Paul Rubin wrote: > How old is your computer, why did you buy it, and is it the first one > you ever owned? > > For most of us, I suspect, it is not our first one, and we bought it > to get a processing speedup relative to the previous one.
My computer is about eight months old, and I bought it because the previous one died. > If such > speedups were useless or unimportant, we would not have blown our hard > earned cash replacing perfectly good older hardware, Oh the assumptions in that statement... "Blowing hard-earned cash" assumes that people buy computers only when they need to. That's certainly not true -- there's a lot of irrational purchases involved. I have a friend who has just recently spent $2000 on storage so he can store more games and videos, which he cheerfully admits he'll never play or watch. He describes it as his "dragon's horde": it is for knowing it's there, not for using. Often hardware is upgraded because it's broken, or because you can't get parts, or because the software you need will only run on newer machines. I say *newer* rather than *faster*, because speed is only sometimes a factor in why software won't run on old machines. My old Mac running a 68030 in 1990 ran Microsoft Word perfectly fast enough for even advanced word processing needs, and nearly twenty years later, there's nothing I need from a word processor that I couldn't do in 1990. > so we have to > accept the concept that speed matters and ignore those platitudes that > say otherwise. The *perception* that speed matters, matters. The reality is that the majority of computing tasks outside of certain specialist niches are I/O bound, not CPU. Office server software is rarely CPU bound, and when it is, in my experience there's one rogue process using all the CPU: the software is broken, and a faster CPU would just let it be broken at a faster speed. Gamers need better graphics cards and more memory, not faster CPUs. Internet surfers need faster ethernet, more bandwidth and more memory, not faster CPUs. Graphics designers need bigger hard drives and more memory, not faster CPUs. (Hmm. There seems to be a pattern there...) Of course, there are a few niches that do require faster CPUs: video editing, some (but by no means all) Photoshop filters, number crunching, etc. But even for them, you can often get more bang-for-your-buck performance increase by adding more memory. Speaking for myself, I'd happily take a 20% slower CPU for more reliable, faster DVD/CD burning. What do I care if it takes my computer 120ms to open a window instead of 100ms, but I care a lot if it takes me 10 minutes to make a coaster instead of 7 minutes to make a good disc. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
