[plug] SME PC hardware linux supplier?

[James Devenish]

In message <20041110214808.288863d9.harrymc at decisions-and-designs.com.au>
on Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 09:48:08PM +0800, Harry wrote:
> (Based on what we can achieve out of an old box at Computer Angels we
> could be doing most things with 200MHz as long as there is reasonable
> RAM).
...
> My main 800Mz desktop sits at 99% idle when the mouse is stationary!

I have to admit that it took me a long time to grow out of the 250MHz
range, and I am still often happy with sub-1GHz speeds. Despite being
a "power user", it seems to take several years to for me to lose my
affinity for outdated speeds. It fascinates me why users want faster
workstations (i.e. I just don't "get it" half the time) although "peak
performance capacity" seems to be a factor. That is, people feel the
need for a computer that's overpowered 98% of the time because they
focus on goals that represent the other 2%. Some major software vendors
also do nothing to help in this regard, since they are particularly
sloppy with their applications' progressive sloth (*waves to Adobe, Sun
and friends*). I'm not sure whether people want faster computers to try
to eliminate particular personal "bottlenecks", or if it's just because
they want their computer to act "smoother". I do appreciate that if you
move from, say, a 200MHz machine to a 2GHz machine, there are profound
and beneficial shifts in the way you can interact with software. But
perhaps my conservatism is both a cause and effect of my heavy use of
text-based interfaces. There are certainly technological advances that
make newer processors, architectures and systems very attractive, but
raw switching speed is necessarily such an interest in those cases.