Whatcha Using?

[ilikekicks]

I often wonder what everyone uses for machines these days so.. Whatcha using? Me? 2 systems. 1.) A 24 inch iMac. Its 5+years old. Core2duo. 4G Ram and a 1.5 Terrabyte drive. Internet machine for me. 2.) MacPro, 8 cores ( xeon ), 16G Ram, 4x2Terrabyte drives, Older DVI video card ( Its a late 2009 model ). Both have 10.6.8 on them.

[Heelster]

Most recent acquisition is an Acer Aspire one netbook running Joli Linux Compaq F700 aptop running latest Kubuntu - soon to be redone using Arch Linux HP Multimedia Laptop running Kubuntu Dell business laptop will be set up for SE Linux when I get a new hard drive in it. As you may have noticed, I don't do Microsoft.

[ilikekicks]

As you may have noticed, I don't do Microsoft.

I have been microsoft-free since 2001.

[meganiwish]

I've got a laptop with a dongle.

[SF]

an apple iMac, and it blows. makes me wish i had my pc back - sigh, (along with the dongle)....

[Shafted]

HP Core i3 Laptop with Windows 7, 4GB ram, 250GB hard drive.

[hhboots]

My primary gaming system: Core i7-3770, 8GB RAM, 250GB SSD disk & 1TB SATA disk, 27" Samsung monitor. My laptop is a Core i7 Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga ultrabook, 8GB RAM, 256 GB SSD drive, with a 13" touchscreen that flips to work like a tablet. Both of these are running Windows 8 x64 with Classic shell (to give me a Windows 7 start menu).

[dww]

Use girlfriends Toshiba laptop running windows 7, mother board on my system packed up few months ago. My two hard drives still work via usb on the laptop and I really miss my 40 inch Samsung monitor.

[Heelster]

We are a household of computer geeks, but we see the price tag of Apple and - - - - we are not paying that much. Almost all of my laptops were units that were so puckered up with bugs, viruses and worms that they couldn't be fixed, so I bought them for pennies on the dollar, wiped the drives and installed fresh.

[meganiwish]

I love this thread. Language becomes pure poetry when the words have no meaning.

[yozz]

This seems the modern equivalent of the old fashioned "what car do you drive?". How many Giga-flops (Tera-flops, Peta-flops) do you have under the hood? (for the uninitiated: how much computing power. This is measured in flops, or floating point operations per second. Basically: how many calculational operations per second.) To me computers are just like cars: basic transportation/computing needs. It just happens that my professional computing needs are at times rather big. I have a modest DELL laptop (3 years old) with open-SUSE linux. But with a good internet connection I have access to very many big computers. I also have an iPad. Y.

[meganiwish]

Super. Even when it's explained it makes no sense. Keep it coming please.

[mlroseplant]

My 6 year old Macbook Pro fried itself (literally) a few months ago, so I'm borrowing the wife's somewhat newer Macbook Pro, with 4GB memory. The 250GB hard drive in it failed catastropically about 3 weeks ago. Luckily, although I was irritated about losing a few things, nothing was lost that was too important. My nephew just happened to have a 100GB SSD drive laying around in his room, so he threw that in there, and we're up and running again. Although the memory capacity is limited, this machine boots up lightning fast now. I'm in the market for a new computer sometime in the near to medium term future. I also use my iphone a lot to surf the net.

[yozz]

Super. Even when it's explained it makes no sense. Keep it coming please.

OK, I will do my best. It becomes a challenge.

For the experts: I will cut a few corners, so please don't put salt on the snails.

Imagine multiplying two numbers, each with 10 digits.

That will take you some time (unless you are one of these human calculators and you can earn a living showing off).

For the computer this is one `operation'.

The processing power (speed) of a computer (or `processor') is measured in how many of such operations it can do per second.

Because electronics is much faster than the human mind, this can be quite a big number.

When I bought my first home computer (1985) the number was about 1000000 per second. -> Mega

Since then computers have become faster and faster and at the moment typical computer chips can do

a few billion operations per second (1 billion -> Giga).

Unfortunately some things need much more computer speed. Like forecasting the weather. Or optimizing car designs.

And many more....

So, the solution is to use more than one processor, and putting together computers that can do a trillion (-> Tera) or nowadays

even a quadrillion (-> Peta) (a one with 15 zeroes) calculations per second.

Also one can put more than one processor in a single chip. These different processors are referred to as `cores'.

Hence some people are saying that their computer has 4 or 8 cores. This means also that it can do 4 or 8 things

at the same time. And in total it can do 4 or 8 times as much as a single processor.

Before you become too impressed: nowadays most of this computer power is used on advanced graphical games.

I hope you can see the similarity with people boasting about how many horse-powers their car has. Or how

fast it will go. Or just having a 2CV or a VW beetle and getting by with that just fine. Or whatever.

Y.

[Shafted]

Yeah, we hit the clock speed ceiling a few years ago and the only way, other biotechnology, is multiple or multicore (better because they can run faster if on a single die) processors.

[yozz]

Yeah, we hit the clock speed ceiling a few years ago and the only way, other biotechnology, is multiple or multicore (better because they can run faster if on a single die) processors.

Actually there are more potential technologies that would improve things considerably.

First there is superconductivity. That would allow even smaller circuits and much faster ones.

The main problem is that the only way we have to make superconducting material is to

cool things down ***a lot***. Like -200 or worse. That would not make it suitable for home

computers.

Another is quantum computing. Progress is much slower than hoped for, but yet there

is progress. I am not going to try to explain it, because I am not even sure I really

understand it, even though I followed a course on it. As with everything with quantum mechanics:

if you think you understand it, you don't.

I recently read about using carbon (graphene) instead of silicon. This would also increase

the speed of the circuit by a factor. Expectations were that we may see this in a few years.

On the other hand: with the ever improving network connections, you do not need so much

computer power in your home computer unless your graphics needs it (games!). It can

be all 'cloud computing'. You may not even know which computer is doing the work for you.

It is also quieter. Less fan activity.

Making programs that can use 10000 processors simultaneously in an efficient way is another matter....

Y.

Edited April 8, 2013 by yozz

[Rockpup]

Yozz: not sure about the CPU, but my graphics card is rated for 2.87 TFLOPS single and 717 GFLOPS double precision. Gpu's are handy little buggers. With the right encoding software I can cut through HD video editing like butter. Oh, yea, finally got through a rough patch, and with a gift from my boyfriend I decided to beef up the home pc finally. i7 3770k Asus saber tooth mobo 16gb ram Crucial m4 ssd system disk, 2tb storage Radeon 7950 It is overkill, but AMD gave out copies of Crysis 3 and Bioshock Infinite with the 7900 series, so I figured that was equal to a $120 price break. Both games are very pretty.

[meganiwish]

Thank you for your comprehensive and clear explanation.

Hence some people are saying that their computer has 4 or 8 cores. This means also that it can do 4 or 8 things at the same time.

So the cores turn the computer into a woman

[yozz]

Yozz: not sure about the CPU, but my graphics card is rated for 2.87 TFLOPS single and 717 GFLOPS double precision. Gpu's are handy little buggers. With the right encoding software I can cut through HD video editing like butter.

The graphics cards are examples of rather simple very-many-core chips. They are for special applications because

they do not have very much memory and it takes time to get information in and out. They also cannot talk directly to

your disk. But for graphics calculations they are super. And they can pack hundreds of them on a single chip.

If you have them in a laptop and you make them work a bit, I would not take the concept laptop literally, or you will

have fried lap. They can get rather hot.

At the moment they are the cheapest way to buy calculational power, provided your problem is suitable for it.

I know of people doing big science calculations with them. Unfortunately they cannot handle my calculations

so I have no personal experience with them.

Y.

[radiodave]

Usually either my desktop, a 27" iMac 3.2 GHz, 1TB hard drive, or my newest laptop, a 13" Macbook Air. The older laptop for everything the Macs won't do is an Asus G72GX, 2.5 GHz Core2 Duo, 6GB RAM, Windows 7.

[ilikekicks]

Ive gone the cheating route lately as my eyes have become.. they arent what they used to be.. 32inch 1080p screen.

[Shafted]

What's cheating? The bigger the better.

[jmc]

Home-built dual-core AMD Athlon, ATI Radeon HD 3450 graphics, dual monitors (1680x1050, 1360 x 768), 1 GB RAM, 2x 500 MB drive, Slackware Linux 13-1, DSL internet connection. That's the older box but it still works. Linux is the Energizer Bunny of OS's -- it just keeps going and going and going . . .

-- or --

Home-built tri-core AMD Athlon, ATI Radeon HD 3450 graphics, dual monitors (1920 x 1080, both), 2 GB RAM, 1x 500 MB drive, 1x (soon to be 2x) 1TB drive, Slackware Linux 13.37, DSL internet connection. That's the newer box. Not cutting edge but it does what I need it to do.

-- or --

Acer Aspire One netbook, Intel Atom processor, not much memory (like maybe a gig), Windows 7, 1024 x 600 display -- when I'm on the go.

Ive gone the cheating route lately as my eyes have become.. they arent what they used to be.. 32inch 1080p screen.

You need a bank of blinking lights under that monitor It would be at home on the bridge of the Enterprise!

[AZShoeNut]

At home I am using my Dell Precision M60 laptop running Windows XP Pro. When I got it back in 2003 it was high end mobile workstation powerhouse. I got it so that could run CATIA V5 (Serious design/engineering software used by Honeywell, Boeing, and Airbus) and continue to do side work when hooking up with my then girlfriend (now wife) on the other side of town. Now it is a slow old dog that barely connects us to the internet. Hoping to get something better toward the end of the year. :-) Larry

[BobHH]

Lots of nice, capable stuff out there. But I like my old dual Pentium Toshiba laptop, 2GB max memory, wonderful keyboard. It's fast on the Internet, and most of my work is word processing and spreadsheets. And it thrives on wi-fi signals that HPs and iPads can't keep a connection on. Now running Windows 7 with a 500GB hard drive that I installed after the original one crashed.

[Amanda]

I have a laptop and an iPad. The iPad is handy for my handbag but takes some getting used to if you have nails of any length.

[meganiwish]

You could try wearing gloves. My son has some special ones with little silvery bits in the finger tips, which were apparently designed especially for iPads and iPhones. I'm not sure how they work.

[at9]

I find the beads don't slide on the wires unless I oil them occasionally

[SleekHeels]

I love this thread. Language becomes pure poetry when the words have no meaning.

I'm not sure how they work.

Dear Megan, that does sound like an invitation to entertain you with jibberish:

The conductive thread sewn into the finger tips of the gloves allows the electrical charge of the human body to interact with an electrostatic grid of wires such that the location of the corresponding reduction in voltage may be detected.

Of course that makes perfect (and rather dull) sense to me, so in order for me to empathise with your sense of elation I had it translated into Spanish and you're quite right, the effect is rather marvellous!

El hilo conductor cosidas en las puntas de los dedos de los guantes permite que la carga eléctrica del cuerpo humano para interactuar con una red electrostática de tales alambres de que la ubicación de la correspondiente reducción de tensión puede ser detectado.

[meganiwish]

Quite. Thank you. By the way, there's a mistake in the Spanish which makes it even more enjoyable.