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That was my first thought. Or people complaining about air travel - "when they are in a chair flying 500 mph 7 miles up!"

I find it hard to get worked up about a program that you are going to use for the next 8 hours taking 30 seconds to start. Though I do get annoyed waiting for STS (SpringSource's Eclipse) to start up.

One thing that would be very helpful for these plugin based program would be for them to be configured with the minimum to start with. It takes forever for Eclipse to start up because it's initializing a dozen plugins/services that I don't care about. And it's not always easy to turn them off.




It only makes sense to complain about any gap between potential and actual performance, though, because that's how things progress.

It's pretty amazing to fly across the country with only ~8 hours of time spent in transit. However, just because that's amazing doesn't make it wrong to complain about one of those hours being spent on completely unnecessary security theater. It could easily be 7 instead of 8, and that's an hour that everybody's wasting. Yes, 8 is still amazing, but 7 would be better.

Same thing with software. It's amazing that we can do this stuff at all, let alone as quickly as we do. Being able to start something as powerful as Photoshop in an hour would still be fantastic. But when the capability exists to make it start in five seconds instead, it's still reasonable to complain about the gap.

To look at it another way, when you're waiting around because necessary work is being done, that's reasonable. But when you're waiting around for the sole reason that somebody decided his time is more important than your time, that's rightly frustrating.


Certainly scale needs to factor in here. What can you get done in a normal hour? Now what can you get done in one second?




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