mxsmanic
wrote:

no it hasn't. my systems today run *much* faster than what i had just a
few years ago and *way* faster than what i had 10 or 20 years ago, and
that's *with* the bloat.

The major source of delay in modern computer systems is disk I/O,

depends on the task and with ssd, that's no longer the case.

Even with SSDs that's the case. Even if they saturate a
6GBit SATA-III connection (which they don't), RAM is still a
couple times faster.

And even SSDs aren't always fast with random access. They
can get even really slow with writing, after some time.

and while
disk I/O increases with each new version of software,

not necessarily

in 95%.

disk access times have
hardly changed at all since the 1970s.

oh yes they have, as have disk speeds. sata is *way* faster than the
crappy ide that existed 10-20 years ago and certainly what existed in
the 1970s.

In other words, SATA and modern (non-flash) HDDs are faster
the same way a cyclist is faster than pedestrian.
Unfortunately everything else has changed from pedestrian to
supersonic planes in the same time.


Thus, almost all the waiting you do in
front of a desktop PC is either waiting for disk I/O or waiting for network
I/O. Very few processes are CPU-bound these days.

actually a lot are.

Name a lot that are common in office, gaming or photographic use.


if that's the same document, something is wrong.

What's wrong is that the software has bloated just as much as the hardware
speed has increased. Worse yet, disk speeds have not improved,

they've dramatically increased.

Compared to the rest, they've slowed down dramatically.

and modern
software does a lot more disk I/O.

actually it does a lot more cpu/gpu for the fancy graphic effects.

There's tons of CPU and especially GPU power to waste on
fancy graphic effects.

In the last 20 years, computers got 8,000 times faster.
And since RAM and HDD sizes increased much as well, more time
efficient algorithms can be used --- use lookup tables instead of
computing everything every time over and over because you don't
have the storage for it, for example!

You should see at least 10% of that speedup in any application
that were possible back then ...

-Wolfgang

In article , Wolfgang
Weisselberg wrote:

How long does it take to boot and shutdown your computer?

i have no idea. i do it so rarely that it doesn't really matter how
long it takes. i don't even remember the last time i rebooted.

Especially when it's a long used XP with lotsa things
installed, that can take minutes.

so what? how often are you booting that this is even an issue?

what matters is how long it takes to get work done. it's a lot faster
now.

Guess how long it takes to boot a C64 ...

guess how long it took to read an application off cassette or floppy
and run it to do whatever you wanted to do? *that* is what matters, not
booting.

Wolfgang Weisselberg writes:

nospam wrote:
In article , Mxsmanic

On an old IBM PC, it took five or six seconds to open a document. On the
latest PCs, which have hardware a million times faster, it takes fix or six
seconds to open a document.

if that's the same document, something is wrong.

Yep: software bloat.

How long does it take to boot and shutdown your computer?
Especially when it's a long used XP with lotsa things
installed, that can take minutes.

My newer computers take a lot less long. Much of the difference is in
the BIOS, too, not in Windows.

Guess how long it takes to boot a C64 ...

My knee-jerk reaction is "who cares?". I never had anything to do with
those early generations of home computers because they were so
completely inferior to what I was used to working with at work.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, ; http://dd-b.net/
Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/
Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/
Dragaera: http://dragaera.info

In article , David Dyer-Bennet
wrote:

Guess how long it takes to boot a C64 ...

My knee-jerk reaction is "who cares?". I never had anything to do with
those early generations of home computers because they were so
completely inferior to what I was used to working with at work.

how long does it take to boot a mainframe, especially one that does so
off tape?

there were mini computers where you had to toggle in a tiny boot loader
*each time* you booted so that it could read the actual system from
tape or disk.