[SunRescue] we're all just spoiled (was: re: IPC)

[jwbirdsa at picarefy.picarefy.com]

>The people who I think DON'T need big fancy machines and actually
>shouldn't have then, are the people doing a lot of coding.  I hate when
>developers have been using 21" monitors running at 1280x1024, or worse
>yet, 1600x1200, and I try to use the same app on my notebook with a
>640x480 display.  Not to mention that their biggaHertz machines are
>doing something in 5 seconds which takes my cyrix 133 like a half hour
>to finish.  ok, enough rant,

   I resemble these remarks, and there's something to be said for both
sides of the issue. On the one hand, 1600x1200 makes life much easier --
at this resolution, it is finally practical under Windows to have several
windows just overlapped or tiled instead of having to maximize everything
in order to get enough usable space. (I have no idea where all the space
goes -- I can have bunches of xterms going at once on an 1152x900 Sun
screen without any difficulty.) But it does make it difficult to judge UI
coding.

   Having a biggaHertz machine is similar. It makes it hard to judge
performance on older machines; I've also been on teams that were very
concerned about performance on older machines but couldn't get any to test
on! On the other hand, I can understand my employer's reluctance to pay me
to twiddle my thumbs for most of a day while something compiles, eating the
machine alive in the process. (That's where I was at when I started this
job, with a 100MHz Pentium -- six hours to compile a new build, and the
machine was useless in the meantime. So they moved me to a 500MHz PIII,
which can do it in about an hour while doing other stuff. Of course, the
software I work on is meant to run on high-end servers, so I'm actually
still behind the curve...)

   --James B.