Example, grandmother's new desktop (it was only $370 but she bought it last week, so current, but low end technology) calculates the first million digits of pi in 44 seconds, my laptop does the same in 25 seconds. Her desktops an AMD Sempron 3600+ though so it's probably close to a typical desktop processor today, not something most mudders or tech savvy people'd be proud to say they own….

I don't think the comparison was laptop processors in general to desktop processors in general. Even the worst laptop processor today will kick the tails off of many old computers. I think the point was that the same processor model in mobile and desktop edition will be rather different.


I didn't realize that high-end processors were a cool thing to own in the MUDding community. :wink: There's no shame in having a processor that isn't top of the line if you don't need one…

*shrug* Any commnity in which the members often live on their own computers I'd expect to see they have higher end computers than most people due to their priorities being different than most people;s.

In MMORPG communities I'd agree hands-down. But I'm not sure why people who mostly work with text games to have processors as a high priority. As for "tech savvy people", some of the most tech savvy people in the world are content with slower computers. It all depends on what you're doing, and it's a little too generalizing to say that all tech savvy people have the same priorities. Not everybody is interested in playing high-falutin' 3d games after all. :wink:

Players don't tend to have a need for uber-machines unless it's higher end 3D games.

But obviously MUD developers would be interested in something faster and more up to date if they're doing the development work on the box in question.

There are plenty reasons one might need a beefier computer even if they don't play the latest and greatest 3D game. Things like audio / video editing benefit from (if not require) a fairly modern system, as well as graphic design (the Adobe suite tends to be a resource hog, especially when 2-3 apps are running together), doing CADD, etc.

At work my co-worker did all of his programming, ran a LAMP setup, and did daily browsing, etc. on an old 900 Mhz HP machine w/ 384 meg of RAM until we got new machines. So not all "tech savvy" people need computers with $500 graphic cards, but there are certainly a ton of areas where having a computer with "modern" CPUs / RAM, etc is necessary. Just because you COULD play MUDs on a 20 year old computer doesn't mean it's suited for the rest of your activities. I have a pretty new system (that can run all the newer games no sweat) as well as a couple mediocre machines that would serve just fine for most of what I do, though. Unlike a lot of the "tech savvy" people I know, I DO believe in eventually getting rid of old hardware, so the worst PC I could probably build from "old parts" might be equivalent to something from 01-02.

.. and let's not even bring up running Vista. <– joke.

It's not disputed that having a faster computer is preferable, what I was disputing is the equating of "tech savvy people" and having a fast computer. It could be somewhat offensive to competent people to tell them they're not tech savvy because they're not extremely concerned with their processor speed and whether or not it's been overclocked etc.

I agree with you. Having a $3,000 computer doesn't make you any more/less tech savvy than having a 4 year old Dell. There are a lot of stereotypes, assumptions, etc. regarding tech savvy folks and their computers, none of them necessarily relevant. A lot of very tech savvy people don't use bleeding edge hardware, others don't; it all depends on their priorities.

All I wanted to point out was that even for a group of people who are interested in MUDs, there are plenty of reasons someone might need (or want) a more powerful computer, tech savvy or otherwise.

Well, my PS2 broke a couple of months ago after serving its purpose for nearly four years. I don't have a DVD player in the dorm room, don't own a Blu-ray player, and the PS3 serves as an outlet to play downloaded television shows rather easily (more easily if the damn thing supported xvid/divx). The added benefit of being able to run Linux on it and use it as a development rig was just that :-).


I would go as far as to say that having a $3,000 computer would make you less tech-savvy. The only reason I wouldn't say that is because that is about the cheapest you can get a Mac Pro. Those are some nice systems if you have the money to put out for them. For all the problems I have with OS X, the hardware isn't that bad, but you sure are paying the price for it. Its essentially a server system in the box. Unfortunately they go skimpy on the memory. For a $3,000 desktop system I expect a minimum of 3GB of memory.

For me it has to do what I need the computer for. Like I said, I have a Pentium 3 500MHZ system sitting in my car waiting to be freed and hooked up (now that I think about it, it probably should be removed before it gets too cold here). I also have a 1GHZ P3 in the office running some applications software for the school newspaper. I mean, the computer does its purpose, the power is irrelevant. I bought a laptop because I wanted something that was mobile, powerful enough to do development on and not powerful enough to game on (and then I go buy a PS3, :sigh:).

Yeah… I have pretty big issues with the high markup you suffer for the "privilege" of having Apple-branded hardware. My desktop was $1.7k and was (still is) pretty spiffy; I could have gone absolute top of the line for $2.5k (meaning better than Mac Pro systems). And had I not gotten the SLI gfx cards, it would have been even more powerful…

My server is a kind of crappy Celeron system. I got it very cheap and it does just what it's supposed to do, which is to sit there serving files (version control repositories, extremely low-traffic web sites, etc.) and various utility-type stuff.

Next laptop I get will definitely not be a "powerhorse" since I'm tired of having to lug around 7lbs. The new laptops are pretty darn light, and for the kind of stuff I do on my laptop, just as fast…

I always get beef from people (or, at the very least, a glare) because I whip out an Apple notebook. The funny thing about the whole thing is that the one piece of software that is nearly always open is Visual Studio in Parallels (or Eclipse and Aptana). But, people will be people in that aspect. I bought the notebook for the form factor and the fact that I get nearly five hours of battery life with WiFi on. Would I ever buy an Apple desktop system? Not very likely, at least, not until I am making $90-$100k a year and I don't have to worry about dropping another $1,000 into the system in order to bring it up to par. Because out of the box those systems don't even come with a decent video card. I would probably just build myself a system, because for the same price you can get a smoking system with a huge monitor.


As long as it does its purpose that's all that matters. I've been meaning to finally get a working SVN running and making sure I get offsite backups nightly (I am looking into using G-Mail as a storage device, heh). That's going to be my main concern after I get back from Washington D.C. next week (I hate these damn newspaper conferences in the middle of the school semester - during mid-terms, even better).

:lol: Around here, Macs are so popular you almost get the opposite: people think you're uncool because you have a PC. It cracks me up because the Mac/PC proportion here is the exception, not the rule…

My lab uses Macs exclusively, sigh, but the first thing I did was to install a Linux VM on top of it. I do all of my work in that. The only application open as far as OS X is concerned is Parallels.

Their notebooks do have fairly good battery life. Vaios are comparable. My father's is pretty neat; with an extra battery plugin, he gets something like 9 hours of battery life… great for plane trips. :smile:


Dude, if I was willing to sink the $1k, it'd be into two or even three 21" monitors for the system. :cool: Even with the salary I'll be making, I wouldn't want to spend money on a system just to get the "coolness" of having a Mac. And like you said, it doesn't even have a great video card, and the memory isn't huge, and the processor is comparable. Oh well.


I have to get around to setting that up. Our family server is backed up to my server here, but I need a backup for my own stuff on the server. To some extent the repositories are backed up on my desktop, because by its nature bzr mirrors the whole repository. But there's some other stuff here and there I want to keep. It's becoming especially urgent, now that Samson's hardware failure reminded me how important it is. :wink:

Precisely what got me thinking about it.

Well at least some good has come from the hardware failure - if it gets people thinking about making regular backups :)

This is so true. I am thinking of just setting up a cron-script to take a dump of my repositories and e-mail them to a gmail account. I think there's a 10MB attachment limit. That's more than enough for a tarball of that magnitude.