It seems everyone forgot that not too long ago, you could back order something and the store would call/ship whenever they got it.
Just let me give you my credit card number in exchange for a spot in the waiting list, then the scalpers lose and I get my new launch thing whenever they get around to it. But no, that would be too simple, gotta get the crowd riled up and race for the available units!
I suppose this could be abused like everything else but it wouldn’t be worse than what we have now with fucking scalpers buying up the little stock that trickles in via automated bots.
It’s not about getting your fix sooner for the new shiny, sometimes you really need a new GPU to replace the one you’ve had for 5 years! Why should you settle for the previous generation if the new one just came out and you are willing to pay launch MSRP for that privilege (not 2-3x MSRP for scalpers!!).
This, so much. I often see this at work, theories about this and that being slow, or how something new « should » be better. As the resident code elder I often get to reply « why don’t you measure and find out »…
For some reason it seems nobody uses sampling profilers anymore, those tell you exactly where the time is spent, you don’t have to guess from a trace. Optimizing code is kind of a lost art.
Sometimes I wish compilers were better at data cache optimization, I work with C++ all the time but all of it needs to be done by hand (for example SoA vs AoS…). On the upside, I kind of have a good job security, at least until I retire.