You can still write software that efficient today. The down side is that you can only write software that efficient if you're willing to have it be about that complex too. Do you want your notes application to just store data directly on a single disk from a single manufacturer, or would you rather have an OS that abstracts the details of the device and provides a filesystem? Do you want the notes software to just dump the contents of memory, or do you want it to store things in a file format that is amenable to other programs reading it? Do you want it to just handle plain text for lyricst, or would you like it to handle formatting? What about unicode? Do you want it to be able to render the text in a nice clean antialiased way with proportional spacing, or are you happy with fixed-width bitmap fonts (which may or may not look terrible, depending on your display resolution)? The same applies to the notes themselves. Do you want it to be able to produce PostScript for high-quality printing, or are you happy for it to just dump the low-quality screen version as a bitmap? Do you want it to do wavetable-based MIDI synthesis or are you happy with just beeps?
The reason modern software is bigger is that it does a hell of a lot more. If you spent as much effort on every line of code in a program with all of the features that modern users expect as you did in something where you could put the printouts of the entire codebase on your office wall, you'd never be finished and you'd never find customers willing to pay the amount it would cost.
Then a GPU will typically beat an FPGA solution. There's a pretty large problem space for which GPUs suck. If you have memory access that is predictable but doesn't fit the stride models that a GPU is designed for then an FPGA with a well-designed memory interface and a tenth of the arithmetic performance of the GPU will easily run faster. If you have something where you have a long sequence of operations that map well to a dataflow processor, then an FPGA-based implementation can also be faster, especially if you have a lot of branching.
Neither is a panacea, but saying a GPU is always faster and cheaper than an FPGA makes as much sense as saying that a GPU is always faster and cheaper than a general-purpose CPU.
That analogy is useful, however with the rubber sheet example there is the force to time misrepresented analogy. That ant example is just changes the time analogy to bring motion rather than force, and is also flawed thus. There really isn't a way to understand relativity without, well, understanding relativity.
Not that I have any idea what I'm taking about.
How many Javascript exploits have you see that infect the browser or the host ?
Last time I did a CVE search, I found about 20 within the six months prior to when I did the search, across a small handful of browsers. I haven't looked for a few months though, so maybe there's been a miraculous improvement recently.
"If I do not want others to quote me, I do not speak." -- Phil Wayne