Computers aren't toys...

It annoys me when people treat their computers like toys. Little is more trivial to me than to hear about the new mouse you just bought, and how high your resolution can go. I equate it to "ricing out" a honda. It's pointless. It's stupid to spend so much money making your computer top-of-the-line, when it's only so you can play games on it. Wow, you've got a 3.7 Ghz processor? Who gives a shit. I guarantee 99.99% of all the cycles your computer will be able to complete in its lifetime will be completely and utterly wasted. Useless, pointless diversions that simply mock the power and ability your computer had before these silly "upgrades." There are two things driving the Ghz race: Games, and bloatware (though it should be noted the two are not too dissimilar). Somehow these games we played years ago looked awesome, and today you really need more fps than your eyes can see? And bigger and even more bloated environments so you can look at all the pretty pictures and forget that the gameplay sucks? Shitty games aside, how foolish to use a computer's incredible functionality for simple diversions.

Perhaps it's the staggering functionality that a computer has daunts people to the point that they have no idea what to do with it. (nah, they just want their porn)

With a little bit of programming skill you can make your computer do many things, but if you combine your computer's information processing power with a limitless supply of information (the eeenternet) there really is little that can't be accomplished! To quote Dane Cook, "Dream it, you fucking dreamers!" To use such information processing power for such insignificant tasks should be a crime. Sure I don't mind games, but I also appreciate the computer for its abilities and recognize that any upgrade that only adds speed is weak sauce.

I remember back in the day, my franken-linux box with the 500 Mhz processor and 512 megs of RAM would kill our $30,000+ network in a heartbeat (when powered with linux of course! Just the thought of a 500 running XP makes me want to pull my teeth out with a claw hammer).

The power is there to be used well, not so programmers can do a shitty job of making their apps and just raise the hardware requirements. Weak programmers rely on the brute force processing power to accomplish their tasks in a tolerable amount of time. Good programmers would be able to make their app work on half the hardware.

Your computer can do so much more for you than you think.