[6SJ7]

It pains me to think that computers which were less powerful than a modern mobile phone could send people to the moon while modern computers, thousands of times more powerful, are harnessed into sending spam, propagating viruses and surfing pron.

Fuel burn rate and trajectory calculations - easy.

Decoding H.262 video at 30 frames per second - hard

[ShadowAce]

Testing whether a ship can withstand the space environment—harder than decoding video.

[antiRepublicrat]

Our expectations keep going up. In the late 90s I remember 640x480 being considered high-speed video, now 1080p is it. Going further back, I remember a Rolling Stones song taking less than 32K. It sounded pretty bad, but these days we expect a song to take several MB and sound almost perfect.

I had an experience with H.264 this weekend. I put a few movies on a daughter’s netbook for a trip, and found out it couldn’t play them smoothly. A 1.6 GHz machine couldn’t even play video without going choppy. I couldn’t dream of a 1.6 GHz machine even 20 years ago. I have to remember to make lower-bandwidth, simpler-profile versions for future trips.