[ih] Secret precedence schemes back then

[Mike Padlipsky]

Jack Haverty wrote:

> My gut feel is that demand grows to consume available capacity, whether
> its networking or just plain computing.  Kind of like Moore's Law, this
> principle has longevity.  Sometimes my 2009 multi-core, multi-gigahertz,
> multi-gigabyte desktop computer seems slower than my 1970s 1-CPU,
> 1-megahertz, 0.001-gigabyte system was way back when.  Same with my
> gigabit LAN versus my old 9.6kb lines.
> 
> So, as long as you operate near the edge of resources, there's a need
> for some kind of policy to decide how to allocate limited resources.

fair enough.  but appealing to 'well, fuzzballs played favorites with 
telnet traffic' to [pretend to] justify contemporary self-serving 
policies desinged to enhance revenue or even do competitors down is, 
imhbdo, beyond the pale.

b/t/w [1], the more relevant Law to cite is parkinson's.  for the lazy, 
what i found in dear old wikipoodia seems to what's left of my memory to 
be close enough to 'right' that i decided not to make an exhaustive 
search for my copy of one or the other of his books on the topic:

     Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

A more succinct phrasing also commonly used is:

     Work expands to fill the time available.

it may or may not be canonical, but i've long re-cast it as 'available 
resources get consumed' -- which may or may not even be original to me. 
  shucks, for all i know it might well be in that book of his i know 
i've got around here somewhere....

b/t/w [2], there is a Padlipsky's Corollary to parkinson's law, to the 
effect that any available op code, however obscure, on/in a given 
processor will be used in at least one important program.  [as far as i 
recall, he never admitted it, but i always suspected the late, intensely 
lamented noel morris of having consciously set out to use every 
available op code on the ge->honeywell 645 in at least one multics 
system program.]  come to think of it, it's probably just a Padlipsky's 
Conjecture, tho; even if noel had admitted it, one instance does not a 
corollary make.

b/t/w [3], while refreshing what's left of my memory on parkinson, dear 
old wikipoo led me to wirth's law, which explains your situation w/r/t 
your current whizbang iron's performing less well than your old lsi 11:

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

[i'd almost arrived at that one independently whle thinking about your 
message, but didn't quite come up with so crisp a phrasing before i 
plinked the plinkable to wirth's law.]

b/t/w [4], seemingly unrelated, but particularly charming, another bit 
of wikipoodinous serendippedinit is:

Hofstadter's Law.... It always takes longer than you expect, even when 
you take Hofstadter's Law into account.

[too early to tell whether it's a corollary, but it does occur to me 
that hofstadter's law is truer in californicatia than anywhere else.]

and an i can't resist mentioning one to conclude with: either imacs' 
operating systems have gotten obscenely large or your satellite 
provider's limit is obscenely low or the problem you encountered after 
hooking up the new imac was a glitch, not a feature. 'a few hundred 
meagbytes' certainly seems to me to be a modest demand to make on an isp 
this century.  ]gee, i wonder if you could get a dsl line to l.a. 
free-net, their geographical span is surprisingly large these years; 
presumably not, tho, since i'd imagine you'dve checked out such things 
before getting saddled with what i now think of as your saddleunlite 
isp....]


cheers, map

[whose shoulder problems caused him to break down some time ago and 
create a 'signature' file to apologize for the lack of his formerly 
customary e-volubility -- and who's been employing shiftless typing for 
a long time now to spare his wristsnfingers, in case you didn't know ... 
and who's further broken down and done 
http://www.lafn.org/~ba213/mapstuff.html, rather grudgingly]