I am a geek, and an early adopter. This has ocassionally pained me. My early adoption of digital photography has saddled me with a crappy 1.2MP camera with muddy contrast and an unreliable focus depth; my early adoption of palmtop computing has put me on an upgrade path with only limited capacities for future technologies-- it would require a serious leap, a heavy investment of time and effort to move out of the PalmOS 3.x range of devices.
On the other hand, my early attention to Linux blossomed into a full-scale knowledge of Unix computing (remember, I came from a VMS and Mac heavy college-- lot of DEC and Apple hardware, no real Unix experience) which has since become a career. So it's not without its upsides. I got WIFI in my house two years before everyone else, which was kinda nifty, if a little crappy because it was non-standard and needed to be replaced when 802.11b was settled.
But as "the geek" in the family, I tend to get the cast-off hardware. After all, I can make it do anything I want, if it's in good shape. So I tottered along with a pair of P2-266's, one for Windows and one for Linux, and mostly survived. Ocassionally I put something nifty in there-- for $20 I put in a CD-ROM burner and for $15 I got a sound card that lets me record vinyl to MP3. My "big buys" last year were a $120 hard drive (possibly now dead five months later) and the $70 modem because the old one fried and, being a Linux box, I need to have something external, no cheap CPU-driven winmodems for me. (And the modem isn't even entirely mine because it's on the router to the outside world, which means Omaha uses it just as much as I do when jacked in through her laptop.)
The fact is my boxes are older than my kids. I'd love to retire both of them, throw one to RePC, put the other one in the utility closet as a household firewall and router, and get a new dual-boot box for Windows and Linux. As much as I've enjoyed tinkering in the past with making my own toys, I'd really rather have someone else do it and give me a warranty. I want someone else to certify that all parts are compatible with all the other parts, for real, rather than "because that's what the spec says." I want a decent video card like a GeForce 2, decent audio, and maybe a 1.7GHz CPU. I mean, that's all last year's hardware. I don't need some dual-4.3Ghz P4 monstrosity.
Omaha's got some superhot Athlon she hardly uses except to run Quicken and treat as a fileserver, which we originally bought because she needed something fast enough to run web-browser-resident, JVM-based software for PSW. She has some really nice, state-of-the-art Macintosh Ibook for her radio show, a low end model but still brand new and better than anything I've ever held in my hands.
I've never owned a new computer in my life.
And she's absolutely fucking right that we can't afford one. We can't afford a machine fast enough to manage cryptographic filesystems without making MP3s stutter painfully, or hot enough to play the Linux version of Quake 3, or even to play Gauntlet under MAME without it sounding like someone has replaced the narrator with Max Headroom on quaaludes: "Ellllllffffff neeeeeeedddds foooooooddddd badddd-bad-badddly."
It might be just the cable. I torture those damned cables sometimes. But, y'know, I'd love something bright and shiny and new for once...
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