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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.
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.
FYI, I still have my first-gen Power Mac G4 from 1999, which has outlasted three of its hard drives, two displays (a sony CRT and an Apple Studio display), the original video card, keyboard and mouse, and hp deskjet printer. This is the least problematic Mac I've owned yet.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
That's not what the theory of capitalism says. Capitalism says that capital follows need, and corporations had better keep their feet moving if they don't want their bottom line to look like DeCaprio's private parts after he plunged.
It's corporatism not capitalism that says "try to keep the dull consumer buying what they don't need anyway".
A modest Pentium-M with silent cooling would serve the needs of most people far better than any Pentium-IV, complete with miniature nuclear cooling tower.
From where we are right now, a mad rush to 10GHz computing is not the most efficient use of available capital, a no amount of duping the average consumer can change that fact.
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.
Or encode video streams. Or compile code. Let's not paint with such a broad brush.
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.
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.
Sucker!
- Signed, Texas!
My C64 boots off a Betamax tape drive that's powered by the potato battery I planted in 6th grade. I overclocked it or something to run Oregon Trail V, which totally rules all over Zork. AND it has a display mode that is capable of presenting over 30 colors. I guess that means your apples SUCK! Nyeah.
NYEAH!
"The Borba"
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.
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.