It's debatable if the the current WIMP interface is what It's debatable if the the current WIMP interface is really what's needed on modern hardware. Arguably it's just noise: little menus and configuation thingamajigs and so on, and you end up working in a tiny part of an 18" monitor. Mimicking this on an Intellivision--while technically brilliant--is so misguided I don't even know where to begin.
I have a Dell PII 600 Mhz and a Dell Inspiron laptop with a 2.2 Ghz. One takes almost 1/2 minutes to boot XP or Debian, and other takes ~3 seconds for XP and slightly more for Linux (mostly because A LOT of services get started).
The only thing that really makes any difference to me personally is how much faster the G5 is than the G4 it's replacing. The rest of it I just don't care about.
That's the key. Windows PCs have been beyond the point of general sluggishness for a some time now. I'd say they passed that point when the PII (yes, 2) hit 450-500MHz or so. Past that point, especially with the ridiculous speeds available on even the lowest end Dell, speed has lost most of its meaning except to the hardcore hardware fanboys (and people with specialized, professional needs). OS X is heavier duty than Windows, and the sluggishness is still there on the lower end G4 processors. The G5 finally puts Macs in the realm of not caring, just like PCs.
The big difference, though, is that you have to pay quite the premium price to get a Mac in the "plenty fast enough" range, whereas you can go to dell.com and pick *anything*. In short, the G5 is a toy for the rich until the PPC970 starts showing up in the $1300--with LCD screen--iMac. That will probably happen in January, IMO.
(I just priced a "bottom end" 2.2GHz, 256MB Dell at $658 before a $50 rebate. They also have free shipping--normally about $100--every few weeks.)
In the little graphs, the benchmarks always pit the Dual 2GHz G5 against the Dell. Realistically, though, the Dual 2GHz is the least affordable of the G5s (really, even for professional graphics use, who pays more than about $1800 for a PC any more, and you can even get a bang-up $1800 system with an 18" LCD monitor). So in all honesty, most purchasers would opt for the $2000 G5 vs. the $3000 G5. And the question is: How well does the 1.6GHz G5 stack up against Dell's dirt-cheap 2.66GHz P4s? In any case, you can't really put the 1.6GHz G5 on a page touting the world's fastest desktop, because it very obviously isn't.
Re:let's please make up our minds...
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
And "bragging rights"? Are you fuckin' high? I can't remember a day on/. where there was not a baker's dozen worth of comments touting how fast someone's Dell was over the newest Mac.
Nobody really cares how fast a PC is anymore, except the hardware fanboys. With a bottom-end Dell you can do whatever you want, be it video compression, graphics work, you name it. For games you should get a flashier video card, but it doesn't matter for other people.
With the Mac, there's been much grousing about how performance is sluggish on the lower end systems. That's the big difference. To get around that difference, you had to buy a Power Mac over an iMac. That increased the performance, yes, but at a price point well above a typical PC. And now the G5 is here, and it is faster than anything from Dell. Awesome. But it's not the ultimate-in-super-speed that I'm clamoring for, but just enough speed to make the sluggishness go away. It's not worth the ultimate premium price to me, and that's fine. But there's no middle ground, which is bad. I can get an iMac, which is noticibly underpowered, or I can pay two to three times as much as a Dell for a G5. That's not a realistic option.
Sigh. It's the price again.
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 1
As much as I was hoping for G5--and yes, it is shipping in August--I'm greatly disappointed by the pricing. Yeah, it's the fastest consumer-level computer available at the moment. But these days, speed is such that it's pretty hard to justify paying a premium price for it. Apple's bottom-end G5, the 1.6GHz model, is $2000, and that's with only 256MB and no monitor. From Dell, you can buy a 2.66GHz P4 with 512MB and an 18" UltraSharp LCD monitor for several hundred less than that. Again, that's with an 18" LCD monitor. Add those features to the G5 and you're up around $3000. This is without even considering the $2400 and $3000 higher-end G5s.
Yes, the Dell isn't as fast, but it's still damn fast. Windows has never had the sluggishness problems that OS X has had, at least not since the days of the PII. Mac users have been waiting for a speed boost to get past the point where that sluggishness is a hindrance. Now they have it...for a hugely premium price. Is it worth it? Unless the benchmarks are really, really spectacular, and you're doing something critically dependent on that kind of ultra-speed, then, no, it isn't. It's really difficult to justify paying an extra $1400+ just for bragging rights.
Because the general sheep public don't understand or care about that stuff. They just see the ever widening "GHZ" label and buy away every time intel releases a new chip.
It's not the "general sheep public" that does that; it's the hardware fanboy types who build giant cooling systems and drool over benchmarks posted to hardware fanboy sites (like Tom's). The "general sheep public" no longer cares about upgrading.
Give a random developer 200,000 lines of code he's never seen. Ask him to find a bug. Odds are he'll have lots of trouble doing so. When he's finished, will it make any difference if you tell him that the code was open or closed source? A big project is a big project, period.
"Design Patterns" is something specifically targeted toward object oriented development. If you looked at the documented linked to in the article, you'll see that it covers the the entire wide-spectrum of programming techniques, of which OOP is just one small portion.
what year is this again 1998?? so after the OS that leaves what 1.5 gigs, I guess they would make good dumb X terminals. good luck doing anything else
I still use a P2-333 from 1998 as my main home PC. It has a 6GB drive. How much space am I using? Around 2GB. ~800MB of that is Windows. ~500MB is used for large applications and development environments. The rest is data.
Most programming is pure grunt work
on
Ageism in IT?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Lots of people learn to program in high school--or earlier. And after a quick learning curve of approximately three to four years, such a person will be a fairly competent programmer for certain types of tasks. He won't be a master; you wouldn't want that person architecting anything sizable. And he'll have monstrous gaps in his knowledge. But you know what? That kind of general grunt programming covers about 90% of the coding work out there. It doesn't take a masters degree to churn through data files with Perl, or to put together some forms and SQL queries with Visual Basic. It really doesn't If you give that kind of work to someone who is 20, is unattached, and maybe lives in a town where he doesn't know anyone outside of work, he'll churn through it faster than someone with a wife and kids. And the 20 year old will be cheaper.
This isn't an insult to people over thirty. I am over thirty. It's more that most programming is pretty simple, and therefore it makes sense to have it done by cheap, almost slave labor.
As programmer becomes a true master, which is something that takes a decade or more and a wide variety of professional experience, that person will be much less inclined to just write brute force solutions in Visual Basic. He'll start to think more, wonder why we're wasting our time using garbage like C++ or why most Visual Basic programs end up being the same and therefore should be replaced by something more succinct and automated. But that kind of thinking doesn't do much good. It takes more time to think about such things than to just write the damn code for the ugly way.
In all honesty I believe the Slashdot whining is because a lot of posters are poor college students or jobless teenagers. This means they generally cannot afford the shiny stuff. About this time last year I was running a PII-233 myself. By denouncing the great you can make the not-so-great seem better.
I have said this before, and I will said it again. I'm a professional software developer. I work on high-end 3D games, and I have a penchant for working with large, high-level languages that so many programmers put down as "too slow," such as Lisp, when I can. When I had an 866MHz Pentium III, wow, that was my dream machine. It felt like I had infinite processor cycles. If something ever felt a little sluggish, it was because I did something dumb and a little algorithmic tweaking made it go away. I never felt the need for more speed. Ever. Seriously. And now I have a P4 with 3x the clock speed (which I have for reasons other than the old PC not being fast enough).
The "gotta have more speed" issues come down to three major things:
1. Certain very specific tasks eat up all the processor power you can throw at them, such as high-end scientific numerical work (think: systems of tens of thousands of equations) and video compression. Both of these are specific enough that they shouldn't be driving general, across-the-board, desktop CPU development. Ideally, video compression should be done via coprocessor, just as drawing texture mapped triangles is. If we didn't have GPUs like those from nVidia and ATI, we'd need CPUs clocked at 100GHz in order to achieve the same results.
2. Some things are slow, but they often come down to really poor design or have nothing to do with processor speed. Boot time, for example. Or sometimes you hit Help in a giant program like Quark or Maya and there's a substantially long period before the help shows up. That's not a processor bottleneck; that's another program being paged in, maybe even the Java runtime stuff to support it, and then a monstrous index of data being loaded. But people see things like this and immediately think the processor is too slow.
3. There are certain outdated--IMO--activities that some people engage in which are fundamentally flawed, and hence slow. A good example is building monstrous applications using C++. C++ doesn't have formal support for separately compiled modules, so each one is compiled independently, you need an ugly make system to sort out the dependencies, and then they all get thrown into a massive link step at the end. People who write code with Delphi don't have this problem; compile time is effectively zero for most projects. Ditto for Lisp or Python. C++ is a necessary language, but again it shouldn't be the impetus for processor upgrades.
The biggie is BlitzBasic. It's not free--but it is only $70--and it essentially turns a PC into an ultra-modern Commodore 64 or Atari 800. It takes one command to initialize a graphics window, for example. The nice part is that you can use a decent version of BASIC for everything; you don't have to dip to assembly for the cool stuff like you did in the 8-bit days.
Python + PyGame is a free option, although it suffers from too much OOP on the brain, which makes things murkier for newbies.
To a large extent his bio reads like any random reader of Slashdot, up until the point he became rich: playing chess, programming calculators, writing software in the night. His only real problem was that he was a serious alcoholic.
All an OS kernel does is provide some very basic services: task switching, memory management, process starting and stopping, simple interprocess communication, and device drivers. That's it really. That's why you traditionally don't see large operating systems (like Linux, BSD, and Windows) used in safety critical embedded applications: in exchange for the few services the OS provides you, you're using a giant blob of software that's much larger, and potentially more complex, than the rest of your application.
In short, I'm not sure why these stories get people all excited. Does it really matter that it's the Linux kernel in there, as opposed to some other, even open source, kernel? It's more the mindset of "Linux, Linux, Linux!" I think.
This is already illegal for publicly traded companies. Just look at any press release and you'll see all the required legal disclaimers about "forward looking" information and all that. But you can still get into trouble by misleading shareholders.
You are... I am... And a bunch of/. readers are too. But the millions of teenagers that grew up without technical skills but love games and subscribe to gaming magazines are looking at the benchmarks to decide what to ask for X-Mas and what to beg Mom to buy at CompUSA.
I don't know, I think it's more widespread than that. It's the same kind of fervor that surrounds arguments about the # of instruction units on the Pentium 4 vs. the Opteron. They're people with some technical knowledge--maybe even a good amount--but it's knowledge that exists in a void, without any kind of real world grounding.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the 3D video market on the PC is that the high-end is very much a niche. 95% all games released do absolutely nothing that requires a GeForce 3 or better, and the simple reason is that the vast majority of PCs sold come with lesser cards. Most Dells ship with GeForce 4s, which don't have programmable shaders. The new, slimline Dell desktop (very nice in most respects) ships with Intel's motherboard 3D, which is a couple of generations back (before hardware T&L). So developers just have to ignore most the cool, cutting edge stuff, because if they target it then they're reducing their market substantially. Remember, games like Quake 3 sold less than 200,000 copies as it is. Now on the Xbox, though, shaders are king.
Oh please! 1GHz is a sweet spot? Give me a break! Software will constantly push the limits of CPU power. Hell, even the operating system will start to push it over time.
The cry for raw speed is so vulgar! Look, I've done commercial 3D game development on an 866MHz Pentium III. It was completely and utterly fine, and not just in a "barely acceptable" kind of way. I had no need to upgrade. Eventually I did upgrade (for other reasons) and I can't tell the difference performance wise. Now, sure, the people who use Photoshop for a living on 600dpi images, or the people who do high-end CG work using Maya, they're extraordinary cases. Those people are in the "I'll pay $5000 for a decent performance increase" category.
Realistically, going from 1GHz to 3GHz does not give you a 300% speed increase. It's more like 50%. Personally, I'm getting tired of the usual 12% clock speed increase that results in a 6% benchmark score increase at the expense of 15% higher power consumption.
twenty percent won't do, dear mr. motorola. the new chips might a nice quick upgrade for a few apple machines, but on the long run we need state-of-the-art cpus.
Not that I completely disagree with you, but stop and ask *why* you think such CPUs are so important. Apple is focusing on laptops and quiet PCs like the iMac. Low power is very important in that regard. You wouldn't want to blindly throw all that away in exchange for the 5-fan monsters Dell is shipping.
In all honesty, the sweet spot of CPU speed is around 1GHz. With that you can do just about anything, or at least the things that you can't do quickly start becoming enumerable: compression of massive videos, certain high-end physics-heavy games, and so on. For most purposes, there is no difference between 800Hz and 2.4GHz, period. This is even from the point of view of someone who likes to use traditionally weighty programming languages like Lisp for commercial software development.
OS X still could be snappier, but more and more I think this is an issue with the way it is written. I'm hoping Apple gets it sorted out.
I'm not a Luddite, just a pragmatist. Remember, you're going to have to copy math formulas, charts, maps, and diagrams. Unless you're really sure you can get all of that into a palmtop faster than you can with paper, I'd go with the paper.
Slashdot Mirror
It's debatable if the the current WIMP interface is what It's debatable if the the current WIMP interface is really what's needed on modern hardware. Arguably it's just noise: little menus and configuation thingamajigs and so on, and you end up working in a tiny part of an 18" monitor. Mimicking this on an Intellivision--while technically brilliant--is so misguided I don't even know where to begin.
I have a Dell PII 600 Mhz and a Dell Inspiron laptop with a 2.2 Ghz. One takes almost 1/2 minutes to boot XP or Debian, and other takes ~3 seconds for XP and slightly more for Linux (mostly because A LOT of services get started).
That's hard drive speed, not processor speed!
The only thing that really makes any difference to me personally is how much faster the G5 is than the G4 it's replacing. The rest of it I just don't care about.
That's the key. Windows PCs have been beyond the point of general sluggishness for a some time now. I'd say they passed that point when the PII (yes, 2) hit 450-500MHz or so. Past that point, especially with the ridiculous speeds available on even the lowest end Dell, speed has lost most of its meaning except to the hardcore hardware fanboys (and people with specialized, professional needs). OS X is heavier duty than Windows, and the sluggishness is still there on the lower end G4 processors. The G5 finally puts Macs in the realm of not caring, just like PCs.
The big difference, though, is that you have to pay quite the premium price to get a Mac in the "plenty fast enough" range, whereas you can go to dell.com and pick *anything*. In short, the G5 is a toy for the rich until the PPC970 starts showing up in the $1300--with LCD screen--iMac. That will probably happen in January, IMO.
(I just priced a "bottom end" 2.2GHz, 256MB Dell at $658 before a $50 rebate. They also have free shipping--normally about $100--every few weeks.)
In the little graphs, the benchmarks always pit the Dual 2GHz G5 against the Dell. Realistically, though, the Dual 2GHz is the least affordable of the G5s (really, even for professional graphics use, who pays more than about $1800 for a PC any more, and you can even get a bang-up $1800 system with an 18" LCD monitor). So in all honesty, most purchasers would opt for the $2000 G5 vs. the $3000 G5. And the question is: How well does the 1.6GHz G5 stack up against Dell's dirt-cheap 2.66GHz P4s? In any case, you can't really put the 1.6GHz G5 on a page touting the world's fastest desktop, because it very obviously isn't.
And "bragging rights"? Are you fuckin' high? I can't remember a day on /. where there was not a baker's dozen worth of comments touting how fast someone's Dell was over the newest Mac.
Nobody really cares how fast a PC is anymore, except the hardware fanboys. With a bottom-end Dell you can do whatever you want, be it video compression, graphics work, you name it. For games you should get a flashier video card, but it doesn't matter for other people.
With the Mac, there's been much grousing about how performance is sluggish on the lower end systems. That's the big difference. To get around that difference, you had to buy a Power Mac over an iMac. That increased the performance, yes, but at a price point well above a typical PC. And now the G5 is here, and it is faster than anything from Dell. Awesome. But it's not the ultimate-in-super-speed that I'm clamoring for, but just enough speed to make the sluggishness go away. It's not worth the ultimate premium price to me, and that's fine. But there's no middle ground, which is bad. I can get an iMac, which is noticibly underpowered, or I can pay two to three times as much as a Dell for a G5. That's not a realistic option.
As much as I was hoping for G5--and yes, it is shipping in August--I'm greatly disappointed by the pricing. Yeah, it's the fastest consumer-level computer available at the moment. But these days, speed is such that it's pretty hard to justify paying a premium price for it. Apple's bottom-end G5, the 1.6GHz model, is $2000, and that's with only 256MB and no monitor. From Dell, you can buy a 2.66GHz P4 with 512MB and an 18" UltraSharp LCD monitor for several hundred less than that. Again, that's with an 18" LCD monitor. Add those features to the G5 and you're up around $3000. This is without even considering the $2400 and $3000 higher-end G5s.
Yes, the Dell isn't as fast, but it's still damn fast. Windows has never had the sluggishness problems that OS X has had, at least not since the days of the PII. Mac users have been waiting for a speed boost to get past the point where that sluggishness is a hindrance. Now they have it...for a hugely premium price. Is it worth it? Unless the benchmarks are really, really spectacular, and you're doing something critically dependent on that kind of ultra-speed, then, no, it isn't. It's really difficult to justify paying an extra $1400+ just for bragging rights.
Because the general sheep public don't understand or care about that stuff. They just see the ever widening "GHZ" label and buy away every time intel releases a new chip.
It's not the "general sheep public" that does that; it's the hardware fanboy types who build giant cooling systems and drool over benchmarks posted to hardware fanboy sites (like Tom's). The "general sheep public" no longer cares about upgrading.
Let me guess... It's a few percent faster than the 3.0ghz, and costs more.
You forgot: Uses more power, generates more heat.
Give a random developer 200,000 lines of code he's never seen. Ask him to find a bug. Odds are he'll have lots of trouble doing so. When he's finished, will it make any difference if you tell him that the code was open or closed source? A big project is a big project, period.
The G5 name has been taken by Canon's sweet new 5 megapixel camera. They had the G1, G2, G3 and now the G5.
Oh, come on. This is like a fanboy writing in to tell a science fiction author that another book had a character named Abraxas.
"Design Patterns" is something specifically targeted toward object oriented development. If you looked at the documented linked to in the article, you'll see that it covers the the entire wide-spectrum of programming techniques, of which OOP is just one small portion.
Personally, I still have reservations about using a relational database to keep track of files.
A hugely conservative Slashdot reader? No way!
putting nwn on all three major operating systems
Windows, MacOS X, and PalmOS?
what year is this again 1998?? so after the OS that leaves what 1.5 gigs, I guess they would make good dumb X terminals. good luck doing anything else
I still use a P2-333 from 1998 as my main home PC. It has a 6GB drive. How much space am I using? Around 2GB. ~800MB of that is Windows. ~500MB is used for large applications and development environments. The rest is data.
Lots of people learn to program in high school--or earlier. And after a quick learning curve of approximately three to four years, such a person will be a fairly competent programmer for certain types of tasks. He won't be a master; you wouldn't want that person architecting anything sizable. And he'll have monstrous gaps in his knowledge. But you know what? That kind of general grunt programming covers about 90% of the coding work out there. It doesn't take a masters degree to churn through data files with Perl, or to put together some forms and SQL queries with Visual Basic. It really doesn't If you give that kind of work to someone who is 20, is unattached, and maybe lives in a town where he doesn't know anyone outside of work, he'll churn through it faster than someone with a wife and kids. And the 20 year old will be cheaper.
This isn't an insult to people over thirty. I am over thirty. It's more that most programming is pretty simple, and therefore it makes sense to have it done by cheap, almost slave labor.
As programmer becomes a true master, which is something that takes a decade or more and a wide variety of professional experience, that person will be much less inclined to just write brute force solutions in Visual Basic. He'll start to think more, wonder why we're wasting our time using garbage like C++ or why most Visual Basic programs end up being the same and therefore should be replaced by something more succinct and automated. But that kind of thinking doesn't do much good. It takes more time to think about such things than to just write the damn code for the ugly way.
In all honesty I believe the Slashdot whining is because a lot of posters are poor college students or jobless teenagers. This means they generally cannot afford the shiny stuff. About this time last year I was running a PII-233 myself. By denouncing the great you can make the not-so-great seem better.
I have said this before, and I will said it again. I'm a professional software developer. I work on high-end 3D games, and I have a penchant for working with large, high-level languages that so many programmers put down as "too slow," such as Lisp, when I can. When I had an 866MHz Pentium III, wow, that was my dream machine. It felt like I had infinite processor cycles. If something ever felt a little sluggish, it was because I did something dumb and a little algorithmic tweaking made it go away. I never felt the need for more speed. Ever. Seriously. And now I have a P4 with 3x the clock speed (which I have for reasons other than the old PC not being fast enough).
The "gotta have more speed" issues come down to three major things:
1. Certain very specific tasks eat up all the processor power you can throw at them, such as high-end scientific numerical work (think: systems of tens of thousands of equations) and video compression. Both of these are specific enough that they shouldn't be driving general, across-the-board, desktop CPU development. Ideally, video compression should be done via coprocessor, just as drawing texture mapped triangles is. If we didn't have GPUs like those from nVidia and ATI, we'd need CPUs clocked at 100GHz in order to achieve the same results.
2. Some things are slow, but they often come down to really poor design or have nothing to do with processor speed. Boot time, for example. Or sometimes you hit Help in a giant program like Quark or Maya and there's a substantially long period before the help shows up. That's not a processor bottleneck; that's another program being paged in, maybe even the Java runtime stuff to support it, and then a monstrous index of data being loaded. But people see things like this and immediately think the processor is too slow.
3. There are certain outdated--IMO--activities that some people engage in which are fundamentally flawed, and hence slow. A good example is building monstrous applications using C++. C++ doesn't have formal support for separately compiled modules, so each one is compiled independently, you need an ugly make system to sort out the dependencies, and then they all get thrown into a massive link step at the end. People who write code with Delphi don't have this problem; compile time is effectively zero for most projects. Ditto for Lisp or Python. C++ is a necessary language, but again it shouldn't be the impetus for processor upgrades.
Thanks for reading.
The biggie is BlitzBasic. It's not free--but it is only $70--and it essentially turns a PC into an ultra-modern Commodore 64 or Atari 800. It takes one command to initialize a graphics window, for example. The nice part is that you can use a decent version of BASIC for everything; you don't have to dip to assembly for the cool stuff like you did in the 8-bit days.
Python + PyGame is a free option, although it suffers from too much OOP on the brain, which makes things murkier for newbies.
To a large extent his bio reads like any random reader of Slashdot, up until the point he became rich: playing chess, programming calculators, writing software in the night. His only real problem was that he was a serious alcoholic.
All an OS kernel does is provide some very basic services: task switching, memory management, process starting and stopping, simple interprocess communication, and device drivers. That's it really. That's why you traditionally don't see large operating systems (like Linux, BSD, and Windows) used in safety critical embedded applications: in exchange for the few services the OS provides you, you're using a giant blob of software that's much larger, and potentially more complex, than the rest of your application.
In short, I'm not sure why these stories get people all excited. Does it really matter that it's the Linux kernel in there, as opposed to some other, even open source, kernel? It's more the mindset of "Linux, Linux, Linux!" I think.
This is already illegal for publicly traded companies. Just look at any press release and you'll see all the required legal disclaimers about "forward looking" information and all that. But you can still get into trouble by misleading shareholders.
You are... I am... And a bunch of /. readers are too. But the millions of teenagers that grew up without technical skills but love games and subscribe to gaming magazines are looking at the benchmarks to decide what to ask for X-Mas and what to beg Mom to buy at CompUSA.
I don't know, I think it's more widespread than that. It's the same kind of fervor that surrounds arguments about the # of instruction units on the Pentium 4 vs. the Opteron. They're people with some technical knowledge--maybe even a good amount--but it's knowledge that exists in a void, without any kind of real world grounding.
Perhaps the oddest thing about the 3D video market on the PC is that the high-end is very much a niche. 95% all games released do absolutely nothing that requires a GeForce 3 or better, and the simple reason is that the vast majority of PCs sold come with lesser cards. Most Dells ship with GeForce 4s, which don't have programmable shaders. The new, slimline Dell desktop (very nice in most respects) ships with Intel's motherboard 3D, which is a couple of generations back (before hardware T&L). So developers just have to ignore most the cool, cutting edge stuff, because if they target it then they're reducing their market substantially. Remember, games like Quake 3 sold less than 200,000 copies as it is. Now on the Xbox, though, shaders are king.
And does it make sense to buy a book about a GPLed piece of software?
That is one very naive question, so let me be the first to welcome you to Slashdot.
Oh please! 1GHz is a sweet spot? Give me a break! Software will constantly push the limits of CPU power. Hell, even the operating system will start to push it over time.
The cry for raw speed is so vulgar! Look, I've done commercial 3D game development on an 866MHz Pentium III. It was completely and utterly fine, and not just in a "barely acceptable" kind of way. I had no need to upgrade. Eventually I did upgrade (for other reasons) and I can't tell the difference performance wise. Now, sure, the people who use Photoshop for a living on 600dpi images, or the people who do high-end CG work using Maya, they're extraordinary cases. Those people are in the "I'll pay $5000 for a decent performance increase" category.
Realistically, going from 1GHz to 3GHz does not give you a 300% speed increase. It's more like 50%. Personally, I'm getting tired of the usual 12% clock speed increase that results in a 6% benchmark score increase at the expense of 15% higher power consumption.
twenty percent won't do, dear mr. motorola. the new chips might a nice quick upgrade for a few apple machines, but on the long run we need state-of-the-art cpus.
Not that I completely disagree with you, but stop and ask *why* you think such CPUs are so important. Apple is focusing on laptops and quiet PCs like the iMac. Low power is very important in that regard. You wouldn't want to blindly throw all that away in exchange for the 5-fan monsters Dell is shipping.
In all honesty, the sweet spot of CPU speed is around 1GHz. With that you can do just about anything, or at least the things that you can't do quickly start becoming enumerable: compression of massive videos, certain high-end physics-heavy games, and so on. For most purposes, there is no difference between 800Hz and 2.4GHz, period. This is even from the point of view of someone who likes to use traditionally weighty programming languages like Lisp for commercial software development.
OS X still could be snappier, but more and more I think this is an issue with the way it is written. I'm hoping Apple gets it sorted out.
I'm not a Luddite, just a pragmatist. Remember, you're going to have to copy math formulas, charts, maps, and diagrams. Unless you're really sure you can get all of that into a palmtop faster than you can with paper, I'd go with the paper.