OT: New low for Microsoft!

[Pedro Fernandes Macedo]

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