A fun little argument erupted on Facebook the other day when someone took umbrage at the usual ‘My PDA has more computing power than the Apollo 11 moon rocket’. I’ve referred to it several times myself and I hereby accept that, if not actually wrong, it was a bad comparison as this helpful article from the Knowledge Network explains.

True my Windows Smartphone may be able to process more instructions a second but it wouldn’t be likely to be able to land on the moon. I certainly wouldn’t risk my neck trying either.

Of course performance and power are tricky things to pin down. For example, my Pentium III 600 with 128MB of RAM starts faster and opens files faster in Damn Small Linux than my Dual Core with 2Gb of RAM starts Vista. It’s largely down to what’s going on in the background and how important that is.