27 Dec
2011
27 Dec
'11
9:17 p.m.
I understand where you are coming from, but wonder how
many
need such a system. I just checked and Wal-Mart has
brand new systems with 1 TB disk and 3GB ram for $300.
For a used system, I see a 1.7GHz P4 w/512 RAM for $25.
One problem with the PIIs is that they are being scrapped
as junk. You can't find a lot of them any more.
The other side is how many users will be satisfied with
systems without Java, JavaScript, iframes, Flash, etc?
Personally, I don't have Flash on my regular browser
because it is used 90% of the time for ads that I don't want
to see. I have another browser with it for those few
occasions that it's needed.
I like the command line (konsole), but many don't.
I've been thinking of going back to Lynx/Links because of
all the junk put out by a lot of web sites.
OTOH, Trinity is quite snappy on a Core2 system or even a
3GHz P4 (2005 vintage).
Perhaps are seeing things from a BLFS "geek" perspective. :)
I live in a rural area. Folks in such areas don't have Wal-Marts close by. Closest one
to me is an hour away. As a caveat, none of my three immediate rural neighbors own a
computer. Which means the average computers owned in this area is still greater than one
per household because I have five. :)
There are many people in less developed regions of the world who have no easy access to
computers and $300 is a year's salary.
For the sake of discussion let's raise the bar to a PIII. Yet doing so evades the
point that NT4, a 32-bit OS from the 1990s, run circles around anything Linux based on the
same hardware. Is there a way to tweak better performance out of TDE? I don't know.
How many users would be satisfied without Java, JavaScript, iframes, Flash, etc? Probably
many. :) I use NoScript in Firefox to disable all of that. Konqueror has a way to create
white lists for some of that, but I never found the interface easy to use.
A better question is how many people using older computers would be satisfied without that
crap? Probably all because they aren't using that machine as a web surfing or video
appliance. They would be using the machine as a basic office (or possibly school) system
with nominal web browsing.
Darrell