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I'm having trouble counting the ways this comment is invalid. It seems to be invalid at each word: 1) Hardware does not become obsolete so quickly: It is good

I'm having trouble counting the ways this comment is invalid. It seems to be invalid at each word: 1) Hardware does not become obsolete so quickly: It is good that hardware becomes obsolete. I can't for the life of me imagine that the world would be a better place if state of the art CPUs were the 8Mhz Z80 my computing life started with. 2) Slower CPUs would be good for the environment: How? By needing more iron for a given task? More energy? Is it by disallowing hugely detailed climate simulations? How??? 3) Slow CPUs would be good for the less economically privileged: The cheapest CPU that can be bought today is some orders of magnitude faster than an 8Mhz Z80. How would the less privileged be better off if CPU evolution had stopped in the early 80s?

sitkack 12y ago
You should apply http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity I don't think the OP was making the assertions you are attributing to them. I think they are arguing that a flatter gradient in the improvement of computers would encourage the diffusion of comparable levels of computing power (the poor). And that if computers didn't become obsolete so quickly, we wouldn't be buying and throwing them away every year. Early on the computation curve this was true, computers had 20k to 64k for a couple decades. Remember the 386 to 486 upgrade adapters in the 90s. We no longer have that upgradability. "invalid in each word" is a bit rude.