The Driving Force of Innovation

[Guest]

Within the last few years, as everyone here knows, technology has shot through the roof. New innovations, and old renovations. I remember seeing the first PII 400 and saying "Oh my God, thats so fast, thats nuts". After the years and the breaking point of the 1 ghz mark, what has driven the market to accel? In my opinion, the main reason for these amazing clock speeds, and high-performace 3D cards is exactaly for that. Games! Everyone that owns a computer plays them, and most people buy PC's just for that. Is it just me that thinks that it is ludicrous to be spending $2500 on a machince that just plays games? Indeed, there are people out there that need these blazing speeds to shorten their work, but if it wasn't for the market of the gaming industry driving the head honchos at Intel and AMD, and many other places mind you, would any of this still be here? I have no clue, thats my question to you guys. Kids are wanting computers. Parents buy kids computers so they will shut up. Kids only buy computers for games and... ugh.... AOHell. Without this money being pumped into research, I am not too sure if we would be seeing what we are right now. Definatly later, but so soon? Most machines at a simple office would suffice to be 400 mhz, all they need to be able to do is open Word, and various other office programs, as well as the need to communicate data with others. Do we owe all that we now have to the programmers pushing the envelope of the gaming community? Just something to think about.

Why do old people always drive in front of you when you are in a hurry?

 

[bhc]

On the surface it may be games, but the real driving force of innovation is competition. The best example is this CPU war waged between Intel and AMD. Without competition, we will probably have to spend $800 today just for the latest and greatest "900 MHz" PIII.

**Spin all you want, but we the paying consumers will have the final word**

 

[peteb]

For every $2500 gaming rig I'm pretty certain 5 or more machines are bought by the business world. Business needs drive cpu speeds and machine performance at least as much.

The sad thing is that they are driven partly by the OEMs, who bring out new models and stop sale and support on currently good machines early, speeding up the churn rate.

In my environment the majority of machines are totally maxed out a lot of the time and we need more horsepower. In some instances we have users with enterprise servers as their desktop because they need that sort of throughput. Exceptions, not rules but even so....

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[RCPilot]

I do love gaming. I build the state of the art (as I see it) every year for myself to game with. That's all I do on that machine except for some email.

However I earn a living as a Unigraphics designer at a major auto company, & I'll tell you what, those machines drive the market. I just had my Sun Ultra 60 replaced with a Sun Ultra 80. I'd hate to know what one of them cost & we have over 300 of them in just my building alone. I only had the 60 for less that 2 years, I think. These machines scream for the solid modeling that I do. We are on a 2 year max replacement lease, just to try & keep enough horse power to be competive. You ought to see the mainframes that we chew up around here, it boggles the mind. Currently the whole company is going to run Unigraphics on NT workstations in the next 2 to 3 years. The Sun's won't run UG on NT. So the whole Corp. will be getting a whole other flavor of workstations, starting this year. Corp wide, I couldn't even guess, but it's in the thousands for sure. Probably take a bunch of new mainframes as well. I can actually bring up an entire car & shade it in real time, while rotating it to do designs on. In our Cad Visulation rooms, I've brought up my models from remote sites around the world & it's just like I'm sitting at my desk here in the states. That's power, to say the least. Tribes 2 doesn't take anything close to that to run, if you know what I mean.

No, my little once a year drop of $2000 or so to build my gaming machine can't even touch that kind of computer power I use every day at work.

Skinny

How do you eat a elephant? One bite at a time!

 

[Phelk]

Ultra 80 thats some grunt but you should have got your hands on a SunBlade 1000... those machines are unbelievable. I can only feel pity that you are going to have to put up with Windows NT, maybe clippy will keep you amused since you'll have to wait around alot.

<font color=blue> The Revolution starts here... as soon as I finish my coffee </font color=blue>

 

[FatBurger]

Hehehe...good old clippy.

Now, all of you are wrong. The driving force of technology is...porn. Really. Why do you think streaming audio and video was invented?

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Apple? Macintosh? What are these strange words you speak?

 

[HolyGrenade]

Apparantly porn is supposed to be biggest content provider for broadband.


<font color=red><i>Tomorrow I will live, the fool does say
today itself's too late; the wise lived yesterday

 

[FatBurger]

I find that really easy to believe. I heard that somewhere around 80% of sites have pornographic content or links, but of course, as a wise man once said, "96.3% of statistics are made up."

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Apple? Macintosh? What are these strange words you speak?