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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.
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.
yeah maybe a dumb terminal would suffice, but how would the clerk play doom3 while ignoring the customers?! It'd be unfair
This is a VT100.
... 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.
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?
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.
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.
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??
Always a great idea to take productivity tips from guys posting on /.
*cough*
No, really.
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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
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.
"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
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!
Here in Canada, cars sometimes rust before they wear out their engine. That's the consequence of having 4 REAL seasons.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
I stopped at Win2k for the same reason. Windows 2000 was more or less, the last of the good OSes that will ever come out of redmond.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
This is a troll, right?
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
As a matter of fact, this is true for every machine including the simple ones like the inclined plane and the pulley. Once you stop, you're taking your chances.
This is true for the earliest steam engines. In fact, at that time it was painfully obvious. If your engine went down, it might never start again without a complete re-build. It was cheaper to keep it running around the clock than to let it go down.
This is also true for the Gigawatt steam turbogenerator on the other side of your electrical outlet. Bringing those down almost necessarily causes damage because of the phase change of steam to water. This is one of the biggest challenges for large scale solar thermal power.
This is true for your car, this is true for your blender, this is true for your drill and your circular saw. This is true for every machine. This is true for the sun itself. Try re-booting that sucker.
But as we can see from some of these latter examples, some machines aren't designed to run continuously because they are crafted in a manner that allows them to finish a job in a relatively short period. A blender is an example of a machine that can probably still be considered an acceptable design if it cannot run for more than ten minutes without overheating. It is reasonable that a minute or so should be enough to blend most ingredients, so a limitation on run time is quite acceptable in such a case. So, you need to look at the context in which the device is used before you simply say that the design is fucked. It's a given that all machines ideally work better when in continuous use, but there are cases where you can make trade-offs.
A PC, is not one of them. If your PC gets too hot to leave on. You have a fucked design. That's not to say that no computing device should ever be allowed to get hot. But the key here is "PC" which stands for personal computer. From a design perspective, a personal computer that becomes too hot to leave running continuously or consumes to much electricity or requires a cooling system that produces too much waste heat or noise to be used in a personal setting should be considered a poorly designed personal computer.
So, in this sense I would argue that the entire P4 design is fatally flawed. As a matter of fact, the Taiwanese board manufacturers were complaining about this fact at this year's Computex in Taipei. This was supposed to be they year of the miniature form factor, low-power PC. But the rumor was that Intel had threatened to cut ties to companies who didn't front their boards with Intel P4 chipsets which were everywhere.
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.
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
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.
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