this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Some still cling on their old XP laptops.
Life finds a way.
like the US military. most of their mission critical stuff has been running for 20 years that way.
if only there were an operating system that could update without shutting down.
Don't tempt the government. Please.
Medical and banks on older stuff yet. Dunno about space shuttle.
The shuttle probably runs on actual mechanical switches
You kid, I know. But the shuttle software was one of the most stringently tested systems, at least as one of my sEng courses would have me believe.
Amazing that the device you are reading this on is way more powerful that the ones that first put men on the moon.
Early electronics are fascinating. The amount of power we were getting out of devices back in the day is crazy. Like this comment probably takes up more memory than Adventure on the Atari 2600.
I wonder what we could pull off now if people tried to squeeze every ounce of power out of modern day equipment?
Agreed. I used to follow a mod group and the optimizations they used to pull off on 8086 is ridiculous. Nowadays an embedded browser app takes up 5gb on my phone. Wtf.
We still do optimize software today, it's just that there's a cap to how much computing you can really need for stuff like flying through space.
The most impressive optimized software things we do now tends towards the more abstract, or banal in modern views.
Calculating the most efficient route to launch a spacecraft to slingshot off a bunch of different planets takes more computation than actually flying or controlling the spacecraft.
We can also model every particle involved in a nuclear detonation to optimize blast yields, which is how we optimize lethality while reducing the number of warheads.
Video games are also typically pretty optimized at their core, it just tends to be overshadowed by being "boring" uses.
One interesting thing is that the OS statistics we have available are based on user agent strings from access to participant sites, and this method won't gather data from offline machines. Statcounter currently shows 3,1% of win7 and 0,52% of winxp, but I wonder if there would be a significant difference if offline machines were counted.