Less Might Be More 714
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.
inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:inevitable (Score:5, Funny)
um... I'd have a different perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Your chip and motherboard may still be working, but your system as a whole doesn't seem to be anything to brag about.
Re:um... I'd have a different perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:um... I'd have a different perspective (Score:5, Insightful)
Then what is? The harddrive failed, the video card failed. A computer is the sum of it's parts. The Mac you have now with a different harddrive and video card isn't the same one you bought 5 years ago.
Besides I still have an old 75 mhz Pentium sitting at my parent's that gets regular use and has had *nothing* fail except for a module of expansion RAM I threw in there for my dad that died after 3-4 years.
Re:um... I'd have a different perspective (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, er, umm... bad example.
Re:um... I'd have a different perspective (Score:3, Funny)
Re:um... I'd have a different perspective (Score:3, Funny)
Now that you mention it -- yes! Yes, it is.
Sincerely,
Bruce Banner
Re:um... I'd have a different perspective (Score:4, Informative)
Re:for laptops? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:inevitable (Score:3, Interesting)
It came with 9 drives, I added three and haven't done anything else except fill up the hard drives. This old stuff can work fine for a long time depending on what you need it for.
Re:inevitable (Score:4, Funny)
Re:inevitable (Score:3, Funny)
The thing I really miss about old computers (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Re:inevitable (Score:5, Funny)
Re:inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
With a little research [ibm.com] you could have accomplished a parallel init-process, without wasting twenty-four hours compiling unnecessary packages.
Re:inevitable (Score:5, Funny)
NYEAH!
Incorrect analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Incorrect analogy (Score:5, Insightful)
"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."
Yes, but cars literally wear out, where computers generally don't*. PC's just keep on working just as well as they did when new until they are usually replaced simply because they are just obsolete, even though they still work OK. I've had at least 15 PCs over the last 20 years, usually have 4 or so in service at any one time. Not one of them have I had to replace because it "wore out". I've replaced many worn out cars in that same period.
* Hard disks + fans do wear out, for exactly the same reasons that cars wear out, ie they have moving parts. The difference is that it is trivially easy to replace a worn out HD or fan inj a PC, whereas it is financially impractical to try and replace every single moving part in an old car, which is why people tend to buy new ones every five years or so. Wholesale replacement of old parts generally only happens when someone is restoring a classic car and value for money is not the overriding factor at play.
Re:Incorrect analogy (Score:5, Interesting)
You've replaced the computers because they became useless before they wore out. But computers do wear out. Typically the motherboard fails first because manufacturers use cheap electrolytic capacitors that leak (because they don't expect anyone to be using the hardware after 5 years).
Re:Incorrect analogy (Score:3, Interesting)
"I haven't seen a solid state part of a PC die. I always use a UPS, dust the insides once a year, and never overclock."
In fact, I often underclock the firewalls I build. I've found that if you take something like a Pentium MMX 200 and underclock it to something like 1.5x50Mhz (75Mhz) you can drop the vcore and run it without a CPU fan at all. Stick a "silent" fan in your PSU and you can have a perfectly adequete Smoothwall box that is damn near silent. 75Mhz is more than adequete to serve up packets over
Re:Rust (Score:4, Funny)
- Signed, Texas!
Re:Incorrect analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:inevitable (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:inevitable (Score:3, Funny)
Why are they buying it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why are they buying it? (Score:3, Informative)
$32 GeForce4 MX 440 64mb
$37 256mb DDR400
$31 40gb HD
$72 17" CRT monitor
why the hell would you want anything slower/smaller and why on earth would anyone complain about the quality of the low-end market being too great?
jesus the only car I can get for a dollar has 300hp and is insainly fuel efficient.. that is just TOO much car for me! I think I'll find something used at the junkyard
Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:5, Insightful)
Midrange is the best value (Score:5, Insightful)
With the crappy quality in most PC parts...the thing won't even last two or three years.
Re:Midrange is the best value (Score:3, Interesting)
My 3rd Gen iMac (slot-loading DV/SE 400Mghz) not only runs all but one of the applications my kids use, it also runs software I regularly use as well. So dooes the dual 450Mghz G4 tower wich handles all photoshop QuarkXPress and accounting for my wife's businesses. That machine, too, is
No, the problem is this: (Score:3, Interesting)
Or perha
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:5, Interesting)
I have been using a Abit BP6 2x400 Celeron w/128 (and now 384MB) since the boards were released (sometime in 1999?)
I don't want to upgrade. This machine runs XP just fine and it is only feeling slower now that I use a 2.66ghz w/1024MB at work. I wouldn't have noticed the slightest difference if I was only using a P3-700.
I am all for using a machine until it's dead. My machines aren't for games or graphics. They're for work and they do that well
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:5, Insightful)
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. $1,000 for a new PC may not sound like much to most slashdotters, but most slashdotters probably don't have kids, a mortgage and a car payment or two. Once you're in that situation $1,000 expense requires it's priority rising past a lot of other items.
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:5, Insightful)
In either case, educating these consumers could save them a LOT of money. This conversation was held on college campus, on that note...
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:3, Interesting)
"She was very upset because the one that had just 'died' was only a few months old. The way she described the 'deadness' reminded me of whatever the Windows virus was that rebooted your PC right after you started up."
This is an excellent point. Of all the clueless users I have ever met who had told me about their plans to buy a new computer, the primary reason that most of them had for wanting to do so was because thier old one was "broken", where broken=infected with virus's, spyware and broken apps. It
What Intel giveth... (Score:5, Funny)
It all depends on your needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It all depends on your needs... (Score:4, Funny)
*the only part I don't have yet
Re:It all depends on your needs... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It all depends on your needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
what? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:what? (Score:2)
Like this. [dumbentia.com]
Re:what? (Score:3, Interesting)
They display text (yellow on blue, at about 20x15 resolution) 24/7. The page updates maybe once every 3 or 4 minutes.
Every single one of these displays is run from a separate Windows XP installation. Some gimp at the Train company was suckered into paying for licenses for all of them.
They don't even use terminal services FFS!!! At le
For those of you under the age of 30... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:For those of you under the age of 30... (Score:5, Funny)
Settle down you two.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Settle down you two.. (Score:3)
Re:For those of you under the age of 30... (Score:2)
Re:For those of you under the age of 30... (Score:3, Informative)
THIS is a VT100 [vt100.net].
Could someone put this in terms of .... (Score:3, Funny)
I'm having hard time understanding this article...
Well, (Score:2, Interesting)
Here's a good example of 'lean and mean' (Score:5, Interesting)
Recently, during a home improvement trip to Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse [lowes.com], 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?
Re:Here's a good example of 'lean and mean' (Score:5, Funny)
$ ls -li
[...]
69687 -r-xr-xr-x 3 root wheel 96720 Dec 6 2003 less
69687 -r-xr-xr-x 3 root wheel 96720 Dec 6 2003 more
[...]
$ _
Correctamundo!
Re:Here's a good example of 'lean and mean' (Score:3, Informative)
But I do have a question -- the link count for the file is 3, so it's less, more, and what else?
Re:Here's a good example of 'lean and mean' (Score:3, Funny)
Bah... I don't believe in inodes. Everyone knows that inodes aren't real. I think they are nothing more than an elaborate farce, concocted by Linus Torvalds to sell more Penguins(tm).
Re:Here's a good example of 'lean and mean' (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, not only are more and less more or less the same, but there's actually more to it! And it's nothing less than page(1).
Thank you.
Passive cooling == silence (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Finally a voice of reason (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Finally a voice of reason (Score:5, Insightful)
Or encode video streams. Or compile code. Let's not paint with such a broad brush.
Re:Finally a voice of reason (Score:4, Interesting)
Where did this guy come from? (Score:2)
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.
Indeed. (Score:2)
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
Better Software (Score:5, Interesting)
It just seems lately they just have been coding software to be so bloated you need a faster computer to run it.
Re:Better Software (Score:4, Insightful)
And disk is often only an issue because there's not enough memory, and the machine has to swap.
-jim
here's the deal (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Less Might Be More... (Score:5, Funny)
Now who wants to trade my 486 and PII boxes for P4EE and AthlonFX??
less is more (Score:5, Funny)
(yes, I know how to block them)
XP Versus Previous Things (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
The sign of a TRUE geek (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The sign of a TRUE geek (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The sign of a TRUE geek (Score:3, Funny)
Damn straight!
It's all about running out to Fry's every week like a fucking lemming!
I can relate (Score:5, Interesting)
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).
Spyware & other junk... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
School Lab's (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not just your university (Score:5, Informative)
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".
Smaller OS & apps to go with lower spec compu (Score:3, Funny)
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 [rule-project.org] is one place to look.
Vector Linux [vectorlinux.com] is another.
Terminals are not cheap (Score:5, Informative)
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.
No, at least a VT102 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
It's a siily argument (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
CPU scaling (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Athlon-MP (Score:3, Informative)
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.
No! We need the overpowered PC (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
A 3GHz P4 is not overpowered... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Re:A 3GHz P4 is not overpowered... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Yeah, but I bet they took less resources to develop. Like it or not, hand-coding everything in assembly isn't practical for anything but the smallest things. Even if your application is three times as fast as your competitor's application, nobody will buy it as the people who need it will have bought your competitor's application a year before yours came out.
You might consider that attitude to be unprofessional, but the people paying developers' wages understand that the bottleneck isn't the processor but the brains of their developers.
Tech Headlines of the Living Dead (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Tech Headlines of the Living Dead (Score:3, Funny)
sentence
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'???????????
Double quotation marks are typically used to quote someone, except when nested parenthesis are required. Also, one question mark is enough. If you'd like to indicate that you are shocked to be asking the question, some people like to double up the exclamation mar
Adware Kills Systems (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
It's true (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Less might be more? Only one way to find out! (Score:5, Funny)
$ diff
Binary files
So the answer is a resounding "no". "less" is definitely *not* "more".
Hope that helps.
You insensitive clod! (Score:3, Funny)
This is a troll, right?
You miss the point I think (Score:3, Insightful)
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).
Right on! (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Software Guys... (Score:3, Interesting)
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?"
Re:We had to deal with this... (Score:3, Interesting)
However, that did drive them into the ground.
At their time of bankruptcy, they had $1.7 million dollars in outstanding cross-shipped hardware replacements or outstanding purchase orders, that they would never, ever call to collect on.
I kept a replacement monitor for 7 months on a 30-day return before they called to ask about it, and told me I had another 90 days to actually get it to them. (I never did, they went out of business first.)
Re:Stopping at Windows 2000 (Score:3, Insightful)