On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 4:45 PM, Jean Christophe Andr? <jean-christophe.andre at auf.org> wrote:
> Also, you are lucky to have a 2 GB RAM computer, but what about > not-that-old computers in school (or elsewhere) that can't be upgraded > because nobody sells that kind of old RAM anymore? Should they beg for > money to buy new computers? That's the Microsoft's way of thinking, not > the GNU/Linux one? I don't think that is the Microsoft way of thinking, I can still recall when I tried Vietkey Linux ;-) on a machine with like, 64 or 32 MB of RAM! And nowadays Ubuntu requires at least 256 MB to run on, and 512 MB is recommended (if I'm not wrong, sorry I am too lazy to google that, but just think like something that is significantly more than what it was in the past). So I would say the point is that the OS (for the masses) in general should use and should use efficiently whatever an average Joe has, and not what a grandma has - and yeah, you can make a distro for grandmas, but a distro like Ubuntu or a wm like KDE doesn't *nessearily* have to run on grandmas' PCs. And in reality, they didn't do that. I also think that in general, accelerate stuff by using powerful hardware is a 'more efficient' idea than trying to twist your code to bits to speed things up. Machines are cheap, manpower (to optimize stuff to bits) is expensive. You can make your program really lean, and run really fast by coding it in assembly but in general the idea is is worse than using something more advanced to do it faster and scarify a little bit of performance. -- Huan Truong PLUG: Technology, Security and You - Ngu?n tin c?ng ngh? Vi?t ng? h?ng ??u - http://tnhh.info/tsu/
