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Comment by commonlisp94 | Hacker News Reader

You don't need to write a software stack for that, just install something like netbsd.

I'm sympathetic to your argument, but I think also many problems (or popular implementations) turned out to be quadratic. For example, the resolution of windows 95 applications vs today.

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Windows 95 could be very snappy... except when you started copying files to an external hard disk, or if your disk was too fragmented, or if you ran out of memory and things started being swapped out, or you had a buggy hardware driver, or you had a virus, or you had an antivirus program, for that matter...

I think there's a lot of nostalgia at play here. There's a lot of ways in which modern computing is far nicer than it was in the past.

> I think there's a lot of nostalgia at play here

I don't think that's the case with latency, as we can measure that directly.

> There's a lot of ways in which modern computing is far nicer than it was in the past.

And resource consumption and latency isn't one of them.

My delight at lower latency pretty quickly evaporates in the face of a spinning hourglass. I'd rather have consistent availability at the expense of latency.

My solution to that is to punt on the actual bit blitting pixel pushing stuff. :-) I still want my high dpi fonts and I’m willing to cheat a little to get them onto the monitor. And given that we are all probably using a modern monitor with multiple powerful processors on board I can pretend that the SBC I use as a video card is just part of the monitor.

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