[Sussex] Online with Ubuntu

[Geoffrey Teale]

On Tue, 2005-02-08 at 12:28 +0000, Thomas Adam wrote:
---%<----
> You may well come back to me with interesting comparisons using "time"
> to show how quickly that application executed, etc., but so what?
> That's not going to affect the overall performance.  That's just a
> measure of execution, and not really of useability.

This is very true, for the average desktop user the idle time on the CPU
is pretty high anyway (mostly the machine is waiting for the user)  -
but in certain applications the use of CPU specific extension can
provide _massive_ performance gains.  

Most users would only come across this types of gain if they are playing
complex 3D games, but in the field of drug discovery (for example) those
gains can amount to weeks worth of processing time.

The fact that I moved away from gentoo is testament to the fact that
other distros gave me enough performance by using more processor
specific builds - notably Debian isn't such a distro in its stable form.

I'm not arguing that Gentoo is somehow going to make everyones machines
suddenly fly along - I'm just arguing that your original points were
both incorrect and inflammatory. 

-- 
Geoffrey Teale <gteale at cmedltd.com>
Cmed Technology