Computers: Toys or Tools?

I question why it has to be one or the other. I'm a programmer by trade. I built my main desktop last year to mimic my work machine. My cpu is the same (albeit the Xeon version), it has the same amount of ram, and dual 22" widescreens. Since I just make office programs my video card doesn't have to be the same and I went with a mediocre ATI 3850 at the time. My rig has been great for both working at home AND for gaming. It handles WoW almost fully cranked up and when I pop open Visual Studio it does a great job there.

Nice article. Brought me back to my Cyrix days and dreaming of the dual AMD system I never got to make. Oh, and the day I put together my 800 Duron system on release date.

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A couple of my friends are Ph.D students, and they in fact both are using overclocked Core i7's for their simulations. One of them asked me for help in overclocking his lab machine, and I pretty much said I wouldn't if I were him. He ended up at 3.5GHz on an i7 920 anyways, which is actually pretty modest, and enough so that it's not too risky. He says the increased performance cuts down his computation times by enough to be noticeable and the overclocking to be worth it. It doesn't quite address the "toy" or "tool" question, but it's some food for thought, and shows that tweaking can have its uses.

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I think computers will always be multi-faceted, used for both business and pleasure. In fact, isn't that what computers were all about in the first place? Being flexible enough to do whatever a smart programmer could dream up and assemble instead of only doing a single task like older machines?

I don't think it has to go one way or the other: I just feel that I've been moving from exclusively gaming/internet/music to spending most of my time on a computer working. I feel that there is a shift from systems that needed to be tweaked to be used at all, to systems where tweaking gave noticable improvement, to systems that really don't need tweaked. You can get a decent gaming machine without breaking the bank nowadays that doesn't need tweaked in order to run well.

With a computer background almost as long as mine I'm sure you'll agree it's the software/hardware comparison that makes the difference. Back then programmers could imagine and create things that were difficult for the hardware to accomplish in a short time. I remember altering and optimizing code so that there would be fewer program lines, which reduced load times and computing time - both of which were critical back then. Or how about using concat to store multiple flags to reduce program memory requirements instead of a single variable each? That's all ancient history with 4 Gb of RAM and 1 Tb drives common to most desktop machines and even laptops have more than enough for most applications. Today if a game falls 1 FPS because the code isn't optimized completely, who cares? The hardware is so far ahead of the software right now you don't need to tweak it. I mean, how many major programs use even two threads? No need to even talk about four, six, eight, or twelve threads.

When consumer software catches up to consumer hardware we may see tweaking and OC'ing become more popular but until then, you're right, it's just not needed ... :)

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Back then programmers could imagine and create things that were difficult for the hardware to accomplish in a short time. I remember altering and optimizing code so that there would be fewer program lines, which reduced load times and computing time - both of which were critical back then. Or how about using concat to store multiple flags to reduce program memory requirements instead of a single variable each?

I remember having to work with limitation when I did BASIC on C64. There were like 39k RAM available and I ran into that a few times. It was rare back then to write anything that big as well. Since C64 did not have if-then-else feature, doing individual if-then lines would have wasted a lot of space. I had a workaround that reduced the whole if-then-else need to about 2 lines by using math. Such as:
40 let x=(1*(a=12)+2*(a=24)+3*(a=36)...
50 on x goto 100,200,300,...
60 goto 10:rem x didn't match anything, try again (optional line)

Returns 0 if it's false (still 0 after multiplication), and 1 if true. Then on x go to is a multiple goto routine depending on x value. Works the same with gosub as well. This trick used to be nice back when saving a couple Kb's were a lot of deal. Today, I probably would have gotten lazy and not bother with compact routines. A lot of other programmers probably skipped this for modern computer to save time, contributing to bloating apps.

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I've a similar experience. Though I started tinkering with computers later than you I find that I very rarely use my computer for things other than work. I'm an electrical engineer finishing up my masters while working full time at a small industrial R&D company which designs motors/generators.

Matlab, Flux 2D, Latex, and Outlook all get used regularly while all my games remain relatively dormant. Even my hardware doesn't get opened up, just every once in a while to top off the water level in my loop. Other than that my computer just churns away.

It's a bit sad, but I suppose is a sign that we're aging, maturing.

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