Buying the latest state-of-the-art computer and then finding that there is something quicker and with far more grunt can seem so unfair.
If I remember correctly, Queen Victoria still occupied the Empire's throne when I bought my first desktop PC.
I had used laptops until then, but now I wanted the heft, the substance, the sheer grunt of a big, boring, beige box.
Suddenly I found myself at the cutting edge with a Genesis Pentium I - 133MHz of raw power.
It turned out to be the best computer I ever had.
But now that the Great Queen was no longer with us, I felt the time had come to make another lunge towards the future.
Genesis is no more - it is a sad fact of local computer life that small independent computer manufacturers, especially those who prize quality over quantity, are often squeezed out of the market by the internationals.
You know the ones I mean - the special-offer crowd, with the big ads and the high turnover.
Little are you supposed to guess that their machines may be obsolete inventory which have been languishing on a shelf in Ohio somewhere until the dust got more than America could bear.
This is not me speaking, by the way - it is the voice of Garry Marriott, sales manager of JDI and member of the Computer Manufacturers Association of New Zealand.
Anyway, I was lucky enough to find that Genesis had reincarnated itself out west as Revelation.
This is not the time or place to offer up thankful praise to the Chadderton brothers, who sorted out the one or two teething problems you get with most new computers and then left me to it with the machine of all our dreams.
An ocean of memory [256Mb Ram]; a hard-drive wider than the rings of Saturn [13.5Gb]; the lightning responses of a Jetway 711AS motherboard; the awesome, surging power of an Athlon 800MHz chip freshly minted in the United States.
All this state-of-the-artness tethered restively to the net, like a racehorse raring to go, with Telecom's ADSL JetStream.
The very latest abacus with, for the first time, Athlon Inside ... but hang on, what's this?
Advanced Micro Devices has announced what could be its largest processor launch ever ... 10 new processors as soon as June 5 - its new Duron processor, codenamed Spitfire, along with its new high-speed Athlon, codenamed Thunderbird ....
Have I been sold a pup?
You mean you can go faster than 800MHz? Already? But I've only had the thing a fortnight.
Surely I am entitled to a larger window of big-noting than this?
Figures swim before my eyes ... 750MHz and that is the Duron, a low-cost slug, apparently.
The T-bird thunders in at 1GHz [1000MHz] and up, zooming toward some unimaginable blink-of-an-eye nirvana.
Not only that, it will incorporate Level 2 cache to boost performance "by transforming the Athlon's current 512 kilobytes of off-chip L2 cache into 256KB of on-die cache."
I do not want to know what they are talking about.
What it actually means is that while my new Revelation continues to chug along at 800MHz, the rest of the world is already leaving me further and further behind.
Somehow, it just does not seem fair ...
Postscript: Meanwhile, the dear old Genesis still bravely surfs the web on the desk of special correspondent S. Braunias, with a faint smell of burning on some of the larger downloads ...
petersinclair@email.com
BOOKMARKS
Most immediate: FijiLive
The Internet first took its place as a key news source with the release of the Starr Report. Any remaining doubts about the web's significance in the global news flow were removed when George Speight led the latest attempt to topple an elected government in the Pacific Islands. As Fiji's Parliament was stormed and voice communication was cut, headlines appeared on the web thanks to FijiLive. Maintained by Suva ISP Webmasters and written by journalists from independent news and business magazine the Review, FijiLive became almost the only source of news during the first 24 hours of the coup with instantaneous coverage of events as they unfolded. From now on, as they clamp down on radio, television and newspapers in the usual manner, insurgencies of the future will have to take ISPs into account as well.
Advisory: Speight was not the only one to score a coup.
Most captivating: Earth From Above
My thanks to reader Walt Rotherham, who has drawn my attention to the images of stunning beauty to be found at this beautifully achieved website in the photographs of Yann Arthus-Bertrand. Not for the faint of Ram, though, plus you will need a fast connection, the latest release of Shockwave's Flash and your browser will want to be 4.0 or better. A breathtaking experience of Planet Blue.
Advisory: Geography approaches art.
Danciest: Loops and Samples
Website of a documentary on the history of dance music in New Zealand, the offshore subculture challenging local rock music. Director Anoar Ahmed's first feature film investigates "the exciting rise of this exploding social trend." The page "What You Should Know" sounds a timely note of warning.
Advisory: Dance on.
Links
JDI
Computer Manufacturers Association of New Zealand
Revelation
Advanced Micro Devices processor announcement
Fijilive
Review
Earth From Above
Shockwave's Flash
Loops and Samples
Peter Sinclair: Thundering to 1GHz is quite a revelation
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