1. I couldn't find too much to disagree with there myself, and your comments about interpreted languages (like Java and py) and emulators are spot on.
   
   Coincidentally, WinUAE actually illustrates how far we've come on that account. Back in the day, when people still used Amigas for things other than retro gaming (wink), there was a fiery thread on c.s.amiga.misc about that very thing, namely, emulation. It was the overwhelming concensus at the time that no 'mere' PC could emulate an Amiga. In short, what made the Amiga special was more than just the intangibles associated with it (subjective stuff, mostly), but also that it was just so advanced that emulation of its features was out of the question.
   
   Old hands like Dave Haynie (if you have to ask, you probably won't care) were of the opinion that *anything* was possible with enough horsepower, even if PCs at the time were clearly not powerful enough to do the job efficiently. Just because it hasn't been done YET doesn't mean that it won't be done TOMMORROW.
   
   History has vindicatd his opinion. But then, hey, he's Haynie. He's used to being right :-)
   
     posted by grimmtooth at 06:56:16 PM on March 19, 2004  
2. I was having this discussion with my father today. He was amazed that people still used IBM main-frames, and I was saying how 'modern' technology throws out perfectly tested and appropriate technology, to replace it with the latest greatest.
   
   My big beef was terminal-based systems. Now before people associate this with command-line or curses interfaces, Citrix provide a graphical terminal system, and the VNC protocol provides a more open version of the same.
   
   Would you need to patch 50 desktops if we used thin clients?
   
   Would someone turning off their machine by accident be a problem? (My VNC sessions are persistent, I often disconnect at work, go home and reconnect over the net.)
   
   Would you have to worry about adding more RAM and disks to all of your machines? Sure, you'd need a lot of storage and memory in one place, but most (business) desktops have scads of unused space. If you don't have an enormous MP3/Porn/Games collection, what else will the average cubicle dweller use 80Gb on?
     posted by Aaron Brady at 11:57:07 AM on March 20, 2004  
3. > Upgrading from Windows 2000 to XP gives you a
   > few useful features and a lot of bloat, some of
   > which is eye candy that slows the computer down.
   
   I just discovered this yesterday. If you don't let the WinXP 'Themes' service start, it goes back to looking like Win2K. I suspect you also get back a bunch of processor cycles too.
   
   http://www.theeldergeek.com/themes.htm
   
     posted by Alan Green at 06:22:56 PM on March 25, 2004  
4. Having previously been used to PCs, I now use a Mac, and I was struck with awe when I found out that System 10.3 (Panther) actually made my Mac run *faster*.
     posted by Jaap Weel at 07:56:46 PM on March 26, 2004  
5. Yes, it does happen sometimes... as another example, Python 2.3 is faster than 2.2. But usually the opposite is true. :(
     posted by Hans at 10:06:50 PM on March 26, 2004  
6. 
     posted by an anonymous coward at 08:43:45 PM on January 07, 2005