OT: old hardware - was Re: "to outlaw general purpose computers"

Sunder sunder at sunder.net
Wed Jul 10 07:30:13 PDT 2002


On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Harmon Seaver wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 03:17:52PM -0400, Sunder wrote:
> > 
> > Sure, you can revive old hardware with Linux, but you'll find it runs KDE
> > 3.0 or GNOME slower than windows 95 did on the same hardware.  So unless
> > you're willing to also go to older software (or at least less demanding
> > software) you've still got a useless machine.
> 
>    What? Your brand of crack must be particularly poor these days. A 200mhz
> cyrix cpu runs linux w/gnome fast enough for most anything. Slower than
> w95??? Come again? I've run 1ghz boxes and they really don't surf the net much
> faster, so what's your point?

You missed the entire forrest of course by concentrating on a single pine
needle from a single branch of a single pine tree.


Fine, have it your way:

Yeah? Which gnome? 1.0?  I wasn't concerned much about internet throughput
as much as display rendering of shit like rendering menus and such.  

Oh, what, did you expect me to use Lynx maybe?

Let's also not forget that the older machines have limits on memory, which
also affect performance.  I don't know about your hardware, but most of my
old 100-200Mhz machines don't have motherboards that can handle much ram.  
I'd be lucky to get 128mb in there -- if I were to bother hunting down ram
for them and paying a lot more per megabyte for it than for say a pair of
512M dimms for the newer boxes.  And no, I'm not going to be spending $200
on an accelerated 3d video card with 8mb for a piece of shit machine from
10 years ago either.  So yes, gnome is slow on old hardware.

> > OTOH, if it does work well enough, and you don't care for swapping memos
> > in Micro$loth Word V283.23 with cow-orkers or don't care about watching
> > the latest 3d movie on XVD disks, then by all means, if you don't mind the
> > huge power consumption, use that old iron.
> 
>   power consumption?? my 200mhz box? 

Power consumption per MIPS.  Do the math.  That old 200Mhz box is costing
you as much more in MIPS/Watts than your 1GHz box.  Unless of course
you're comparing notebooks with fully loaded towers. :)  My old piece of
shit Pentium 1 box which has a 250Watt power supply.  Same as my newer
machines.  Which is more expensive to run, hmm?  Now lets say that you
take every machine you've ever had and run them all at the same time.

How much aggregate MIPS will you get out of them versus how many
Watts/hour would you be using?   Will those be servers of some sort?  Oh,
ok, that means you'll need more UPS's.  What?  You don't have
UPS's?  Silly man! I've got UPS's on practically everything. Yes, yes,
including the Tivo and my alarm clock.  Two 3+ hour blackouts was more
than enough to convince me.  Hell, I was pricing generators right after
that, but thought a few large UPS's would do the trick.


Certainly that old Pentium tower makes a fine firewall, DNS, mail, or
printer server, or low bandwith web server, but for how much longer?  At
what point does it become useless?  Certainly were I to bother encrypting
everything on it, disk, swap, and network connectivity, it would slow down
to Commodore 64 levels of usability.  And how many users do you have going
through it?  Just yourself perhaps?

Ever notice how much slower it is to ssh to that old 100Mhz PC of yours
than to the 1Ghz one?  the initial connection takes far longer to
complete?  Maybe you haven't, I have.

Perhaps you need more caffeine in your blood stream.  Seems to me your IQ
is faling.





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