OT: New low for Microsoft!

[admin at kclinux.net]

And if your a gamer, Doom3 and Half Life 2 will definately need more 
horsepower than 700mhz. :)

Pedro Fernandes Macedo wrote:

> duncan brown wrote:
>
>> and computers that are around now are overpowered, people don't need 
>> more
>> than  3ghz, hell, most people don't need more than 700mhz (given enough
>> ram).  the new direction in chip fabrication needs to be slower, more
>> efficient, smaller and less power hungry.
>>  
>>
> Not exactly. It's overpowered for *normal* usage (with this I mean web 
> browsing , listening to mp3s , watching DVDs , etc).
>
> For people who work with computer science and computer related 
> researches , every extra clock cycle is usefull. For example... 
> Imagine that you are a network researcher and you've just written a 
> new protocol for a wireless sensor network. Then , you start running 
> it on NS (a network simulator). You need to gather data corresponding 
> to 1 day of network usage. If you have , let's say , a Pentium 2 
> machine with 256MB of ram , this may take months. If you have a 
> Pentium 4 3Ghz or a Athlon 64 3200+ with 1GB of ram , this may take 
> *only*  one or two weeks (which is a considerable economy , given that 
> usually programs dont work perfectly when you first compile them.. And 
> is most considerable when you need to run this simulation about 30 
> times to get data to write a paper about your project) .. And I'm not 
> joking. I dont work with NS , but my brother does.. His simulations 
> usually run for two days only to gather data about 1 Hour of network 
> usage...
>
> Or imagine you have a mailserver running Fedora + postfix + 
> spamassassin + amavisd for a domain that has about 1000 users. In my 
> last work , we had a mailserver (Pentium 4 , 2.8Ghz , 1Gb ram) running 
> suse + postfix+spamassassin and it works fine. We know that we need a 
> especial machine only for running amavisd (we were on a subdomain of 
> the university. The main server for the university was a dual xeon 
> server and it usually didnt survive the workload caused by amavis). So 
> , 3Ghz may be the *minimum* in certain circunstances..
>
> So , it may be overpowered in some circunstances.. like for my mother 
> , who uses her computer only to read e-mail and browse the net (but 
> she uses a 486 DX2 80mhz for that)... Anything above 400Mhz would be 
> unnecessary for her...
>
> -- 
> Pedro Macedo
>
>