On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 05:09:39PM +0100, Ted Harding wrote:
Ehh?? "very slow"?? What *do* people use computers for these days. then?
Running Mac OS X with all the eye candy isn't going to use a small amount of resources. Playing video, managing a large iTunes library and doing mail+running a web browser etc. isn't going to leave many resources on that machine. Also with the gfx chipset and hard disk in that machine it won't be much of a gaming machine.
I can see that the Apple Mac Mini could be inadequate for computing predictions of climate change, or similar; but what the hell can it be that enough of Joe Public want to do with a computer that it wouldn't be up to?
From reading the spec of machines you're running they're not anything
I'd really want to be using now. Given the price/availability of new hardware the 75Mhz one I'd class as seriously obsolete even the embedded wireless routers on my lan are running at ~200Mhz :) I'd only want machines as "slow" as the other 2 you are running if they were exceptionally low power (my home server is a 533Mhz Via epia).
Given the price of electricity vs. how many machines you've got and how much you can do on each at once... personally I'd be replacing them all with a single more powerful machine, ok this depends on what you are doing but to me it'd seem the way forward. People routinely bin machines that are twice the speed of your fastest machine. I was looking the other day and Dell were selling a brand new 1.8Ghz dual core machine with 2 gigabytes of ram, 160GB disk with a 19" tft monitor for 350 quid delivered.
I honestly think your argument could be applied to saying that you /could/ still do useful work on an 8 bit computer from the early 1980's but it's not something you'd want to do if you wanted to keep your sanity for any length of time compared to what you could use instead.
The only reason your machines are still useful is that Linux isn't that picky about what it will run on compared to other operating systems. When you are selling non-free software you want to fit the hardware that is currently available to try and trap people into the continuous upgrade cycle and also make it do more "stuff" so that people have a reason to buy it.
Adam