[Techtalk] more cores, more slows

[Cynthia Kiser]

Quoting Wim De Smet <kromagg at gmail.com>:
> > I've long felt that developers should be encouraged to use older,
> > slower, lower memory machines as their primary desktop machines.
> > You'd see a lot less software bloat. They could always have a few
> > powerful machines around to use as build servers if needed.
> > And yes, I say that as a developer myself.
>
> Aside from that. I'm taking the comment about putting developers on
> fast machines a bit personally, but seriously there is a good reason
> for it. The less time a developer spends waiting for his IDE to start
> up or his tests to run or an application server to restart, the more
> time he can spend actually working. It makes perfect sense to give
> them the best possible computer you can get (within reason), since
> that translates directly into the speed they can do their work.

I can see both sides of this. At work I have a fairly decent Mac on a
fast network. But I do a fair amount of work and browsing at home from
a hand me down PPC Mac laptop on a cable modem connection. The latter
definitely influnces what I choose to do when building web apps. I
recall having seen an extension for some browser that let you surf the
web as if from a poor connection. Now I can't seem to find it -
perhaps because something is making my Firefox run so slowly as to be
unusable - even on the fast box. So sad since Firefox used to be my
favorite browser for development. 

-- 
Cynthia N. Kiser
cnk at ugcs.caltech.edu