Comments on: You can’t fight city hall

By: Anton Eliasson

Anton Eliasson — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 19:21:56 +0000

I’m with you on this K.Mandla. A P4 is NOT OLD! Been using mine since it was new about six years ago and it’s still capable of vanilla Ubuntu and even occasional gaming in Windows XP, which is all I need.

By: 8.04 might be your best bet « Motho ke motho ka botho

8.04 might be your best bet « Motho ke motho ka botho — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:22:23 +0000

[...] and how there’s no reason to banish a 2.8Ghz machine to the closet. But people have heard me whine about that for a very, very long time, and whether or not people listen is immaterial any more. I could say [...]

By: Issues of perspective « Motho ke motho ka botho

Issues of perspective « Motho ke motho ka botho — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 13:54:22 +0000

[...] the case any longer. Two years ago when people were ho-humming 800Mhz machines, or last year when Pentium 4s suddenly became “antiques,” I felt I had the moral high ground. But to make the same case for those machines now, after seeing [...]

By: ikaruga

ikaruga — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:00:00 +0000

@Luca@ – gonna have to disagree here luca. I see your point, partly. If you can do something that current hardware *really can’t do*, then that’s fine. I have no problem with that. (And that was Windows 3.1.)

The problem is when current hardware CAN handle what you want to do but your software is bloated. Ex: Windows Vista (the proof is Windows 7 that does the same but *faster*).

I also take objection when you ship increasingly bloated software every couple of months. Ex: Ubuntu — there really is no need for me to upgrade my computer every 3 or 6 months.

By: zmjjmz

zmjjmz — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 00:30:06 +0000

Well, in a year my MacBook turns 3.
Really, according to the hardware companies who make a profit on this, I should buy a new computer then. (And I will, but that’s because the warranty on this unreliable POS expires, so I don’t want to use a computer that’s likely to break down at any time and then require expensive repairs from Apple.)

By: K.Mandla

K.Mandla — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 21:52:00 +0000

In my humble opinion, waiting for the hardware to catch up is probably the worst possible excuse for bloated software I can think of. But I’ll reserve my complete opinion on that point for another time.

By: Luca

Luca — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:41:06 +0000

“If a machine that fast is slow, it’s because Gnome is just plain slow (which it is)” – what is slow though?

A couple of months ago I was listening to a podcast giving a small biography on Bill Gates. They talked about when Windows was first launched and everybody was saying that it was too slow. They were right, when comparing it to the current hardware, but given time it ran fine.

They were saying this was one of Gate’s big achivements, rather than spending time to optimise code, he knew the hardware was going to improve so there would be no need for it. Even today this is still true for Windows, look at Vista, when it first came out everybody was saying it was two slow, but on todays machines it is fine.

For commerce this three (or even two) year lifetime of a product is a good thing as it encourages new developments, the debate here though is whether this is good for Linux?

By: Tony

Tony — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 17:01:52 +0000

I’ve got at least 2 desktop’s now that are “vintage.” One is an AMD 2200+ 1.8ghz, and the other is a Pentium 4 1.5ghz. These were given to me broken and I repaired them with parts from my spare parts pile and they now run good.

Most owners do not have the Windows OS that came with their computer and unfortunately I have not been able for the most part to entice them into trying a FREE Linux Distro. The cost of buying Windows is usually the deciding factor if somebody makes the decision to discard their old system. Some are also hesitant about installing used parts, which I provide for free.

Repairing a computer that is a couple of years old is not cost effective at times. They are then thrown away and I will at times be able to get them for free just for recovering some of the information from the hard drive(if possible).

I’ve given away a lot of rebuilt computers to family members because of this and that is when somebody’s junk turns into somebody else’s treasure…

By: pilpilon

pilpilon — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:30:09 +0000

Now, there is a lot of netbooks around, and them a lot slower then usual desktop setup. I hope it should slow down the antiquarization process you are talking about .

By: Guitar John

Guitar John — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 12:03:30 +0000

I’m stunned.

My wife’s Dell laptop has a Celeron 1.4 GHz and 500 MB of memory and it is running a default Ubuntu install with Gnome, OOO and it can even handle the desktop effects. I did a couple of the tweaks to speed up Firefox and Open-Office, otherwise it’s bone stock. It’s the slowest computer in the house hardware-wise, but it is NOT a slow computer.

I’m with you. If that’s a throw-away computer now, send it this way.

Cheers,
John