I recently ran across an amazing little video over at Gizmodo that shows a couple of very resourceful geeks putting together a very mindblowingly powerful machine with 24 (yes, 24) solid state drives running in a stripped array that was moving data in the gigabytes per second range.To everyone's complete amazement, it was also running Vista, the bane of Redmond, at blinding speeds, and even loaded the overly bloated Microsoft Office 2007 in half a second! That's quite an accomplishment when you consider how much of a resource hog Vista and Office are .What's more exciting is that this little demonstration over at Gizmodo will get the gears flying in the brains of hardware designers and engineers as they look for methods and solutions that will achieve that same 6gbps throughput (SATA 2 only does 300mbps throughput) without the need for raid.Hey, they've done an amazing job so far, and most items in the tech world are doubling in speed every 18-24 months, so I fail to see why the demonstration of such raw speed wouldn't peek their interest and make them want to recreate that on the consumer level (rather than the enthusiasts level as seen in the video) for the average joe.That now brings me to the point of this little introduction to mind numbing speed. If their enthusiast setup can run the bloated, resource hogs of Microsoft at jaw dropping speeds, what will that mean for software in general? We already know that programmers are growing increasingly lax in their efforts to tighten up software code to run as lean and mean as possible.In the FOSS world, there is at least a continuous effort still to cut the fat as much as possible, but as hardware becomes increasingly faster, what incentive will there be for tight code? I say this mostly because, as hardware gets faster, the differences between good code, and bloated, resource hungry bad code will blur to the point where the two are indistinguishable from each other.We'll actually have to switch to using a load counter that tracks load times in the milliseconds to even detect the differences. This will essentially mean that bloatware will reign supreme, and we'll no longer be able to point the finger at such programs and say that FOSS is better because it's less bloated and runs faster.If the difference in load times is half a second, who's going to either notice or care? I doubt few will. And unless Microsoft and other big software companies really start heaping on the bloat to a point where it once again drags, what will be then a *normal* computer, to it's knees, it's unlikely that anyone will notice the huge amounts of bloat infecting their computer.It makes you wonder how long it will be before bloated software is the norm.As a small aside, it seems that someone has already begun to tinker with this idea of raid on device. Also, I just learned recently from a friend of mine that the Sata3 standard will boast 6gbps speeds on all drives, and they'll be solid state only (plater drives are apparently officially dead with the release of Sata3) with raid on controller (IE, you can string up to 8 devices on a single sata cable) to take advantage of these new uber speeds.So it looks like the future may be a world of overblown bloatware, and nobody will likely even care. Especially if the hardware is able to run all of it without batting an eye.
Raiden's Realm Social BookmarkingIf you have any problems with any of these links, please let us know. Thanks.
This is just a reminder to everyone that we're always looking for articles for posting on our site. So if you have a Linux, Open Source or Media related article, review, tutorial, or editorial you want to post, by all means please send it to admin@raiden.net and we'll be glad to post it. Thanks.
