Posted 4:48 PM by Gene

As my new homemade computer takes over more money -- I'm waiting for Intel to cut the price on the 950, and in the meantime I'm buying an unneeded hard drive -- I think to myself, why can't computers be small and fast? They can be small and slow, or fast and expensive, but not small and fast. That could be behind the Church of Cupertino's growth: Its Indulgences do most of want people want computers to do in a convenient package. Notebooks outsell desktops for largely the same reason. But too much computing involves trade-offs. Why thirty years after the first PC, and thirty-five years after the Virgin Birth, are we still talking trade-offs with computers?