Slashdot Mirror
Less Might Be More
Quantum Skyline writes "Most of us are running on a newer Pentium 4/Athlon 64 box with lots of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive and a uber-sweet graphics card that pushes 100 FPS in Doom 3. Our parents are probably running an old Athlon 700 with half the RAM and a Rage128 videocard, and some think that's overkill while the parents think its not enough. Why debate this? DevHardware has an opinion piece on 'leaner computing' and the author thinks that less might be more." This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
Quantum Skyline writes "Most of us are running on a newer Pentium 4/Athlon 64 box with lots of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive and a uber-sweet graphics card that pushes 100 FPS in Doom 3. Our parents are probably running an old Athlon 700 with half the RAM and a Rage128 videocard, and some think that's overkill while the parents think its not enough. Why debate this? DevHardware has an opinion piece on 'leaner computing' and the author thinks that less might be more." This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
Companies make the most money when you buy as much new hardware as possible rather than keeping your existing stuff that is sufficient. Car manufacturers are the same way. It's inefficient but like everything else we can chalk it up to capitalism.
Why are they buying these fast systems? Easy, it is what is being sold and it is not worth the hassle to buy a used system to save money.
Unlike a hobbyist, Joe isn't going to run out and change his PC every 6 months. Joe's going to use that sucker until it dies. So, what's horribly overpowered these days will be ho-hum, run-of-the-mill in 2-3 years. That's why Joe buys a machine that overpowered for what he's doing today.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
...Microsoft taketh away!
In my opinion, what most people want is a responsive desktop, not necassiarly a fast one. Most people would be perfectly happy with a ~1GHZ processor, but the 128mb of memory and slow 5400rpm disk destroy the usability of the machine. That's why I adovcate to all my non techy friends, to buy a resonable speed CPU (mid 2Ghz Celeron/Athlon) but grab a fast 7200RPM disk, and 1gb of memory. The cost of the machine is similar to a decked out 3Ghz with 256mb (what Dell seems to sell these days), but the machine is much more responsive. Opening multiple programs doesn't cause the machine to slow to a crawl swapping. And loading apps are fast, because the disk is nice and speedy.
We are talking about Apple macs here right? ;)
Jonathanjk.com
yeah maybe a dumb terminal would suffice, but how would the clerk play doom3 while ignoring the customers?! It'd be unfair
That sucks! I'm stuck at 60 fps. Damn id and their frame limiting. Who'd you have to sweet talk to get the extra kick?
This is a VT100.
Reminds me of the mad rush to get computers on everyones desk, back in the late 80's. What did they run? An ADDS Viewpoint 60 emulator.
ADDS Viewpoint 60: ~$200
PC and Monitor: ~$1,500
One of the first things I recommend to people who've bought a new PC is to go through and uninstall all the crap they don't use/need. Many storebought boats are half sunk by the amount of crap which comes pre-installed, without, I might add, any damn instruction on how to get rid of it if you don't need it. A friend had a top o' the line PC and was having serious problems with video editing. I dropped by and uninstalled a massive amount of sh!t and his video editing took about half as long. It don't be amazin', neither.
Those of us who build our own rigs usually have a pretty clear idea what we want and what we don't, thus our smokin' Athlon with Gig o' RAM and Video Card el Luxo can smoke through apps. I've got a PC at work with a faster clock, but it does SETI sets ssssllllooowwww, while my de-clocked home system zips right through them (declocked for stability, never nailed it down, but don't really care since it's plenty fast enough.)
I have wondered what kind of terrible timing conflicts happen on a PC when all the devices are extremely fast, but on their own clocks. Seems having more things in sync would improve even more, but the last hardware I saw work like that was over a decade ago. I can't seem to get straight answers on tuning, either, as most people can't seem to be bothered with it. i.e. which clock and CAS is best for your machine? Storebought usually are whatever's cheapest (though may actually be faster since some engineer at Dell knows what they're doing.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/23/192243 &tid=109&tid=1
... MS Levels of computer terminology?
;)
I'm having hard time understanding this article...
I have a brand new high end box that I play doom 3 on. Windows 2000, gig of ram, radeon 9600, etc. I also have a 5 year old viao that's about the thickness of 2 magazines stacked on top of each other. It's running a pared down redhat 7.2. If I only needed mail and web the vaio would be all I need. It's what you do that dictates what you need.
Seriously, though...a big part of what keeps IT rocking and the money flowing in high tech is upgrades. If this ever comes to an end...(shudder)
We need more hi-res video, not less! Bigger memory footprints, not smaller!
I'll tell you what the 'effect' is! It's pissing me off!
Huh? Gamers with plenty of cash to pour into $400 video cards and processors every few months, maybe. I'm sure they don't account for the majority of Slashdotters, though.
With the crappy quality in most PC parts...the thing won't even last two or three years.
Recently, during a home improvement trip to Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse, I noted that the terminals their employees use are running some version of Linux with WindowMaker as the X11 interface. They of course mainly use an IBM TN3270 application to access inventory and supply data, but I'll bet that their version of Linux is not a full-blown distro.
In any case, they definitely subscribe to the less is more principle... Have you seen the crappy PCs they have there?
doesn't doom3 limit the fps to a max of 60 so that system resources can be used for better purposes than rendering frames we can't see? That's what I read a while back in an interview with john carmak. Anders
I use a VIA EPIA 5000 Fanless Motherboard with a 533mhz CPU as a silent X terminal with a more powerful workstation in another room doing all the work.
I couldn't do this with a desktop P4 or Athlon XP processor etc since they get too hot to passively cool. So for this computer at least, less definitely is more.
How do ya figure that?
Let's face it: unless you feel the need to play games, there was no reason to upgrade your computer for the past six years.
I don't know about Joe Sixpack's near where ever he lives, but around here, they all ask me what the cheapest machine is that will do basic stuff for themselves, or their kids at school. The only ones I see running out for Alienware or Dell XPS machines are serious gamers who are either 1) too uneducated, or 2) don't want to put forth the effort, to build their own machine.
My parents run P2-366 class hardware and it's more-or-less enough.
But I will need a faster PC just to build FreeBSD-packages for them, and re-build world.
Because that's taking ages on these slow machines...
When I migrated them from SuSE to FreeBSD, the idea was to be able to upgrade the machines step by step - but I didn't take into account that it takes almost a weekend to build KDE....
Rainer
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
In my recent experience, decent vt100 terminals cost so much the PC with XP license is probably cheaper. No, it doesn't make sense to me either.
I have found that, under the right conditions (i.e. lynx or links, vim or emacs, and a decent shell installed on the system), I can actually get a lot of work done. In fact, now that I think about it, I would have less distractions (no instant messaging, games, etc. to distract me). So I guess this is another way less really might be more.
Get a free iPod!
glad to see someone bring thing topic up. For the "normal" computer user, think about it, you play MP3s, use some type of IM, web browse, check email... All things that work fine on anything higher than lets say a 500MHz... As far as I've noticed, the average user's complaints of a slow computer is actually the disk access, and not the actual processor.
It just seems lately they just have been coding software to be so bloated you need a faster computer to run it.
It's probably cheaper for computer manufacturers to make (only) the latest and greatest and sell it to everybody than to try to specialize and sell one guy a 486 with DOS, somebody else a 4ghz p4, third guy gets a vt100 terminal, etc...
That's why new vt100 terminals retail for $250 while a new dell retails for $300. I'm sure the EE's on slashdot can testify about slapping a overpowered PIC microcontroller into a design instead of a cusom circuit because it simplified the design, and only bumped the product cost up from 30 cents to 40 cents.
It just makes sense from a manufacturing standpoint to mass produce one general-purpose product then try to shave a few pennies off making custom solutions for all kinds of tasks.
Car manufacturers do not operate under the same mentality as computer manufacturers. Theoretically computers offer significantly more potential every year as hardware development increases power exponentially. Car manufacturers are in the business of taking a core technology and repackaging it until they are forced to concede to a partial redesign or new implementation to satisfy consumers or federal regulators. Sheet metal on most vehicles remains 90% similar for more than five years, uni-frame designs may last twenty years before a redesign, usually for crash safety modernization. Engine castings are used, with different bore, stroke, and cam choices, until the engines no longer meet federal emissions or fuel economy reqirements.
The auto industry made its money convincing consumers that they had to have a new car, never mind that it was mechanically almost identical to the last three they had. Computers actually do develop new technologies, more power, and new end-user features at a fairly brisk pace.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Less is More!
Now who wants to trade my 486 and PII boxes for P4EE and AthlonFX??
Jebus, you'd think they could apply the "less is more" concept to their advertising on that site. I could barely find the article through all the blinky and flashy ads, and the textads, and the banner ads, etc. I realize they need to make money off ads but that is plain overkill... an argument that parallels the one the article tries to make.
(yes, I know how to block them)
501 Not Implemented
Um? Have you tried to deal with 95/98/ME before? They make me cry, seriously. XP, while not perfect is a 100 fold improvement over ME. I've been trying to start a business consulting company -- and I've started to notice something -- every time I'm out ona job and there's a 9x machine involved, the job will be invariably hindered by hte 9x machine. I have hundreds of war stories if you want to hear them ... Its gotten to the point where I am considering saying we simply refues to support 9x (95/98/Me).
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
A REAL geek is running a web server on a 386SX. Personally, I don't understand all of this dick waving about fast computers. Any moron with a few hundred bucks can buy a fast computer. Big fucking deal. I'm always impressed by somebody using ancient, ancient hardware, held together with duct tape. Geekiness is all about resourcefulness, not running out to Best Buy every week like a fucking lemming.
Leaner is more. Leaner is cooler. If you can get done what you want to get done by being smart as opposed to throwing soon-to-be-overpriced hardware at the problem, all the better.
I don't respond to AC's.
on os x, anyway:
/usr/bin/less /usr/bin/more
$ ll -n $(which less; which more;)
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 123204 27 May 16:13
-rwxr-xr-x 1 0 0 123204 27 May 16:13
so you see kids, sometimes less(1) is more(1)!
My windows box is compelte overkill (in theory), but I use every bit of it! Whenever a program freezes up, on a normal computer it would take a fraction of a second for that program to eat up all the available resources, but not on mine! On mine, it takes at least 5 seconds to max out.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
Hell, the average desktop (gaming) machine today is sufficient for hosting an http://www.ltsp.org/ server capable of serving 20 concurrent users - assuming it has enough RAM. That's a *lot* of wasted resources, if you ask me...
My desktop is a dual processor PIII 750 that I built a few years ago (upgraded from a dual Celeron 400). For all practical purposes, it's not really all that much different than the dual Celeron box, except that I've added more RAM and a faster drive. All my apps run smoothly, my games (albeit limited) run well, and it's a super Web-browsing machine. I even run a small website from it, simultaneously.
Now, I did have a mini-ITX machine awhile back. P4 2.4ghz, 1 gig of RAM, 7200 RPM HD. I did not notice a single bit of difference between the two machines except my framerate was a bit highter on the P4 (better graphics card installed). So I sold it. I'm still using the dual PIII.
Earlier this year, I picked up a used iBook G4 800mhz. Ancient CPU technology, by most PC standards. And yet, it is also 100% sufficient (enough to say it's not DEFICIENT) for anything that do. A Voodoo or Alienware laptop would be more than enough machine for me, at a higher price tag. Performance I don't need. Performance I suspect others don't need, as well.
I also agree with the author of the article. CPU's are growing faster and faster, and are consuming more and more power. I'd really like to see more "Power consumption" aware options (like a desktop based on the P-M), because frankly I don't like my computer to be a space heater (actually, the 2 21" CRT's in front of me are probably more to blame than anything). It really has gotten to the point that buying a new machine today is not really all that "special" as it was a few years ago. (With the exception of the G5 in the Apple lineup, or maybe the Opterons or Athlon64 machines, but the general public doesn't seem too enamored with the latter 2).
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
As the essay points out, another advantage of running an 'underpowored' box is that it's quieter, too. I built a cheap machine with a Via C3 a couple of years ago, passively cooled so that the only moving parts were the disk and the power supply fan. Unlike most quiet PCs sold nowadays, it really was very quiet. I stuck it in a closet next to my desk and I couldn't tell if it was on.
I would say it had three drives and a video card fail.... And being from 1999 you're averaging a drive failure every 1.6 years. If that's the LEAST problematic Mac you've owned, I'd hate to see the MOST problematic one.
Your chip and motherboard may still be working, but your system as a whole doesn't seem to be anything to brag about.
Does this mean I can find some sucker to unload a bunch of Pentiums and K6's on?
The Chronic *WHAT* les of Narnia!
For factories (for example) or retail, a small machine running XP embedded that only connect to terminal servers would be the best way to go. Why spend $$$$ on a machine sitting on a factory floor with all the software they'll never use? If I had the talent I would create a dumb windows terminal that could do this.
Go ahead. Take the idea. I won't sue and use this post as prior art.
Just a dude. Stuck in IT.
I tried the minimistic path once. I setup a music store (now out-of-business) with hardware it only needed to run an old foxpro app. I used cheap components and no cd-rom or sound-card.
The first issue I had was someone wanted to play a cd.
There are other uses of computers than just the standard business app and you should adjust your hardware in accordance.
Right now, I'm doing a heck of a lot with an ancient Pentium II--browsing, playing da muzik, typing up copy and papers, serving a website and maintaining a DNS, that kinda stuff.
...and now that I've typed that, the hard drive will finally die after years of abuse...
Now, if I wanted to play Doom 3, or run ProTools (or Nuendo:-), I would want to get my hands on something up-to-date, with a stupid-fast CPU and gobs of RAM and storage. Really, though, whenever friends need to use this machine, they don't miss anything. I have a web browser. I have an IM client. I have an IRC client. I have a word processor. It all Just Works. Aside from games or media production, what would I need a P4 3.6GHz or dual G5 for?
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
My mom was using a 1998-vintage Quantex (remember them?) PII/266 with 128 MB of RAM quite happily until last month when her DSL modem died. BellSouth sent out a new modem, but the software accompanying it decided that her computer was too slow. After a couple weeks of back and forth with them we just gave up. (I'm a Mac guy and 1000 miles away, so I couldn't help her with XP that much over the phone.)
;)
So I started shopping and found some pretty good deals on Dell's refurb site. I ended up getting her a 2.6 GHz machine with 512 MB of RAM, 40 GB HDD and a 48x CD-RW for $490 shipped. Yeah, it's a Celeron with integrated graphics...but it doesn't matter. She just surfs the web, prints out house plans and stuff and plays solitaire. The 266 MHz machine was more than capable of doing all of this, but the "industry" forced her to upgrade.
I really wanted to get her a Mac so she wouldn't have to deal with viruses and spyware, but couldn't justify spending twice as much for an eMac. I wish Apple made a cheap "pizza box" G4/G5 machine for people who already have decent monitors. (Try telling a mom that she should get rid of a perfectly good 17" monitor....)
Frankly, from what I've found, most people either get new computers so that they can have more than one in the house, or they do it because their old one gets a virus, lots of spyware, Windows crashes, etc.
Getting a new computer to increase the number of them in the house seems perfectly fine, since afterall, they get used more and more, especially with the advent of easy home networking. Now as for those who get new ones to "fix" the old ones, you have to consider that these days, with computer repairs still being relatively expensive, it can often be cheaper to just buy a new computer than to have to deal with an old one that's warranty has run out.
For a lot of stuff, you don't even need much of any power at all.
:)
Now, let's take into account the OS for a nice user friendly interface, multitasking, etc., you're going to need at least a 68000 @ 33 Mhz. Let's add in all the skins and so on that Joe User seems to love today, internet applications... I think a 486DX2 @ 80 Mhz should suffice. Maybe a 586 @ 60 or a 6811 @ 70 if you want java, and so on.
Pair one of those processors with about 32 Mb of memory, and a 20 gig disk, and you have enough to do anything but gaming, and even do it in a really flashy way.
I don't know how many times I've heard that all modern PCs are overkill. A long time ago I read an article where the author was running a dual P6-200 running Windows NT. He talked about what overkill it was and how a Pentium 133 should be just fine for most people.
Yep, we sure should have listened to that guy. Everyone should have hailed the Pentium 133 for being modern computing's crowning achievement, and we could have closed the books on making new hardware, because what would be the point in building anything faster than that?
Then it was "nobody really needs > 300MHz for home PCs". Then it was 500MHz. Now I guess the bar has been raised to 700MHz.
My benchmark: if I still have to wait, then it's not fast enough.
Sure, people will always buy the best and newest, but I think that less people share this attitude now. I'm not talking about maturing and realising that you don't need the best that's out there; But I noticed something my geek friends and I shared: Our love for Pentium 200's. We have all agreed, without someone convincing us, that the 166-300mhz age was the golden era of desktop pcs. Sufficiently tweaked, they will still perform well for most tasks one needs to do, and still have some room for fun.
;-) It performs extremely well for its age, and comfortably runs Windows 2000.
My 16-year old brother recently 'catched' the P200 love flu, and will only use the P4 for UT2k4; for all other purposes, the MMX with 192MB of RAM and the 8gb harddisk is what he uses, but kept absolutely clean, defragmented, updated and optimized for optimum Pentium 1 Power
Maybe computers will become like cars in the end, and we will change them as often as we change cars. Probably not, but I'm sure more and more people will eventually learn to prefer obsessing on tweaking old hardware than buying new, just like cars.
This reminds me of the lab computers at my University. They are: Pentium 4 3.0GHz Radeon 8500 1GB of RAM Sound Blaster Audigy (No Speakers) DVD Burner Mind you that the most people use them for is Microsoft Office. A total waste of my tutition money...
Bloatware -- it's not just for Microsoft anymore. Your typical latest SuSE and RedHats require 64MB of main memory or more, and god forbid you try running OOo on the thing. Still too much!
What to do for your granma's system? You want something with up-to-date kernel, a low-profile windowing system and a nice combination of office apps that don't chew up memory and disk like they were going out of style.
Run Uptodate Linux Everywhere is one place to look.
Vector Linux is another.
Ok, I want to know how you can have Mod points already with a UID of 770966. Or are you just saying that to be cool?
I suppose so, if the admin is an imbecile, deletes the less binary and puts in a symbolic link to more .
But the reverse makes much more sense. less rulez, baybee.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC
PCs are cheap enough now that they are competitive with terminals, consider the production volumes. I'm not talking about things you pick up from the dumpster around the back of the bank, but something that someone would pay for and get support for.
You also get some pretty good host integration features such as using the PC's local receipt printer without additional networking, not to mention the ability to change your POS software to something PC-based later on if you so choose.
While a Rage 128 is enough for non-gaming usage on a PC, it doesn't fly on the Mac. Even my early Radeon is a bit creaky. Why? Because Apple's using the GPU a lot more than Microsoft is (at least until Longhorn hits)... with Windows, unless an application uses OpenGL or DirectX the video card's not doing all that much more than the Amiga Blitter did in 1985. With OS X (and with Longhorn, remember) the whole GUI is getting fed through OpenGL (or in the case of Longhorn, DirectX).
There's already some experiments with 3D GUIs. Mac OS X is taking the first stumbling steps with Expose. Sun's demonstrated a much more 3d Java desktop, and I've seen a 3D collaborative environment that lets you "look around" and see other people's workstations as avatars standing in front of floating windows and you can look "over their shoulder" (hopefully only at windows they've explicitly made public). I can imagine an environment where windows don't iconify or hide, they just fade into the background (using the GPU's fog effect, of course), and where skinned interfaces are really texture-mapped 3D objects you can move and rotate.
When this really starts taking off, so will the graphics cards, complete with realistic turbojet sounds from their fans.
...but I think it's only a matter of time before software catches up with the hardware.
After all, everyone remembers the infamous "640k should be enough for anyone" line with a chuckle, but at the time, it seeemd reasonable enough. Who knows what application is going to come along that will push today's hardware to the limit?
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
We had 50 dell P133's and 486's they connected to the unix server by digiboard (serial) and they were over kill I could have used 386's but you can't find any at least we only paid 20 bucks each for the dell's but when they originally put in the 486's (3 years earlier) they cost almost $200 each
http://Lenny.com
I have a 4 year old AMD K6II @ 450MHz, with a Voodoo 3 in it, and it serves my purposes well as a Windows box to check websites in over VNC from my Mac and for troubleshooting friends virus/spyware/printing etc problems.
I also have a 5 year old G3 Mac Powerbook @ 333MHz, which I still occaisionally use for some applications and retro games that never got ported to OSX (I'm now considering installing Linux on it with the WMI lightweight keyboard oriented WM on it).
These computers still have very good use to them, and I sometimes think it's a shame that people throw away old computers when they have a lot of potential for a good few people.
A thrift store near me has their POS running a dos program in window mode on some very nice hardware (but a pretty bad OS :).
Ok, so I don't shop there very much, but I keep thinking those people are wasting their money. Why, they could just go on ebay and get a few '386s and load freedos on them.
My laptop is slower than the article's example of "old" -- it's a P3-650 Dell. It keeps up for everything except compiles, but the benefit of using older stuff (with recent batteries) is that I get 8 to 9 hours of battery life, even while using the wifi card.
Show me a P4-3Ghz laptop that can do that!
--
Gmail invites for completed referrals It's working.
I can't imagine a VT100 being useful for much of anything. Without insert/delete line, which appeared in the VT102, vi is painful. So are many other programs. TECO maybe.
Half of our office still runs my trusty old PIII-450. They connect to either a old DOS billing program, or to our new unix based accting program. The training center for our new program actually has green-screen wyse terminals still running. All we need is enough horsepower to run Windows for easy networking and Word97. A couple of us that do more have bigger (1-something GHZ) boxes.
Their is a hobby for building carPCs. Some people spend a lot of money and get the best possible equipment however for those with not so heavy wallets older systems were used.
One guy bought an old laptop and got a striped down version of xp to work. Some people even use much older systems and DOS mp3players in their car.
Interesting stuff, http://www.mp3car.com sells products for it and has forums with pictures/info on finsihed projects. Worth a look.
I'll make you a deal. You pray to God for help and I'll stop the moment he shows up.
These pyramid scams will soon to come to an end when you finally run out of suckers. Please do us a favor and let these scams die.
People keep buying faster and better computers because microsoft has managed to bullshit them into believing that they need all the latest and greatest features and eyecandy that their marketing department can concieve.
I long for the good old days when top of the line was a 386 and programmers knew how to get the most out of the limited hardware by actually optimizing their code.
I still use my old P2 450 MHz and my parents use an old P1 200MHz and it is more than enough for everything we want to do.
(I am a programmer, and my system is loosely based on LFS)
Death has been proven to be 99% fatal in lab rats.
What always struck me as odd/funny was how people insist on accompanying their computer with handheld calculators. As if their computer wasn't able to tackle the horrendous load of basic addition or division.
While people may make do with a slower computer, and you may wonder why someone who only surfs the web and reads email needs a 3 GHz computer, it doesn't really work that way.
It takes intel millions of dollars to make a fab to put out a chip, and that fab only makes those chips, so all that is available to the consumer is faster processors. How much would a new 486 sx 25 Mhz processor cost today. If you wanted one, how much? Intel don't make them anymore, so you'd have to fund some sort of production faciltiy, so that's a millions straight away.
The fact of the matter is that there are only fast processors available now. They may eat power and heat siberia but it's all there is (at a reasonable price for a desktop).
This is also a good thing though, the computing power is needed. Computers at the moment are kinda crap, you need to argue with them to use them, voice recogniton (good voice recognition) intelligent computers will need alot of power, and it's no harm at all to have an abunfdance of it available.
...and buy the latest whiz-bang Pentium-7 multi-gigaflibbet filled with M$ Bloatware Professional so Joe Executive can type up 100-word memos, and to run green-screen emulators for cash registers. It just makes more and better gear available to schools, third-world countries and tinkerers like me to run our own Linux/BSD servers. In the meantime, Corporate America gets to depreciate all that stuff and duck out of paying some of the taxes Bush hasn't yet relieved them of.
One notable exception to this is Fry's. Ever notice the bazillions of Vectra VL 266's they use as POS terminals?
void*x=(*((void*(*)())&(x=(void*)0xfdeb58)))();
"less is more"
Is this what computing would have been on Seinfeld if the show was still around?
I always recommend my friends and family towards the higher end computers, telling them that they won't have to upgrade for a long time. I then explain to them my favorite distributed computing program and chuckle when the work units come in. :)
I'm at the Utah DMV, sitting in front of a flashy VT52 writing my code (they recently upgraded me form a KSR-33). I'm looking forward to getting an 8-inch floppy next and then it's goodbye to paper tape!
My ex-wife has built an ad hoc accounting firm in her home. They had a P III-450 running Windows 98 as one of the workstations, and were doing file sharing off of it. It was painful.
Finally, I convinced them to get a newer computer for that employee. They bought a refurbished Dell - a Celeron - but with "only" 128MB of RAM, and running XP Home. I added a 512MB DIMM, which vastly improved performance. One happy employee.
Then, I took the P III-450 and rebuilt it with Red Hat 8, upgraded to kernel 2.4.26. I put a recent build of SAMBA and CUPS on there, and now they have a rock-solid file and print server that performs much better than Personal File Sharing on Windows 98. One happy accounting firm.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
Most motherboard are designed with capacitors that have an expected lifetime of three years. Sure, most people could get buy with a Pentium III, but they're not making new ones anymore, meaning all the ones that are out there are unreliable and no longer supported. Look, I've got a 166Mhz Dell laptop that was state-of-the-art when I bought it, but now it's a worthless piece of crap. Not because it's too slow, but because it doesn't have a DVD driver or USB and it has PCMCIA slots whereas all the new 802.11 adapters are CardBus. Or like my MP3 player -- it can be expanded with a flash card, but it only takes up to a 32MByte card. which NOBODY make anymore. Let's face it, you could get by on much less then they are selling these days, but you have to take what they're selling if you want something reliable that will work with the peripherals they are currently selling.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Actually, a VT100 would probably not serve as well. The PC could be used to connect securely over a TCP/IP connection, obviating the need to configure a modem farm and maintain a bunch of incoming dialup lines -- or, worse, pay for a bunch of dedicated wires. More than that, the PC probably cost less to buy than any dumb terminal on the market -- businesses know the trick of buying way behind the curve for all but the most demanding employees.
We get a lot of customers buying our single-board-computers to use as embedded servers. For most people, doing things like web serving, DNS, and email, you don't need a lot of CPU power or RAM. The single board computer is much less failure prone due to its low power (== low heat/thermal stresses), fewer parts, smaller circuit boards, soldered-on vibration-proof RAM/CPU, and lower cost and all this means more than the pure horsepower a desktop machine offers. Also, you can get a 1Gb compact flash card with Linux preinstalled and it has no moving parts and 0ms seek times; making the whole system perfect for a lot of high-seek, low throughput services. Not to mention you can run these things on backup UPS power for DAYS... (2.5 watt power consumption)
:-) We sell (and I personally helped design) a 166 Mhz ARM SBC with ethernet, USB, and compact flash for $150 in single unit quantities (with full Debian-ARM installed on compact flash) at www.embeddedarm.com.
Now the plug:
The other twenty percent usually ask, "What's the best computer you carry?". In most cases I usually agree with the sentiment that 'less is more' so I have no problems with selling them the cheapest computer they can get, because I feel that most computers are so ridicuosly over-powered for what even that 20% segment needs it for (I am obviously only refering to the segment of the population who shop in my store). Plus we are not commission paid so why should I care if my company squeeks an extra 400 bucks out of Joe Sixpack (or in the case of my town Joe Multiple-Kegs).
As for my personal beliefs... I truly think a beginner (who really wants to learn) should start with the oldest piece of junk they can get their hands on. You learn more that way. And if it truly interests you than you will figure out exactly what you need to do to get things to work, and learn more along the way.
I walk into the school library filled with a row of Win2k machines, half of which are busted or have something wrong with an application or the fan is broken or whatever...
All I'm looking for is a LCD screen with a wireless card in it, 2 usb ports (1 for mouse 1 for keyboard), a power jack, and barely enough CPU memory and flash ROM to run VNC. A single applicaiton machine, I'm not even sure if an OS is required... VNC connects to a linux server in some back room that allows multiple remote logins with some nice openoffice installed on it...
Seems much, much cheaper to both buy and maintain than the rows of variously aged PCs.
Anyone know if anything similar to this?
We have 3 (midtower, 100Mhz Bus mobo based)PCs in our house; 1 G4 iMac, a 500 PIII laptop, a G3 PowerBook, and an old Palm, and with our needs and budget, we get more for our money using older hardware.
If we spent on one what we spend on our older machines and two laptops, we'd probably have the latest, greatest PC we see on TV, but then we'd only have 1 PC.
We'll probably upgrade the motherboards/cpu/memory on the three PCs, eventually, but for now they do the job. Anyways, shopping for deals on Craigslist and EBay for old hardware is too much fun.
I can't be the only one who saw Fry's listing last winter - $99.95 + tax out the door, no rebate! (quantities limited). I don't remember what the called the Linux distro they provided as an OS, but I havn't seen that name since.
While we're waxing nostalgic for minimal hardware, anybody want to bring dot matrix printers back? Yeah, I didn't think so.
I notice that a lot of people believe they need faster computers, when they really don't. Take my school, for instance.
We have everything from Pentium 200s running WinME to 2.5 GHz P4s running XP [I didn't choose this setup.], and they all complain to me that their computer is too slow. Always. The only time I ever heard them cease to complain was when I, as an experiment, threw a Knoppix 3.1 bootdisk into one of the Pentium II 400s. It booted, wrote a swap file, and everyone used it comfortably for a week, until they forced me to switch it back because I hadn't configured Thunderbird.
The point of the observation above is, as machines increase in speed, the software tends to become bloated with it. I know that KDE 3.3 is more demanding than 3.1 is more demanding than 3.0 and so on...but Linux in general seems to get more bang for the buck out of systems. I mean, Word now is bloated to several dozen MB, minimum...I know Abiword works rather nicely on every system I've tested it on, and with plugins, it takes up under 30 MB.
Observation addendum: I took an old Pentium 200 off the hands of someone who had just gotten an upgrade, threw in a 6 GB HD, and now I have a fully functional SMB/CUPS/Apache server for internal use. It's quite functional, and well appreciated and used by all, including those of the staff who were too paranoid to use floppies.
Moral of the story: Linux runs better on older hardware, and can often do most of what the newer boxen can do.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
How many offices turn over their PC's every few years just so they can run MS Windows so they can run Word? Lots and lots and lots. Ridiculous.
At the place where I work, most employees have an old P1-133 or so with minimal ram running Win2K. On bootup they are automatically terminal serviced into a server with multiple processors along with others. This works fine for most people in the building as they only use it for email, outlook, sufing, word and basic excel. Then there are those of us that need are own computer due to advanced excel, programming, graphics and other things (Or we need a laptop). Bottom line is, a lot of buisnesses are using old computers for this kind of thing and only those of us that need our own computer are getting newer ones. IT where I worked realized I needed my own when they gave me a call for the third week in a row asking why I was using 100% of one of the processors. (Aint programming fun?) Course, the fact that I was generating a lot of compile errors and running a program called A.exe (default program name in gcc) didn't hurt either.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It's not just your university, this is happening at most universities. At my state university, the library has probably 200 public use PCs spread in out in groups of four thruout the building. They're currently 3.2 GHz P4 systems with 17" LCD monitors. Last year they were different PCs, 2.8 GHz with 15" LCDs. Nobody seems to know where exactly the old machines went.Unlike the lab machines you mentioned, our library machines are mostly used to access the card catalog software and hotmail.com
Most of the labs on our campus are updated to the latest and greatest Dell models every 2 years. Thankfully they usually have plenty of ram, but the hard drive size is usually insanely large. I think most of the actual deparment labs now have 200+ GB drives---that's pretty big for machines that get reimaged via Norton Ghost every Saturday morning.
And yet, we still have neglected labs. You know the type, the labs that look like what you find in most highschools---Pentium 1 systems running an unoptimized stock install of Win98, running slow. For some reason, our most neglected labs are those that get the most real usage.
Next time you pay your tuition, check the fees section. This semester my tuition included ~$400 "Campus Technology Fee".
I don't have enough of a load on the machines, so P75-200's are more than enough to handle routing, apache, file serving, etc.
Why have a P4 using the extra power and generating extra heat? I don't think my P75 even has a cpu fan.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
"Less is more only when it's better."
Less is more, love is blind (I don't know why)t ay%20Away
http://www.algonet.se/~kenta/music/nirvana.html#S
I don't really understand this article. It certainly is not new information, hardware passed up most common computer applications a long time ago. Even though most people don't need a ~2.5ghz celeron with 512MB of RAM, 80GB hdd which is about as entry level as you will find in a desktop now.. what are they supposed to do, buy a 3+ year old computer?
The article isn't well written anyway, the introduction makes it sound like the author just realized that the 3+ ghz systems with 4GB of RAM, 256MB video cards, and multi-disc RAID arrays he built for regular email/web using users was overpowered..
There is a good blog about this very subject over at the forum at PCMAG.com Its called "Ten Things Wrong With PC Technology."
A lot of us think that most computer users need only to do a few things well, and they don't need a grand gaming machine, nor do they need video on demand, nor do they require screaming GiggaHertz towers.
What they need is something simple to do writing, spreadsheets, a simple database and/or easy page layout.
The fact is, and amazingly, nobody builds such a computer. (The all-in-one Macs from the early Nineties were pretty close to this ideal.)
The new computers today, running the new and incredibly buggy Windows XP have way more speed, memory and hard drive space than the majority of people will ever need, use or want.
Heck, even the minimal AlphaSmart would work for some of them, but only if it had a full sized grayscale screen for page layout. No hard drive is needed. Flash memory is fine, thank you.
Most people just want to print their stuff and have it done right, without font or formatting changes that Word always zings you with.
They want to store their documents on something that is easy to retrieve and stable enough to last a few decades (like flash memory).
They don't need the amazing bloatware, nor do they desire the new muscle-bound computers, that nearly require a degree to operate correctly.
Someone, somewhere, is going to figure all this out someday.
When they do, they will come up with the Volkswagen Beetle of computing.
It will be a machine that will be the same from year to year, and its software upgrades will be very minor events, and with no surprises or landmines in how everything works, or where everything is in the OS.
When they come out with this simple computer, I will be first in line to buy one. So will my little sister, and my old mother. So will most everyone else who hates Windows and Microsoft.
(This begs the question: Why doesn't Linux address this problem of a simple computer for the rest of us?)
Less is more, for most people on this planet. Us computer users are really in the minority, if you think about it.
The rest of the world wants off the madly spinning Upgrade and New PC carousel.
Leave the cutting edge, bleeding edge stuff to geeks, gamers and slashdotters.
Give me my Volkswagen Beetle computer, please!
Regards,
Roger Born
writing.borngraphics.com
"Time Flies like an arrow. Fruit Flies like a banana "
Nice article.
:-(
Definitely nothing new, it's stuff I've been thinking in the last 5 years -- yet this guy puts it in a particularly brilliant way. Even the analogies with the auto industry are brisk!
Just to add my 2 cents: I guess if chip makers want to keep making money, they should get smarter.
I want a multiprocessor machine on my desk -- not more power, but less latency. I want RAID-5 *_by default_*. I want two half-sized HDs, so I can have a faster swap. I want more RAM. Stop marketing higher GHz with small memory... stop cheating the buyer!
I want real graphics power from factory... not a super 8-fan 2 GPU card, just decent, moderate performance conventional 3D which would mimic that Altivec (sp?) thing -- even if much less performing.
You know what? It's time for having how-tos and tutorials on how to assemble more effective machines. And people already do this. Many online magazines and journals assemble "the best machine your money can buy" every year.
But we really should have some kind of competition to see creative ways to put together servers, desktops etc. with the smallest possible amount of money.
This used to be a science in the days of yore, when real programmers like Mel ruled the Earth. Or Woz with his ultracool hardware reducing powers. Also Lord Sinclair did some amazing things in his ZX81 project... kinda like Mr. Spock when he made a tricorder out of mud. Oh, boy, those were the times!
Some guys really could afford more equipment; but they were l33t and perfected their computers as works-of-art. Nowadays, it seems chip makers got into production mode, churning monotonous gadgets all the time.
That would promote the selling of good inexpensive standard products which would, therefore, be mass-produced and get even more affordable.
As the article suggest, I would love to see a desktop PC running on a Pentium M (or any other mobile version of a CPU): less heat, less power, reasonable performances.
It would be also very good if desktops' MB and CPU may implement frequency and voltage scaling on the CPU (as is done in notebooks).
Unfortunately most desktop systems do not allow it (but I heard that some newer models will).
I use Linux on my notebook, and I have instructed the daemon "cpufreqd" to scale down on voltage (when the CPU is not very busy) *even* when I am on AC. This way, the CPU operates at an average of 60Celsius (compared to the 70C that I see under WindowsXP): saving the heat is very nice, the fan operates much less, less noise; and you can really keep your laptop on the lap.
Moreover: do you know that CPUs evaporate? Yes, they run so hot that the tiny metal strips forming the VLSI circuitry do evaporate, (or if you prefer, diffuse) : if you keep your desktop on 24/7, in ~2 years, a Pentium or Athlon at 3000Mhz will stop working....
But if I could scale it down when I do not need the CPU full power (and this means, most of the time) the problem would be much diminished.
Summarizing: CPU scaling = less heat, less power, less AC bill, more life of CPU
I work for a company that installs distribution control systems (like large conveyor systems). The "get the most powerful machines" mentality is 100% dominant in this sector, because the people who decide what to buy (from what I've dealt with) don't know anything at all about computers. All they know is it has to be Windows XP and it has to be fast. Of course, it doesn't. They argue that if they buy a powerful system now, they won't have to upgrade for a long time. The fact is, every time they "upgrade", they always end up buying new machines anyway. It happens every time. And I'm not talking about servers either. At the last job we did, the company bought 40 2.5GHz machines with Windows XP for the client machines. All each machine does is run one program we write, and sits idle 99.9% of the time.
They could run the software we write on a 233MHz and you wouldn't notice a difference. You could even run it on Linux (it's written in Java.) But suits seem to have a different way of thinking.
Most people word process, send email, and occasionally create HTML pages. An Apple //gs would be enough processing power for that.
I gave my sister my old laptop for Internet browsing and e-mail checking. It's a HP 600Mhz, 128MB Ram, and a 10GB hard drive. She doesn't need anything more than that, and it handles even the most content driven of sites in Mozilla Firefox. Doesn't lag at all.
Under my desk is a 2.4ghz and a 500mhz. I can do more useful things with the 500mhz (granted it's a Ultrasparc), but the 2.4ghz is mostly playing games and bloated windows apps like word processing and printing. As an IT 'Professional' I can make the ultrasparc do an amazing amount of work. UNIX/Linux boxen are workhorses/Trucks, they are not geared for the average joe just yet. It's specialized gear, you have to do a lot of work to get it to do basic windows things like play dvds and printing. While they are getting better it's not yet time for the average non-tech to buy a linux box and get everything that microsoft will cram in their system. Currently I am willing to cied the battle to the beast of redmond on that point alone.
I also have a dual boot laptop runing w2k and SuSE. I ripped out the C compilers and much of the other junk I will never run on that box because it's not needed. If I want to watch a DVD it's windows all the way baby. When I am programming it's in SuSE but the compile gets done elsewhere. Compiling software on a laptop is like hauling dirt in a Alfa. I manage and control from the laptop and the ultrasparc does all the heavy lifting.
So where do SUVs come into this? That's about choosing the right tool for the jobs. SUVs are a wasteful joke, they are too large use too much gas and are premoting a automotive arms race. In Japan they make you dump your car after so much time/mileage. Because if they don't then nobodys gonna buy the new models. I won't say we will be expecting this when it hits but it will in some form.
Hey how about that new version of Doom? Is your video card enough?
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Back when I was in high school I ended up troubleshooting some computer that was only used for email and attendence by the teacher. I looked around a bit and it had dual Voodoo 3d cards. I guess that's what happens to a school system that has no high school computing classes :P
The description of my computer, I mean. A Slot-A (non Tbird!) Athlon 700 with 384M of RAM and a Rage Fury Pro 128 32M AGP4x video card. It's our token Windows machine for running some apps for school and remembering how to fix Windows machines. Of course, the machine I use day-to-day is my even older dual P3/450 PowerEdge server, but still...
Kidding aside, these 50,000 machines DDoSing Authorize.Net ... where do they come from? Does the average person know that these are not machines owned by the DDoS'er but likely THEIR machine 0wned by the DDoS'er? SETI at home, Folding at home, etc., aren't the only ones capable of reclaiming these wasted resources.
This abundance of power won't go away (until Longhorn is released -- kidding) for what manufacturer or salesperson will tell the novice computer purchaser that a 1998 computer is more than enough for their needs? Or that LTSP is all a large company needs for their basic workstation desktops?
People should be held accountable for what they allow their computer to do. Just like any other property I may own; if through my negligence something I own is used by another to harm others, I may be held liable. Especially if I left the item unprotected -- such as a car with the doors unlocked left running with a full tank of gas along with my now-legal assault weapons, fully automatic and fully loaded, sitting in the passenger seat while I stroll into the convenience store for a Sno-ball and RedBull power lunch -- those harmed through my negligance can sue me, or press charges against me.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
No, the average user doesn't need a 3 GHz processor.
However, the reason they buy such fast machines is because when it comes to issues of performance, the response they receive most often is that they need to upgrade their machine. This alone speaks volumes about the ability and professionalism of the average Windows developer.
And I can always spot Windows devs at conferences - they're the ones who will argue to the death that assembly is obsolete, as they plug the latest Microsoft reinvention of the wheel which requires ever more processing power and memory to do the same things that it did ten years ago...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I have a decked out AMD Duron 800mhz, 384mb SDRAM, and a 20gig 5400rpm hd running slackware and a customized fluxbox. EXTREMELY responsive for what I do, looks great, tough as nails, and will last me years, like a retired race horse.
But if Joe-sixpack walks into best buy, and sees one of these 'decked out' machines running a slightly less flashy windows 98 (or any basic gui...) whats he gonna think? Will Joe-sixpack realize that he can turn it into a race horse in under a couple of hours?
No!--Too much hassle. He doesn't want to be bothered when he get err..reasonable eye candy and responsiveness in a standard fat-ass 3ghz racehorse that drinks more power than his refrigerator.
Slashdotters should be happy that people are dumb enough to throw money in the river. More for us..
Simcity Sphere--> http://simcitysphere.com/
I use a 466Mhz G4, 768 RAM ... I don't play solitaire or chess, I run Tomcat, Cocoon, Jety, Apache 1.3 + 2 Mysql, Berkely BD, Postgres, SOF etc, etc.........
I don't need no stinking 3 gizillion Mhz crap.
blah blah yadda yadda NOT ENOUGH blah blah blah
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
As a previous poster mentioned, you can say its like the car market.... Well the reverse of the car market: cheap rental cars for business use and luxury cars for personal use. Since business need more power, give it them. And for the Doom3 users, heck people do buy used cars for personal use?
If you have a Windows 2000 or XP Pro on the client side, you don't have to purchase an additional CAL for the terminal server (about $100).
The cost savings of moving to something like linux doesn't really ad up. for an additional $100 I can purchase windows XP pro, put it on a new machine so that i won't have to go out there for hardware fixes, and lock it down via group policy.
Could they have done this terminal program cheaper... yes.
Was this the fastest solution, going to cause the least amount of headache, and really cost that much more... no.
I once bought a Mac because when faced with the cost of a brand new "dumb" Tek410x terminal, the Mac SE + Tek emulator was actually cheaper. The fact that it was also a computer was a bonus.
Well sure, on Linux less does the same thing as more, but the less command is not implemented in all versions of unix!
I just bought a P1 Toshiba Satellite for $25. Dropped slack 9.1 on it over an nfs connection and I have to say, I am quite happy. I have a 1.73Ghz Atholon for a desktop if I need it, but the laptop is suffice for portability (kind of ;) and a small "extra" computer. I agree with the author, less is more in many cases. I will happily spend $25 instead of $2500 and install the same OS I would have anyway.
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
I go to this high school in Charlotte NC... and we have all these new 3.4 ghz pentium 4 dells with windows xp and win 2003 server on the servers. Thousand dollar digital cameras, scanners, massive color laser printers... I am doing coding in C++ and Im like what the hell, why do we need all this waste. I can compile code quickly enough on the now 'old' 1.8 ghz machines. The computer 'teacher' is very spendthrift and takes all of the school's money and uses it for her pet projects. There is even now wireless networking in my school and no one uses laptops!
Reminds me of Fraiser Crane:
"If less is more, think of how much more more would be."
"Most of us are running on a newer Pentium 4/Athlon 64 box with lots of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive and a uber-sweet graphics card that pushes 100 FPS in Doom 3. Our parents are probably running an old Athlon 700 with half the RAM and a Rage128 videocard, and some think that's overkill while the parents think its not enough. Why debate this?"
Wait wait wait... First we need to learn how to construct a sentance before pulling something like this as a front page story. I mean, 'Our parents are probably running an old Athlon 700 with half the RAM and a Rage128 videocard, and some think that's overkill while the parents think its not enough'???????????
WTF are you trying to say? The parents are running inferior hardware and don't think it's enough? Some other people don't think it's enough? The parent AND these mystery people are in league with the demonic hardware from a 5th dimention paralell to ours? WTF are you trying to say????? And when did all of us stumble across these great uber-machines? I musta missed that boat, sadly enough.
Cripes, I know journalism isn't Slashdots forte, but how this one even made frontpage in shambled state is an amazing feat in itself.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
wattersa,
I think you might be confusing consumerism with capitalism [assuming by capitalism you mean "free markets", not Marx's definition of capitalism which is essentially Market Socialism -- monopolies or at least megacorps created and protected by government.].
Consumerism, on the other hand, is the promotion of buying as many goods as possible with the argument that this is always good for the economy. Even if you disclude the broken window fallacy, consumerism still does not always stand up.
However, it's hardly an ill of capitalism (again, as in "free markets", not capitalism as defined by Marx).
Speckpot?
I thought this story might be relevant. One of my customers is a lady aged 86. She asked for a computer for "looking things up". So I gave her:
Hardware:
- Used IBM Pentium I 166 Mhz PC with 32 Mb RAM
- Used 15" screen
- Kensington trackball mouse
- Intel 536EP PCI modem
- Epson Stylus C62 printer
- Boxful of compatible cartridges from JR Inkjet
- Internet pay-as-you-go account with UK Linux Net
Software:
- Debian 3.1 stable base
- Custom kernel with the bare essentials
- Intel 536EP kernel module
- GDM
- Wvdial
- IceWM
- Mozilla
- Flash plugin
- Flashblock extension to Mozilla
- KMail
- KWord
- LPRng
- Gimp-Print Ghostscript driver
Customisations:
- No keyboard repeat
- Slow mouse acceleration
- Large fonts throughout
Training:
- Several one-to-one lessons
Result? One happy customer. It takes a while to boot, after that, it performs fine. It browses the Web just as fast as anything on a 56K connection. It runs cool and quiet. It doesn't eat power.
I've found it amazing how much it is possible to get away without, given the right sort of customer. After about three months I found it needed a new hard drive. She was worried that meant a new computer, and it was quite hard work explaining. Apart from that, no problems.
Less is more because you can scroll up.
A dual 167 Ultra 2 is my primary machine. I've got faster PCs sure, but for nothing more than games. The Ultra 2 does all I need it to, even runs Quake and its only a whopping 7 years old!
Well just so you know, I'm chugging along on my two PC network.
... too poor to afford more ... My two bits
1) A Amd k6-2 -300 box, 292 megs ram with a 3 gig drive, running Mandrake 9.1, Samba for file and printer sharing, and ip_masq for my other computer to get onto the net.
2) a Win98SE - AMD K62 - 500 box, 192 megs ram, 15 gig drive, for my business stuff (resumes and proposals in Word) and for my wife and daughter's work and Internet stuff
Works for us
Clive DaSilva Email: clive.dasilva@gmail.com Ubuntu 18.10 Kernel 4.18
This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
True, but you're not taking into account the fact that a new PC can be hard for pretty damn cheap. Yes, lots of people have more power and features than they will need, but it usually makes more sense to buy new-- and to be under warranty for a while, and not have to worry about inheriting someone else's problem-- than to save a couple hundred bucks seeking out a used beater. Especially for a small business, where they may not have an IT expert on staff and where a crashed hard drive or other failure could shut them down for a day. Not that a new computer can't be a lemon, but you do have a little more peace of mind. Or at least, perceived peace of mind.
(Whether running XP is a smart choice is of course a whole 'nother matter...)
And, a new computer can grow with the business and serve other functions beyond the terminal-- you don't know that someone at the store isn't using it to develop their website or do some desktop publishing, or whatever else might come along.
my password is private, but unchanged.
Get an Athlon-64. You can underclock these babies via software and on-demand. The 90W TDP guzzler turns into a 22W miser that you can passively cool, but still vastly faster than any of the VIA EPIC integrated motherboards.
You can get Micro-ATX MB for these processors, and they will fit into SFF boxes like this one. Shuttle also has a very small FF case+mobo for them but it is less silent than the Aria.
To underclock the Athlon64 under Linux 2.6 for x86_64, just do(Correct the spaces due to slashcode).
That will set your Athlon64 2GHz to 1GHz and divide its power requirements by 4. When you need the power again do "echo 2000000" instead above. Turn the CPU fan on if you feel the need then, or get a good cooler (like a Zalman, which does fit in the case above) with a very low-speed fan that you can leave on all the time and doesn't make any noise. That's what I have and the processor never gets over 55C at full speed).
There are scripts around that will do that for you automatically depending on the load.
To me that's an almost perfect solution right now. Did I mention that these combos are really cheap? Cheaper than the VIAs.
NOTE: the above doesn't work with the newer Athlon-64 FX53, check before buying on AMD's web site.
If anyone know how to do the same trick under Windows I'd appreciate it. I'm not sure this will be possible until Win64 comes out for these processors. Linux-32 which treats the Athlon-64 like an old Athlon-XP doesn't recognize the new AMD features (it's called powernow-k8 or Cool-N-Quiet) so the stuff above only works in Linux-64, AFAIK.
So... you're telling me it's more economical to use what you have instead of throwing it out and buying something new?
Well aren't you a bunch of rocket scientists.
Everyone in the IT industry needs money. Unfortunately, the company that needs it the most is Microsoft. Release a new OS every 3 years and a new Office suite every 2 years, price them insanely high (well, at least the Office suite), rewrite the platform to use a higher-higher language, which requires a faster CPU to process what really amounts to someone typing in the letter 'a', and pressure everyone to believe that yesterday's computer just isn't good enough for today's "software innovations."
...
Or perhaps instead it might be the little guy, you know, the independent tech consultant, promising you the "latest and greatest platform" to support your every need as a business. Really what he is doing is playing on your ignorance, buying the biggest and baddest machine he can get his hands on (so that a $800 consultants fee won't look as large compared to the $5000 server your company just purchased), and then playing your stupidity to lead you to believe that (for $120/hr), he's the only guy in the world who can support the platform for you. And all this time, he's just trying to feed his own business.
Our school district has these old IBM PC 315 Pentium Pro servers. Their idea was to throw them away. Well, all I did was take the RAM and HD from one computer, stick it in the other (64MB and 4GB doesn't really cut it anymore, but 128MB and 8GB still do), load them with Win98, Firefox, Thunderbird, Office 2000, and one of the teachers asked me if it was a new computer. Really, all it needed was more RAM and a reformat.
There are quality PC parts out there that are being thrown in the bin because people are led to believe that you absolutely have to have a 3 GHz, 1GB of RAM, 120GB hard drive system just to run multimedia apps in Internet Explorer. The only thing I told the staff at my school is that it won't play DivX. Then everyone looked at me and asked, what's DivX?
I love it when the last consultant hired convinced the district to buy a dual G5 XServe w/ 2GB RAM & 180GB SATA storage just to set up a file server for a total of 400 students and staff at the school. Love it even more when we already have a dual PIII, 1GB RAM, and RAID-5 140GB system doing that job already (and we're only using 22GB of hard disk space right now).
The problem is this: people want money, and they'll use as much FUD to sell you what you don't need. If a 5-foot high fence keeps the dog out, there ain't no reason to tear it down and build it higher.
My sister went out and bought a brand new system when she was going away to college. One year later, I heard that she was looking to buy another one because her system was "so old." Now, given that my computer is five years older than hers and I ran more intensive applications than her AIM and IE, I was surprised.
When I visited her, she had every spyware kown to man. Everyone in her dorm seemed to. There were so much of the stuff that I could not even open the Start menu and I found it easier to reinstall Windows than try to remove the crap.
So, many consumers are driven to buy modern computers because they have so much malware running that is bringing their system to a halt.
My point is, computing has reached a point where the AVERAGE person doesn't need to upgrade anymore. It used to be that the newest killer apps would require an upgrade of some sort. More memory, an updated OS, or if it was called for, an entirely new system. Who remembers checking the back of a software box back in the day and nothing thinking "wow, I wonder what my fps will be", but instead "jesus, will this even RUN on my 386???" Nowadays really the only person who needs to buy the latest and greatest are gamers...and they're such a small percentage of overall computer buyers and users that they're negliable at best.
I think computer companies are starting to realize this and they're starting to freak out a tad. The real limiting factor with the majority's computing experience is how fast their net connection is, not what CPU they're using or what GFX card is under the hood. This isn't to say of course that when/if I get a job, I won't be throwing my money away at CrapUSA on a sweet video card. It's just that we've hit a maturity in computers where it doesn't pay to update every 1.5 years if all you're doing is checking email, writing shit and downloading the occasional mp3.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
You can put certain Athlon-MPs in a desktop. Socket A. I think they even do frequency scaling.
That said, I'd rather pay a lot less money for a lot less computer than buy a 3 ghz only to run at 200 mhz most of the time.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Whippersnappers!
I have to kind of agree with this article. My PC is a 266mhz Pentium II from six years ago. My mom's computer is literally ten times faster than that and my friend's Pocket PC even beats it, but I still get along.
With 2000 instead of 98, it's stable enough to write papers. With a second hard drive and some RAM I harvested it stores a decent amount of music and movies, runs Winamp fine and even DivX at low settings. Plays older (and cheaper) games like CivII, FFVII and Baldur's Gate II (barely). Besides saving me the cost of the games, also saves me tons of time I would just spend playing instead of studying.
Of course after college I'll need to get something to keep up with the applications and new games. Could buy a new system with twenty times the speed, but I'll think I'll just take someone's old machine and go ten times for free.
You're right, Joe is buying a new computer in 2-3 years.
But that's the problem. All the Joes I know are buying a computer every few years, but the biggest workout these computers get is some of the more processor-intensive operations in TurboTax.
Meanwhile, in 2003 I was working on a stereoscopic computer vision system for a thesis. The development computer? Pentium 133 MMX laptop with 32MB of RAM. And it was definitely up to the task. No, it wouldn't run at a high enough framerate to, say, work on a platform moving at the pace of a walking human, but it didn't need to.
I'm pretty sure that people determine that a computer is 'underpowered' using the same logical system that they use to decide that a car is underpowered if it can only go 40mph over the speed limit.
Of course people look for the latest and greatest computer! If they weren't, we would be have terminals and renting time on mainframes. Ever notice how middle managers insist on having the better models? Its a viral meme. Its what has driven the Mhz, now Ghz chip speed race. Bill might have been right about users never needing more than 640 kilobytes, if buyers made completely rational decisions about their computing needs.
I thought they were talking about Unix shell utilities. I'm so confused now...
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Here in Canada, cars sometimes rust before they wear out their engine. That's the consequence of having 4 REAL seasons.
I'm still using my old P2 333 with 384 MB RAM, 32 MB video. It runs fedora core 2 fine.I develop in Java, PHP and C++. I'm happy with it and don't have plans to upgrade in the near future. People tend to jump into the latest technologies without asking their selves, "Do I need this?". Most of the time, they don't. They just want to buy it because it's the "in" thing. Technophobes tend to go to this kind of mentality so that explains why computer manufacturers get high volume of sales. Blame it to the marketing people.
Yep most distos they are extactly the same file because they are the same file. Some times hard linked other times ln -s methord.
The funny part is that you ran the MD5 checksum twice using file system tools you would have seen them directly linked.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/23/2 213212
I even encode movies to DivX with it. It takes quite a long time, but I'm not that eager to see the final product as I have already seen the movie before.
This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
Ever price a dumb terminal new? You'll find that 400$ Dell running XP is cheaper. A relatively modern VT-520 costs as much as 500$ new.
Even if you don't want something that just does text expect to spend 700+ on a terminal that can do citrix, wts, text, and X.
Also - VT100 looks like a TRS-80.
I'm always amazed at the average, well to do, middle to upper class perception of what most computers people are using. They're generally the type that will refer to anything under 500Mhz as ancient and nearly a joke. I on the other hand say that i've you got something better then a pentium, you're fine.
-Chris
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
You know, I hear you about the tuition and fees.
...but I'd bet dollars to donuts that if your university had PII 400's around campus, you'd be sitting here bitching about how crappy the computers are at your university and how neglected the student population is when it comes to technology.
Of course, I don't KNOW this....but I am guessing that's a pretty sure bet.
1: How much time it takes to open Windows Explorer
2: The time it takes to open a page on the internet
I was speaking with my uncle, and he though that getting a computer faster then his actual 2+GHz something would speed up the internet. His wife thinks it's slow when a page does not appear instantly when clicking a link (that is with a cable modem). And I notice a lot that people think "Wow, this computer is faster than mine, look at the speed at which Windows Explorer opens!"
I kid you not...
Recently I wanted to put together a quite media pc box. something I could put MythTV on.
Only you can't buy a new quite PC. The cheapest chips need heat sinks and fans fast enough to freeze the flame of a blowtorch. I would have converted my current box but it already sounds like a jet aircraft taking off.
1Ghz (with hardware mpeg encoding, decoding, and alpha stretched blt) would be more than enough. But this can't be bought and put together new. The parts shouldn't cost more than a $100-$200. But only sold in form factors like, oh, say an X-Box.
Ended up just getting a Tivo.
Before someone else tells me, yes, I did see I mispelled quiet 3 times. I do that a lot with that particular word.
What, nobody else keeps pre-Pentium's around for playing all their DOS games? I found a 486 in the garage with DOS 6.22 installed, works just fine. Floppy doesn't seem to work, but I haven't opened it up to see if there's a cable loose. What's so amazing about a 5 year old machine that still runs? I don't have any PC's above 500mhz, and I have 8. All but 1 work, and that's because the BIOS chip is missing.
Sleep is futile.
Look Toby, the guys in that movie are not 28-year-old file clerks who live with their grandmothers in an ethnic ghetto.
They didn't get their computers like you did -- by trading in a bunch of box tops and $49.50 at the supermarket.
My father is a blogger.
In other news: They Might Be Giants.
BTW, I use a 400mhz PII, and the only thing I keep adding to it is RAM. Because I keep it clean and know its capabilities, it's more functional than most of my friends' newer computers.
There's no trick involved in Windows, as long as your motherboard supports Cool N' Quiet. Just download the Athlon64 drivers and use the Minimal Power Management power scheme. The processor should run at 800Mhz when idle.
...common sense makes sense. Details at 11.
real buttons > virtual buttons
As a test for the s(h)ituation described anecdotally at the end of the initial post, my company has tested a Neoware device for just this purpose: to use RDP5 to connect to a Terminal Services server. They are well built, inexpensive (not cheap!) boxen that do the job. They also have a great management interface.
Although we did not go with them (we are doing a technology refresh and pushing apps back out to desktops... sigh...) I did wish that I could keep the box.
It's core is linux / running an X client to enable RDP. 1600x1200.
(And, no, I don't work for Neoware, just think that their product is most cool.)
--
WWJD? JWRTFM!
The rest of us PeeOns have to make do and try to be productive on substandard WalMart computers and elcheapo software, using monitors that were built in the Seventies.
You know the drill.
Roger
writing.borngraphics.com
"Sorry, no refunds."
My father probably has everyone beat with an outdated Mac. It was the first Power Mac (running at 66mhz) and he bought it over 10 years ago. I remember he spent a pretty penny on it (around $9,000 for the computer, 21" monitor, laser printer, high end desktop publishing programs) for him to do his freelance art work. He said that he was never, ever going to buy another computer as long as he lived! Since then he's put more RAM into it, replace a Hard Drive, and monitor, but the little Apple runs just fine for him to do some artwork--he's since retired. I'll bet if I won the lottery and bought him a new G5 imac he'd probably wouldn't take it! This computer does exactly what he needs it to do...albeit a little bit slower than anything out today.
I'm planning on retiring my old server soon. It will be a cheap low power quiet little mini-itx system.
http://mini-itx.com/store/default.asp?c=15#p264
I don't need any more than that, and I am tired of the fan noise, and the higher electric bills.
That's the thermal design power. As far as I know the single core Athlon 64s only consume 40+W.
They _never_ guzzle 90W when running within specs.
While people were confused or puzzled about the 83W/90WTDP spec _across_the_board for all CPUs no matter what clock speed. AMD was looking ahead when they announced their 64 bit CPUs.
I believe they wanted to ensure that manufacturers won't skimp and make designs that only cope with 50W. They wanted everyone to make designs which allow users to upgrade by just dropping in a _dual_core_ CPU.
If you do 40+W x 2, the 90W TDP makes sense.
How much did you charge her?
A year or two ago I did google searches for a place to buy vt100 or equiv. terminals and could not find one. It was even hard to find on ebay, which isn't an option for most companies....
Think Deeply.
Most buyers make the same decision I did as a business owner:
I need 4 new PC's for my staff. New hires.
Do they need a 2.5 GHz system with a sweet vid card and 512 meg RAM?
No.
But, if I go to computer Rennaissance and buy 4 systems, are they going to be:
1) standardized, so I know what sort of drive space/ram/etc that they all have, not something different for each one.
2) are they going to have the full warranty and service coverage?
3) how were they treated in former lives? Did someone pop them on and off every time they left their desk meaning I should expect component failures sooner, rather than later?
Yes, they could do their jobs very happily with 1 GHz, 256 meg RAM systems.
But the simple fact is that it's far easier (and cheaper, considering the value of my time/attention) to buy something off-the-shelf from Dell than to dick around trying to save $200 per machine.
-Styopa
No! Not all of us have the latest P4.
Granted, I have a Dell P4 3 MHz with 1 GB of RAM at work that was assigned to me last December. But I did not ask for it, nor complain about the one I had. It is part of the regular refresh cycle they do.
At home, all my PCs are PIIs (300 MHz to 450 MHz), except for the server which is a PIII 550MHz. There is a total of 6 PCs in the house in use.
All of these PCs have been bought used. I had to upgrade one from Celeron 300 to a PII-300 because the silly cachless Celeron ran like molasses. They work well with Mandrake 10.0, Open Office, Gaim, ...etc.
Power consumption is high, considering the power supplies of these machines, but so are the new P4s as well. Unless one goes to the Mini-ITX form factor, power consumption will remain high for 'regular' home PCs.
No one at home does graphics work, nor heavy gaming. So the P4s are overkill, not to mention a serious amount of dough shelled out as well. Money better spent on other things.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
The newer machines run QNX or Linux, anyway.
that I've been using since 1999, and my "real" machine I use for CAD, coding and such runs at 977MHz.
But the real bargains are at the thrift store. There are older/slower Pentiums at various speeds for two dollars each. These are usually 100-200MHz, but that's fine for a digitizing scope display (okay, the box and monitor are bulky). I did get a 400MHz machine for two bucks, but it wants a bigger hard drive - these things usually come with 0.5 to 3 gig drives. Where can I find 40-80gig EIDE drives?
I recall when Don Lancaster wrote that an Apple ][ (1Mhz, 8-bit data bus 6502, 140kbyte floppy drive) had so much computing power, it should be illegal...
Tag lost or not installed.
Essentially, it seems that there should be enough power so that the software you are running is responsive to the degree that you do not experience the sensation of waiting idly while spell checking or whatever.
Of course, it is the job of the Giant Software Corporation to build software Giant enough to run on the most powerful computers, and still seem slow. Your milage may vary. Your treadmill awaits you.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
This sort of thing has been going on for decades... I stayed on my 286 12Mhz for a fair while because I did not need a 386. When the 386SX came out, I bought this considerably cheaper than the 386DX... When the 486 DX50 came out we heard cries of 'but you don't need that much processing power yet' from the geeks (the ones not running Wing commander at least ;) ) and for most people they were right.
ITs just that now we are talking CPU speeds in the Ghz and RAM in the hundreds of megs... still the same principle as when people were going to 16Mhz 386 with 8 meg ram from a 12 Mhz 286 with 4 meg ram and 40meg HDD.
If people didn't buy overpowered machines, then I wouldn't be able to get a computer capable of running the CAD stuff I need for as cheap as I get it.
Go on, keep buying 3ghz machines for word processing- I love you for it and you are doing a service for humanity.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Here's some food for thought, since we are treading around the topic.
Someone had to do it.
American Splendor, great movie btw.
Last week, I build a completely functional gaming system out of dumpster-dived parts I've found behind computer stores over the last while. I built it so friends of mine who don't have their own computer can use it when we have LANs.
166mhz Pentium MMX, overclocked to 262.5mhz (who cares, it's dumpster-dived, I have like 6 of them)
(FSB is 75mhz, thus PCI bus is 37.5mhz, woot)
2.1gb hard drive
some Matrox 2d video card
Diamond Monster 3d II video card, 8mb
Oh yeah and 64mb of ram, I actualy bought that since PC133 ram is very rare to "dive"...
Running Win98 to save system resources. All the comp's time is going to be spent in-game, so why waste CPU time on a "nice" OS?
in Quake 1 (glQuake), doing "timedemo demo2" gives 108.4 FPS reliably. The game plays lag free no matter what's going on ingame - explosions, tons of monsters - still lag-free.
UT plays nearly as well, very smooth graphics and almost no lag.
So how much did this completely usable, very reasonable-speed computer cost me? About 30 bucks. That's only because I bought the RAM. It could have been 100% free if I had used slower 72-pin ram (on a different motherboard), which I have a bag full of from finding tons of 486 boxes over the past year or so.
For anyone who's looking for cheap computer hardware, seriously try it: go look in the dumpsters behind local computer stores, particularly single-location, single-owner places (chains like Future Shop, Best Buy etc. tend to never throw a damned thing out)! It's not much of a hassle, just check out the places while walking to work, school, etc.
Oh yeah, I also have a 400mhz Celeron, 32mb/RAM web server that I "dived", completely intact in the case, only missing a hard drive and video card. Pretty damn good deal if you ask me.
So I use an old NeXT Cube to IRC from... You people and your "500Mhz" cpu's.. Ive only got 25Mhz 68040....
Although I must admit, I did up the ram from 8mb to 40, and replaced the 5 1/4" FH disks with some SCSI II disks!
Our local library had an awesome catalog system built on monochrome dumb terminals to search for books using a simple and efficient text interface. You could even dial it up via a BBS and get all the info from home almost as fast as if you were there.
A couple years ago they adopted P4 Dells. At the library, an internet connection and Internet Explorer serves as the means to access their "enhanced" database with all sorts of cross-entries, duplicates, missing information, etc. So now you have these gigahertz computers running a full version of Windows that run slower than the terminals and that you have to worry about locking down and protecting for a wider variety of threats. (viruses, hackers, users changing settings, etc.)
It seems now that people get the best, most expensive technology feasibly possible and downgrade to their needs. I think it's much more efficient to build up to your needs.
A newbie at something tends to go all in. A beginning cyclist buys the most expensive bike, or a beginning painter the best brushes thinking that he'll be able to jump right in with the pros, but that is not the case. They have to train UP to that level, and I think now people are finally starting to realize this the hard way, as far as technology is concerned. Time will tell if everyone's learned their lesson.
This is not quite the same thing, maybe I wasn't clear. CNQ allows the processor to run at the lower speed *when idling* but I want it to run at the lower speed even when fully busy. The AMD driver doesn't allow me to do that AFAIK, but presumably it's possible with a third-party utility perhaps.
This is so that I can safely passively cool it all the time if I want.
At 1GHz with the fan off and 100% utilisation the temperature is in the high 40s.
Really? Let me check this right now.
/bin/more /usr/bin/less /bin/more and /usr/bin/less differ
$ diff
Binary files
So the answer is a resounding "no". "less" is definitely *not* "more".
Hope that helps.
You're trying to tell me, my TI-99 is not good enough? Next you will tell me 5 1/4" floppy drives are obsolete.
Click HERE
Here's mine:
webserver - P233 w/198MB RAM, 10GB HDD
2 external nameservers - P166s w/64MB RAM, 4GB HHD (one is also running NTP)
mailserver - Dual PP200 w/128MB RAM, 2x2GB SCSI and 16GB IDE HDD
Firewall - P60 w/48MB RAM, 1.6GB HDD
Internal DHCP/nameserver - P133 w/128MB RAM, 4GB HDD
Internal nameserver/NTP/management server - PII450 w/256MB RAM, 20GB HDD
Build server - Dual Celeron 400, with 512MB RAM, 200GB HDD
Test server - Celeron 300, with 256MB RAM, 40GB HDD
I also have two old Alpha servers (300mhz) one running Tru64 and the other OpenVMS.
And of course an old SparcStation 20 with Solaris 8.
Now if I can just get the rest of the parts I need for the PDP I'm set.
My laptop - PIII700, with 512MB RAM, 20GB HDD
Toss in a couple of cisco routers and some 3Com switches and there you have it.
As Microsoft says "Do More with Less", of course if you want realize that dream, try FreeBSD.
The really nice thing about all this is that with the exception of my laptop, it was all free, throw aways from my or friend's clients or employers over the years.
my old sig is obsolete, and I haven't come up with a stupid enough new one yet
Anyway, I had fun with that cement block of a computer for a couple of months, wrote some games with the BASIC interpretter that came with whatever version of DOS, but eventually my eyes started bugging out from staring at the 4.5" black and green monochrome monitor, so I had to give it up. Fortunately my parents were, by that time, just a few short months away from buying a Packard Bell 486 DX/2! Oh joy.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Most of us are running on a newer Pentium 4/Athlon 64...? Maybe it's true in USA and other big'n'rich countries, but not here (in Czech republic).
You have never been running Gentoo, or another source compiling distro then, they use all processor power they can get.
I was similarly startled by a non-techie friend planning to buy a new PC when his 1GHz desktop obviously just needed a clean OS install. Then I noticed the service fee schedule in a computer store: Spyware Removal, $100; Virus Removal, $120 + cost of AV software; Reinstall OS without data backup, $100 + cost of OS. Another friend of mine just bought a brand-new Dell P4 2.8GHz 533 FSB with 256MB dual channel RAM, 80GB HDD, 48x CD-RW, with XP Home Edition for only $320 after $150 rebate, sans monitor. I can't custom build anything to compete with that. Heck, OEM XP Home by itself costs one third of this system's price. If your not technically inclined and have to pay for support, you might as well save some money by buying a new computer. Joe Sixpack just wants to minimize his TCO.
If Joe sixpack had bought the "just enough" machine in 1997, it would have been thrown in the bin counter long ago. Unlike 1980's and 1990's machines, which would last only 3 years before serious upgrading was due, a common user can now reasonably expect to buy a top-grade machine and have it last for 6-7 years, until upgrading or a new one becomes necessary. And don't forget operating systems: would Joe sixpack still enjoy having only Windows 95, crashing more often than win98, 2K or XP, and finding out that everyone now has a pen drive and he doesn't even has a USB port? Or that all new hardware for Joe sixpack available in supermarkets and appliance stores only has win98 and later drivers? The sensible advice is: buy the best machine you can WITHIN the range of small price-hikes. (I.e., ignore that all-the-rage that costs 100% more than the model just below it.) And try not to forget to spend 300 or 350 every 3 years to upgrade. If you do, well, cross your fingers, you may get lucky (memory interfaces may not change -if you're lucky, typical motherboard fitting may not change - if you're lucky), and manage to spend those 300 only in 4 or 5 years. But you are taking your chances...
Full blown computers are cheaper than a VT100 these days.
My new Athlon 64 box has a feature called "Cool 'N Quiet" which throttles the CPU frequency and voltage down when the processor is idle. When the processor is pegged, it runs at 2000MHz at 1.5V, but when it's mostly idle (say, while I'm typing this), it runs at 1000MHz at 1.1V, cutting the power requirement by about two thirds.
The upshot is, I have all the speed I need to crunch serious numbers (i.e., play Doom) when I need to, but I'm not burning so much power and needlessly heating my house when that much CPU power is simply not needed.
AFAIK, the Sempron 3100+ and all Athlon 64s support this feature (so long as the motherboard supports it as well).
Most laptops already do this sort of thing as well.
BTW: this feature is functional in 32-bit versions of Windows, just download the driver from www.amd.com.
The article's author is an imbecile who doesn't realize that what he is prescribing would severely hurt the industry and the economy. Less money spent on computers would mean less R&D. Less R&D might mean the end of Moore's law. Now, why do you think computers have gotten so powerful and cheap so quickly? Because JOE SIXPACKS are paying for R&D.
By all means, buy the cheap systems for your spare room or whatever, but don't tell people to spend less on computers.
7200 rpm is not enough for a modern computer. Most of the people I know have 10 000rpm already or even 15 000.
This utility will let you do that. Just set the speed to "battery optimized". (This program is intended for laptops, but it works just fine on my Athlon 64 desktop.)
This is a troll, right?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
is this true for laptops too? i've always heard that laptops get too hot quite often, and you shouldn't run them all the time.just wondering
You can get them Commell certainly do one and there may be others. As usual Google is your friend.
Surfing the net just fine with DOS 6.2 and
/16 Eithernet card
:)
Arachne 1.7 thankyou.
I was bored and put together the following
machine out of spare computer parts lying
around in my junk boxes.
Pentium 233MMX
64 meg DIMM
9.1 gig Ultra wide SCSI
Cirrus Logic 2meg PCI video card (whoo hoo)
SoundBlaster 16 Sound card
Intel
Zoom 56k modem
It's a little slow but hey, it's geeky
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
I've been on an Duron 700 without any problems until I started with video (mpeg encoding). The Duron was still ok, but converting an hour of DV would take more than a day. That was the moment for me to upgrade.
Personally, I'd prefer to run mainly on a low power CPU, i.e. a C3. But I occaissonaly need the high perfomance. So perhaps it's an idea have mainboards that have a low power CPU, and a high power PU, such as a P4 or Athlon, available for the applications that need it but turned off (or standby) when not used.
That would definately reduce the powerconsumption of my machine.
---
I would never consider buying a car less than about 10 years old. I'm quite happy with my 16-year-old Citroen CX - it's just had a whole load of work done and drives like the day it was new. It's simple to work on (the hydraulic systems aren't as scary as people seem to think) and the ride quality beats any new car hollow. Plus, it's always fun watching people trying to work out what it is....
We only dreamed of VT100 terminals, we were still writing code out by hand to be entered into the college mainframe by punch card operators... and when my dad started computing the CRT was the memory, but that was 1953. (That was Britain's first postwar computer, it was miltary and so secret that even now nobody believes it ever existed, but I have seen the photos. It also had mercury delay line sonic memory, which used to suffer from FROGS although the frogs suffered more! Input was by pneumatic paper tape reader) That didn't stop him doing ground breaking work in AI and image analysis - or it would have been ground breaking if it hadn't been classified.
We are?! I think maybe you meant to post this on some other site, perhaps WeenieGamerBore.net, or maybe WhoNeedsALifeWhenYouHaveAFastComputer.org.
FWIW, my day box is an 800 MHz P3 with 256 MB RAM. It has a Matrox G400, because I was playing with OpenGL for a while in 2001 (?), and a 120 GB disk, because the old disk died back in the spring. FreeBSD, of course. It can lift 234.765 sprongles in Swark 72. Until I got interested in OpenGL, my day box was a 486DX2-66 with 16 MB of RAM, which was also running as our company firewall and server (mail, web, and DNS). A great machine until the network card melted. FreeBSD, no X. Only 17.823 sprongles, though, so it's just as well I upgraded.
My home box is a ThinkPad R31 (Celeron 1.2 GHz, 128 MB RAM, 20 GB disk) with a dodgy battery.
My other home box is an old iMac.
Fortunately, for the industry, people, in general, are stupid.
I have had the more aliased to less for ages...
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Power consuming (and even noise) aren't an issue with my AMD64 CPU and ASUS K8V mobo. The Cool'n Quiet feature clocks down the CPU to 800 MHz when it's not heavily used, thus lowering the power usage and the noise (cooler).
Though mine is a 3200+ (but hey, i'm not Joe Sixpack; maybe i'm Joe Twelvepack *hic*) and that one is getting cheaper and cheaper, you can even get an AMD64 2800 CPU for as low as $140
And who knows... If Joe buys one today, he can even run XP 64 in the (not so near) future.
Capitalism says that capital follows need
Care to provide a quote that backs this up? You can't be talking about Marx, who I believe popularised the idea of Capital and a system driven by the bourgeois. You seem to redefine that as corporatism? Or do you mean 20C economic theory, or even North American society when you talk about capitalism?
In fact Marx held that capital(ism) would eventually implode under the weight of its own internal contradictions, as the relations between producer and owner of production were stretched to breaking point, precisely because capital does *NOT* follow need. Anyway, here's a nice quote from the communist manifesto.
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind."
So I'm not sure what you call capitalism, but it seems to be a word with a lot of different definitions, you're also using it as if it means the same thing as efficient!
Free market capitalism, or regulated capitalism, may be the best system we in the west can find (or perhaps it's just beyond our control?) but it's hardly efficient or without flaws.
My mom and dad have a 1ghz (Pentium 3 I believe) and I have the 750 duron. Of course, the reason I can play most good games like the Tribes Vengeance beta is my graphics card, a GeForce4 MX 4000 128mb.
.. is still a functioning computer.
... and we all know, letting the user decide about what to do about anything is just asking for it ..
only trouble is, PC's sell everywhere. they're like the 'industrial wonder-product' you just make, and let the user figure out what to do with when its done
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
This guy is a bone-on. I am sorry but much like his 286/486 speech about computers becoming obsolete, I have been burned WAY too many times buy underbuying. Does this guy work for the computer hardware industry? If I am going to spend my money, I am going to get as much as I can and if the voltage is high and if your electricity bill is that high, god forbid you hit the power button once in a while, when you aren't using it. I wonder where those durons and celerons will be when Longhorn is released? Judging from the past probably stuck in the boot sequence. While Jack Be Nimble is leaving his computer on 24 hours a day cranking out word processing at the speed of sloth, afraid to shutdown because it takes three days to boot. I will take my chances with my electricity bill and run a computer worth wasting the electricity on.
-Moduz
For a business of any real size a computer is a trivial purchase. They just don't cost that much, especially given it is tax deductable (where I am anyway).
In assessing this cost remember how expensive something going wrong for a business is in terms of (a) the time of an employee trying to fix things, (b) lost earnings/tarnished reputation when a customer feels let down and even (c) image...notice how trendy "creative" companies always have the latest Apple hardware even if its just for word processing?
It just doesn't make any sense to scrimp on non-standard hardware. And non-standard in this sense is anything that isn't current. No business is going to want to do things that a home user might think trivial (e.g., hunt around for drivers on the web, find a keyboard for a non-standard connector, etc etc.) Unless you already have the capability it is never worth repairing when you can just replace instead.
It has nothing to do with the technical capability of the hardware and is all to do with perceived reliability (newer==less likely to fail in the next year), logistics (swiftly replace like with exact like) and image. I would push this and say that if the new iteration of hardware was actually somehow worse than the previous one in an objective sense, businesses would still throw out their old machines and buy in the new model.
Yes it is senseless, but its the way of the world and the same thing applies to company premises, company cars and even formal dress in the business environment (servicable but double-breasted when it should be single? Over/undersized lapels? Put it away and head for the nearest tailor).
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
The growing computing power of modern PC's opens new uses. I work in the GIS sector and until a few years ago you needed very expensive Unix workstations. Cartographic datasets usually are very large (GBytes or even TBytes). Even the working sets usually are in the range of hundreds of MBytes. Thanks to the power of modern PC's you can put GIS functionality on the desktop of a secretary.
Two comments,
1) If you buy a computer about the time that Microsoft releases a new OS, you *have* to buy top of the line stuff. Sure the minimum specs on XP are a 2GB partition, but by the time you put SP1 on, you are out of disk space. Same with the memory and cpu requirements. I *can* put XP and anti-virus, and office on my old amd 500MHz K5III, but it is dog slow to actually use. Consider what would happen if you put a modern scan on access anti virus on it.
When Microsoft releases a new OS, they put on all kinds of "Cool widgets" that only function well on hardware that is about to be released. This feeds the hardware cycle.
2) Games (this should be enough said)
I can have my clients tell me that they only need their laptop for email and word processing (leaving me pointing them to a Athlon 1.3 lifebook). In reality, they call me back a few months later because they can't get "SoulSwiller" to run. In this case a stick of ram fixed it, but what do you do when the grandkids come over and want to play "The Sims 2?"
The point is that you may be happy with a vt100 with pine and lynx running remotely. I'm happy with a Wyse box. If I sell to someone, I better have a signed statement that they will not play games or make it fast enough that it can run games in three years. (Assuming estimates for MS ShorthornXP, NAV2006; SoulSwiller2-alcholics anonymous)
Of course, reading the linked story on how "Less is More", spiked my CPU usage to between 50-80% because of their animated ads, causing poor performance and jerky scrolling. God I hate sites like that.
486 and 486-compatible CPUs are still readily available and are still being manufactured. If you only need one cpu try Digikey.
Actually computers "Wear out" simply because of stupid mistakes. Like asking Junior to manually reset your BIOS, and installing linux when it's 107 degrees farenheit. Motherboards do'nt just "fail". Sure the punks who do the manufacturing are a bunch of monsy hungry losers under any normal circumstances,but "Cheap electrolytic capacitators that leak" are just due to your own stupidity. I mean, just the other day my brother was installing the latest version of Slackware on his ten year old486, and his instilation disk blew up because of an high measure of heat. His motherboard is still just fine, and will be until he lets Junior manually reset his BIOS.
In soveit Russia you're a Moron! Gyahahahahaha!!!!!!
My university experience may be different than most, but I recall a severe imbalance between the kinds of things I wanted to have (100 watt stereo with a direct drive turntable, a magnetic needle cartridge, and a reversing cassette deck) and the things I got by with (Dad's retired 1960's turntable plugged into a shortwave radio's AUX jack via patch cables from Radio Shack) because the money to buy the former wasn't there.
I personally would have killed for a thing like a laptop, which would have not only allowed me to write my papers faster than my non-correcting electric typewriter, but also could have been used to speed up the tedious process of transcribing citations in the library. But there was no such thing in those days, and had there been, it would have still been out of reach. Therefore, I suspect that anyone who couldn't afford a hot, multi-GHz laptop would be satisfied with whatever he could get.
Also, why are those of you who are under 30 staring at me like I'm an old geezer?
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
But back on the topic of low-power computing, I'm completely in agreement. I suspect a lot of the bloat is new versions of Windows. I know that Microsoft-bashing is the norm around here, but there's a serious concern when the OS can easily take half of the resources of a computer... How was it that the one Cathy cartoon put it? "5 years ago, my computer with 128K of memory could run a word processor and everything I ever wrote could fit on a handful of floppy disks." Ok, highly paraphrased, but they've got a point...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
been there. done that. I eventaully got that 3.3 obsd box running on a '94 - 486 as a firewall - the same one that I saw in the museum along with CSIRAC. But lets face it. Unless you have plenty of time on hand and you want to reexamine old hardware is it really that geeky?
It's just time consuming and hard work trying to locate old hardware and getting it to talk together. Going back to '94 (and earlier hardware) is getting harder. MTBF eventually catchs up. ... Geekiness is all about resourcefulness ...
to a point ... but after that its more wasteful of time. True geekiness would be emulating the hardware in software :)
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
Wow - this article is right on the money! I've been running an AMD 700Mhz for the last four years, and the only reason I'm not still running it is because it died (actually, I did the math and found that it was on for something like 80+% of it's lifetime, so it's demise was not unexpected, especially given the environment in which it spent those years). That machine did everything I needed it to - I'm even a software developer, and it still compiled with plenty of speed. I'm kind of batting around the idea of trying to find some old used parts just to reassemble the same machine.
This feeling carries over into laptops. The main reason I haven't bought a new machine yet is because I'm thinking of moving to something portable instead. However, it seems my desires are a bit out of line with what Intel/Dell/etc. wants to sell me. I'm really only looking for two things: small size and lots of battery life. The size search does have limits, as I don't want the keyboard to be too cramped, but mainly I really don't want one of these new laptops that has a good 2" on either side of the keyboard. I know battery life is mostly a factor of the screen on a laptop, but you can't tell me that just scaling back the other stuff a bit won't help.
I've actually been expecting for a couple of years now that we'll start seeing machines that are more dedicated to specific purposes again. For a long time we've been talking about how "one commodity piece of hardware can do everything." But, the simple fact is that most users don't need it to do everything. Thin clients are excellent machines for surfing the web. I expect someone will soon come out with a media PC that makes sense. I can't say I'm all that surprised that no one is marketing a word-processing machine any more, but that application is so lightweight that it could execute on any of these other systems.
Alright, I've ranted/rambled enough. Time to stop this post before I really do begin to sound stupid. ;P
...that is utterly invisible to virtually all programmers, except compiler writers. Not to detract from the truth of what you said at all, only from it's applicability to the real world.
So you want to jump to the future...
You can craft a new 64-bit instruction set, (IA-64) or you can add 64-bitness onto what you've got in a minimal way (X86-64) and put your innovation into the memory controller and NUMA. Guess which approach is being better recieved in the market, though it's not clear from the outset that IA-64 is really a 'better' ISA than X86-64. It's has its own unique problems, and is hampered by other issues.
Compilers have gotten just about good enough to make the instruction set irrelevant. Not that there isn't room there. IMHO, someone should redo the original experiments that led to RISC, with modern compilers and processors. That type of experimentation should be redone periodically, because all of this is with respect to a snapshot of semiconductor, processor, compiler, and operating system technology.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Mortgage? I didn't know you could mortgage your parent's basement...
Photos.
There is not a computer I have purchased, where I have said 'wow-this can do everything I want, all at once', probably never will be (for a reasonable price that is).
Want to encode a home DVD, sorry, you can't play UT right now, depending on the APP, you can't do anything else.
Was the blinking lights. They were so cool. I know PC rice boxers are putting windows and colored lights, but they have no function. You used to be able single step the program counter and debug your program by looking at the values in the registers.
Ever since clock speeds went north of 1Mhz and computers lost their switches and blinking lights, we have been living in a world of abstractions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
both C/C++ and assembly. Being well versed in both, he's got the freedom to optimize sections of the code in assembly when necessary, and sense enough not to code the whole application in it.
Good development is more a matter of good design and using the right tools for the job than blindly following the programming trends of the moment. Generally speaking, those who don't bother to learn the platform-specific details also won't bother to learn algorithm optimization, so you get the worst of both worlds - slow algorithms, poorly implemented.
The beauty of C++ is that it hides the implementation details from the application programmer - allowing easy development in the hands of a knowledgeable programmer - but the flipside is that it allows even those obstinately ignorant of computer science fundamentals to create code which works, albeit rather poorly.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I had a interesting experience when my mother recently informed me her computer was "broken". It kept restarting on her, so she came to the conclusion that it needed a new power supply. Now I built that sucker from scratch, so I was pretty doubtful it needed a new anything after only a year. So asked her to tell me exactly what was wrong. Turns out if she runs AOL for a while then plays games through AOL, her computer will occasionally reboot on her. It doesn't happen if she doesn't use AOL. She said, and this is as direct of a quote as I can remember, that it had to be the hardware because AOL's check up said her computer was fine. She was ready to replace hardware because she was convinced by AOL that her software was fine. Incidentally, Ad-aware came back with 380 hits. When I sat down to uninstall kruft, it kept coming and coming. Now her computer runs fine, and I didn't even need to reinstall WinXP.
My point is, people buy cheap computers and get cheap computers. Her computer, without monitor, cost me about 500 to build. However, it's going to last her a lot longer than a Dell would, because it's got quality parts inside. People replace Dells and Gateways because Dell and Gateway make disposable computers. They don't run as fast because they use the lowest clockspeeds possible and meet the barest minimum requirements. If you build it yourself it doesn't cost a ton more, but you can make it last much longer. Her computer has roughly the same specs as his, except it's faster (2600+) and it's got twice the memory. And, I'm willing to bet, it's using parts with a much longer statistical life expectancy.
I hope your friend figured into the cost of his Dell a RAM upgrade, because Dell just sold him a computer that won't work as advertised. 256 is just flat out not enough for XP + almost anything else. XP itself can swallow almost that much.
Never confuse volume with power.
One project of mine is a little php/mysql app to manage my dvd collection. A friend of mine suggested that the program should also control the DVD player, selecting the proper DVD.
Then he started specing out the machinery. Nothing short of an ITX machine seemed to satify his desire. A desire, I might add, which consisted of nothing more than accepting network input and outputting IR.
All told, we were talking about $300-500 to run an IR Blaster off a serial port.
But that's the mentality. Software guys are so used to starting with predetermined hardware and then writing whatever code they want to on top of it, and if it's too slow, you just add more metal.
It's just a matter of perspective. You're looking at it from "I need a to talk to a server" and the hardware supplier is looking at it from "How do I connect a PC to this server?"
:wq
I have four computers at home ranging from 800MHz HP E-PC's to a higher-end 3GHz custom-build PC, and I leave the all "on" 24/7 because it takes so d***ed long to boot. One is used for higher-end video editing, while the others are really nothing more than Internet Surfing, email reading, Quicken updating machines. But it's a major hassle to have to turn on, wait for boot, and then get to work.
If I could have PCs that boot within, say 10 seconds or less, I would be able to leave all of them off!
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
I tried links2, but it can't beat lynx's vi like navigation with "links and form fields are numbered" option on. Maybe there is an option like that in links2, but I couldn't find it.
AccountKiller
I've got a PII-350 with 256 megs of ram and an 8 meg video card, and that's my "power" system. And that's more than enough for what the majority of my family uses it for (I'm the only one who needs anything more powerful, damn you games and DAW!!)
I'm using a Celeron 800/128 meg ram laptop right now.
It was a bit odd to move out of the dorm and start paying utilities. When I realized that power was costing over $1000 a year, I started paying a bit of attention to electricity usage. I didn't go out and buy low-power equipment though, it kind of just happened this way.
I have an old PPro 200 that was given to me serving as my web/file server. Since I don't expect to be slashdotted anytime, it's plenty powerful enough and only draws 8-15 watts sitting in the corner.
My main computer I put together four years ago. Athlon 750, 496mb ram, four harddrives, etc. Draws a fair bit of power, but plenty of speed for normal work and I don't leave it on all the time.
Then there's a computer I put together to watch movies. Since the current bare minimum for mpeg-4 playback seems to be 500MHz and climbing, I went ahead and made it a Athlon XP 2200+. Due to unforseen events (hey, UT2004 if really fun, I've got to be able to play this) It now also has a Radeon 9800 Pro. Guessing by the heat comming from the vents, I'd guess that it draws 80 watts while IDLE. This one is only on when I need it to be.
On another note, I'd love to play with putting together true low power systems, but that's pending a bit of money. Transmedia has a 533MHz that doesn't require a fan, that would be nice to hook up to the TV, but I'm not convinced that it could pull the load of playing videos.
Any comments on big chip makers being able to market low power chips? GE's been doing that awhile with light bulbs and the embedded market often cares more about power than speed. I just haven't seen Dell step up to the plate.
I still use my old P2-350 + 64Mb + 6Gb PC as a Linux firewall and gateway. It works incredibly well - it never crashes and performance is definitely acceptable, even through Cable. I also use Apache on it to develop PHP scripts from time to time.
Three years ago, I used this PC to serve my website; about 10Gb a month with no problems.
Great selling point to incoming students- you get better stuff than the profs.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I agree. One of my daughters recently bought a Compaq because it was cheap at WalMart. With a 2.xGHz Celeron, DVD player, a slow disk drive, and... 128MB of RAM. For Windows XP.
BZZZZT!!!
The thing was a dog even before it started picking up MalWare. (Yes, she should have asked for help in the decision. Any parent can come up with several of the reasons she didn't!)
OTOH, at home, we have recently upgraded from a 133MHz Pentium cheesey desktop and a 200MHz Dell server to a pair of 400 MHz AMDs with the Dell server becoming just a file server. Running Linux, used for the same things she uses at her house (email, research, web stuff, basic office apps), we run rings around her. I'm buying my daughter more RAM as a present, but even so, we'll run almost as fast in most apps, but the 400s cost a total of $70 for 3 (my son bought one, too) at a company surplus equipment sale.
My son also has a 400MHz Windows system for games. He fusses about it some, but hasn't been motivated to work to buy a better one, and it even plays most of the games he cares about, using a decent graphics card (that cost more than the 3 400s 8^).
Would I love to have a blazingly fast system? Sure, I get to use those at work, and I love it! But right now, that would be a stupid budgetary decision. The 400s are good enough for now.
On a trip to Europe in 1999, I saw plenty of examples of M$ forcing an OS on folks that didn't need it. In places like train stations, I saw them using PC's with NT running DOS applications that would have been perfectly happy on lesser machines with WIN31 or less ! I work with a small 4-station company whos primary application is written in FoxPro DOS and the vendor of the application refuses to rewrite it in Visual Studio or whatever the current "visual" version of Foxpro is !
Walmart is rolling out new NEC POS systems. Quite often the self checkout terminals are down. When they go down you can see the Windows XP desktop. Look, I actually like XP (go ahead flame me) but what kind of idiot builds a retail POS system on Windows? Desktop OS's belong on the desktop not on a cash register. Also, the price checking stations posted throughout the store are being converted over to Windows CE. What was wrong with the old ones? I suspect it is that the new ones can display color graphics advertisements. Unfortunately they are down most of the time.
I didn't read the article and went right to the BS. I buy all my computers from ebay now, stereo sh__ too. I'm married with kids and too poor to by the latest stuff, but I can by the latest stuff of yeasteryear. Hell the stuff last longer too.
Sorry Kmart.
FxM.
Really, an old VT100 would have sufficed? It's great how we ignore the cost of user training and application development. That PC probably cost the store $500. That's $500 paid for a system that most people already know how to use and all technicians know how to service. But I guess $500 in "unnecessary hardware" is enough to justify spending thousands of dollars on a system that is ugly, difficult to use, and inflexible. Look at the big picture.
I saw a poll in a USENET group about a year ago. Most posters (residents of the USA) were still on Pentium I and Pentium II PC's.
You may have a non-representative sample group here. How a this affects a poll is a classic problem. There was a presidential election where they predicted the wrong candidate to win based on phone polling. The problem was that there was a whole conservative base of voters who didn't have phones yet. Modern pollsters are concerned that the rise of cell phones will cut off access to an entire demographic due to laws that prevent pollsters from calling them.
People who use their computer to play modern video games or to grab pirate video & audio tend to have whizzier machines. People who spend their time in chat rooms, on newsgroups, in MUDs tend to have budget machines. It could be that their buying habits follow their hobbies or that their hobbies follow the quality of their machines, but the correlation is still there. This skews the results.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Since when does 2-3% mean most? Our entire company develops high end 3D software and yet there's only one 64 bit box here. The majority of our machines are still Athlon XP's or MP's. And who really cares about Doom 3 performance unless you're a gamer??? Some of us have REAL work to do!
yes it's still running. That uber PII 350 just refuses to die, so does the hard drive, memory, PSU and all other parts.
Its running my fedora based firewall for my home network, and keeps up just fine. When the hard drive dies it will be replaced.
It's the only consumer pc I have ever purchased. Before that I had a compaq deskpro 2000 P133. My brother still uses it for word processing.
I only ever had one computer go kaput. It was a compaq dx33 from 1992. It died in 2001 from motherboard burnout, presumably from the 1/4 inch of dust and moisture on the motherboard somewhere causing a short. I now clean my computers twice a year, so that will never happen again.
I am convinced that only excess dust, or 'keeping up with the joneses' can kill a PC, outside of obvious misuse(flooded basement, computer on floor; coke into the case etc). A PSU can go from a worn out fan, or a short from the factory, but barring the moving parts in the case, it's pretty much impossible for a power conditioned computer to die without human stupidity intervening ( or not in my case).
The only exception to this rule is hard drives, of course. I have lost 3 in 2 years. The new hard drives run very hot.
Yes, you're both right, and I think a big part of the problem is the fragility of the "ecosystem" on a typical home computer.
Consider what happens when you try a new game on a game console. You plug it in, play it, and if you don't like it, you just unplug it. It's as if it was never there. It's gone and the game system is "plain vanilla" again. It can't be corrupted by just using it. What a concept!
On a PC, Mac, or even a Linux box, installing something new -- almost anything -- is likely to put the system into an untested state and uninstalling may leave it that way. And now, even browsing the Web can put your system into an untested state.
The more this is done, the less reliable the system becomes, the more things go wrong, and the more you (and all who have to help you) yearn to return to a tested, working configuration.
Since the average consumer CAN'T restore his own machine to a pristine state, the only way to get one in that state is to buy a new one.
Since the price of doing so keeps falling, I think the reason for most upgrades these days is not the desire to have a more powerful machine -- most people feel theirs is already more powerful than they need -- but to finally have one that WORKS again (for a while...).
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."
I am running on my firewall FreeSCO on a P90 underclocked to P75, 8 meg of ram and a floppy drive. You are right - we both could get that el-cheapo router, which would probably use less power - but there is something cool about a home-brew box...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Thanks! much appreciated.