Accumulation.

[dsrtao]

First: historical cost of computing, adjusted for GDP:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pkedrosky/468721697/
(from Paul Kedrosky at http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/InfectiousGreed/~3/111094704/progress_of_com.html

Second: the government knows all your prescriptions: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008872.html

Third: Michael Dell uses Linux ( http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/corp/biographies/en/msd_computers?c=us&l=en&s=corp ) and Dell will make Windows XP available again on selected machines, ( http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2116076,00.asp ) because nobody likes Vista, especially if they can't afford a $3000 desktop. In related news, a $650 computer can be quite a screamer (dual core AMD 3800+, 1 GB RAM, 250 GB RAID-1 disks) but the price goes up by $370 if you need Microsoft Vista and Office...

Fourth: Macs are easy to use, and a low-end MacBook with a gig of RAM is sturdy, well-designed and performs decently, all at a price point not terribly dissimilar to a brand-name PC notebook. And the OS is much more stable than Windows anything... Just saying.

Comments

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Exception, though a large one. Exception, technical field. Exception, specialized market. All valid markets, and yeah, I belong to those groups, but it's the 90/10 argument all over; those people are willing to pay a significant premium for their hardware. But summarizing all of computing into a single line/scatter involves averaging, and on average, computers have been 'fast enough' for 'everyone' for at least a decade.

(Why are we telling each other things we already know, and that we know we know? Are we trying to prove to each other how smart we are? I'm pretty sure we know. Maybe it's just reflex, or reflexive.)

I/O's a good point. Someone was objecting to how long it took to wake from hibernate until I pointed out that that was about the time it took to read 2GB of RAM off disk. (Of course one could argue that smarter demand-driven reads could improve that time...)

Ray-tracing is an interesting evolution to me. Gaming did an end-run around the ray-tracers and other mathematically-exact rendering folks (howdy) to get stuff that worked. Now that computation is making it tractable, RT in RT is moving back into vogue. Very interesting. Some twenty years ago I claimed I wouldn't be impressed until I could move a reflective/refractive crystal ball around in a lit virtual room in real time and have the image update appropriately; I'm pretty close to impressed with modern computing.