[Mailman-Developers] The Philosophy of Web Use.

[Brad Knowles]

Ethan wrote:

>> | Dollar for dollar, network-based computers are faster.
>
> This is incorrect, based on my experience of working in a few data
> centers.
>
> While it is possible to buy expensive hardware today that has more
> performance than the average consumer machine, hardware is getting
> better faster than purchasing decisions.

That's new hardware.  There's tons of old hardware out there that people
refuse to upgrade or replace.  Why do you think that Microsoft has had
such problems EOL'ing Windows 95?

> Because the consumer market is both larger and growing faster than the
> server market, and the machines less reliable, the average server is
> older than the average client machine, and thus have less resources than
> the average client.

That's not my experience at all, and I've been a professional systems
administrator for over sixteen years.  Businesses tend to rapidly
depreciate and replace hardware, much, much faster than individuals do at
home -- by an order of magnitude or more, in some cases.  This is why
companies like Dell focus almost exclusively on the business market.

> Even if you disagree with this point, there's one server for many
> clients; the amount of resources available to devote to the task of an
> individual user's web experience is almost always greater on their end
> of the pipe.

True, the number and power of clients can always overwhelm the number and
power of servers.  The SETI at Home project certainly taught us that.  And we
knew that lesson at AOL before SETI at Home came alone, because there were a
number of incidences when a surprisingly small number of attackers could
do serious damage to the service.

But just because the number and power of clients can overwhelm the number
and power of servers doesn't mean that they necessarily will always do so.
 If that were the case, then we'd all be permanently out of work.


Moreover, although you might be right in general, you cannot assume that
each specific user will always be in that same sort of situation.  That
would be like claiming that everyone is above average.

> What it boils down to is that people perceive change at around 150msec;
> very few net users get anywhere near this latency, and so for most, the
> round-trip delay represents a substantial impediment to the
> responsiveness of the interface.

Right, and if they're running on an ancient Pentium computer with Windows
95 and their interface is dead-dog slow because you force-fed it too much
stuff to process, they're not going to have a particularly good
experience.


The lesson that Yahoo! and Google teach is to keep everything as simple
and light as humanly possible.  They learned this from Colin Chapman and
the guys at Lotus, whose motto was "Simplify and add lightness".

That's all I'm looking for.  Give me the Lotus Exige of interfaces.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.