Number 206 - July 2000
UPDATE
Job Search
    Many of our members are retired so this may be of no interest to them. However, some of you, though still employed, may be looking for other employment where your skills may be best and most satisfyingly applied. An experienced computer man, Jim Hoisington of the North Texas PC User Group, has written a helpful article about his job searching techniques, learned through a lot of personal research. In the hope that it may be useful to you, it is included in the General Interest section as My Job Search.

A Million Here, A Million There...
    Recently we were reminded of Senator Everett Dirksen's not-so-snide remark, made many years ago, about the Government budgetary process: "A million here, a million there--pretty soon we're talking about real money!"

    The memory jogger was the note below written by Leo Laporte in the May 21, 2000 issue of Access Magazine (askleo@accessmagazine.com) which we Tacomans receive as an insert in the The News Tribune each Sunday.

    "Who needs billions of hertz?
    "It's a milestone like the four-minute mi1e and the Dow crossing 10,000. Intel and AMD are shipping 1 GHz processors--computer brains that operate at 1 billion cycles per second. That's more than 200 times faster than the first IBM personal computers.
    "But does anybody need all that power? Not unless you're calculating rocket trajectories or rendering "Toy Story 3." So why are Intel and AMD spending so much to design chips no one needs? Bragging rights. Each wants to be able to say it has the fastest chip.1

    "For the rest of us, 500 MHz to 800 MHz will do more than just fine. You're better off putting the extra money into more memory, a faster hard drive or a bigger screen. If they can come up with a chip that can clean the house, cook dinner and walk the dog, sign me up."

    1 We may not need it but we're not so sure about not using it. Oh, he's probably right about the economics of putting our money into storage capacity and speed until the technology shakes out.However, we think something like Parkinson's Law is at work here. You remember Parkinson's Law don't you? "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." There is also the observed computer-related phenomenon that capacities seem to double every year and a half.

    It seems to us that if the capacity is there, we will somehow find ways to use it for what we now think of as nonessential services or applications. We can still remember, when TOG started in 1982, when the "O" stood for Osborne, with computers running the CP/M operating system with 64 K of memory and an 8-bit Z-80 chip. Then, we thought a 10 MB hard disk on the Kaypro 10 was large and an IBM PC's 40 MB disk huge!
  Number 206 - July 2000