The Unbalanced World

The Unbalanced World

World is unbalanced at many places. We see droughts and floods. Its same for the electronic industry as well. We see products around embedded with components which are far more powerful than what current consumers can make use of. We see 4GB of RAM in PCs now a days, and not one time you will notice system consuming more than 2GB. Yes there are application which can make use of this extra horse power, but how many of we actually use them?

What is the size of HDD installed in your PC? Are you running short of more space lately? No, probably. What about those dual and quad-core processors? That would roughly give you more than 4GHz and are you using these for running internet browsers and songs?

We call these configurations Hummers for City transportation. We all live in cities and not in rendering farm houses. And how is the software industry responding to this cult? By giving us more resource hopping applications. Even OSes would tell you “Your current configuration is not our OS capable”. But there is a change in this trend.

Netbooks, UMPCs and MIDs are on rise not because we are in recession (or were in?). But, people are realizing, they need bikes and scooters. They are choosing mobility and maneuverability over real life animation rendering capabilities and complex OSes. And yes, they are cheaper.

But these new trends are presenting us with very different questions. Since resources now have to be optimised, what is the perfect configuration? How much storage should I have? How many simultaneously running applications would make me happy? What is the perfect screen size for me? Do I need a keyboard sticking on to the screen? How much RAM, since I’m not using bloatwares? What if I get stuck somewhere because of the different resources I have at my disposal, can cloud computing be a solution for me then?

If you look closely, you can draw a similarity between Oil and computer industry. First, if you make lot of oil available, you get lot of cars in the market. Lot of oil gives these car manufacturers freedom to make more powerful cars and hence consuming more fuel. And what would more demand would do the the oil prices?

Same is with the application writers. If you get freedom to use more resources, you would concentrate on how to use it, and not on how to use less of it to do the same work. In the end you get application which demand more, and we give them a systems which in the end are just, More.

And solution as we ponder upon is, Simple.