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I used to do image deconvolution of the original (flawed) Hubble images on a Sun Sparc5. Exactly what are you people using your Macbook Air for while sitting in

I used to do image deconvolution of the original (flawed) Hubble images on a Sun Sparc5. Exactly what are you people using your Macbook Air for while sitting in starbucks ? Is there a big underground CFD or N-Body scene among the trendy teens that I'm not aware of? Or is everybody into computational chem and protein folding to develop the next party drug?

stcredzero 16y ago
Right. Folks nowadays carry around an embarrassment of riches in terms of CPU power. People feel poor if they can only sit with a phenomenal amount of computing power in their local cafe, as opposed to phenomenal times 3.
- mxavier 16y ago
  While we do have a phenomenal amount of power in our hands, the fact is that the rest of the industry has grown in step with the hardware in a lot of ways. Browsing the web (admittedly as a power user) is one of the most intensive things I do aside from compiling software.
  - stcredzero 16y ago
    the fact is that the rest of the industry has grown in step with the hardware in a lot of ways This tells me that there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of huge inefficiencies in our computing infrastructure. I think Steve Jobs and others at Apple went down this mental path when formulating the iPhone/iPad. Actually, Opera Mini is a powerful demonstration of this idea!
    - GBond 16y ago
      >This tells me that there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of huge inefficiencies in our computing infrastructure. VMware has benefited from the CPU race. ESX is an easy sell for fotune 1000 datacenters that have huge amount of idle cpu horsepower.
niels_olson 16y ago
heh. I did an internship at NASA that basically involved image alignment of IUE starfields compared to another dataset. All done on a Sun 4. I would surf with Netscape while the conversions were running, which took anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes each.
nooneelse 16y ago
Well it is a bit of a bummer when I have to repeat my voice commands and dictation to my phone because it lost its connection to the big server farm that does the speech recognition.

stcredzero 16y ago

Right. Folks nowadays carry around an embarrassment of riches in terms of CPU power. People feel poor if they can only sit with a phenomenal amount of computing power in their local cafe, as opposed to phenomenal times 3.

mxavier 16y ago
While we do have a phenomenal amount of power in our hands, the fact is that the rest of the industry has grown in step with the hardware in a lot of ways. Browsing the web (admittedly as a power user) is one of the most intensive things I do aside from compiling software.
- stcredzero 16y ago
  the fact is that the rest of the industry has grown in step with the hardware in a lot of ways This tells me that there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of huge inefficiencies in our computing infrastructure. I think Steve Jobs and others at Apple went down this mental path when formulating the iPhone/iPad. Actually, Opera Mini is a powerful demonstration of this idea!
  - GBond 16y ago
    >This tells me that there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of huge inefficiencies in our computing infrastructure. VMware has benefited from the CPU race. ESX is an easy sell for fotune 1000 datacenters that have huge amount of idle cpu horsepower.

niels_olson 16y ago

heh. I did an internship at NASA that basically involved image alignment of IUE starfields compared to another dataset. All done on a Sun 4. I would surf with Netscape while the conversions were running, which took anywhere from 10 seconds to 5 minutes each.

nooneelse 16y ago

Well it is a bit of a bummer when I have to repeat my voice commands and dictation to my phone because it lost its connection to the big server farm that does the speech recognition.