Silvan wrote:

Buttonhole McGee wrote:

Gradually, this effect tends to drive good merchandise out of the
market entirely, leaving a generous selection of cheap crud.

Oh, I dunno. I have a $200 computer that's got a 40 gig hard drive, a 2
gig
processor, half a gig of ram... Sure, I got crap video and crap audio, a
crap mobo with only two slots, a comparatively small drive, no DVD stuff,
but damn, I got a ripping fast, perfectly functional computer for $200.

It wasn't all that long ago that I paid $800 for a CPU. Not that much
longer ago that $1/megabyte was a steal for hard drives. (That's really
scary when you think that the average low spec drive today in 2004 is
probably 80 gigs. By the old standard, it's an $81,920 drive. For $75.
Damn.)

I remember when there wasn't 80 gig of magnetic or electronic storage on the
entire planet. I remember when a 1 gig shop filled a couple of floors of a
large building.

My new laptop outperforms supercomputers that cost tens of millions of
dollars 20 years ago.

I just don't think it's quite a fair comparison. How much do people NEED
a
computer to do? My cheap computer does everything the dual 5 GHz 10
terabyte 4 gigabyte mega ultra hoo flutzy of my dreams could do, only
slower, and maybe a little less of it. It spends 90% of its time with a
CPU load average of near 0%.

I think the fact that super el-crappo low budget Wal-Mart consumer
computers today are a lot faster than the one I'm using now is really
great.

Moore's Law at work. Eventually they'll start hitting hard limits and the
pace of performance improvement will slow or stop. Right now development
is in the rapid-growth phase of the curve, kind of like aerospace was
between around 1920 to 1970, during which time they went from wooden
biplanes to footprints on the Moon, and even figured out one way to build a
starship. Since 1970 flight performance hasn't changed a great deal.
Stealth and so on are new, but they are peripheral to flight performance.

That's not at all the same thing as saying I love HF tools and I'm happy
to own my Suckmeister 3000 TS with extra sloppy arbor, double decibel,
ultra anemic motor, and extra flexible fence.


--
--John
Reply to jclarke at ae tee tee global dot net
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)