Comment by peter_d_sherman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by peter_d_sherman | Hacker News Reader

peter_d_sherman

Excerpt:

"An Android system with no apps takes up almost 6 GB. Just think for a second about how obscenely HUGE that number is. What’s in there, HD movies? I guess it’s basically code: kernel, drivers. Some string and resources too, sure, but those can’t be big. So, how many drivers do you need for a phone?

Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that!

Windows 10 is 4GB, which is 133 times as big. But is it 133 times as superior? I mean, functionally they are basically the same. Yes, we have Cortana, but I doubt it takes 3970 MB. But whatever Windows 10 is, is Android really 150% of that?"

My favorite line: "Windows 95 was 30MB. Today we have web pages heavier than that!"

If there's a new saying for 2020, it shouldn't be that "hindsight is 2020"... <g>

Also... each web page should come with a non-closable pop-up box that says "Would you like to download a free entire OS with your web page?", and offers the following "choices":

"[Yes] [Yes] [Cancel (Yes, Do It Anyway!)]". <g>

My favorite was "Google’s keyboard app routinely eats 150 MB. Is an app that draws 30 keys on a screen really five times more complex than the whole Windows 95? "

I mean... considering the fact that in contains the probabilities of typing every single word in the English language versus every other, at every stage of typing, including potentially the probabilities of all the ways you might mistype each word while swiping without precise accuracy...

...maybe?

I don't know if that's 150 MB' worth of data... but it's certainly a lot.

So why is it persistently, perniciously and stubbornly insistent in refusing to spell 'naughty' words like 'duck'?

What's the problem again? I just typed "duck" by swiping. If you mean the "i" variant, be informed that swear words are blocked unless a preference is set.

They mean the "f" variant.

Probably because it contains extra data about which words are "naughty".

I'm sure that's intentional... I think you can disable it?

I agree in spirit but really most of this is is going to be related to unpacking images of more than 2 colors on a high density display.

This in particular is a terrible example. Gboard is full of good features that Windows 95 did not have. Features that require a way deeper understanding of natural language than existed on computers in 1995. Autocorrect, voice typing, swipe typing, handwriting input, translation. It's so far from "30 keys on a screen" that it's not even funny.

Windows 10 is way richer than Win95 - there were countless big features added since 1995 (all enterprise and security features, backups, full disk encryption, ...), plus existing features got way more complex - multimonitor support, support of complex USB stack, GPU support etc. IIRC, out of the box Win95 didn't even have DirectX! Still, of course the total sum of changes does not justify the 133x size increase.

damn. windows 95 was indeed 13 floppy disks. amazing to think about.

So what is in these huge downloads? Layers upon layers of virtual machines?

In a way each layer of abstraction could be seen as a virtual machine - a new set of “instructions” implemented via previous layer of instructions.

The analogy holds as long as we don’t cross layers, which is quite often true.

Therefore counting total number of layers is performance-wise quite similar to running this many layers of virtual machines. Of course, you need code for all of these translation layers.

Mac OS Catalina ships with 2.1 GBs of desktop pictures https://mobile.twitter.com/dmitriid/status/11981966747301109...

My favorite: "What's in there, HD movies?"

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