Friday, October 31, 2008

Why I hate the Web

I live a life of frustration, always waiting for web pages to load and refresh, it is all so slow.

The Web Browser provides the state of the art in dumb terminals with slow performance and lack of responsiveness. I have a machine with a 64 bit bus, more memory than I would know what to do with and I am constrained to spend nearly half my life interacting through this most unbearably restrictive interface of rendered markup languages and remote procedure calls over shared networks to overloaded time sliced servers.

Computing has not come very far in my opinion.

What can we do about this?

Build smarter client applications that are connected to the cloud, but understand how to take advantage of the computing power in my hands. Please build your software to be network aware, power managed and very fast.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here Here Dr. Neil! Can't wait to start using Azure. I've been putting of using EC2 (from amazon) but i'm an S3 fan boi. Time to learn how to leverage Azure for this :)

Miguel Madero said...

What about using Silverlight? Still not there yet.... there's so much power in our machines these days, nothing like a fat, heavy, powerful client app.

Dr. Neil said...

Silverlight is good for improving the richness of the experience, yet you are still locked into a sandboxed, low trust environment. Silverlight apps cannot take advantage of many of the machine level features, such as, network awareness, power management and device sync. Silverlight will not let you do your own memory managment or allow you to optimize the code at a low level. Silverlight is just another abstraction layer hiding the power of the machine underneath.