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Some software bloat is OK

(waspdev.com)
50 points senfiaj | 1 comments | 04 Nov 25 08:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.218s | source
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benrutter ◴[04 Nov 25 14:00 UTC] No.45811117[source]▶
Tangent, but software bloat always leaves me wondering what hardware/software could be if we had different engineering goals.

If we worked hard to keep OS requirements to a minimum- could we be looking at unimaginably improved battery life? Hyper reliable technology that lasts many years? Significantly more affordable hardware?

We know that software bloat wastes RAM and CPU, but we can't know what alternatives we could have if he hadn't spent our metaphorical budget on bloat already.

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1. Retric ◴[04 Nov 25 14:57 UTC] No.45811711[source]▶
Screens and radios do a lot to limit battery life on most modern devices even if the energy use running the OS and user software was free.

If with a reasonable battery standby mode can only last a few weeks and active use is at best a few days then you might as well add a fairly beefy CPU and with a beefy CPU OS optimizations only go so far. This is why eInk devices can end up with such a noticeably longer lifespan, they now have a reason to put in a weak CPU and do some optimization because the possibility of a long lifespan is a huge potential selling point.