OLPC upgrades

[Martin Langhoff]

2009/2/11 Wade Brainerd <wadetb at gmail.com>:
> I have spent the last 10 years optimizing software for a living, and can
> tell you without a doubt that any system can be optimized without starting
> from scratch.
> It's just much harder to understand the performance characteristics of a
> large, complex, existing system than it is to imagine an ideal performance
> world in your head.

+1 on both. Experience teaches that performance comes from
understading and optimising a complex system. If you build a
replacement system, it's initial performance _will suck_ until you
study it, understand it and optimise it.

We can skip the "build a replacement" step, and head for the goal faster.

(I've only seen one exception to the rule above -- and was the
building of git. But it's a rare case where you get a band of
battle-hardened kernel devs building a small and focused cli tool.)

cheers,



m
-- 
 martin.langhoff at gmail.com
 martin at laptop.org -- School Server Architect
 - ask interesting questions
 - don't get distracted with shiny stuff  - working code first
 - http://wiki.laptop.org/go/User:Martinlanghoff