Ken said:
Remember the "transputer" with many ALUs for a single task. Now If IBM
would just make a multiple version of a chip like that so that each thread
in XP could have thousands of ALUs to work on it, a 3GHz machine might be
able to keep up with RS232 data coming from an 8051. That would be nice
wouldn't it.
You sound bitter...
I just upgraded my sister in law to 512 MB of memory, so she can surf
the web. She was running 128 MB, and XP SP2 was SO SLOW that she simply
could not do anything. After upgrading, the system was zippy.
Same situation for a neighbor of mine, who, in addition to having over
600 bits and pieces of spyware and a rootkit trojan on the system, was
running McAfee Internet Security. After I reformatted her disk,
reinstalled everything, and upgraded to SP2, her 128 MB system was quite
slow. Turns out McAfee sucks up about 50% of the cpu just sitting there,
according to Task Manager. McAfee is actually worse than having the
trojan; at least the trojan was free.
Now, my first home computer was a 128K (not M, K) mac. At work, I had
used minicomputers with a maximum address space of 2 MB, that supported
compiles for 20 users.
My suspicion is that microsoft made a deal with compact, dell, etc, at
some point in the past (probably when they were killing off OS/2) that
guaranteed that if the mfgrs sold dos/windows, and made it hard to get
anything else, then MS would make the OS would bloat so badly, and
perform so miserably, that people would be required to constantly
upgrade their computers to get the same performance they used to get.
(whatever happened to the connection machine? The BBN butterfly
architecture? All of that massively parallel stuff has fallen by the
wayside, probably in favor of massively parallel stuff built on racks of
hundreds of cheap PCs, running Linux.)
--
Regards,
Bob Monsen
If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has
so much as to be out of danger?
Thomas Henry Huxley, 1877