Darren New wrote:
> Invisible wrote:
>> How many people use a supercomputer to read their email? ;-)
> 
> Anyone using gmail? :-)

No - what is it?

[NO! I'M KIDDING THIS TIME!!]

That's using a supercomputer - or more accurately, an entire cluster of 
perfectly ordinary computers - to *store* your email, not read it.

> I was just thinking the other day, what kinds of computers are we 
> running that not that long ago, the US considered a 486 a 
> "supercomputer" enough to restrict its export to countries that might 
> use it to do nuclear bomb simulations. And now there's probably an order 
> of magnitude more power in the graphics chip of a game console than what 
> used to be a supercomputer 15 years ago.

Pretty mental, eh?

Wanna speculate how many FLOPS you can get out of a Commodore 64? Since 
it has a 1 MHz clock and typically takes around 4 clock cycles per 
instruction, and all float processing has to be done in software, I'm 
thinking were somewhere in the kFLOPS range?

What does, say, an Intel Xeon 3.66 GHz generate? How about a 
top-of-the-line nVidia GeForce GPU? (I know it's MFLOPS, but I couldn't 
tell you how many exactly...)

> Not that Windows is great either. They just have a user base that 
> expects computers to be easy to use, and a financial need to keep those 
> users happy. Plus, lots of Linux weenies don't know Windows' 
> capabilities and complain it doesn't work when it does. :-)

I still contend that AmigaDOS was easier than any version of Windoze 
I've ever touched. But I'm minority like that...

[Perhaps somebody will claim Mac OS X is the way to go?]

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