[MUD-Dev] 3D graphics (Was: The impact of the web on muds)

[Caliban Tiresias Darklock]

At 12:18 PM 2/14/98 +0000, you wrote:
>[Mike Sellers:]
>
>[I humbly beg forgiveness for straying away from central MUD issues, but
>system horsepower is on the edges of relevance.]
>
>The way Microsoft is going, you're going to
>need 64 bit machines to address the system memory not long after 2000!

Do you really think we're going to need 4GB of memory or more THAT soon?
Yes, we'll need lots of memory, but right now 128 MB is outrageous and even
going to ONE gig is pretty much in the realm of science fiction for most of
us. 

>Re: the earlier comment about us all running 1GHz Alphas in 1999: I've
>been having a hard time settling on what my next computer (when $ allows)
>should be - a Pentium running Linux or an Alpha running Linux. I'd like
>to chose the one with the best performance, but also with a decent expected
>lifetime. 

Go with the Pentium. My Linux Alpha was a constant pain in the ass and next
to no resources were available for it. On a Pentium class machine, I can
find the answer to damn near any question -- no matter how obscure -- with
a simple web search and about ten minutes of effort. Maybe I did trade some
performance off for that, but if it makes the difference between the
machine being hosed for an hour and the machine being hosed for a month, I
think that's worth the trade.

>Any gut feelings for whether or not endianness
>affects how well a given architecture can be an internet server?

I think the impact is so incredibly low, you may as well ignore it.