Quirky News Article
Interestingly, today's papers contained an article which caught my attention: Hangin* ont* old PCs t_o cu*t c*ost_s? It's ba*d f*or pr*odu_ctiv*ity. This article talked about how "old an_d* sluggish" computers end up reducing productivity, and the possible trends in which companies get new computers. Sales of c*mputers was also reported to have decreased by certain figures in the last q*uarter. Interestingly, it cited an example about some A_T&T employ*es suing the company for not paying tem the exra 3*0 mins they had to waste in starting up and shutting down the computer.
In my opinion... that's strange talk. I suppose the writer had made the following assumptions:
1. Most offices are into 3D-gaming, graphics processing, video editing, complex algorithm processing...
2. A vista is faster than an XP machine, as much as an XP machine is faster than a win2k,98,95 machine. And hey, the latest version of windows is definitely gonna be faster than the current vista. Yup, yup, it must be...
3. The faster the machine runs, the greater the productivity. Thus, if my old computer could calculate the sum of 20 items in 0.005 seconds when I click on the add button, and this new machine could do the same on 0.001 seconds, hey, that's a 400% improvement! Wow, I'm so going to get a new machine at any rate...
4. Most old computers that companies are super old and laggy. While hard disk defragmentation, uninstallation of unused software, configuration for maximum performance and a registry cleanup may possible speed up a computer over 2-3 times in really jialat (i.e. worst-of-the-worse) circumstances/computers, it makes more sense in spending a few thousand dollars to replace them all.
5. Some geniuses probably tried installing XP on a pentium 2 or below, a vista on a pentium 3 or below, and probably the latest operating system on a pentium 4 or below, and all with 256 mb or less of RAM =)
6. Programs are getting more efficient and smaller in size. In short, an office 2007 would work faster and require less hard disk space than office 2003 on the same machine, a 2003 faster than a 2000, a 2000 faster than a 97... etc.
7. With the increasing amount of processing power over time, speed limitations due to hard disk and RAM being the bottlenecks can be ignored. (i.e. if my ram is at 533 mHz (and most calculations require RAM) and my processor is at 4 GHz, getting a 4 GHz duo core PC with 667 MHz ram would mean a doubling in speed although there is a 667 MHz bottleneck. ???!!!) As for had disk speeds... haha, I doubt I need to elaborate on them...
8. With the increase of processing power (i.e. hardware), software will automatically catch up in utilising that power (although from history, software has always lagged behind hardware. for example, the 32-bit windows XP of today. Did you know that currently, hardware supports up to 128 bit already? Note: Bits indicate the amount of information that can be processed at each clock cycle. As such, a 32 bit processor could process twice the information as a 16-bit processor and hence, could operate twice as fast).
9. Of all countries, S*ng*pore is technically backward such that most offices still rely on MS-DOS or windows 95 as their sole operating system with the bare, bare, really bare minimal specs of hard disk space <200 MB and RAM <8 MB... And many companies are reaaaaly laaaaagging out theeeeeere...
Thought: Hmmm, I never knew engineering required that many assumptions of that kind of scale in any given problem.
posted by Glass Cookie @ 1:54 PM
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Well, since strings sound somewhat soft, and somewhat muffled such that demisemiquavers are not to distinct, and considering it does take up time and there are 5 other pieces to go, and considering this is but 2 bars in a 100 bar piece, and considering blah blah blah... sometimes I play just a note. (OK, most of the time, happy?) Hey, I'm not the only keyboardist around guilty right? Someone tell me I'm not the only one... pleeeese....