21 Jul
2003
21 Jul
'03
3:55 a.m.
Quothe Fred N. van Kempen, from writings of Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 10:30:07AM +0200:
On Fri, 18 Jul 2003, Zane H. Healy wrote:
I don't think this is a valid point. The
*average* PC user doesn't do
incremental Upgrades, just like the average Mac user doesn't.
Indeed; they
lack the skills to do so. Which is usually why they call
upon their (more) geeky friends to do that for them. Down here, I see people change their hardware at least
once every year,
and the really geeky ones even more often. The lost ones are in a
[...]
Something about all of this upgrade mania makes no sense to me.
Upgrading just for the sake of upgrading seems rather pointless. If I
need more disk space, I'll just add another drive, or another file
server. If speed becomes an issue, which it rarely does (I'm talking
about UNIX, not Windoze with all of it's super-duper crash-happy
bloatware), I'll do processing on a faster system on the network, find
a faster system at a hamfest, replace a PC's CPU with a faster CPU,
etc... whatever's cheapest. A 200 MHz CPU on a PC running FreeBSD,
for example, is plenty fast for most things, from compiling large
programs to the kind of processing needed for LaTeX (when writing
manuscripts hundreds of pages long), Csound and Lilypond. Peripherals
such as keyboards, monitors and laser printers go for many, many,
years without being replaced, unless they become unrepairable or
higher-resolution is needed... 1280 x 1024 and 1024 x 768 displays
have been available for many years. Tape drives - those only get
replaced with higher-capacity drives as storage needs increase.
Network cards... well, those old 10MBit/s cards from a decade or so
ago still work fine.
To get this thread more on topic for the list, I can also think of
many programs that run, with very satisfactory performance, on many
classic systems, from 1MHz Z80 systems, to various PDP-11s, C-64s,
Sun-4/110, and assorted MicroVAXen, etc. :-)
--
Copyright (C) 2003 R. D. Davis The difference between humans & other animals:
All Rights Reserved an unnatural belief that we're above Nature &
rdd(a)rddavis.org 410-744-4900 her other creatures, using dogma to justify such
http://www.rddavis.org beliefs and to justify much human cruelty.