On 12/05/2011 04:48 PM, Tim wrote:
Buying new and expensive hardware every few years, for artificially
necessary reasons, is the Windows mindset.
The underlying problem is much more fundamental than that. Often, the
devs get big, muscular boxes to work on with lots and lots of disk
space, RAM and video RAM, including the Latest and Greatest Video Cards
they can find. This makes development much easier. They don't,
however, bother to test their work on anything other than their own
boxen, meaning that they quite often end up with great software that
only works on a maxed-out computer with the latest video cards. And, of
course, their regular response to anybody who complains about the
unreasonable and expen$ive hardware requirements is to tell them to
throw money at the problem because they rarely, if ever, have the
slightest idea how much their development equipment cost or how hard it
might be for their users to get together enough cash to upgrade.
This problem would be self-correcting (because people would stay away
from such resource hogs) if it weren't for companies who are willing to
pay whatever it takes to upgrade because they think they have to have
the latest pile of festering dingo poo to come down the pike and kids
just out of school with more disposable income than common sense who do
exactly the same thing.
I don't know, of course, if that's part of what happened in the case of
Gnome 3, but I wouldn't be the slightest bit astonished to learn that it
was part of what made it turn out the way it did.