Timothy Terriberry

A member of the Philip Greenspun's Homepage community since May 31, 1998

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May 31, 1998, on Software Pricing:
There's just one small problem with creating a time-based system for distributing revenue: Everyone will want to have their code executed for the most time. What's a really easy way to have your code executed longer? Make it really inefficient. You want to open a file? Let's catalogue your entire hard disk and find all possible places that file might have moved to, checking by file name, creation date and file size, and then look to see that it was in its original place after all (well, naturally that's ridiculous, but you get the point). What this would lead to is user interfaces, like Microsoft's Developer Studio, that require 100% of my PII 266 CPU just to move the mouse around the screen. All incentive to be efficient is lost, and people will write more and more slow, bulky code: they will turn into Microsoft Clones. This can't be good for anyone.