Sorry if this comes through twice. My mailer is acting up. I know better than to continue an OT thread, but there are a few points worth considering here. True in the way Moore's Law is usually thought of. But when he stated his "law" Moore wasn't talking about speed; he was talking about the number of transistors. He foresaw the rate at which transistor sizes could be shrunk. Now, for a long time, making the transistors smaller made them faster and the overall CPU was also faster. That's less the case than it used to be, in part because the on-chip interconnects don't benefit as much. On top of that, we just kept making the discrepency between CPU and memory speeds greater and greater, putting more and more demand on the cache. So rather than using the additional transistors to create an implementation that's even faster (e.g. increased pipelining), we're now using them for additional cache and for multiple cores. And that's we where start to hit Ahmdal's Law. As the parallel guys have known for years, not all tasks parallelize nicely. There's probably not much to gain from implementing a word processor with multiple concurrent threads. So what does all this mean? Even though the physicists are clever enough to keep the "end of Moore's Law" always 10 years in the future (which I've been hearing for at least 20 yeasrs), Moore's law doesn't necessarily buy us the performance increase we're used to. And that's before we even look at software bloat. There is once class of user that's large enough and willing enough to fork out dollars that there's still a point in pushing performance as much as we can. That's the gamers, the guys that keep moving toward a day when their game is so immersive and so realistic that they can't always tell whether they're in the game or the real world. And it turns out that some of the things we need to do in those games do parallelize nicely. So I expect we will continue to see some of the continued growing overkill of system performance for uses like e-mail and browsing. But then the people who took the web and twisted it from being a solid information distribution world to an entertainment medium will find ways to use those cycles. Now I shall slink off and punish myself with many lashes of a wet noodle for contributing OT material. My only excuse is that I mentioned hearing about the end of Moore's law for 20 years :-) BLS