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Re: Anyone else going to switch to Fedora?
de Mark Carter 04/08/2006 07:43
Al Klein wrote:
> My 486DX33 with 5 MEGS of
> RAM runs linux (no GUI) without breaking a sweat.
I feel a bit of Monty Python one-downsmanship coming on.
About 10 years ago I was doing a maths PhD: numerically modelling
reaction-diffusion systems in FORTRAN. I use a 486 33 (or maybe it was
66), but it had less than 5MB RAM. Admittedly, I wasn't modelling the
weather or trying to produce animation for the cinema. Still, numerical
modelling is numerical modelling, an activity well-known for soaking up
the cycles. So the question is, if I could run numerical computations
on that effort, then exactly WTF are machines doing nowadays?
... rhetorical question, BTW. Just in case.
An interesting activity is to examine the state of computer technology
in sci-fi films of the 70's+. The ones that stick in my mind are Aliens
and Terminator 2.
In Aliens, there was a curses type console thing going on, which changed
when a person was bumped off. The interesting thing is, that, if it
makes sense to the audience, then one could regard it is a perfectly
good interface. Which shows that there's nothing necessarily wrong with
a curses interface.
Also, I always like the scene in Terminator 2 where Sarah Connor visits
Dyson, the supposed inventor of the Terminator. They go to his house,
and he's fooling around with a computer. He has those massive floppy
disks, which I always found amusing. He goes on to state that a peek at
the chip from the original Terminator gave him ideas that he would never
have even thought of. I feel like saying "guess again, future-boy, you
should make the disks smaller for starters".