Quote:
Originally Posted by Ghitulescu
Are you telling me that editing text in 2014 needs a computing farm of Crays dipped in cryogenic nitrogen or else the mouse will not move on the screen? When I started editing for the University' Press I used a 286 (remember?  ) at 20MHz with 1MB RAM (from which a sensible part was taken by BIOS) and 80 MB HDD, it was a giant back then (12 and 16 MHz were standard, so 256kB RAM and 20MB HDD).
I made a test. I wrote Hello world! in MS Word 2010 and save it as .DOCX. Wow, almost 16kB instead of 12B, the size of the ROM in an 1982 personal computer like Sinclair Spectrum ZX, which contained the BASIC interpreter as well.
Well, my point was anyway another - a working system has not to be changed.
You see, in the past if one needed more power for their projects, they went for a higher spec'ed PC, like our At286/20, then 386. We needed matlab or a faster rendering in AutoCAD, we added the 387 math coproc and more RAM. And people noticed that 386/40 was faster than 386/16. Today one has to upgrade to keep the same working speed. That's something wrong happening, that people born yesterday don't get it, because they were born in this world.
And concerning end-of-cycle for XP, I really really don't understand the craze. The fear. The urge. Please raise your hand all those that relied on MS support, that you fear you lost it when MS announced they ended their support. My music computer works happily with W98SE (15 years old) and have no issues at all. |
To continue to do the same stuff will not require updated hardware.
To take advantage of new stuff, like for instance Qt5
you will need hardware that can handle ALL the new stuff.
The alternative is using your own Qt5 that you fork and strip out anything which XP cannot handle.
And compile Qt yourself without SSE2. Sure, it will not run as fast as regular Qt5 would, but better than not running at all.
Just don't expect software maintainers to
target old hardware when they compile programs for general use.
That would slow everyone down to your level.