Geek Greed
In all these years of development of computer technology, some theorems have emerged gradually. For starters, it turns out that there’s no such thing as -
- Too much RAM
- Too much storage
- Too much bandwidth
So if you want to gift something to a geek on his birthday, try one of those.
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The performance of a computer depends on a lot of factors — not just the speed of the processor, as many believe. If the flow of data within the system is considered, certain characteristics of the architecture can be identified as bottlenecks, slowing down the whole system and degrading performance.
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Sometime in the future, we’ll probably have non-volatile high-speed high-capacity random access memory that eliminates the need for a hard-disk. As far as storage-space is concerned, better algorithms are constantly being developed to compress the same data into less bits. Simultaneously, the hardware cost is also dropping, making it cost-efficient to purchase hard-disks of higher capacities./p>
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Deciding when to buy a new computer is a difficult issue. The day after you get one, the prices will probably fall, making you wish you had waited for one more day.
March 30th, 2006 at 06:26
I’d settle for an input device that’s more comfortable than a keyboard, but without too much of a speed penalty. I can type reasonably fast, but it’s hell on my fingers and wrists. (Mice are pretty uncomfortable too, but thankfully there are trackballs.)
Of course, I grew up in a pencil (which I still like, though it’s slow) and fountain-pen (which I don’t — way too much maintenance) culture, so maybe I just wired myself wrong too early.
March 30th, 2006 at 06:47
I think computer peripherals would have been quite different if the monitor had evolved as an (almost) horizontally-viewed device like a notebook. Instead of a mouse, we could have a device that emulates the pen (I’m not sure how widely used existing devices of that sort are).
The advantage of using pen or a pencil is that there’s support for the wrist. A touch-screen is no good. When I write, I want to rest my wrist confortably on the paper, and I want to press down the pen as hard as I can, to the extent of injuring the paper. I couldn’t do the same with an electronic device.
When it comes to text-input, I’m not very sure. I think I can type faster than I can write nowadays, especially because my fingers get tired more easily when I write. How habits change!
March 30th, 2006 at 20:31
Definitely no such thing at too much storage! And too much bandwidth? What is that?!!