It says a lot about modern computer hardware that despite my being logged in and doing work, the time-to-complete a long-running computational task is not significantly affected. I guess Unix makes this kind of calculation more visible -- it's possible to tell, with any long-running process, how many dedicated units of time, added up into one number, the process has used. In times past, merely being logged in and doing things in X would use significant CPU time (perhaps 40% or more). Now, unless I start up Openoffice or am doing something really complex with Mozilla, I don't often see the interactive part of my dealings with the CPU go above 2%, despite almost always playing music and flipping between a number of virtual workspaces every so often. So much power... and only the smallest sliver of it is needed to send tchaikovsky to my ears.

For some odd reason, I'm reminded of my first job, where they used some of the most irritatingly bad software possible to manage email and contact information. When I left MacLeod and Associates, it was a major pain to arrange to bring my email with me I suspect that, unless they're reading this (Hi Mitch MacLeod!), they still don't know I brought it with me, and, like the information packrat I am, I have every mail that involved me from those times, indeed every email that I've ever wanted to keep since the early 90s (and a few from the 80s, but things were kind of spotty there). We do seem, over the span of the day of a computer, to have incredible amounts of power at our hands.. and use but the smallest fraction of it.. computers sit unused for the majority of their lives.. Programmers almost never do productive things with that time.. always focusing on the immediate demands, and demanding more from the hardware to fund their waste. In life, while we may occasionally need to use direct, focused action to do what we want, we can often do other kinds of things better by tacking on small things that add up, to existing tasks, or to adjust natural processes to slowly meet our needs, and saving acive effort for other things. Consider designing explosives to create the Grand Canyon versus redirecting a river to do it. The power is adequate, we just think of the problem in a limited way.. We insist on things NOW, EXACTLY how we want them, and thus find misery. Hmm.. I seem to have some topic drift.