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Rightsizing
Jun. 7th, 2004 09:32 pmI have a laptop fit for an itinerant computational mathematician; half a gigabyte of memory, P4/2800, three large fans.
I have now realised that I am not an itinerant computational mathematician, and, after looking around the sea of iBooks and Vaios at NotCon, have gone onto eBay and bought a second-hand Thinkpad 240. It's the kind of laptop I used to have, carried backwards and forwards to college for eighteen months in a standard A4 Jiffy bag; I wrote most of the text in my thesis on it. It weighs a third as much as my current laptop, and has a tenth the CPU power; that is, it'll be idle only 90% rather than 99% of the time.
It's, err, about the equivalent of downgrading from a Cray 2 to a Cray 1 in order to read email, IRC, and write Livejournal postings. Since these are tasks the equivalents of which our ancestors performed quite happily with a quill pen, and the new machine will still be more powerful than the systems on which the US's current nuclear arsenal was designed, I don't feel I'll be underpowered.
I'll put the big laptop on ebay when the small one arrives, and see if I was right to anticipate depreciation of 50% per year.
I have now realised that I am not an itinerant computational mathematician, and, after looking around the sea of iBooks and Vaios at NotCon, have gone onto eBay and bought a second-hand Thinkpad 240. It's the kind of laptop I used to have, carried backwards and forwards to college for eighteen months in a standard A4 Jiffy bag; I wrote most of the text in my thesis on it. It weighs a third as much as my current laptop, and has a tenth the CPU power; that is, it'll be idle only 90% rather than 99% of the time.
It's, err, about the equivalent of downgrading from a Cray 2 to a Cray 1 in order to read email, IRC, and write Livejournal postings. Since these are tasks the equivalents of which our ancestors performed quite happily with a quill pen, and the new machine will still be more powerful than the systems on which the US's current nuclear arsenal was designed, I don't feel I'll be underpowered.
I'll put the big laptop on ebay when the small one arrives, and see if I was right to anticipate depreciation of 50% per year.
