Slashdot Mirror
No Need to Upgrade that PC?
An anonymous reader writes "The Washington Post (free reg.) has an interesting article about a developing trend in the computer retail business: People aren't buying new PCs. Why? Well, no suprise to those who read this, but grandma and Joe Sixpack don't need a screaming new P4 to surf the net and write letters. Are they just figuring this out?"
in our office, i hardly see the graphics guys upgrade their macs. after 2 years they always buy a complete new Gx. Do people actually upgrade Macs?
With a Celeron 400mhz and a Riva TNT 2 video card I can't play many of the games released in the last year. :(
Being a gamer I'm REQUIRED to upgrade or get left out of all the fun. At least Half Life still works...
Computer power goes up, windows's speed remains constant. If we lag behind with hardware windows'll be going *backwards*
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
... it's time to put Longhorn on the fast track to release. Nothing stimulates the hardware industry like a new, even more piggish release of Windows with plenty of "new features to make Windows even easier to use"!
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Until KDE4 is released
...this is the only voice readers may hear to contradict the endless marketing hype by computer mfr who realized this a long time ago! This is a general audience pub., and they can repeat this message as often as they like.
To be honest, it only really occurred to me about a year ago, that there wasn't anything you might need for most folks that you could get for 1/2 price on eBay, and then I thought, gee, the industry is in trouble unless these things start breaking a lot. (Soon, we learn about the built-in SELF-DESTRUCT chip.)
I do all my home development on an old AMD K6-2 450. This way, I know that any software I release will run with acceptable performance on systems that most people have.
Microsoft and Intel are finding that while they have a monopoly, it is a monopoly on a durable good. As such "the monopoly creates it's down competition and must take that into account in its production decisions" (nicholson)
In the extreme case the products are perfect substitutes, only the competitive price can prevail in the long-run i.e. price = marginal cost.
As Boogaroo, above, pointed out, gamers need to pretty much constantly upgrade. Used to be, developers put a lot of time and effort into making software compact and min spec - friendly. No more. The bigger and more demanding the software, the better the computer you need to run it. Everyone wins. Oh yeah, except the consumer.
Thankfully that's not where everyone's at. My parents need their email, a little word processing, and that's it. And if console games keep getting better (and offering network play), it may finally come to pass that gamers have their console and their word machine and never the twain shall meet.
Okay...
;-)
I guess this article states the obvious. Of course people don't need faster computers. The only reason they'd need fast computers is if they are playing high-end computer games, or using Windows (which for some reason or another always keeps on making it's software more dependent on speedier computers, even though it is completely unnecessary.)
Most family friends, and people I know who need computers just need a simple box that allows them to chat online, play a few simple games, e-mail, surf the web, and perhaps play "The Sims". Since almost all of this can be done on linux, I buy older cheap computers, and i have a special "personal distro" of linux that I give them, which always works, and they usually have no complaints, since everything they want is included, and it didn't cost them much ( I just charge the price of the used computer I bought. ) For smaller families without much money this is great.
As well, for those families with the little brat that demands more you can usually appease them with something that is sub 1-GHz and has a good graphics card, since most games don't require screeching speeds.
Just from my experience though. Right now I am running off a 750Mhz Laptop, and I have been considering upgrading eventually to a small tower, but nothing with the numbers I have been hearing lately (2.0+Ghz, with 1Gb+ of RAM, etc.)
Well, maybe something with those numbers.
~ kjrose
My in-laws are still using a PII and it suits them just fine. Same goes for operating systems - it's only due to forced obsolescence that they will eventually move off of Windows98. (ie/ when they eventually buy new hardware, no support for it in win98 will mean new OS)
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Yeah, they're just figuring this out. Of course, I went and did the "impossible" for a buddy of mine at work and installed XP on his Cyrix MII box with 96 megs of ram... People really need to begin asking themselves why things are spec'd the way they are, and maybe save a few $$$ As for myself, there's a few 486's and P75's sitting around here, perfectly adequate for 90% of the day-to-day stuff. I've got this monster dual PIII Coppermine box here with a gig of ram for the other 10%
C|N>K
They aren't playing ANY of the latest games. Unreal 2k3 stutters on a 2GHZ with 512MB and a GeForce3 card.
NBA 2k3 needs lower resolution to flow smoothly through some of the animations and events occurring on the "floor"
And I just bought 2 1700 AMD XP Athlons to UPGRADE my 1Ghz systems.
Maybe Mom & Pop don't need to upgrade, but they also don't use the computer for the tool it was designed to be.
You keep going until you die..."Me".
I'm so confused, I just don't know who to believe anymore!
Use 'slashdot stuff' in the subject line in any email you send me if you want to get past the spam filter.
In Soviet Russia, computer upgrades you!
...by almighty Cringely.
I'm currently considering a downgrade.
Except for my gaming needs, I'd like a small (physically), extensible, *low-noise* little PC, with a comfortable screen and a decent keyboard.
It seems to me like the low-noise requirement is starting to appeal to more and more people. Hell, else the Via C3 would have been laughed at in *every* review it's gotten.
I'm currently thinking of getting an (otherwise worthless) Epia C3 933MHz box for server duties, provided I can hang my harddrives in there and keep those silent a bit.
Oh, where are you, Transmeta, with halfway decent performance low-noise/heat solutions?
People: most computer users simply do not care about running the latest and greatest applications on their PCs. They are quite content with Windows 95, Office 97, and AOL. To them, this is all that a computer does. The PC is merely a way to send email, instant messages, and write papers. The sad truth is that it's the same way for many college students as well.
From the article: Robert Clemenzi, an electrical engineer who lives in Manassas, is still using an older model that runs Windows 95.
This is another surprising trend in the PC world -- many users don't care about which operating system their computer uses to manage hardware devices and programs. Whether or not their machine's underlying system code is an inherently secure model such as BSD or an inherently virus-prone OS, they simply do not care. They will go to Download.com, perhaps, and install whatever free virus scan is available. Of course, the virus definition files may be a year old and they'll never update them, but they just do not know how to do this.
It's the same way for many users of Unix-type machines. All these hackers care about is getting a command line interface so that they can run a couple instances of the Vi text editor and the Mutt email client. Simple. That's all. It's just that straightforward. Whereas the average Windows users just wants to write and chat, the average Unix user just wants to code and post to mailing lists.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
This is a trend that has been going on now for about ten years now. The average upgrade time has been slowly moving up, from 12 months to 24 months over the last ten years IIRC. My guess is that average home computer upgrade time has moved from 2-3 years to 5-6 years (with the exception of gamers, who ofetn live on the cutting edge).
For people to upgrade, they need to see sluggish performance. An upgraded GUI can soak tons of raw CPU power in ways that make you yearn for it (just ask the Mac folks about CPU consumption under the OS X GUI). Transparent windows, photo realistic icons, bayesian user interfaces, fully indexable content, database file system, you name it: these features can keep a P4 busy all day.
Until then, a slow pentium at home is all I need to surf the web and read e-mail.
I seriously think every software designer/programmer/whatever should have a Pentium-133 as their primary platform.
:p
People with new, fast computers sometimes end up writing bloated software just because they don't realise that everyone doesn't have the same equipment they do.
I'm not a softeare developer, I'm a GIMP artist, so I'm allowed to use a Celeron-600 powered laptop.
Begs the question. For things that individuals use computers for, will there come a time when we will simply run out of things to use the computing power on.
I remember when I got a 200MHz machine for my mother and I could not think of anything that she would want to do that would require anything faster.
Unfortunately then came MS products which want more and more computing power and flash heavy internet.
So is it stupid of me to think that once I upgrate her machine to 1GHz she will not need anything more? Or will programmers be able to use even more power?
Currently I cant think what anyone using a computer for just writing and looking at the internet would need faster processors.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Computers were designed to play games? Maybe someone should have clued Babbage, Turing and the rest into this a while ago. We could have some kick ass gaming machines now, though they probably couldn't run notepad.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
A linux plug:
...But it also ran Windows XP equally well for surfing, email and light word processing.
I got a PII 266 laptop with a 8gb drive and 96 mb of ram. I bumped the ram to 384 and it runs Redhat 8 great....
But I went to Redhat as this was the first 'spare' computer I could singleboot to.
All for $100 (plus $60 for the ram)
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
I'm going to be content with what I have. The only reason to upgrade PCs is for the games, but I'd rather spend $300 every 2 years or so to have my next-gen console.
I've been running my dual Celeron 366's running at 550 on my Abit BP6 motherboard since September of 1999. It still suits my needs just perfectly. However, my main HD is a 10K RPM U2W drive. But nonetheless, the system is still faster than the new P4 systems in many ways. I have a laptop with a P4 2.4 CPU in it (before you say there's no such thing, read up because there is and has been ever since the P4 2.4 came out). I have a P4 1.8 system at work. Both of the single CPU systems I use on a daily basis feel pretty sluggish at times compared to the duals.
Duals are just plain awesome! I do plan on upgrading to an Athlon MP system. I will never go single CPU again!
You know, developers sometimes need to compile stuff. It's a pain to code if half of your time is spent building the binaries for testing.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Call me a cynic, but the reality is that the PC industry needs a new reason to sell boxen. This is the next wave of marketing from the big three (two?) PC manufacturers along side of Micro$oft -- create fear, uncertainty and doubt among the majority of PC users who don't know any better and convince them that they need the new *secure* computers along with the latest generation of Windows crap.
Or create a Windows Media PC that allows you to plug your computer seamlessly into your entertainment centre and TV at home -- everyone knows we can't do that today (sarcasm).
The other huge push of course will be the .NET revolution that MS believes will snare all the unwitting mom&pop operations and casual users. And mark my words -- that 1999 Compaq PC that grandma has sitting on her desk at home just won't cut the mustard on the MS controlled .NET-enabled Internet.
It is truly sad, but the computer industry has sunk to the "whiter-than-white" marketing driven society that we all live in today. Intel, Microsoft, HP, etc. all step in line because they know that it's the only way they are gonna sell new computers. What's the world going to be like in 5 years? Hard to say -- but at the rate we are going now, it'll look an awful lot like today but with more widgets and gadgets than we ever need. And I'll still be typing away on my PII-400MHz and accessing the 'net via outdated software.
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
I have a medium-sized collection of DVDs. Among the movies it contain are favorites, like Barcelona, GhostWorld, and Annie Hall, that I sometimes want to watch just for a certain funny or intriguing scene.
I also prefer (not owning a large TV) to watch movies on a computer screen. I think would prefer this even if I *did* own a large TV, which is (drumroll) one reason that I don't. Ahem.
So I have been compressing my movies into DiVX;) using the excellent software dvd:rip and enjoying the results.
This is a very slow process, and it's the first thing in a while which has specifically made me want to upgrade both processor (a 600MHz Athlon otherwise still feels very fast to me, and I'm in time-machine-based negotiations to lease a fraction of its power to the U.S. Space program circa 1962) and hard drive (because movies are big, even compressed).
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Once you hit 1Ghz you hit the point of diminishing return on CPU's. Unless a hard core gamers or running some high end graphic or simularion software you aren't going to see much difference and Joe Public is seeing it. IMO the main contribitor is software, there is no popular with the masses software that needs that many CPU cycles. Most software is sitting waiting for the user to give it something to do. Then the rest of the computer system memory, buses, cards, and devices are way slower, again a lot idle cycles for the CPU. Intel has noticed this and has said they are going to start focusing more on power usage. Also this is part of the reason for HyperThreading, trying to take advantage of all those idle CPU cycles.
Computers are currently a few common things:
Word processor
Email/Web/Chat
Accounting
Games
And if that's all they are, and all they will ever be, then there's no reason to upgrade, outside of the dedicated gamer who needs the faster parts. The three former uses simply don't require it and haven't for years.
So what must they do if they want to keep inspiring people to buy? Give us new uses.
The multimedia PC is a step in that direction- using the computer as a home jukebox is a great idea, except that certain interests are determined to undermine that use.
Apple's making an attempt at it with their bundling of video editing software aimed at the home movie maker.
We need to see more moves in this direction that stretch the definition of what a computer is for, for the regular home user.
Then, and only then, will people have a reason to go out and buy new machines.
I'm sure that most people will disagree with me, but I think not having to upgrade your computer to get an equivilent experience as a person with a new PC is a fairly recent phenomena.
The key thing is "equivilent experience" -- sure, you can browse the web and send email on a 386 with 16MB of RAM running Linux, Lynx and Pine, but its not the same experience that a person running a newer system with a GUI, new browser, plugins, etc. I'd argue that an absolute bottom of the barrel equivilent experience would to have to be 98SE/ME on a PII450 with 256MB of RAM. Anything below that just isn't the same as P4 running XP.
Sure, there are some Linux trolls out there happy to deal with sluggish old P1s and P2s, but they're not getting the same experience.
I don't really notice a difference with my "old" computer (2.5 yr old dual PIII, WinXP) and brand-new P4s with XP. But had this been 4 years ago and I was trying to run Win2K Pro on a P1 166, it would have been glaringly obvious (yes, I have done this).
I'd attribute most of the comparability between 2-3 year old systems and new systems to the lack of overwhelming mobo throughput increases but mostly to the relative OS stability over the last three years -- the economic slowdown has definitely prompted MS to slow its OS upgrade cycle a little.
I also see analogies between the computer industry and the auto industry when it developed. At sometime back in the auto's history, probably the 40's or 50's, cars could already travel as fast as most people would ever want to drive. That didn't stop the industry from improving, and I don't think it will stop the computer industry either. We'll start concentrating on safety(security) and design factors, making software safer, easier, and more fun to drive.
But first, economically we somehow need to get out of this funk. As long as what we make is an extra that people can do without(and it always will be that) people won't buy in economically hard times.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
And I'm typing this post on a PII366 Dell Latitude CPiA laptop. This machine, bought used off eBay, is 4 years old. So I guess I win.
Especially when you consider, as all Mac users seems to, that a 466mhz PowerPC processor is at least as good as an Intel processor at twice the megahertz. Therefore, you are posting using a 900mhz Pentium III laptop, which was hot stuff just last year.
Therefore, your laptop is only 1 year old in the Intel world and your boast is nothing special.
Of course, all of this over a post that could be made from a 8088 machine.
As for Macs being meant to be used for a longer period of time, that is a common myth. If users installed Windows 95 on their old Pentium II 233 and just kept putting security fixes and IE updates on it, they would have something equivalent to a beige G3 getting all the nice little fixes between OS 8 and 8.6. Both would have kept up just fine with the update process and would have been just as zippy four years later and just as useful. If you move up from Photoshop 4 to Photoshop 7 in that time period on either machine, then you would be reaching the limits of the machine (rather your patience with the machine).
My company currently uses Pentium III 450-550 machines with 192MB. I am fighting tooth and nail to prevent the CIO from buying new machines. The company is in a tough financial situation and these machines simply do NOT need to be upgraded. At the same time, our Mac Admin has encouraged the same CIO to upgrade our current stock of G4 towers at 500mhz.
This isn't necessary, he just wants to be able to go to OS X and have it be as fast as possible to make a good impression on everyone. I resisted the upgrade to XP myself in order to keep the OS in spec with the hardware. In fact, if any money is to be spent, I'd rather it be on a couple of servers I could use to run these machines (and older ones too) as thin clients for Linux.
I sell Macs for a living. In terms of processing power, for the consumer-targeted lines of products it can reasonably be argued that you get more processing power for your buck with a Wintel machine. However, very few of my potential customers are concerned with such things. I'd say maybe 50-60% even bother asking about what sort of Pentium an 800 Mhz G4 (the CPU in a flat-panel iMac) is equivalent to. Home users care about applications, and about not having to deal with driver conflicts and the Blue Screen of Death. When a potential "switcher" comes into the store, I mention OS X's stability, then start showing the iApps. And that's usually all it takes. :-)
If all the content people want (songs, movies, games) come prelocked and only the right kind of Intel processor can unlock it, it will spur a new generation of replacing PC's. Good for Intel, good for MS who will get to re-license Windows yet again. Time marches on.
Or is J. Q. User expected to attempt a reinstallation of Windows? I shudder to imagine certain members of my family trying that.
(Disclaimer: I use OE, and have never suffered from an email virus)
Frankly, if you take a person who knows very little about computers and plop any OS in front of them they get scared and will not really know what to do. Mr. Gate's "easier to use, faster internet access" marketing ploy to sell his OS's (which drive the hardware industry) would be meaningless if everyone really knew 2 things. One is that just browing the web will work fine with a 200 - 400 MHZ machine with 64+ MB if ram. The second is that no matter how many features, knobs and gizmo's that Gates packs into his bloated OS the same functionality is really available in older versions of the OS. Plus, a novice will still not be able to use the XP os out of the box very effectively (see below for explanation.)
My bet is that MS is very aware of these dangers and builds some abstraction into their design to purposefully make the OS harder for new users. Note that Win XP has no desktop icons or easy HUD type bar (like KDE, GNOME, Aqua etc.) on the default install. The start menu (possibly the most familiar "PC icon" i the world) is completely different and much harder to navigate IMO. They make these OS's seem better with gadgets but the core functionality is still not in line with the common users needs. MS will then be able to launch a new OS every few years that is "easier to use." To use an analogy, would anyone be interested in a car that doesn't drive very well (hard to steer, accelerates erratically, just "cuts out" while driving.) then keep buing a new car every 2 - 3 years that has only slightly better conditions (or fixes some problems while adding more!)
Jesse Wolfe Sr. Manager Systems Integration
Software isn't growing in complexity as fast as the chips. Perhaps this a good thing... But I really do wish comercial software would start using some of the more cpu-heavy algorithms out there. I want a neural-net email filter and IM status indicator, a GA for determining disk load order in order to improve boot time, and huristic news gathering agents the output of which can be used on my PDA, my computer, or my website. Quick-launch menus should be generated from observations of my behavior, not manual labour or click-counts. For example, I want a quick-launch bar that can understand that when I start firing up web development apps, I may want other suchlike programs. Why must the icon for Warcraft III remain prominant if I am currently working in photoshop? If I use a certain directory constantly for a certain type of document, the agent should recognise the importaince of that directory to ME and promote the accessibilty of it somehow when I am working on such a document. My directory structures should be somehow understood, so that when I want to save a new document, the computer can recommend where it thinks I want to put it. Software is starting to stick in its current roles, and so chip speed is no longer the limiting factor. If we start building better software, the chips will resume their progress.
I loved the Gateway? commercial, advertising a computer with the latest and greatest processor, ram, video card, and 56K MODEM, "so you can surf the web faster"! The target audience saw nothing wrong with this.
Its been nearly one hundred years since the automobile hit the mainstream in the United States, and more than fifty years since it was just assumed that you had access to one. A majority of people still haven't bothered to learn how to change their oil, replace basic parts (brake pads, headlights, spark plugs), or even use the turn signals. New Jersey doesn't even know how to pump gas. People don't spend the time learning all about their products. They never will. Dumb will always be the aim of the major commercial players.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
The new upgrade trend for the general public will no longer solely be done for a faster PC with more storage space. Most users need only about 20GB HD for their MP3s, emails, etc... because the general public doesn't have a porn collection or tons of video games installed.
My prediction is that people will start demanding silent PCs that are power efficient, don't take up much space, and have a chasis, moniter, speakers, keyboard, and mouse that fit the fashion of the day.
Oh, and people will want a PC that is more easily maintained. For example, just last night, I help a friend fix his sister's PC. Turned out there were no hardware problems at all with this thing. Instead, she had a rotted out Windows 98 install with over 250 spyware infections, 40 virus infections, and about 50 processes running in the background and system tray.
It turned out that this girl's PC wasn't very old. It was about a 700mhz machine (can't remember exactly), which is faster than both my computers (windows and linux). Anyway, after removing all of the spyware, viruses, and unnecessary background processes, then 3 Windows Updates, updated drivers, a scan disk (tons of errors found), and a disk defrag later... the computer performed wonderfully!
I also cleaned the "broken" mouse, which now works wonderfully. Before I "fixed" this broken computer, it performed like a 386 with 8 megs of ram...
Basically, computers are like cars: people are going to have to take them in to a specialist every once and a while, to have them tuned. The problem is, I got to thinking that once this girl gets her computer back, in 24 hours, she will reinstall most of the spyware, and after a few months, she will reinstall most of the viri. So maybe people need to learn how to use their computer in addition to taking it to get tuned up by a specialist.
My point is that the average computer user only needs to upgrade because their computers are so un-tweaked and they are running so many spyware daemons and viri.
Back about 1985 I started saying that I hoped the software 'industry' understood their market had a very limited lifespan. Once Word Processors actually work, well, that's the end of the WP software industry.
What's more, people won't have to even buy one. Once the concepts are public literally anyone who wishes to take the time can right them and distribute them for free.
In fact, I went on, the single biggest problem Micro Soft (remember those guys?) faces is the fact that by the turn of the century even operating systems will have an effective market value of $0.
It was entirely predictable and, give or take a few years here or there, I pretty much nailed it.
Of course what I didn't count on was the sheer marketing power the big guys have been able to bring to bear. The average Joe is completely unaware that software has zero effective 'value' these days and continues to pay through the nose for it.
But they *are* at least begining to realize that what they already have works to their satisfaction. The upgrade cycle depends on customer *dissatisfaction.*
Well hey, if the car still runs make the customer dissatisfied with the size of its tailfins. Hence transparent widgets being hailed as a major breakthrough in 'technology.'
Well, I hate to tell the computer 'industry' this, but while this may work with a the younger crowd for a while your grandma already knows how to suck eggs better than you do. She remembers the invention of planned obselesence. She bought into it before you were born, and learned the folly of it, again, before you were born.
When your market consists entirely of people waiting with 'bated breath for the next release of the latest and greatest gee gaw you're ok, but when your market moves to Walmart and the nations grannies it's a whole new ball game. Granny just wants to buy it, take it home, and have it work, and if it does. . . well, that's pretty much it for her, she's done.
And so are you computer 'industry.'
KFG
I am going to save this article for when the annual wave of new pc buyers hits me this season. I keep telling people that unless they are processing video, doing number crunching, programming or playing 3D games there is no need for a monster pc. Maybe if they read it in the post they will believe me.
I switched from a dual processor PIII-1GHZ Windows XP Pro PC with 1.75GB ram and a 64MB nVidia card to an iBook 600 MHZ with 384 MB ram and OS X 10.2 (for work) and an xbox (for play).
The xbox plays games a hell of a lot better than my dual processor pc ever did. The iBook runs MS Office v.X as good as my dual processor pc ran MS Office XP. The 600 MHZ have been plenty for everything I do with it at work (web programming, remote server management, office tasks, etc). There is only one program that runs like crap: Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. Everything else runs perfect.
Worse, I offered to my wife to give her my dual processor pc and to sell her Celeron 600 Dell with 256MB ram and Windows XP Pro. She told me to go to hell, so I sold the dualie to offset the cost of the xbox and a few games. Her Dell runs rock solid and I don't average one hour per month in maintenance for that pc.
Eventually I am switching her to mac too, but that pc will probably stay in action for at least a couple more years.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Is the fact that a Windows install gets slower over time from a bloated registry and so on. I know a lot of people with decent machines that are simply bogged down by software who don't know to reinstall and instead buy a new computer.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
People buy PCs to do things, and the PCs that people have now can do the things they want to do. The good sales in the past were based on the jump to the net.
Windows 3.1 machines were horrible online, Win95 was better but still way too flaky, Win98 was an improvment when it first came out, and by the end a well patched 98 second editition became more or less usable. 2000 and XP are much better than 98, but if you just surf the web and send email, 98 is good enough.
The thing is, my 1.4G athalon is crummy at playing full screen hi res video compressed with a top notch codec. I use MPEG2 instead. That makes me crave a faster machine. Video is the next killer app, the one that will push people into upgrading.
A world with solid PVR apps, good file sharing apps, and lots of video files floating around would be a good thing for the tech industry. I'm not saying anything about the ethics of that, or anything else. But it would push people to buy better computers.
-
For most users, the only killer app for a fast desktop machine is games.
- Now that A-title games cost around $20 million to make, good games have to be high-volume products.
- The game industry is moving to consoles for the high-volume products.
Therefore, games won't be driving the PC industry for much longer. The requirement for a PC is levelling off.What this may mean is the beginning of the PC appliance era. About 80% of PCs are never opened once they leave the factory. They could just as well ship as sealed boxes, with the usual "no user serviceable parts inside" marking. It's already possible to build $400 boxes that will do everything needed for 80% of home and business desktops. That's the future of the PC. Expandable boxes will be a niche market, sold by specialty retailers.
... is like using a big, huge, truck to drive 10 miles back and forth to work in..
:-)
Oh, wait.........
bun-fhuinneog agam!
Because the monopolies on broadband aren't expanding speed and capacity, processor-pushing broadband internet-based apps aren't developing, such as a videophone, MPEG-4 video encoding/decoding, RARing of large files, or stuff I can't even think of. Yep, napster probably pushed processors and hard drives, and we need video/CDROM pirating to do the same.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
If this becomes widespread, where are we going to get cheap discarded pcs to upgrade our beowulf clusters?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I know I upgrade my Macs. I am currently upgrading my Umax S900 604e/225 to a G3/400 with additional SCSI drives, new/used IDE controller, 60GB IDE drive, USB/Firewire PCI card and another 256MB of memory. I'm looking at spending around $250-$300 (already had the 60MB hard drive sitting around).
As for upgrading my PC or buying a new one, I've never had a compelling need to buy a newer/faster Windoze machine. My Pentium II/266 has over 300MB of RAM, an upgraded IDE controller, second hard drive, 8MB (upgraded from 4MB) VRAM and runs all the programs I need like a champ. The only thing I can't do is run games that require more than 8MB of VRAM. And if I wanted to, I would just by a new video card instead of a new computer. Why would I buy a new machine? My serious work and game playing I do on my 333MHz iMac or my 400MHz G4 tower. And eventually instead of buying a new G4 Tower, I will simply buy a processor upgrade card-or, wife permitting, a DUAL G4! (drool!) processor upgrade card- and a faster video card-maybe in two years.
Well, to be truthful, I will upgrade to the new processor as soon as my wife....uh..our finances allow.
Veritas patesco per quaestio questio. Truth is revealed through questions.
I just close my eyes and imagine the next Great Leap Forward my MS. Windows 2K5XP whatever they call it. It will REQUIRE a 2GHz processor a Gig of RAM and ATA133 drives. Probably high end video and sound adapters as well. Now everyone here will think this stupid but it's never been stupid before. And at any rate they'll have DRM built in so they'll drag you along the upgrade path because nothing else will work.
Unless there is wholesale revolt and people stop buying Office and MS doesn't strong arm everyone into coding to IE9.5 (or whatever) and you don't want to play you r audio CD's or DVD's anymore.....
that's exactly what I've found myself doing. I've got a reseller just a couple blocks from my house and can put together used systems, with monitor, for about $250. I'm looking into the Walmart computers because I think I can now do better with *new* equipment, or with the newest generation of integrated motherboards build from scratch at the same price with higher quality.
I then install a "personal" Linux distro ( right now a heavily modified Mandrake/KDE, but I'm working on a "from scratch" version) that I've found includes just what the average 'Joe/Mary' is expecting from their system. . . and nothing else, which is *also* what I've found they expect. ("Why the hell do I have seven console programs, and why do I need a commercial grade web server to play Tetris?) If at a future time they feel their needs have changed I just pop in whatever it is they want.
Simple, bullet proof and so far not one *single* complaint about Linux being too 'hard' or 'geeky.'
Not even a single complaint about not being able to run Quicken. I don't know about your friends and family, but *my* friends and family already know how to balance their checkbooks and don't appreciate being treated like morons by inanimate objects.
KFG
There are a lots of motherboards that support sata now, but I have yet to find a true sata drive out(cuda V soon). Lots of people are waiting for hammer, I was tempted to upgrade to xp 2800 with the asus nforce 2 board, but i decided this year to examine my cpu usage for a week with my XP 2100.
The were only very rare instances where my cpu hit 100% utilization for a long period of time, mainly compiling and seti so those are probably the only activites that would benefit from an upgrade besides games, which with the ps2 network adaptor I playing console games online rather than say unreal tournament, since there has no real revolutionary fps since half-life, just graphic improvements.
New software should be designed not to run on existing hardware. The electronics market badly needs a new software direction to keep alive the demand for new hardware. Most software for the mass market, even the huge latest version of MS-Office, is using similar amounts of central processing power to software of a year ago. You guys upgrade your hardware regularly. But for the average user using average software, how could you persuade them they really need to upgrade their PC/settop box/games console or whatever? I think demand cannot grow without fundamentally new types of CPU intensive applications.
Why oil price increase equals economic trouble (Score: Interesti
I have a 1.2 GHz Athlon and a GeForce 2 Pro, and this runs everything well, including every game I play. The only reason I'm even considering an upgrade is Doom 3, and I'll probably hold out on that until Doom 3 is closer to a release, at which point I'll probably just replace the Motherboard, Processor, and Video Card rather than making a whole new PC.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
The law of diminishing marginal utility basically states that the utility that any consumer derives from additional units of a particular product diminishes as total consumption of the product increases (if the consumption of all other products remains unchanged).
For example, I am currently typing this on my P4 2.2GHz workstation. If I replace the CPU with a P4 2.4GHz, the utility that I gain will be marginal (ie: hardly any difference). In any case, I have to argue that it is all relative!
I have a P3 1.3GHz laptop, and another P3 450MHz workstation, and for me to use those as my main workstation is just not possible anymore. Why? Well, believe it or not, there is a noticeable speed difference with all the machines - even for basic word processing and internet browsing. Sure there are architectural differences in terms of RAM, HD, etc, but the fact remains that there is a speed difference.
Why is that important? Computers are used more than just for word processing and internet browsing. Playing games, watching movies, listening to music all require a decent amount of resources for the experience to be enjoyable. You're kidding yourself if you can really play (and more importantly enjoy) UT2K3 on anything less than P3 1GHz and less than a GF2. Don't tell me that you're getting 60fps, max details, 32-bit colour, at 1280x1024 because you're not.
Nonetheless, we have to remember that CPU speeds are relative. The gaming industry is driving CPU speeds a lot more than say Microsoft is with productivity applications. But to say that you're 'happy' with your less than 1GHz machine with today's applications and games is kidding yourself a lot more than you realize. You'll never want to use a 'slow' machine as your main workstation when you've used something 'fast'. It's human nature after all.
Everyone (damn near?) has a computer in their home. This is a given. However, the new market is the second PC market. A lot of people have turned one room of the house into the computer room and share it amongst all in the family. Now that mom uses the computer for email too damn much and dad has found the joys of net porn and the kids cant get enough of downloading thousands of songs on kazaa that they will NEVER listen to, its time for two if not three PCs in the house. On top of that, there is cheap wireless networking which makes such a crazy cooky idea even more feasable. The sales monkeys need not to be saying trash your old PC and get a new one - they need to say, its time for PC #2.
PS - I have known people who have taken an entire PC, Monitor and all and thrown it in the trash when they got their new PC.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I'm typing this on a Dell P166-MMX overclocked to 200. It has 64 megs of RAM and is running Windows 98SE. Actually, I found this computer sitting among a pallet of old computers on their way to the dumpster. All the other ones were P133's.
I took this one home, installed a 6 gig hard drive I had sitting around, an old sound card and a $1.99 NIC (on sale at Fry's). Know what? For basic web browsing, checking email, typing a letter or two, and other mundane tasks, it works just fine. Yes my wife has a P4-1500 with half a gig of DDR RAM, a whiz bang video card and an 80 gig drive that she edits photos on...but we find that this little computer in the bedroom gets used every bit as much as the power one does. Indeed, it's used all night every night to play ambient music from Live 365 to lull us to sleep.
Let me ask you doubting Thomases this: for what this is used for why does it need to be any better then it is? I believe the answer is no.
my mother's machine starting getting slower even though she only used it for email and surfing. The software had been upgraded and 32M wasn't enough. So I added 256M of memory for $50 et voila: happy mother. Bill isn't happy. Monkey-man isn't happy. But mom is doing just fine.
Consumers who use a computer to perform tasks, rather than because they're actually interested in the computer itself, won't have a reason to upgrade until their hardware keeps them from doing something they want to do. This applies to home AOL/browse/email users as well as to corporate and institutional users. (That's why there are still lots of Win98 machines in homes and NT boxes desktops.)
For many people, bandwidth and network limitations bound performace and capability more than chip speed. The slowest piece of the foodchain will determine overall subjective performace, and increasingly that bottleneck is the network.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
One trend that this does not take into account is many families have more than one computer. How many Dad's have upgraded so that their kids could use the old computer?
I think that manufacturers saw a big surge in purchasing as many homes bought computers for the first time. Y2K was also a big reason to upgrade PC's. Now I think that most people have a PC that meets their needs with no reason to upgrade for functional reasons. The main reason to buy a computer is not to replace the old one but to have another computer in the house/office.
In order to drive sales of new computers, new applications are required. These new applications require companies that are willing to take a risk and enter the software market - but with Microsoft hanging over the market like a Godzilla waiting to tromp over any newcomer that might threaten Microsoft's cash cows funding for innovative software is going to be very hard to come by.
People don't forget what happened to Netscape - the web browser was the last real killer app, and look what Microsoft did to that.
The fact is that Microsoft is strangling the computer market, and the situation won't change any time soon. AMD realizes this, and is looking to make cpus for markets where Microsoft is not dominant. Markets where innovation and new technologies are possible.
The reason Wintel fosters this notion does have a grain of truth to it.
/dev/null) were trying to generate support for the use of flash for entire sites.
:-D
If everything you're looking at on a webpage is being pushed at you through streams because some butt-head corporate site has invested heavily in Macromedia (FLASH/SHOCKWAVE) then yes, running with anything other than a dreamsystem is going to result in some minor irritation.
This is just one of the reasons why flash pages should be an option, and not the mainstay of a website, but a little while back some ass-monkeys (I must have piped them to
Personally, I'm a "slow-tech" kind of person. I actually order bios upgrades and reuse hardware until a _real_ need to upgrade presents itself and then I upgrade to satisfy just that need. But the idea of a _needed_ upgrade is completely subjective. I won't knock anybody who feels they have have the latest and the greatest, especially if they turn around a while later and say ,
"Hey, could you use __________?"
Oh yeah.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
The only reason I got a TiBook is that I knew that eventually the G3 would croak (it finally did this month,) and, even at that, I waited until the TiBooks could burn CDs and CD-RWs.
Backups (redundant data & hardware bought before a catastrophy,) take all the ugency out of buying a replacement.
I may not buy a new computer for a decade. Maybe some boards, more RAM and a new monitor (just picked a Nokia 4445Xpro for the Linux box,) some new bigger drives (I ripped ALL my 200+ CDs to Mp3s,) but I don't use Windows so I never got on the upgrade treadmill.
My client's a bank and their thousands of NT4.0 SvcPk6 boxen are definitely NOT multi-media ready (bad idea with the public doan'cha'no? You're supposed to be at work, not playing games and watching DVDs.) NO CD burners, no audio cards.
The apps that we write and that run on those desktops are client-server so they don't need more than a 200MHz pentium III, a 4GB drive and 64MB RAM (and even at that most of that foot print is the OS.)
Frankly, pitching DRM at these people is a waste of time. Pitching 90% of the software is a waste of time. Pitching 90% of the hardware is a waste of time.
The working world needs better security, better user authentication, better subnet management tools and 100% reliability. The rest is noise.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Windows 95 version B was an OEM only version of win95 that was released as a stopgap measure until 98 came out. you could only get it on a new computer. It fixed a lot of win95 bugs at the same time as adding a couple things...those are...
You can download a PATCH from M$ for it that can give it LIMITED USB support. Most hardware manufacturers that make USB devices say 98 or higher because of the problems with the 95 version. Also, it could not support more than 1 USB device very easily. (In fact, if you install an Iomega Zip drive the driver install tells you that you will not be able to use any other USB devices on the port until you uninstall the iomega stuff).
Hopefully this helps you.
RoundTop
Most people remain ignorant of it, and their computer's performance is continually decreasing. Eventually they will upgrade their computer.
Also most people have every single program they install create a quick start, memory-hogging icon in windows.
Here's my two cents. Hardware companies certainly can benefit from the proliferation of spyware etc. Is their a partnership?
oh yeah if you have spyware, get adaware from lavasoft. Again i dont feel like making a link. Its easy enough to find.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
The story yesterday on AMD states that AMD is going to be branching out to make processors for other pieces of hardware.
Looks like this might be a smart thing to do. Make the processor for the MP3 player, for the handheld, etc, if it's a growing market.
I find my 1.2 ghz Athalon too slow, but my wife is happily running on a P2 450.
I first used a 286 with about 1MB of RAM. This ran Wolf3D, but poorly. Wolf3D was copied to my dad's pride and joy 386 w/3MB RAM where it screamed.
Then Doom came out. And it wouldn't run on my 386 (needed 4MB of RAM). Luckily my dad just bought a 486dx2/66 with 8MB of RAM and Doom was good. Doom2 was just as fine, but we bought a sound card to complete the experience.
And then came out Quake. It ran at about 5fps on the 486, so I saved up some cash and transformed the 486 into a P133 powerhouse at 16MB (and it only cost about $1000 to do). Quake played nicely and the world was at peace.
That was until Quake2 came out. Time for a k6-2/300. That was cool, but with a voodoo2 it was even cooler. I bought a companion k6-2/350 and could host h2h deathmatch in my household for the first time.
But what's this? Quake3? This prompted me to put together a powerhouse of the likes that I had never seen before. I built it piecemeal over time, like mechanics might build a hotrod in their garage. Acquiring it piece by finest piece. Finally, my Athlon 700 was complete. It sported 256MB of RAM, a voodoo3, and an SB 512K.
And here I am using it now, waiting for Doom3 to come out so I can no doubt upgrade again. I dare to say id Software is more important to the home computing industry than most vendors realize.
I *finally* decided that I'm going to upgrade my PII/266 machine (which I use far more than anyone else I know uses their machine) next time an x86 processor that doesn't suck down 60 watts comes out.
Yet the only real reason I'm thinking about it is to get software DVD decoding and be able to use a peppier mozilla (websites increasingly have poor support for more efficient browsers like dillo).
May we never see th
A new space exploration game from Electronic Arts Inc. called Earth & Beyond, for example, specifies as its minimum processor a 500MHz Intel Pentium III or equivalent AMD processor. Even the cheapest computer available from discount computer maker eMachines offers more than three times that horsepower on its most basic configuration, which goes for $399. (Many games do require more powerful graphics cards, but they can be added to older systems much easier than processor upgrades.)
Gamers are going to consoles because they are tired of needing the newest $200 graphics card is one reason. Second, most parents are probably tired of updating their kids' computer for the most recent high-end game too. I know several people that get wowed at superb graphics and sound; then toss the game when it crashes their GeForce 2 (?) a dozen times or they have to constantly update their game software or hardware drivers to keep up at the next LANparty/geekfest. Businesses are getting the same way about their workstations -- unless it wears out or breaks it should not be replaced every three years.
And further, there are many, many of us out here who chose between the electronic gadget or the computer and choose gadget; or cannot afford either thanks to current economic trends [to borrow a cliche and NOT to say this is just a tech sector thing. My first wife's boyfriend was recently laid off and he does nothing IT. It's hurting us all].
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
If games are the only reason for fast PCs, why is it that the consoles don't have gigahertz processors?
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
While the statement about joe user not needing a faster PC to read email and type the occasional letter is true, I'm amazed at the number of average users that have to have the newest, biggest thing. It's a keeping up with the Joneses type of thing. I run an ISP, and all the time, I'm getting new users signing up that brag to me about the specs of their computers. "Yep, I got me a Pentium XV 5 billion megahurts w/ 9000 megabites in the hard drive, and 3000 GBs of RAM, er wait, flip that there around. My next door neighbor just got one from Dell, so I had to upgrade. Got great financing, just $10 per month fer the next 50 years. It's great for playin' ma new Deer Huntin' game. It's a great game, it's called "Redneck Christmas" and came out on the first day of Deer Huntin' season. Minimum requirements is a 1024 MB video card so it can render them pretty 16-point bucks.
Instant Karma's gonna get you...
I am writing this from our six month old P4 with XP.
When our 166 mh pentium died (MB problem) I picked a cheap little pIII box out of a catalog. I thought that an upgrade to windows 98 or 2000 (whatever was lying around my dad's office) and a dsl line would solve all of our computer problems.
My wife had a conniption: we just painted, framed pictures and hung track lights in the office and she was d***ed if I was gonna clutter it up with some mismatched frankenstein beige thing.
It's not all her fault. When we got to the store I upgraded to a flat screen, better sound and more memory. I still have not burned any vinyl to cd, my ostensible excuse for the upgrades.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
C++ source that uses templates would take forEVER on a slow machine. Well, it already takes forever on a fast machine....hmmmmm...what comes after 'forever'?
You want something small and quiet, but doesn't sacrifice anything in terms of performance?
/. article. Put in a Pentium 4 2.0 GHz CPU (Northwood-core version), 512 MB of DDR333 RAM, a 60 to 80 GB ATA-100 hard drive, a combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive (e.g., Toshiba SD-R1202), and a LeadTek WinFast A250 LE TD card with the nVidia GeForce4 Ti4200 GPU, and you have a very nice computer that not only plays today's most advanced games quite well but also has enough connections to support today's and tomorrow's multimedia hardware that use USB 2.0 or IEEE-1394 connections.
Get the Shuttle SB-51G motherboard/case combo, which was mentioned in a very recent
"Faster" is not coming for free. We're seeing boxes with five fans in them and several pound heatsinks. Good grief, the new NVidia card requires an external power supply. So not only are we not needing the extra performance, but we're paying for it in other ways.
Intel should just give up developing new processors until they stop buying more speed with what may be a greater than linear increase in wattage. When something much better comes along, like optical processors perhaps, then we'll have something.
As it stands, Moore's Law is going to prematurely fail in another generation or two, when the cooling system is prohibitively expensive and/or large.
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I wouldn't be surprised the next major form factor for desktop computers is something akin to Shuttle's designs. Why bother with big, monster-sized system cases when you could built a very powerful system with a case that is 1/3 the volume of the average mid-tower system case?
I think in today's economy, the next major burst of upgrade comes in four areas:
1. Memory upgrades. You'll be amazed that many computer built before 2000 sport 64 MB of RAM at most. Given many of them use 168-pin DIMM's, they could be easily upgrade the RAM to 256 MB or well beyond that for a very reasonable price. And the benefits are immediate: since the need to use the hard drive as virtual memory is very low with computer that have memory upgrades, performance increases of 70 to 100 percent are not out of the question, not to mention substantially fewer system crashes, too.
2. Hard drive upgrades. The switch to a 7200 RPM drive makes reading and writing data on a hard drive much faster. People shouldn't worry about ATA-66 or ATA-100 hard drives working on motherboards with ATA-33 connections, since they should be compatible in general. Sure, you won't get the full benefit of the ATA-66/100 data rate, but it would probably be much better than the old hard drive.
3. Graphics card upgrades. Many older systems use old technology AGP slot graphics cards that are woefully underpowered to handle many of today's multimedia tasks. Cards such as the ATI Radeon 7000 or card that use the nVidia GeForce4 MX420 CPU of course won't offer cutting edge 3-D performance, but they're very reasonably priced and are still vastly better than the original cards.
4. CPU upgrades. Don't laugh--if you have a motherboard that uses Slot 1 or Socket 370, there are now upgrades that can tremendously increase the speed of the computer. Powerleap is now selling CPU upgrades for Slot 1 and Socket 370 that uses the Tualatin-core Celeron and Pentium III CPU's running at well beyond 1 GHz CPU clock speed.
Very likely, most people will spring for the memory upgrade first, since it's the cheapest solution and the one that has the most immediate benefits for all programs.
Ah, the title got you reading, didn't it?
Even Mac users don't really care much about the OS X eye candy, from what I've seen. Eye candy is neat for about a month, and then you just ignore it, unless it slows you down (in which case you turn it off).
The reason you get so many Mac people lauding the UI is because they're fed up with MS's stuff, they like the quality of the software that Apple puts out, and the biggest and most obvious difference between OS X and Windows is the eye candy-filled UI.
Eye candy is good for selling/demoing a machine. It really doesn't matter for long-term use, though. Not many Enlightenment users always use E, and at least not most of the effects (like the water). They just keep it around to show it off, then flip it off and go back to work.
May we never see th
If you do not do the following, please use -MM. It autogenerates dependencies so that when you change a header, affected object files are autorecompiled. It makes everyone's life better.
C++ is still hideously slow to compile with g++.
ccache should be a standard developer tool. Tremendously helpful. Speeds up builds after "make clean"s by a huge amount.
May we never see th
Oh, yes. I almost forgot.
The "new upgrade" feeling, the rush of excitement when putting the thing together is much better this way. Upgrading every two years means that you notice a bit more snappiness, a bit less paging. No big deal.
But, I still remember upgrading from a Mac Plus to a Power Mac 6100/60. From a monochrome 512x384 8.5 inch or so screen with a wave-synth sound system, 800k floppies, an 68000 chip, no numeric keypad to a system with *16 bit* color, a *14 inch* monitor, a (you may want to sit down for this one) *CD-ROM drive*, a totally different chip architecture, an effectively non-multitasking OS to a cooperatively multitasking one...
Wow. Quite an experience.
May we never see th
As someone put it recently, you can run Word just fine on a Macintosh SE. Miraculous, I survived college with just that, including by thesis work. (You can buy an SE for about $5, BTW.)
:)
Maybe not the latest, most bloated Word, but I figured they'd lost their minds way back when they introduced voice annotations. Also, the screen is a little small...
Computers have gotten a lot nicer, and prices have dropped a lot, but there is a lot of exaggeration as to what people "need."
Hate to break it to everyone, but the consoles have won the game wars. You can buy a nice, high-end console (PS2/XBox), for the price of a video card these days, and you don't have to pay for OS, processor, drives, etc. On top of that, the games run consitently and are at least on par if not better than many PC games. Quit wasting all your money and buy a damn console already.
but then I realized that Unreal plays flawlessly on my network with its P3 866, AMD 900, and AMD 1gh. A new machine would be just that a new machine without much more to offer (im practical terms anyway)
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
I think what's happening here is that despite a great deal of criticism, Windows XP is pretty stable if installed by the OEM. The typical user only upgrades when there's a need. Until now, one of the reasons to upgrade was the elusive search for reliability. As XP is largely reliable (although certainly not perfect), users with XP computers are not as likely to upgrade because of reliability issues - they'll upgrade when new "must-have" bloatware comes out that requires faster computers with more memory. Or because they want to play Doom III.
144l. ph34r my 133t l3g4l 5k1lz!
You missed the point. These operations have well defined meanings outside C.
C subverts that meaning with arcane rules. Indeed gives a different value than There is always a tendency in the
In contrast, sqrt(2) used to be an inderteminate value, in ANSI C sqrt(2) == sqrt(2.0) as one would expect.
You know, developers sometimes need to compile stuff. It's a pain to code if half of your time is spent building the binaries for testing.
.c and .h files (you should be doing this to make version control easier anyway) it's really not that arduous, so long as you have plenty of memory and fast disks.
So long as you aren't doing make clean between builds and you have your code neatly split into many
I still do useful work on a 33Mhz 68040 with 32M running NeXTStep 3.3. Nothing like knowing a compile is quite an expensive operation to sharpen the mind rather than taking the "shotgun debugging" approach.
Fine, code locally, test locally, do some funky distributed compiling. 5 develpoers on old machines, 5 graphics artists on new machines. USe the CPU power of the graphics machines (when not running filters etc.), to compile.
A lot of the *speed* of new computers is the faster hard drives and more memory.
Take that older PII/K6 era machine, throw 256M of memory into it, and give it a fast [IDE] hard drive. Congrats, you have a faster machine. Buy a nicer video card off ebay for $20 (someone recently recommended 8 Meg PCI Matrox Millenium II's for the 2D support), and you got a big enough vid card for a 17" or 19" monitor at 1024x768. Assuming it has around a PII 300 mhz or K6-2 400mhz processor, its fine for Mozilla, Open Office, and a few old games. For a lot of users, they don't need more.
My wife's machine matches yours (except Celeron/450 instead of P3/350) and is running KDE 3.0.3 (from Mandrake 9.0). Everything in it was autodetected correctly, it runs some things faster than my Athlon 1800 (bodgy MSI motherboard), and it's dead peaceful even with a copy of StarOffice 5.2 and OpenOffice 6.0 (don't ask) and Mozilla and XChat loaded and doing stuff (like Flash, in the case of Mozilla, 'coz #1son (3yo) likes Bob The Builder). It also found a nice Yamaha sound card when I plugged it in, and drives an Epson C41UX printer, Sony DSC-F707 camera and a second (Swann) USB mouse (for little hands).
/etc/rc.d/rc5.d might be instructive.
RedHat has been notorious for starting un-necessary services, although I gather that they've improved on that a lot in recent distros. A listing of
What does `top b' look like on that machine once it's got (say) a copy of OpenOffice.org started?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
AMD did, they recently announced that they're diversifying (away from bigger heatsinks and a microwave on your motherboard). Actually figuring out what customers need? Inconcievable! (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I agree. My little 500 Mhz AMD, K6II runs Photoshop 7 on Windows XP speedy as ever(and with antivirus and firwalls running). Of course, every few months I put another 128 MB of ram in it (but what's that, like $25?) I keep wanting to upgrade, but I just can't justify it yet.
Recently I read an internal Microsoft white paper that discussed the need to drive the purchase of new PC hardware by creating bigger, more demanding apps that do exciting, useful things. I go along with the exciting and useful part, but it would be nice if they weren't bent on maxxing out hardware so people will have to buy more. Maybe it's to put Palladium chips in place, I dunno. But if there seems to be a lack of motivation to make MS apps smaller, simpler or more efficient, it's not because their coders don't know how, it's because the suits don't want them to.
I see your point, and for basic applications you're correct. But the real value in upgraded PCs tends to come from new, innovative software that performs tasks that weren't possible before.
.WAV sounds and play them back - but it wasn't the same as mathematically calculating the whole thing and reproducing the instrument in real-time. This new ability allows you to have a nearly perfect simulation of an instrument on stage, without lugging the thing around with you or worrying about it getting out of tune. (Not to mention the cost savings, or instruments you simply can't buy at any price anymore.)
EG. Software synthesizers for computer musicians. Before the newer generations of CPUs, a PC simply didn't have the processor power to accurately simulate a real Hammond B3 organ, or a Steinway piano, or you name it. Sure, you could sample in one as a series of
High-end PC sales won't sell in massive numbers to the general public, perhaps -- but they'll still have customers. (Assuming, of course, that software development doesn't stagnate and resign itself to re-inventing the same old apps year after year.)
Rather than waiting for a power-saving x86, I'd buy a recent one and underclock it well. I'd imagine that an 1.8 GHz (cheap these days) CPU running at 1.2 GHz with a lowered voltage runs really cool and cheap, in terms of power. Can't measure it due to lack of equipment and 1.8 GHz processor, I'm afraid.
And you would have expected otherwise? You are doing integer math (which is certainly not confined to C programming).
Actually you are wrong on this one. Before C most languages would have interpreted that as floating point math on two counts: (1) the division sign "/" and (2) the presence of the float x which taints the entire value. This is the natural interpretation under math rules, which are far better known than C rules.
In those languages conversion to int would happen at the end, often only after explicit conversion (truncation, rounding, floor/ceil).
A lot of us who are pretty hard core about programming pay more attention to the theory and practice of programming than we do to tinkering with hardware and drivers.
For Windows, ordering a power machine from a major vendor works wonderfully. Even with Linux, I like having a mainstream hardware setup (not too cutting edge) to increase the chances that my distro installer can do the grunt work of making all the hardware pieces work together without intervention from me.
The sooner I can get my dev tools installed and get down to programming -- and put the hardware and system config out of my mind -- the more I like it.
(Ironically, all my relatives think that since I'm a programmer, I'm naturally the perfect person to resolve all the driver conflicts they have in that hacked together pile of PC parts they just saved so much money on, so that's how I get to spend my holidays....)
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."