Wednesday, September 24, 2008

18 years working with computers

I've been working with PC's since 1990, around this time of the year. At the same time I also was introduced to the the Mac, at work I would play on them both: although MS-DOS was a nightmare difficult to get out of and the Mac did bring lots of playful features. The difference was the PC allowed you to see its interstices, the Mac seemed more like a sophisticated video player, you could use it but you could not understand it. Finally I had my own first PC in the Christmas of 1991, a gift from my parents, a shining 386SX AMD processor running at 25 MHz with a co-processor by Cyrix. It ran fine although the Cyrix co-processor was underused, only when a magazine called PC Format brought, in a shining diskette, the software "Persistence of Vision" (POV-raytracer), did the math co-processor shine in its performance, easily outrunning my girlfriend's 386 DX at 40 MHz. It would only take a day or so to render some transparent spheres! Although I created some experimental pov-ray files in which a single image took several weeks to render.

The decision to buy an AMD cpu had to do with price but it rapidly become a matter of principle. For years I would accompany the highs and lows of Cyrix and AMD always hoping that their technological prowess (especially by Cyrix) would finally translate into a significant market share; I was incredible disappointed when Cyrix was bought over and literally destroyed. For me Intel represented the "bad guys", the monopoly, the high price and low productivity, the closed market, sacrificing global evolution to get selfish profits, etc.

From 1997 onwards things have slowly changed and, today, I don't think there is much of a difference between most brands in the way they deal with costumers. The first impact on my understanding of AMD was when they blocked the clock of CPU's that were being artificially underclocked, that is, a good product was being changed into a lesser product just to create different categories and higher prices for "luxury" products. More recently I made the mistake of buying a laptop with an Intel Celeron cpu, to realize only later that this kind cpu has its energy saving parts burned of at the factory so other cpus can be sold more expensively. Intel, of course, as not only created chagrin for the customer but also another cross for the environment. But the style was the same for both companies. ATI also had been making a gigantic effort to make lesser products investing large sums of money to make sure no one could transform their artificial downgraded products into their full version originals (remember the radeon 9500 and its bios' hacks). This for me was a clear sign that AMD, Intel, ATI and many other companies had made profit their highest goal, rather than helping technological evolution, building a better world or simply respecting the people that buy their products. It was therefore without surprise that I've learned that several motherboard makers had use faulty capacitors to provide for planned obsolescence of their products, a practice that continues today. The perfect plan would be for a product to fail right after the guarantee expires. Perhaps we'll get there!

AMD and Intel are like Yahoo and MS Search engines. Their main concern is with profit. Yahoo did not want Google's engine when it was offered to them because their main interest is to get us to see their links, their paid links! Why would they make links accessible if they do not pay anything to them? It may seem absurd, to provide good information for free disregarding the ones who actually pay us, but that absurdity is what Google did! It put consumers first, and look how that craziness got them!

But, obviously there is no Google-like company on the CPU front. Another example is this: I have a relatively outdated desktop PC, which runs pretty well in my daily needs. It has 2 gb of ram, a +3000 cpu, a 2400 pro radeon graphics card and the motherboard can be highly overclocked. All well and dandy. But sometimes I would really like to have more cpu power, so, well I thought about upgrading the cpu. Well, surprise, surprise, since my current motherboard uses an old 939 socket, AMD is selling outdated cpus for more than 150 euros, something that would cost only about 60 euros for the most recent AM2 socket.

So I am given the following choice, either pay a huge amount for an outdated CPU or buy a whole new system (ram memory and motherboard are not compatible). Economically the rational choice would be to buy a new system and put everything in the trash bin, but that has a huge environmental cost. So I decided to just stay with the current system. I know people who are happy with their ten year old PC's running windows xp on a 198MB ram machine, reading and writing and surfing the web. If it works great why change it? If you just write and browse and listen to music and see movies, etc, then nothing else is needed. Perhaps you'd just like to get Vista? Wow, well we are actually thinking about getting rid of vista in the new laptop we bought, so that can't be it. XP is by far a better OS, as are many Linux distros. Vista is a huge drawback! So, although as a teenager I've wasted almost all of the money I gained working in the summer vacations by buying new motherboards, cpus, CD-ROMs, and ram memory, now, it seems to me that to be computer-wise is simply to maintain the current hardware (until the capacitors fail !!) and look for better software, which means, software that makes a better use of current resources. This means most of the time going for free software like oppenoffice.org, irfanview, etc.

For more processor demanding tasks, we'll just have to wait for software that uses the new GPGPUs out there (my lowly 2400 pro included). They are the new technological equivalent to the Cyrix mathematical co-processor I had 17 years ago. I've only used it in a short attempt to keep up with folding@home deadlines, but it was fun to see this 30 euro graphics card performing better that any top of the line cpu. That is certainly the future as most intensive applications can use mass parallel processing, from artificial intelligence to converting audio and video.

It's time to slow down on the hardware and investigate the software more and more... GPL here we come!

PS - have been thinking that the main reason for "the hardware is dead, long live the software" is probably due to the stagnation in software development. In the last five years mainstream software, with the exception of games, has known no real advances. Microsoft Office and Windows OS have reached their peak in 2003, all there has been since are small cosmetic differences, sometimes arguably for the worse. On the side of free software, by the contrary, there has been a steady evolution. But the new hardware (mainly GPGPUs) could have been used by Artificial Intelligence software. Somehow the investment did not went into this sphere, perhaps through games AI will grow. More and more we live to be entertained which might actually be a good sign, provided it's not alienating.

No comments: