4 ms·

I should start publishing this news, since my source seems faster and more reliable, though a little hard to understand. I get an email at least a few hours bef

I should start publishing this news, since my source seems faster and more reliable, though a little hard to understand. I get an email at least a few hours before the announcement that reads "Your new absolute-top-of-the-line-hardware has shipped. Tracking number YC23JK." While I don't think it's technically illegal, I do find it strange that the manufacturers are allowed to collude to insure I personally overspend by at least 20% and never have top-of-the-line hardware for more than a month. I've come to accept that I'll never know how they picked me, but I'd still really like to know how they get my email passwords. I think it'll work the other way too: A cheap way for hardware manufacturers to make their deadline is to ship me their current generation a couple weeks before they need to ship the next generation junk.

gjm11 17y ago
The canonical solution to this problem is not to buy absolute top-of-the-line hardware; it's seldom good value for money. (Yeah, I know, sometimes you just gotta have the best. But still.)
- hga 17y ago
  I've generally found myself satisfied by looking at a price-performance graph and buying the processor just before the knee. Sure, I'd like more CPU, but up to now more memory and disk have been the better tradeoffs. Especially memory: there are some things that just aren't practical when your working set gets too large (e.g. you start constantly paging), whereas a somewhat slower CPU just requires a bit of patience for what I do (which isn't number crunching or anything else that keeps my CPU pegged). All that said, the next major machine I build should be in 2011-12 and I'm really looking forward to having bunch of cores with more cache than, say, the 16MB of RAM I bought in 1991 for my 486 Windows machine. As it is now, wouldn't it be hard to buy "normal" CPU that doesn't have at least as much cache as the address space of a PDP-10 (18 bits of 36 bits words, or a megabyte of 9 bit bytes)? And cache has become the new RAM, RAM the new disk, and disk the new tape. Wild times for someone who started out with punched card FORTRAN on an IBM 1130 (64KB max, more likely a lot less, 1-10 MB disk, probably closer to the former).

gjm11 17y ago

The canonical solution to this problem is not to buy absolute top-of-the-line hardware; it's seldom good value for money. (Yeah, I know, sometimes you just gotta have the best. But still.)

hga 17y ago
I've generally found myself satisfied by looking at a price-performance graph and buying the processor just before the knee. Sure, I'd like more CPU, but up to now more memory and disk have been the better tradeoffs. Especially memory: there are some things that just aren't practical when your working set gets too large (e.g. you start constantly paging), whereas a somewhat slower CPU just requires a bit of patience for what I do (which isn't number crunching or anything else that keeps my CPU pegged). All that said, the next major machine I build should be in 2011-12 and I'm really looking forward to having bunch of cores with more cache than, say, the 16MB of RAM I bought in 1991 for my 486 Windows machine. As it is now, wouldn't it be hard to buy "normal" CPU that doesn't have at least as much cache as the address space of a PDP-10 (18 bits of 36 bits words, or a megabyte of 9 bit bytes)? And cache has become the new RAM, RAM the new disk, and disk the new tape. Wild times for someone who started out with punched card FORTRAN on an IBM 1130 (64KB max, more likely a lot less, 1-10 MB disk, probably closer to the former).