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)
Why are they buying it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:5, Insightful)
It all depends on your needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of us? (Score:1, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Re:inevitable (Score:3, Insightful)
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...
School Lab's (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:inevitable (Score:1, Insightful)
Well that and more bloated code. Seriously people, what has changed so damn much since my 486sx clocked at 25 mhz could compile the kernel in a couple minutes. Now I try to set up a k6-2 clocked at 450 mhz as a media player, whoops it turns out i can compile in half an hours. Sweet, progress.
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.
Laptop Battery Life (Score:2, Insightful)
Show me a P4-3Ghz laptop that can do that!
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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.
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.
Re:Incorrect analogy (Score:1, Insightful)
For this reason, buying the latest and greatest computer is one of the most irrational purchases. People who ignore this simple rule are the same people who buy a powerful computer 'built to last'. Of course, knowing Moore's Law makes this solution untenable.
I am constantly amazed by how often people blow off the advice to buy 6 month old hardware (at a cost of about 1/5 of the fastest components) every 1.5 years rather than brand new software that will be useful for 3 years max. The 6 month old hardware will be sufficient for now, and with new hardware in a year and a half, I will have a faster computer then at a lower overall cost.
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.
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: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
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.
Need 'em to run MS crap (Score:1, Insightful)
How many offices turn over their PC's every few years just so they can run MS Windows so they can run Word? Lots and lots and lots. Ridiculous.
Re:Joe Sixpack is looking for "useful life" (Score:2, Insightful)
Were they perhaps in a parked car on the side of the road?
Re:inevitable (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, at work we just replaced a Sun SparcStation 10 which was the only webserver for a university department. ~500MB SCSI hard drive. 30MHz TMS390 Sparc CPU. Continuous uptime since it was switched on, when bought new. It never failed, not even the hard drive, and the fans are pretty clogged with dust.
Sun hardware rocks
At home I use a lot of old stuff, I'm posting this from a 5 year old Sun Ultra 10 @333MHz running Gentoo and kept up to date software-wise (firefox 1.0PR, etc). Also have a 6 year old dual P2-333, a 3 year old P4 1.4, and a <1 year old P4 3.06 laptop for when just pure power is needed. The laptop (most powerful) sees the least use of everything, and the U10 (least powerful) sees the most.
Modern software is just getting insanely bloated, and that's all there is to it.
Re:It all depends on your needs... (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:It's not just your university (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Re:Incorrect analogy (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Finally a voice of reason (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:A 3GHz P4 is not overpowered... (Score:1, Insightful)
In this case a 3GHz processor is absolutely overpowered. A less powerful processor would perform no worse.
C++ is not better than assembler for writing device drivers
I think that depends a great deal on how complicated and time sensitive your device is. Most of the Linux kernel is written in C, and it does alright. C++ isn't that much worse with modern compilers, and it makes it somewhat easier to produce stable code.
Re:Incorrect analogy (Score:1, Insightful)
Motherboards are NOT the first thing to give out. The recent (late 2002 and later) problems with capacitors going out has been an industry-wide problem. However, for the larger part of history (and I presume the present as well) this has not been an issue.
In other words, just because YOUR caps have failed, doesn't mean they all do.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/f
Re:Stopping at Windows 2000 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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).
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:Incorrect analogy (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe so but since 1986, I am on my second car. My first ran from 1986 to 1996, while my second is still happily running. During that time I have gone through 14 different computers, from TI-99 (if you can call it that) to my current set. Mind you some are still running (4 to be exact) but the rest have died along the way.
I try to take good care of my cars and my computers, its just that computers fail pretty much in the short term, usually right after the warranty expires and of course the lure of a new machine, at a mere multiple of the price to fix the old one always seems to win out. Case in point a laptop died recently, it would need a motherboard replacement (out of warranty of course) at a cost of $600 dollars. Instead I bought my wife a new laptop for $900, which was about 4 times faster.
--laz