On Friday, April 4, 2003, at 03:49 PM, Eric D. wrote: > I really wonder where things'll go. I think that in the next few years > we'll > see a make-or-break situation for computers and OSes. > >
[snip] > About the only thing that's really demanding on CPUs is the modern > video > game, and, for that I'd rather have a console than a computer any day. > Video > games stress a computer physically and I'd rather pound away on an > attachment to a $300 console than the keyboard on a $2000 laptop > (which does > a worse job of playing games anyway). > > This was a good summary of where we are, and I agree with it. It's analogous in many ways to photography (another of my interests); while digital cameras are still changing dramatically, there are a whole load of SLR users out there using 10, 20, even 30 years old equipment. I own a 43-year-old fully-manual Leica, which I even use sometimes, and on the occasions when I get the exposure calculation in my head right, the pics I get are probably better than from any other camera I own. Most of the time, however, I use one of my EOS's but even there I prefer to use one that's 14 years old and another one that's about 10 years old. The big improvements in camera & lens technologies (aspheric lenses, programmed exposure control, autoexposure - and I do recognise that not everyone regards all/any of those as 'improvements') have all happened, there's little difference between this year's new Canon EOS and last year's or the year before's. Going back to computers, however, one area that might tempt a user towards a newer machine might be stuff that we don't do professionally but nonetheless do do, occasionally. As a an amateur photographer I like to do my own image processing and output the results to my photo-quality inkjet printer. There's no doubt that CPU-intensive tasks like that benefit from a faster system, and (in the case of Macs) specifically from a G4 as against an equivalent-speed G3. There can be other benefits from a later machine, too - more ram may available, bigger/faster cacheing (though not in the case of the 12" PB), faster system bus, and all of these may well produce better performance for that sort of usage. So there are benefits from upgrading, though they may not be compelling ones. Tom Burke -- G-Books is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics http://www.smalldog.com | Refurbished Drives | -- Check our web site for refurbished PowerBooks | & CDRWs on Sale! | Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> G-Books list info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-books.html> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/g-books%40mail.maclaunch.com/> --------------------------------------------------------------- >The Think Different Store http://www.ThinkDifferentStore.com ---------------------------------------------------------------
