Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (1761 mails)

[Anton Aylward <anton.aylward@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Suetterlin said the following on 08/25/2010 08:40 AM:
> Rodney Baker wrote:
>
> > Turning of KDE4's desktop effects (i.e. suspend compositing) will drop the
> > CPU usage to near zero again.
>
> While true, this is only a workaround.  Wasting 20% of a really powerful
> machine for *nothing* (it uses it even if nothing happens) is a bug and not a
> blemish....

The same could be said of any GUI ...
"we command line fanatics ..."

Why waste money on computer power when a

* radio
* mp3 player
* tv

costs so little?


The answer is the user.
In practice, delivered CPU power has stayed about the same as the
workload and complexity and presentation has grown ore sophisticated.

If I compile things now on my dual-core machine, they seem to go about
as fast as they did on that old PDP-11/45 back at the beginning of the
80, when I had a dumb terminal and a CLI.

Seem to.

And even though DOS3.3/WordPerfect4.2 was the hight of office automation
I'm not producing business letters and printing them an faster than I
did 25 years ago.

Or it doesn't seem that way.


Well, there are some benefits.
This Compaq Presario laptop is a lot lighter and has a bigger, clearer
screen than the 386/20 "luggable" "lunchbox" I had back in 1987, so I'm
not complaining.


-- 
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if
there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing
but blind pitiless indifference.
-- Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (1995),
   quoted from Victor J. Stenger, Has Science Found God? (2001)
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