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Still not convinced that processor speed increases alone are enough to make computers better. I wish people would stop worrying about how many Mhz their CPU is, and worry about how the system runs as a whole.
And IMHO network bandwidth is almost as important as speed. I'd much rather have a 350mhz on 100Mbit versus a Ghz monster on 14.4 modem, after all.
The same argument goes with battery life on laptops. Who once a Ghz laptop if you can only use it untethered for an hour or two.
Rya
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The worst evil of the modern world are computers. They are the disaster of our civilization. There's only one thing worse of computers - Internet.
Though, I'm working as a programmer (a system one) - i hate computers, they ruin our world.
rezdm
icq: 8913430
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Yeah, and the worst part is: they're still not fast enough! 
I hope you're getting your daily dosage of happiness somehow. I'm sure you don't feel so great about being an accomplice to the "disaster" which,
a. puts food on your plate,
b. allows you to vent your frustrations to the world,
c. allows you to read what other people in your field think,
d. stimulates your mind to solve problems,
e. gives your fingers a workout,
f. makes you laugh,
g. etc.
Regards,
Alvaro
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but computers & inet become the only thing to a-f, et
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Nowadays, every owner of a black leather couch would say: Hating the thing that feeds you quickly turns into hating yourself. But back in medieval times,Landlords ruined the civilization. The owned the land, opressed the peasants, etc. But for the peasant: the landlord was the one who gave them the land, gave them a chance to make their (hard) living; and prevented them from falling into harder forms of slavery or simply starving.
IMHO, the worst evil nowadays are not computers, but lawyers (although many of my friends are). They make their own rules, and make the world living by these rules; and soon they will have destroyed all the fun you can have with the Net and computers. But I must admit, they probably have prevented quite some wars and quarrels, and millions of deaths, probably.
Civilization isn't "good" or "bad", Civilization just IS. An absolutely "ethically good" world order would be the one where you can freely choose what civilization to live in. But that's impossible for various reasons... not only lawyers and computers.
Peter
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I totally agree.
Why can't they train little monkeys to do the job
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They are not fast enought ;-
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You guys seem to be talking about home computers, not the developer's ones. To surf the net or play MP3s, a 500Mhz pentium is quite enough, but I am working on a project that takes an hour to build in debug mode, and ~6 hours in production release mode on my PIII 750Mhz/384M/Barracuda 28G/7200rpm computer... Of course, upgrading to 1G cpu for $1000+ makes little sense, but I will definitely consider an upgrade as prices drop
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Can I ask, what in the world are you building that takes so long?
Actually, a while back I was on a project that linked about 60 FORTRAN source files and 30 C/C++ files. The thing would take like an hour to rebuild (but this was on a "top-of-the-line" P90Mhz/32M system). Then I noticed that there were a lot of machines in the office just sitting around most of the time so I wrote a couple of batch files which would each build about 30 of the source files in the group. When I would start a rebuild, I would go to all the machines and run the batch files simultaneously. The whole process was cut down to about 30 minutes -- linking all the files at the end was still very slow.
I bet that would be an interesting project for you to tackle... having a "build server" that farms the build to other machines which are idle. I wonder if there's anything like that out there.
Regards,
Alvaro
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compiler.NET or even linker.NET ?
Sorry, couldn't resist
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I don't think this would be a violation of my non-disclosure agreement if I say that it's a CAD program, ~720K lines of C++ code, ~25M in ~1750 files... Not the biggest project in our company, BTW.
It's actually a good idea to have a networked build system, and I wonder why there is nothing like that on the market. At least I could find nothing when 4 years ago we looked for such a thing. We even developed a 'networked make', but then dropped it because we had no time to polish it. Of course, the network should me fast enough, but 1000Mbit cards are going to be out there pretty soon...
Best,
Yuri
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I seem to recall there being a Windows/C++ compiler a while back, from I think Watcom, that had a network build feature. Unfortunately I don't think it survived.
Regards,
Alvar
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Symantec C++ had a feature to distribute compilation jobs around a network, FWIW.
(Not that we ever used it at Symantec. NAV and NU still use freakin' batch files to build most of their stuff.
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They're not fast enough when you take games into account,
and all of what's desired. I'd personally like to see the
hair move independantly with shadows for each biped in a
game. Facial movements for expression. Better ai, more open
terrain for free movement.
With todays machines this isn't realistic... more more more..
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Since 300MHz, the bottleneck for PC performance has been the memory and I/O subsystem.
I've notice a far greater performance increase by switching from 5400RPM to 7200RPM and 10000RPM drives than I've ever experienced from processor clock increases.
And I've gotten even more performance by utilizing RAID technology to distribute the data across multiple fast drives.
Steven J. Ackerman, Consultant
ACS, Sarasota, FL
http://www.acscontrol.com
sja@gte.net
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Point taken, but it depends on what you usually do with the machine.
If you are encoding AVI files to MPEG-4, utilizing RAID technology will not boost the speed very much.
Raw power is needed!
With that in mind, it is still a shame that so few applications are SMP aware and capable
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Not SMP aware? Most of the programs aren't even "multithreading aware". SMP looks too far away from this point. Perhaps new type of OS, new language, new compilers will be able to help the world
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If all you do with your computer is to type in text with a keyboard, I guess you wont need a faster one. But if for some reason you'd like to use your puter for something else other than as a wodprocessor with limited input devices such as a keyboard or mouse (pen for pda's), you'll need more horsepower.
And dont forget the coolness factor when you tell your friends that your puter is x times faster then theirs =
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The coolness factor seems to be the only reason I would consider updating my current machine. I'm running a PIII 450 w/ 128Mb, and it cruises. Each time I see a new laptop I drool over the thought of a new 750 or above, but will they _really_ make that much difference?
Actually, the reason I posted the poll is becuase I get asked once a fortnight by various friends/relatives/strange people in the street/whatever what sort of computer they should buy. I find it really hard to answer (like asking "what sort of car should I buy"), but all the salespeople really push the new faster processors. I'm just not so sure the value for money is there.
Still - if I had the cash and was looking for a new 'puter I'd be totally sucked in to buying whatever I could afford (second mortgage? No problem!)
cheers,
Chris Maunde
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Chris, it all depends on what you do with your computer. My old P166 is working fine, but Quake3 is way too slow on it. And I'm not even going to try to install Win2K on it..
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Well, the basic maxim of hardware upgrades is that you decide how much you can afford to spend on hardware, then buy the best that you can get for that money. Then you use it until software you want to use is unacceptably slow. That's what I always tell people. I also tell them that for everything except the latest games, a low-end PC will be fine for two years or so.
For me, my P-75 (bought from summer earnings between my freshman and sophomore year of college) was unacceptably slow a year ago, but I was also short on cash. If I had money last year, I would've ended up with something like what you have, and wouldn't even think of upgrading it now.
Instead, I bought a new computer earlier this month, and it's a P3-800. It runs Win2K, not Win95, and has more RAM on its video card than my old system had, total -- and I went with the cheap video card. And everything is a lot faster.
Will I drool over 2 GHz P4s next year? Maybe. Will I buy one? Not a chance. Will I buy another upper-midrange box in 3-5 years? Almost certainly
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The faster your computer, the more you want to do with it. I have a 500+ MHz Pentium that is a "spare". If I set it up with my first Windows configuration (Windows 3.1, Word 2.0, Excel 4.0) it would certiainly fly. But all I use it for now is storing and playing music from WAV files. For that, it is not quite fast enough. There are sometimes slight gaps in the songs from the drive trying to catch up, and the drive is always running. And there is no way I could run another app at the same time.
For every new computer I ever bought, it took about 1 day to find some useful task that maxed out its performance
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Have you ever tried setting up Win 3.1 on a "current" technology machine? It just flies, I mean it is stunning how fast it runs. Makes me scratch my head sometimes when I'm booking up Win2K or 98se, and wait, and wait.
It's booting that really drags me down, I can live with the operational speed of my poor old PIII-500, but rebooting sucks.
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I just updated the BIOS of my Motherboard so that it now supports the Hibernate feature of W2K. At least for normal shutdowns and reboots, not ones for product installations (weren't those supposed to stop due to System File Protection?), My computer will come back up in 10 seconds flat, with all my apps open and ready. I was quite amazed
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