[geeks] Re: Need an opinion

[alex j avriette]

> If you've driven the police version of a car, and the "street normal"
> version of a car, I'd say you were qualified to compare the two.

I'd say you arent. There are a whole lot of things that can differ 
between two cars that make one "feel" more powerful than the other 
without actually being more powerful. Gearing, suspension, NVH, et 
cetera, can all contribute.

I'm reminded of my time spent on car lists a few years back (when I was 
still racing and driving). Kids would always join the list and tell us 
that they had bolted on a header and gotten an additional X horsepower 
because "they drove it and could feel it." This was often referred to as 
"wallet lightening" horsepower. It's entirely unscientific, and at best 
suspicious. If you want to believe that one car is faster than another 
(and in your case, you do want to believe that a police car is faster 
than its civilian counterpart), you will, regardless of fact.

Just stop for a second, and make an analogy to computers.

Tooling around in the shell on two boxes does not actually tell you 
whether one is faster. Heck, even compiling a kernel on the two boxes 
wont tell you that. There are a lot of considerations -- IO bandwidth, 
disk seek time, video card, et cetera. Without actually knowing whats 
going on "under the hood," you cannot say whether one or the other is 
more aptly suited to a particular task (i.e., producing horsepower or 
torque).

alex