Gotcha. Ignorance fought!
A very interesting response.
As ancedotal evidence, most unix commands take a lot longer to execute on my iphone 3g than my 2GHz desktop.
Desktop on left, iPhone on right. All commands ran through the same terminal on my computer using ssh for the phone commands.
(simply displaying the uptime)
time uptime > /dev/null
real 0m0.002s 0m0.049s
user 0m0.000s 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.003s 0m0.030s
(displaying the date)
time date > /dev/null
real 0m0.003s 0m0.049s
user 0m0.002s 0m0.010s
sys 0m0.000s 0m0.020s
(dumping a text-only version of this forum)
time links -dump http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/forumdisplay.php?f=3 > /dev/null
real 0m1.011s 0m3.503s
user 0m0.066s 0m1.580s
sys 0m0.005s 0m0.180s
(listing my home directory, on PC it has 15 files and directories, on phone only 6 directories)
time for i in $(ls); do echo $i; done > /dev/null
real 0m0.003s 0m0.033s
user 0m0.001s 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.001s 0m0.040s
(display date and change all uppercase letters to numbers. In retrospect, this command probably didn’t do anything)
time for i in $(date); do echo $i | tr [A-Z] [0-9]; done > /dev/null
real 0m0.016s 0m0.250s
user 0m0.006s 0m0.040s
sys 0m0.009s 0m0.210s
(Taking all my ssh keys and replacing numbers with letters. my ssh directories are identical on PC and phone)
time for i in $(cat ~/.ssh/*); do echo $i | tr [0-9] [A-J]; done > /dev/null
real 0m0.212s 0m1.940s
user 0m0.062s 0m0.260s
sys 0m0.127s 0m1.620s
Heh, it’s fun trying to come up with a difficult one that may take a while to compute. This takes all my ssh keys, changes all the numbers to letters, changes all uppercase to lowercase, puts a space between all of them, replaces the space with a newline, sorts all lines, filters out unique lines and counts them. Huge difference in processing time here.
time for i in $(cat ~/.ssh/*); do echo $i | tr [0-9] [A-J] | tr [A-Z] [a-z] | sed ‘s/ */ /g’ | tr ’ ’ ’
'; done | sort | uniq | wc -l > /dev/null
real 0m0.543s 0m5.928s
user 0m0.188s 0m1.270s
sys 0m0.332s 0m4.530s
All this basically means that your average cell phone today (2010) has much more computing power than NASA had when they sent missions to the moon (1969).
Well, in 40 years thats pretty expected. I dont know why people hold up the lunar missions as some golden age of computing. Getting to the moon isnt computationally difficult and if anything this shows how clever engineers can be when they have limited resources to accomplish a task.
So does the little chip in a singing greeting card. That’s not much to trumpet.