I use 3 machines with essentially the same OS:

The Zaurus amazes me. In a space small enough to carry in a pocket, I can run perl, read & write OpenOffice documents, ssh into the server through wifi or a mobile phone, and countless other things. It runs for 5 hours plus on an 1800mA 5V battery. My first home machine was an ICL 1603 in the 70's, and it was huge! 5 inch green crt, spools of 1/16 inch magnetic tape. The comparison between the two is startling.

Fifteen years ago, my father (who's worked in the industry since the sixties) had a habitual verbal slip, referring to disks of e.g. 20Mb as 20k. Chuckle as I did at the time, I now find myself doing the same with Gb and Mb.

But with the speed of proliferation of computers, and the pace at which power is increasing, should we be at least a little concerned?

On the one hand, sales of laptops are rocketing, and they generally use less power than desktops. Sales of LCD displays, which use a fraction of the power of CRTs, are also shooting up. Improvements in manufacturing techniques to allow more powerful machines also allow those same machines to run cooler, and hence use less power, at lower clock speeds. When a home user goes to the PC shop, and the sales assistant asks what they want the machine for, it's usually "word processing, internet, and games". The games are getting more and more sophisticated, the graphics are getting more and more realistic. From that point of view, the future of computing is looking constantly cooler and more exciting.

OTOH PC's and servers are proliferating at an astonishing rate, and the energy use attributable to them is going up, not down (not to mention the energy needed to manufacture them, the energy needed to recycle the components of old machines (or the pollution caused by dumping them)). Those amazingly sophisticated games are part of what drives the need to constantly upgrade.

OTOOH, those games are probably what will drive the future. When we're putting 'trode sets on our heads to access the net instead of relying on clumsy old keyboards & mice, it will probably have been those resource hungry games that got us there.

So what's my point? If there is one, it's that the future has cool things in it, but those cool things have consequences, but they're still cool, but etc. We should probably keep both things in mind.

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g0n, backpropagated monk

In reply to Re: multi-PC tasking by g0n
in thread multi-PC tasking by samizdat

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