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April 30, 2003
More Newt
One thing about the Newton is that it makes you think about priorities. Many long ago when I was a young university student, we studied methods for improving programs. This could involve less memory, faster execution fine, better use of storage or a combination of all three. the effort expended was considered worthwhile because of the relative cost of resources. There was a harmonious approach that merged good algorithms with efficient code. The biggest tradeoff was efficiency versus maintainability which promoted good documentation and comments in the code.
Somewhere in the last twenty something years, the IT industry has forgotten how to do this. The cost of resources is so low that efficiency and optimisation are no longer encouraged. The first culprit that springs to mind is, of course, Microslash with their ever increasingly bloated software. They are not the only ones, a quick study of Java would show the same tendencies.
Back to the Newton - which doesn't have the same setup as a normal computer. Everything is stored on flash memory. Some of this is on-board inside the newton and the rest is on a flash card in a pcmcia slot. A very small part of this is set aside for the heap. Back when the newton was young, Apple sold 2Mb flash cards, or you could get very expensive (at least they were expensive in Australia) 4Mb cards. In such an environment. A small heap was really to be expectedbut today, with a 32Mb flash card (or even larger with the new ATA drivers), the heap is terribly small. While I can go and load hugh amounts of software from the Newton Archives, there is a limit to the number of programs that can load into the heap. Yes I know how to freeze packages but the hard part is choosing an active set to keep alive. Obviously I need nBlog and nHtml, then there are the NIE drivers and Dashboard plus . . .
All in all it becomes an exercise in fitting your needs against a limited set of resources - just like the old days at university.
Posted by Ozguru at April 30, 2003 12:04 AM
