Re: the same page

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

On Wed, 2001-12-19 at 05:04, Bill Haneman wrote:
> Regarding support for older machines:
> 
> While I'm sympathetic to this, and in fact use a P2 for some development
> and a slow p3 for other stuff (not to mention a 5-year-old SPARC), I
> think we should bear in mind two things; one, the Gnome2 we are
> preparing now will take time to "hit the streets" as it were, so we
> should be planning for the user population of mid-2002 and not the
> population of this instant; some of those old p1s will doubtless get
> replaced in the interim.  

My machine is a PII 400 which seems to work OK, but I think the machines
we are talking about are slower (maybe 3-4x slower) and have
significantly less RAM.

> Also, as this is a new "major rev" release, it's not unusual for the
> system requirements to jump up discontinuously at 2.0.  Once 2.0 is out
> we want to avoid forcing the 2.0 user base to keep upgrading, but I
> think a major release is an acceptable time for a "step function"
> increase in platform requirements.   I think the need not to degrade
> performance (footprint, etc.) will become more important when moving
> from 2.0 to 2.0.1, 2.2, etc. 

Yes, but the point is that some people believe we should be bucking the
industry trend... precisely because the increased software performance
requirements being normal has left certain classes of user such as NPOs
in the dust. 

My personal feeling is that this will result in the same thing happening
as happened to Cyrix. Targeting less visible/flashy markets and moving
to more visible markets hasn't seemed to be a common phenomenuum in the
computer industry. That's why, for example, while I think its great that
Linux is getting embedded in all sorts of things I don't think it will
have a profound impact on penetration into the desktop (since in
embedded devices Linux is supposed to be invisible). Microsoft has
partly been successful because they captured what became the most
visible market, and has used that to move into other markets. Doing the
reverse has tended to result in death, albeit slow.

I also don't think its unreasonable to say "Use an older machine, use
older software". If you're using a Pentium-200 you should probably
consider using GNOME 1.4 or Windows98 instead of GNOME 2.0 or WindowsXP.
Its true that you won't have the same features...but if you can always
get the same features without any hardware upgrades why would anyone
ever upgrade? Why aren't we still using Commodore64s or whatever?

-Seth

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