> how did we get here? "personal oppertunities"? > Oh, I'm obscurely asking whether in fact your faster computer does provide the additional time and opportunity one might expect it to. In my experience, it doesn't. Not only, but the additional unreliability (fans conking out topping a peculiarly rich list of failure modes) leads to frustration and stress, at least in my case. And very poor productivity.
> all i'm saying is that it is not true that using a computer is now > slower than it used to be. > Yes it is. Just hunting down a floppy that has no bad sectors consumes significant fractions of my working day. Even out the box. CD-ROMs seem to develop faults and brand new drives can't read them. Memory is unreliable and unavailable for any but the latest models of motherboards, not to talk of CPUs and adapters. And a friend whinged that ATA is no longer supported on recent motherboards. He's just invested in 6 swappable trays, so he's got good reason to be miffed. Hell, I was thinking that gaming had improved considerably, but my favourite game recently managed to hang the system the first time I tried it on a fresh Win'98 installation. > who rembers pc 5ΒΌ" disk drives? sppppt chunk chunk chunk ... > spppppt chunk chunk chunk brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrf. all for 64k. I wish I still had my Osborne model II to prove that I can still read 90K floppies with working versions of SuperCalc, WordStar and DBase2, whereas I have no ways of running mountains of Windows software because my best available platform is a 400MHz Celeron with only 64MB of RAM. In fact, Ubuntu Linux takes exception of my 2.4GHz Celeron board that has only 128MB of RAM and runs about as fast as it does on the above, which is perfectly unusable. ++L PS: I warrant that conditions here are hardly the norm, but I am a sophisticated computer user and only rarely do I get the benefits of Moore's law, whereas I am constantly reminded of the corollary you reject. Perhaps I ought to have been less specific about software bloat, but hopefully I'll have explained why I believe all these "advances" are not progress.
