The only reason that I am writing this post right now is because I have a semi-decent machine to do it. Only recently have I become painfully aware of how obsolete all my computers are. Granted, I did recently purchase a netbook, but that thing is powered by a weak intel atom processor, so it really only kept pace with my aging hardware.
And, the painful kicker, this $600 machine crushed my expensive dual G5 when it came to encoding video. The standard for encoding my regular videos on my G5 takes about 5 hours. This dime-a-dozen machine shredded the same video in less than 90 minutes.
In retrospect, to a large extent my gadgets, and computers basically ground to a hault not to long after I graduated GVSU. I am not sure why exactly, but I guess I was too busy working on things to realize how antiquated my equipment was becoming. Or, perhaps it is a testimate that around 2004-2005 computers finally got to the point where they were “fast enough.”
When you think about it, more an more applications are moving to the web. No longer do you need to continually upgrade your machine to increase the performance of your applications. You need only increase your bandwidth to the internet. Although this does come at a price.
Web applications are still far behind desktop applications in raw performance. Even when your pages are loaded within a couple of seconds, the time is still agonizing, when a desktop application could perform the same operation in no perceivable time. But, event that is changing.
With the introduction of the “offline” web we are seeing the same webservices getting a performance boost. Technologies like Air, Silverlight, or even Google’s Gears, are allowing web developers to deploy their applications to the desktop. And, while these platforms are still not as fast as native applications, their performance is notably better than anything you see in the browser.
What do you think? Have you been trying to keep up with the latest trends in tech, or is that bargain clunker at Best Buy enough to put all your equipment to shame?
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