5 Jun
2013
5 Jun
'13
9:59 a.m.
At the end of
the day, in most thing, cost tends to win out.
Yes. *grumble* > I'd love to run Sun x86 workstations, or Macs,
as my PCs, but I
> can't afford to. I have PCs to earn me money, not as a hobby, so I
> run the absolute cheapest kit I can
My SS20s, my X4100, my Power Macintoshes, my Alphas, _were_ "the
absolute cheapest kit". They all came my way for $0.
So did my peecees. But...
My approach is a bit different, and is summed up by
the old line,
"I'm not rich enough to use cheap tools."
...I've run a lot of Suns, VAXen, etc. And I've run a lot of peecees.
(More of the former than the latter, because people throw out more of
them as they scroll off their idea of the low end.) Even after
correcting for machine-hours run, the peecees exhibit much higher
failure rates. Maybe one or two of my dozen or two Suns have failed.
I'm not sure I have even _one_ working peecee made contemporarily with
those Suns.
It's not accidental that my screen-and-keyboard machines are SS20s.
Even though they are significantly slower at things like screen
response than the peecees. (Part of that is the use of a type-3
keyboard, but I could have made it work well on a peecee if I'd really
wanted to.)
I particular, toward the second reaction, people have
been trying to
tell me that "serious computers" are "going away" for a very long
time.
Heh. It's not restricted to hardware. The first language which was
supposed to make programmers unnecessary is older than almost any
computer still operating, and programmers are perhaps even more
necessary than ever.
Lots of people shop at Wal*Mart, but not everyone puts
up with the
garbage.
Some of my friends do, even.
I think I have some idea why. (Of course, some don't know how horrid a
company they are, but I'm ignoring those.) It's taking the
immedate-term view of cost that I sketched above, only in a different
form: they cannot afford not to. It's one of the ways in which our
society is deeply broken - those who most need to save money are, in
far too many ways, least able to do so. The ones who are in the
tightest straits financially, who most need to save money, also have
the least ability to do bulk buys, to casually shop on the other side
of town because that store has a better deal...or to spend a little
more today so as to continue to have choice tomorrow.
I'm not sure how relevant this is to computing, perhaps except that
they're both related to paying attention to only immediate-term cost.
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