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What Would Be Your Dream Machine?
isaachulvey asks: "If you could put together your dream machine with any components you want, what would it be? Obviously price is not a factor here or we'd all be putting together 800 MHz systems with 128 MB of RAM. This is your dream machine, so be creative, go as over the top as you need, remember overkill is not a crime."
All I want is a machine 100% compatible with my Linux distro of choice. If I can have that, I don't care about the specs.
I would want it to talk, kinda' like HAL, only without the killing people part. Oh, and it would have a sexy female voice.
Is a Beowulf cluster of whatever comes in second place.
I realize there's a long queue, but how many years ago was this question submitted?
i want my C64 back. and the whole bunch of good memories too.
Yeah, and output it to two of these
Where the hell is the "-1 Creepy" mod?
Douglas P. Price
Can we pick two? I'd take a core 2 quad pc with two GeForce 8800GTX in SLi, and maybe a few drives in 0+1 raid. Custom built of course.
Then perhaps a closet full of dual-processor quad-core blade servers for password cra^W^W helping out folding@home or something.
Sure, it'd be fun to have the fastest computer available, but lots of power comes with drawbacks: noise and high electricity bills.
My main machine is a Mac Mini G4, and you know, it's fast enough for just about everything I do. It's nice and quiet, and doesn't draw ludicrous amounts of power. The only drawback is its lack of room for internal harddisks. I've got two external disks connected for a total of 500 GB, and I still don't have enough space.
I'm shopping for a PVR at the moment. AFAIK, any current machine would do for this purpose; the only thing that may pose a problem is HDTV playback. But given the lack of HDTV broadcasts where I live, this wouldn't be a dealbreaker.
My work machine could do with a bit more power, but in my job (writing technical documents), the CPU rarely is the bottleneck. Disk speed is more of an issue. I just replaced the 4200 rpm disk in my laptop with a 7200 rpm disk, and the difference is quite remarkable.
My ultimate work machine would be a laptop with 4 GB RAM on the fastest bus available [1], a RAID-0 using four of the fastest drives available [1], a 15" internal screen and 2 DVI ports that can drive a 30" screen each. Then again, with that RAID it wouldn't be very portable.
1: note the lack of technicalities. I've no idea which speeds we'd be talking about. Mostly, I just don't care enough to keep up.
Go max out a Mac Pro on Apple's site... it's $20k.
I could use that.
Direct away from face when opening.
'nuff said!
I want a machine with an original Pentium I processor (you know the one). Put that together with like 16MB of differently spec'd RAM (2-8s or 4-4s) on a mobo with capacitors circa 2001, and an IBM DeskStar 75GXP hard drive. Oh, and it should be running WinME. That's like a dream come true...
This guy's the limit!
In terms of form factor, I think the Psion Series 3 had it about right. I'd like an updated version. Give it an 800x480 touchscreen like the Nokia 770, a 1GHz XScale CPU, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of flash. Throw in WiFi and UMTS. Keep the keyboard. Make it about half a centimetre thinner, and add a web browser and mail client. Oh, and some kind of magic batter technology so it can get the same sort of life that the original Series 3 had...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I want a machine with an original Pentium I processor (you know the one). Put that together with like 16MB of differently spec'd RAM (2-8s or 4-4s) on a mobo with capacitors circa 2001, and an IBM DeskStar 75GXP hard drive. Oh, and it should be running WinME. That's like a dream come true...
About the only things you're missing are the USB-attached crotch kicker and keyboard with random TASER capability.
Ignore anything I said above, I actually agree with everything you believe - mod accordingly.
You spent forty four thousand, four hundred fourty two dollars, with no less than eight hard drives, forty-eight gigs of ram, and three years of onsite gold enterprise level support... But you cheaped out on the DVD drive?
Man, spend the extra twenty bucks!
The ______ Agenda
My dream machine has exactly the hardware, peripherals, network connection, etc. that I would come up with, if I put in the enormous amount of mind-numbingly boring time to track down the indisputable best combination of components (and they all have to be compatible with each other...) for my future usage patterns.
It would run the OS that I would select after having tested perfectly-tuned and personally-configured versions of every OS and variant, plus all possible OS extensions, add-ons, enhancements, etc. that are out there.
It would have all of the software that I would select after exhaustive testing, preinstalled and configured just the way I'd like it, if I spent the time tinkering with all the options and exploring every little subfeature and 3rd party extension.
I'm dead serious. I spec'ed out a new computer a couple of years ago, and I'm enough of a perfectionist that it damn near sucked the life out of me doing all the research. And I love the configuration flexibility of many OSes and development tools, but the sheer effort required to *find* that perfect configuration is horrific.
Couldn't you just cut out the middleman and turn dirt into the commercial goods you seek? Take that, tax!
...that regardless of specs, this dream machine will have to have a vagina.
I too was thinking retro. I'm torn between wanting a fully loaded and totally decked out (functional) PDP/11 or a Cray Y/MP . . .
but if you want the imagination station:
I want a computer with the following specs:
numa memory
1024 bit vector math units (128 of em should do)
64x64bit CISC processors (core two duo EE)
a couple dozen of those multithreading jobbies from sun
and a full memory addressable array of spartan FPGAs ready to go.
For disk I would like 1TB of DDR2 ram battery backed with redundant controllers with lazy write back to FC disk as working disk and 64TB as archive disk.
64GB of numa flat memory should do the trick for all those CPUs (give each one a dedicated gig as well)
That, along with a really cool OS (open BSD perchance?)
oh, and I want a wall o monitors (6 or 12 [2x3 or 3x4 array] 22" wide screen deals).
-nB
just one more thing....
remember those really old memories that used the persistence of phosphor as memory in a CRT? I want one of those glued on capable of showing the stack of any given CPU as a bitmap, cuz that'd be cool.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
you know, now that I'm reading my post, fuck it. :-)
/. is afraid I'm spamming.
I want a functional quantum computer and a spaceship with warp 9.9 speed.
-nB
it's been one minute since my last post and
I'll take the sausage, spam, eggs, and spam with a side of vikings please.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump