Kind of a cool idea, but the tests were clearly cherry-picked. I liked this comment.
Interesting, but moot. Your 4MB mac would crawl to a halt with any non-trivial office document. Sure, find/replace may nearly equal itself in time; but on a modern computer you could be doing that with the same speed while -many- other applications were running. How about other common business functions - reporting? An average sized mail merge into an average sized document would have smoked that mac.
Sure, common tasks may not have improved - on their own. But to say productivity has not increased... I strongly disagree. Multitasking has greatly improved. Boot times are moot; many office users do not even shut their computers down. Dare I even mention networking? Drop a 100MB 10baseT in there, and watch the CPU cycles bleed away, while the modern PC scoffs.
Bad test, one that serves no purpose other than to rouse the luddites.
When I rebuilt my machine last week, I decided to stick with XP because it can do everything I want. The machine is faster, but for the most part I can't tell since it was already faster than I was.
I have been seriously thinking aout moving to a cheaper LINUX machine next time I have to repair this one.
Valid point. I think the real thing to take away from this is do we really need the OS bloat we're getting? And to point out just how much of the cpu we're losing to shiny distractions. In that respect Linux should be more powerful, but at the cost of significantly greater complexity in configuration.
I don't think we need much of the new software that's coming out. I still use Corel version 8 for graphics editing and I can't think of a feature that I want that it doesn't have. I think they're on version 12 now.
Like medicine, software mods seem to be addressing smaller and smaller segments of the population as most of us had our requirements met years ago. What really turns me on now are the tiny, embeddable niche applications for my blog. I can't imagine what Office 2007 has that I need.
3 comments:
Kind of a cool idea, but the tests were clearly cherry-picked. I liked this comment.
Interesting, but moot. Your 4MB mac would crawl to a halt with any non-trivial office document. Sure, find/replace may nearly equal itself in time; but on a modern computer you could be doing that with the same speed while -many- other applications were running. How about other common business functions - reporting? An average sized mail merge into an average sized document would have smoked that mac.
Sure, common tasks may not have improved - on their own. But to say productivity has not increased... I strongly disagree. Multitasking has greatly improved. Boot times are moot; many office users do not even shut their computers down. Dare I even mention networking? Drop a 100MB 10baseT in there, and watch the CPU cycles bleed away, while the modern PC scoffs.
Bad test, one that serves no purpose other than to rouse the luddites.
When I rebuilt my machine last week, I decided to stick with XP because it can do everything I want. The machine is faster, but for the most part I can't tell since it was already faster than I was.
I have been seriously thinking aout moving to a cheaper LINUX machine next time I have to repair this one.
Valid point. I think the real thing to take away from this is do we really need the OS bloat we're getting? And to point out just how much of the cpu we're losing to shiny distractions. In that respect Linux should be more powerful, but at the cost of significantly greater complexity in configuration.
I don't think we need much of the new software that's coming out. I still use Corel version 8 for graphics editing and I can't think of a feature that I want that it doesn't have. I think they're on version 12 now.
Like medicine, software mods seem to be addressing smaller and smaller segments of the population as most of us had our requirements met years ago. What really turns me on now are the tiny, embeddable niche applications for my blog. I can't imagine what Office 2007 has that I need.
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