On Sun, 22 Jul 2018 20:59:32 -0400, J. Clarke
wrote:

On Sun, 22 Jul 2018 15:52:25 -0700, OFWW
wrote:

On Sat, 21 Jul 2018 09:04:15 -0400, J. Clarke
wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jul 2018 21:14:43 -0700, OFWW
wrote:

On Thu, 19 Jul 2018 22:54:08 -0400, J. Clarke
wrote:

On Wed, 18 Jul 2018 22:47:55 -0400, Bill wrote:

I accidentally deleted the post, but someone (Jack?) wrote that
he was tired of hardware systems lasting only 3 years.

It seems that systems sold at retail (Best Buy?) are built that
way, so that you come back to replace them. If you assemble your
own, using quality components, you can expect it to have a
lifetime alot longer than 3 years..long enough the you'll
probably be ready to replace the system for other reasons before
it stops. The purchase price will be a bit higher. But you will
also be in a much better position to service it if you want to
upgrade it. I just wanted to mention that this alternative option
is available. I think that once you do it, you'll never again
settle for someone else's choices (in a system).

FWIW, my 200 Mhz Pentium Thinkpad still works fine. It's not really
useful today but it boots and runs. One doesn't have to build a
machine to get quality, one does though have to get a machine that
isn't intended to be a loss-leader.

And it takes a long time for a system to become obsolete due to
inadequate performance today. At work we replaced our 3 year old
laptops with new ones with higher spec and there is no noticeable
difference in performance. Performance improvements have been coming
slowly for a long time--having more gates at the same clockspeed
builds paper performance but you don't see it in the real world unless
you have a process that can be parallelized.

You can really tell the difference when processing, converting, etc.
Graphics, or responses from a db and on large spreadsheets, but most
notable with graphics.

Our old machines had Intel graphics, our new machines have Intel
graphics. If graphics mattered to us we would have nvidia.


Intel does have the option of nice graphics suitable for gamers and
video processing, although my favorite has always been Nvidia.

So Intel claims. Some games can bring a dual 1080ti to its knees. It
isn't just looking nice that matters, it has to be able to render in
realtime.

As for responses from a db and on large spreadsheets, there are times
when we have all cores of the machine running 100% for hours at a
time. We work these machines hard. The only significant performance
gain in our new machines is that they have two more cores than the old
machines--that gets us a performance boost but to get the two more
cores we had to get management approval for the enhanced
configuration--if we had just gone with the ordinary refresh we would
have had the same number of cores as previously.

Are you running your db's and spreadsheets locally?

We aren't running spreadsheets, we're running APL, Python, or C# code.
The spreadsheet is just used to format the output and give us an
easily comprehensible record of the setup.

And yes, we are running locally. What would be the benefit of running
a spreadsheet remotely?


It depends on the use of the spreadsheet.

Network I/O is not our bottleneck--we shadow all data to a local solid
state drive before we run.