Hardware has become much faster, and storage capacity much higher, but most
of these advances are used to support GUIs.  The underlying concepts, and
how they apply to data storage and manipulation, have not.  Think of how
many accounting fundamentals have changed since Pacioli.  Youngsters these
days spend almost all their time understanding and learning to use GUI APIs
both to create apps and in the development of them.  Most do not have the
time, inclination, or ability to understand computer science at the
fundamental level.  There are exceptions of course:  Linux kernel developers
come to mind.

It is nice to have color to increase information density on a screen and
highlight important bits of info; and graphs of data are great to quickly
see what a mountain of numbers mean; a GUI can make a quick fix quick, or an
excellent interface for a complex rarely used program/command; but for the
most part I think most modern software "improvements" just a bunch of
expensive fluff! ;)  And when things go south, debugging a multi-layered
GUIfied application is a pain to debug or optimize, even if what they are
accomplishing is relatively simple.

My dual core Opteron workstation with 2G memory, 6 large disk drives (using
multiple software RAID arrays and LVM2) and a gigabit NIC has more than
enough horsepower to support tens of thousands of MPE block mode users, and
probably that many character mode users, if I had some sort of processor to
present input only after a Return/Enter.  Yet as an optimized GUI thin
client server, it will only support a few hundred users using mostly the
same few GUI applications. There are appropriate uses for GUIs and GUI
applications, but many applications would be best served from several
aspects as moderate to high resolution full screen colorized character
applications.  Alas, most new developers have only GUI hammers and all
problems look like GUI nails. ;)

Pete


On 7/20/07, Jim Rogers <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> It's great to read all these posts about the changes in the industry.
>
> To see the look on peoples faces when they bring in the latest and
> greatest
> new technology, and just can't understand how you could really understand
> what they are doing.   (not realizing it was already done....20 years ago)
>
> As theses posts show, easy to understand a disk defrag when you used to
> have to do it by hand.   Or TCP/IP when you used to have to write your own
> communications routines.
>
> The more things change, the more they remain the same.
>
> And most importantly, concepts are the same, just the syntax(and the name
> of the language/database) has changed.
>
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