After all these years, much about computers is still mysterious to me. For example: how come Google can give me search results from a database of the
whole world-wide-web in
1/10th of a second, and it still takes Apple software a full half minute to tell me whether there are sofware updates available for my machine? It's just bizarre.
Google has poured enormous time and money into making it that fast. It has to respond quickly to a gazillion people constantly typing "britney spears" and "midget porn" and "canon 5dmk2 review" and "survivor". You know Google instead of all the other search engine companies that once existed because Google was the most successful at this.
ReplyDeleteApple's main business is not to quickly check if your machine needs a software update. You don't do it a thousand times a day. There's no need for it to happen really fast, so little or no effort has been put into optimizing it, unlike many of the other things that your machine is designed to do.
Is "Midget Porn" doing it in an MG?
ReplyDeleteHow come there's no giant porn? I mean seeing some 6'9" Amazon grappling with a 7'6" Andre The Giant type...wow, that's hot.
ReplyDeleteNo giant porn because:-
ReplyDeleteThe pornograph to play it on would be too big for the living room!
Well, for one thing, Google doesn't take 1/10 of a second to search the world-wide web, it takes 1/10 of a second to search the notes they took on the WWW the last time they ran around. So you might get results in a second, but those results won't include something posted a second ago. (Though for my own blog posts, I find it only takes a few minutes for Google to find them, and I'm hardly high-priority for Google.)
ReplyDeleteGranted, Apple's database of available software is way smaller than Google's DB of what's on the Web, but the difference there is that Apple has to compare its DB of software updates with all the software on your computer, taking computing power on both ends as well as back and forth communication. If Google had to compare its search results to information already on your computer, it would slow things down a bit.
All those are fair points.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I would think that the Mac should have a runningly updated little file of which Apple-relevant apps have been updated when. It should only be a few kilobyte, near-instant to send.
But what do I know.