Too Slow

[swestrup]

For a few years now I've been seeing essays by various pundits that computers are now fast enough and users don't need any more. I can't imagine how they get this impression. My computer is a nifty new dual-core Linux box with gobs of RAM and it regularly slows to a crawl. Just today I was writing an email and was having to wait several seconds between me hitting a key on my keyboard and the character showing up.  Now, admittedly I was also simultaneously surfing the net, re-encoding a movie, installing software, downloading software, transferring files from my machine to another on the network, and running a windows emulator, but if it can't multi-task, why bother with multiple cores?