I would truely hate to live in a society that would treat technology as something so important in their lives that they need to turn themselves into virtual cyborgs to just have more of it.
I'd really like to know your personal motivation for coming up with (and programming) some of the most popular games in PC history. Is it the kind of inspiration you can keep up for another ten years or do you think you'll eventually move on to other forms of work while maybe keeping a hobby interest in your games?
the Maxx technology on the card is a good idea but its not something I'm going to think about buying anytime soon just like the GeForce. The chips on this card basically suck, they run hot and don't have anything new but what they do have is a new chipset that has a future. The chipset was designed so when they come out with the next generation of their big and bad chips they can stick them in a Maxx chipset and double the framerate and maybe even performance. The GeForce is the same in my opinion, the idea is sound and will be cooler in a few months but right now it's a waste of money. I think chipmakers are all going to move to a GeForce styling where the video processor is a GPU (or whatever) that takes some of the strain off the system's CPU. My P3 500 with a Viper v770 plays any game I put on the machine damn well but in two or three years it most likely won't. If I want the newest games (assuming that video card technology stayed the same as it is now where the graphics card just handles the actual rendering and output) I would have to update my entire system which would mean I'd build a new one. Then along comes a technology like the GeForce where you can just get a new graphics board that deflates the load on the CPU by handling more parts of the game. I no longer have to completely update my system, I can keep it competitive by replacing the faster and more powerful graphics board. Just look at the games that ran great on a 90mhz Pentium processor a few years ago. If they had a way for more and more of the game to be run on the graphics board then your 90mhz pentium might be able to play Quake 2 pretty decently since it would only have to run the game code and not the graphics setup. Maybe in another year or two we'll see an entire gaming subsystem you could plug into your AGP slot, like having a Dreamcast in your computer. The subsystem could run every aspect of the games and use the rest of the parts of the PC as imput. The CPU wouldn't even have to be involved because DMA devices would mean they could communicate directly with the subsystem without bothering the tired CPU.
This has been tried before AFAIK but I counldn't point to anything definitive on it. The problem is figuring out how to do the different instructions but I would think you could have two cores running at 100mhz on a 200mhz total system bus, that would probably solve the bandwidth problem. Deviding up the code between the processors could be done most likely in the compiler which would multithread the program. With the two cores you wouldn't have double the clock speed but you would have double the MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second).
The chip runs on a 200mhz bus, the rest of the system (including it's RAM) is only 100mhz. I don't have time to educate you with links to this common knowlege.
Be would make a horrible server OS, so would NT which is too unstable for a high volume site without a bunch of machines behind a switch. Linux SMP works great if you're doing server applications (as long as icecast and apache are revamped to use SMP). The improvements that came after the Mindcraft shit really improved SMP performance.
won't need a G4 server for what is basically a file server. There's several routes you can take depending mainly on your expected volume. Windows NT as you probably know is a crappy idea but good ideas would be FreeBSD or Linux. If money is an issue then you might want to go with a Celeron based server which is just a P2 core with an on-chip cache running at 66mhz. This is plenty of speed for a web server as long as you have plenty of RAM (probably over 512MB). Icecast is a good MP3 streaming server which is available in source for linux (glibc), Solaris, and Windows. Encode the MP3s at or below 64kbps to maximize bandwidth and keep the file size relatively low. DOn't forget the RAID5 setup for quick access and expandable space. You CAN build an IDE RAID system which is much cheaper per megabyte than SCSI but getting an IDE RAID controller that works nice under linux/FreeBSD will take some searching. If it's something you want to try you can download the source to QuickTime Streaming Server (don't say that in CUpertino, there it's called Darwin Streaming Server). So to make it short: Celeron or P2 processor (at least 400mhz) at least 512MB RAM RAID5 with lots of space 64kbps (at 22khz) for good playability I don't suggest a Mac server because I can't testify to the reliability to PPC linux or MacOS X. Alot of the question depends on your bandwidth too. If you're running off a full T3 you're going to need a faster server with more RAM because more people are going to be using it at once. If you've got a smaller connection you don't need as much umph in the server and you probably should encode the MP3s at a lower bitrate to maximize your bandwidth.
has alot of points I think alot of people miss out on. The whole cathedral and the bazaar idea seems a little idealistic to me anyways. Sure open software is great but for the most part users want things to run without tweaking them, things the bazaar has a hard time understanding (at least what I have seen). Cathedrals have the problem of putting too much emphasis on their talents and charge you amazingly exorbant fees to merely license the use of their software without actually owning it. I think ESR goes too far to one extreme and people like Bill Gates go too far to the other. FreeBSD is an excellent example of how the middle ground can be more versatile than either one of the extremes. The BSD license doesn't require you to reproduce the source code yet it states you need to give credit where credit is due. This kind of license doesn't force anyone to do anything except give the person who they based their software on the credit they deserve. Imagine if all the software Microsoft copied was released under the BSD license, it would add another GB to the size of Windows 2000. More to the point, FreeBSD is a successful development model because it's major development and source tree is maintained by a smaller group of individuals yet it remains completely open and free. Smaller groups are much easier to manage than thousands which leads to better organization and cohesion.
this article is very insightful in many respects. It focuses on problems in the desktop arena that I haven't seen too many other people talk about. Mainly about what would happen in open standards ceased to exist due to a monopoly. I really like the SMTP example; IF M$ could get exchange on every email server or at least a majority of them it could change the protocols just a little bit to leverage everyone else to use their products in order to compete in their markets. Imagine being forced to use Outlook compatible HTML e-mail, horrible. Open source or at least open standards let everyone compete fairly as long as they have as much talent as the competition. In 10 or 15 years I see mainstream computing not existing on the desktop or set top but somewhere inbetween. The web will most likely turn into a big hard drive rather than a huge network, not physically but access to information and applications will be network based because connection speeds are bound to increase logarithmically in that time. You'll probably think less of websites and more of places (I doubt.com's will end up being much more than a trend for businesses). The open source "movement" I guess you would say needs to start working on this sort of development right now rather than waiting to do it in responce to Microsoft or anyone else. O'Riley agrees with me on this, the killer app will be a website or net-application rather than a new kind of spreadsheet. The desktop technology has hit somewhat of a wall because there's not many places left for it to expand to, it has productivity and entertainment, the network is it's last frontier. Linux and open source can keep ahead of this by being the next killer net application or means of accessing information. If Microsoft bullied it's way into the control of netWidgets, everyone would have to use M$ netWidgets and would have to pay them handsomly for their use but if an open source group is the first to release netWidgets in a mass scale to get them universally accepted and providing open standards then netWidgets will not only become the standard they'll remain free and open. Keep the network open.
If he blabbed about Transmeta's company secrets he would be fired faster than kernal patches appear. It's assanine to think because he designed an open operating system that he somehow owes you all of his employer's company secrets. Go hack in peace without a modem so you don't make yourself look like an a$$hole.
I see one of the biggest problems of Windows CE as being the damned GUI, which tends to be the problem with most versions of Windows. The Win32 API works marginally well on a low res desktop (remember Win95 at 640x480 resolution?) but on a screen that's much much smaller than your 13.1" monitor is just assanine. The PalmOS is a pretty much "perfect" operating system for palmtop computing, it's super easy to use, great interface on a small screen, and stable. There was an OS before Palm that did that, NewtonOS. I unfortunately was never able to get a Newton even though I really wanted one but I did have the opertunity to use one. If Apple brought the Newton back at a comparable price to the Visor or Palm I'd seriously consider one. If any palmtop designers are reading this, here is what I'd like to see in a palmtop:
1. Easy access expansion slot (preferably a type 2 PC card slot) that can hold anything from flash memory to microdrives.
2. A cradle that uses USB to recharge the batteries and synch it to my desktop or laptop. Not to mention an IrDA port on the corner of the device for use with my Powerbook's IrDA port (the corner so it has wider visibility).
3. A really long battery life, somewhere in the range of weeks (one would be fine). I don't want a colour screen and have third party device manufacturers put little lithium ion batteries in their stuff so my handheld's batteries arent taxed to heck. Enforce a voltage limit of 3.3 and make your device run on 1.1v.
4. Access to the sub-etha net and "Don't Panic" written plainly on the outside. Maybe include travel information for most of the galaxy.
5. Team up with Victorinox to create a Swiss Army Palmtop complete with scissors, fish scaler, and modem. 6. Wireless access given to me in the same fashion as text pager messages (think XML). I dont need cell phone capabilities but I would like be able to hand surf a handfull (pun intended) of web pages parsed to my viewing ability. I'm done.
a brown dwarf rather than a 10th planet. For years astronomers have been theorizing an as yet unseen large body in some kind of orbit around the Sun. It's more plausible that it's a Brown dwarf with enough mass to keep itself from being drawn into the solar system at large but not enough mass to keep from being caught in the Sun's deep space gravity well.
The machine itself is damned fast but the GUI isn't as excellerated as much as Windows or new XFree servers. Do some 3D rendering on it and then try it on an Ultra5 or something and you'll see a hell of a difference. Sun needs to work on their interface for their workstations but the backend (the Solaris kernel) is damn fast and pretty efficient.
I'll wait to get myself a Visor. Palm stuff looks cool but then as soon as you buy something they come out with a more expensive feature laden model and you're stuck with the one that wasn't the cool toy youy thought it would be. The stuff from Handspring is priced much better than 3Com's not to mention has Tiger Woods. The Visor looks to me like a much better buy, you get what you pay for plus Palm OS which tops all others in my opinion. The Visor also seems to be much better at expanding with the slot on the back (a great idea) for modems, games, memory, microdrives, ect.
I dont need a multi user network command line OS on my palmtop. Linux is useful in alot of paces but not a palmtop. People who bitch about linux palms have never used Palm OS, the easist OS I have ever seen.
I already have 5 computers. The new iMac is really cool in my ever so humble opinion, it's what most people want a computer to be. You turn it on and it works with no setup and few wires. If you naysay the lack of a fan, stop yourself. The PowerPC chip runs very very cool because it uses this wonderful thing we call copper. Copper lets the chips run on a lower voltage (1.1v) instead of the 3.3v for Intel's chips which means you get alot less heat and alot less powerr consumption. The G3 in my Powerbook is the same chip in a desktop Mac. My powerbook is the only one of my computers that I could leave running alnight without keeping me awake. I think it's also a great idea to include Airport hardware with the iMac, it really looks like technology thats going to beat the pants off phone line and power line networking in the home especially because it uses the 802.3 standard so any device you buy can work on it. iWebpads in the future maybe? I did notice something funny about the iMac though, when you turn it off it wilkl save it's state and whe nyou powerup again you can start where you left off, this is a feature found only before on their Powerbooks (either when you put the screen down or the battery is about to die also when you set it to sleep) up it just puts that info back into the RAM, I'm not so sure if thats so good for a desktop but it'll be interesting to see if it's a featurew we'll see in alot of PC's from now on.
that AMD needs really badly at this point which would probably turn the company around. 1. A better relationship with Microsoft- Microsoft you say? How can he really think anyone needs to be friends with Microsoft? Well you need to take into account something Intel realized a long time ago. Microsoft will not go away, kinda like gum stuck to the bottom of a pair of Airwalks. Linux is great yada yada, but the linux geeks of the world don't have the mass buying power that PHB's have. 3D Now extensions in M$ products like office and maybe some special support in NT and 98 for it also. 2. An intelligent marketing director- AMD is missing something that Intel has and it's not money. According to Intel's commercials if you buy their processors you can actually move into the internet and cute bears will walk around your screen all because of the P3. All AMD has to do is get people to believe they can do some extraordinary stuff with the Athlon and when it comes down to buying a P3 system or an Athlon system Jonny and Suzy Nontechsavvy will buy the Athlon. 3. Some kind of relationship with any computer manufacturer that has TV commercials- People watch alot of TV so when they see a Dell or Gateway commercial with the AMD logo they'll think the processors are damn cool, like they do now with the P3. Intel makes a majority of their megabucks selling though computer manufacturers, learn the lesson AMD. 4. Really snazzy SMP- This fits in with all of the other suggestions. Make the SMP run really snappy with up to alot of processors, companies like Dell and Compaq will put them in their servers and then sell NT on them and put them in commercials. If AMD can keep prices low we might even see consumer SMP boxes for under 2000$ with any distro of linux or Windows NT or 2K from a said computer company. SMP is sorta like RAID in that it would work wonders in a consumer environment but never panned out and has for the most part been relagated to enterprise class machines. SMP just leaves so much room for expansion on a system, if you really need more power you can buy a second processor and you're set, no worrying if you can find a slightly faster chip to work in your system or if you just need awhile new system. Thats why I got a dual motherboard, when I need more speed I want to pay 200$ for a second processor, not have to upgrade to a while new motherboard AND faster processor. When I need a faster system still I can replace both processors and up the bus speed by 133mhz giving me a much longer life span out of my investment. This is good for Joe COnsumer. Slap the motherboard companies to get their SMP boards out AMD, you need it. Ok that's all.
A 128bit chip designed like the Velocity Engine on the PPC 750 chip would work damn well as a full processor. 32bits will do most if not all of your calculation very well, and if you need a bigger word size you can go with 64bits. But then comes the processor with it's 128bit pipe, uh oh it's wasiting most of it's pipe on small words, or not. A 128bit system would work wonderfully if it ran 32 and 64bit code because it could run 4 or 2 instructions per cycle which makes it more efficient, this is what the PPC 750 (G4) does with the Velocity Engine. The main die could be 128bit but the memory bus could be 64 so motherboards wouldnt be too much more expensive than they are now.
Re:http://www.tomshardware.com/
on
700 MHz Athlon
·
· Score: 2
I could overclock my P3 to 750mhz if I stuck a 4 foot tall heat sink on it too:P
Re:Williamette retail chip?
on
K8 Details
·
· Score: 2
The Merced has always been thought of by Intel as a way for them to transition into the 64bit RISC market while still keeping the 32bit CISC market open. The McKinely will be the real ass-kicker, while Merced is more of a warm-up bout. I've heard rumours about Intel not even actually producing the Merced and skipping right to the McKinely because everyone who currently uses the IA-32 is well on their way to porting their stuff to IA-64 which would mean backwards compatibility would be awaste of core space. I think skipping Merced would be more beneficial to them than releasing it them a year later come outwith the McKinely. Sure AMD might be able to kick Intel's ass with the K7 for now Intel could easily pop out the McKinely and leave AMD waaaay behind since the K8 wouldn't be ready for production any time close to when Intel could release McKinely.
for way too many years your computer was a beige-turned-yellow flat sided box that looked really bulky and just not something you wanted to show anyone. They were bland because that was the style of the tyme, both socially (in the tech workplace at least) and functionally, the big boxes helped the chips not overheat. Now the social trend is to have an office that works for you but also has a sense of fashion, it impresses people. It's also possible now to stick processors in small boxes because they don't run quite as hot. Once you get to the point where the technology to build something isn't hindering you it's natural to explore with it. We saw computers turn black (I think Acer started with black PCs) so fit in with your living room decor, then IBM made their desktop look like some techno-art piece. Apple came along and changed everyone's view of the desktop with the iMac. The iMac was a complete reversal of desktop design, while you may scoff it's a natural cycle. When a technology is hard to produce and maintain it's designed to be extra serviceable and accessible but when you reach the point where it's maintenance is negligible and it's easy to produce you work on the visual design of it. Look for example at cars in this century. At first they were designed for ease of manufacture because they were difficult to manufacture but then the technology to manufacture them was improved and you begin to see a more artistic approach to them. Computers are now entering the artistic design phase, don't get pissed off at computer companies cuz you don't have to buy a coloured computer. The technology is getting to the point where speed is beginning to become irrelevant to all but power users since everything is so fast now, how much a difference do you notice in Applix or StarOffice running on a 600mhz Athlon and a 200mhz Pentium? In another couple years you'll start seeing super slim computers stuck everywhere in your house purring along with a 1Ghz processor, it'll run Quake 5 fine at 14400x10800 resolution on your 30" screen.
I did that with the Sony VAIO I have. All the panels on the damn thing annoyed me but without them it looked wrong, so I replaced the panels with blue tinted plastic and it looks damn cool now. I'm working on making a mold out of the plastic on the CPD-120 monitor so I can make that translucent too.
This isn't the biggest deal since sliced bread you realize, Solaris isn't Sun's cash cow. Someone said the other day that if Soalris was open sourced it would be more popular than linux for servers. I think this is true for the most part, for super huge servers linux will work but FreeBSD would probably do it better while SOlaris would do it damned well but until now you couldn't just obtain a copy of Solaris. I see this as more of a push for linux onto desktops rather than big servers where it could do the job but not as well as other things. Sure some people want linux toothpaste but personally I would like to use what works for the job it needs to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I would truely hate to live in a society that would treat technology as something so important in their lives that they need to turn themselves into virtual cyborgs to just have more of it.
I'd really like to know your personal motivation for coming up with (and programming) some of the most popular games in PC history. Is it the kind of inspiration you can keep up for another ten years or do you think you'll eventually move on to other forms of work while maybe keeping a hobby interest in your games?
the Maxx technology on the card is a good idea but its not something I'm going to think about buying anytime soon just like the GeForce. The chips on this card basically suck, they run hot and don't have anything new but what they do have is a new chipset that has a future. The chipset was designed so when they come out with the next generation of their big and bad chips they can stick them in a Maxx chipset and double the framerate and maybe even performance. The GeForce is the same in my opinion, the idea is sound and will be cooler in a few months but right now it's a waste of money. I think chipmakers are all going to move to a GeForce styling where the video processor is a GPU (or whatever) that takes some of the strain off the system's CPU. My P3 500 with a Viper v770 plays any game I put on the machine damn well but in two or three years it most likely won't. If I want the newest games (assuming that video card technology stayed the same as it is now where the graphics card just handles the actual rendering and output) I would have to update my entire system which would mean I'd build a new one. Then along comes a technology like the GeForce where you can just get a new graphics board that deflates the load on the CPU by handling more parts of the game. I no longer have to completely update my system, I can keep it competitive by replacing the faster and more powerful graphics board. Just look at the games that ran great on a 90mhz Pentium processor a few years ago. If they had a way for more and more of the game to be run on the graphics board then your 90mhz pentium might be able to play Quake 2 pretty decently since it would only have to run the game code and not the graphics setup. Maybe in another year or two we'll see an entire gaming subsystem you could plug into your AGP slot, like having a Dreamcast in your computer. The subsystem could run every aspect of the games and use the rest of the parts of the PC as imput. The CPU wouldn't even have to be involved because DMA devices would mean they could communicate directly with the subsystem without bothering the tired CPU.
This has been tried before AFAIK but I counldn't point to anything definitive on it. The problem is figuring out how to do the different instructions but I would think you could have two cores running at 100mhz on a 200mhz total system bus, that would probably solve the bandwidth problem. Deviding up the code between the processors could be done most likely in the compiler which would multithread the program. With the two cores you wouldn't have double the clock speed but you would have double the MTOPS (millions of theoretical operations per second).
The chip runs on a 200mhz bus, the rest of the system (including it's RAM) is only 100mhz. I don't have time to educate you with links to this common knowlege.
Wow two whole days uptime, when you get 70 days uptime with Windows you can think you're cool.
Be would make a horrible server OS, so would NT which is too unstable for a high volume site without a bunch of machines behind a switch. Linux SMP works great if you're doing server applications (as long as icecast and apache are revamped to use SMP). The improvements that came after the Mindcraft shit really improved SMP performance.
won't need a G4 server for what is basically a file server. There's several routes you can take depending mainly on your expected volume. Windows NT as you probably know is a crappy idea but good ideas would be FreeBSD or Linux. If money is an issue then you might want to go with a Celeron based server which is just a P2 core with an on-chip cache running at 66mhz. This is plenty of speed for a web server as long as you have plenty of RAM (probably over 512MB). Icecast is a good MP3 streaming server which is available in source for linux (glibc), Solaris, and Windows. Encode the MP3s at or below 64kbps to maximize bandwidth and keep the file size relatively low. DOn't forget the RAID5 setup for quick access and expandable space. You CAN build an IDE RAID system which is much cheaper per megabyte than SCSI but getting an IDE RAID controller that works nice under linux/FreeBSD will take some searching. If it's something you want to try you can download the source to QuickTime Streaming Server (don't say that in CUpertino, there it's called Darwin Streaming Server).
So to make it short:
Celeron or P2 processor (at least 400mhz)
at least 512MB RAM
RAID5 with lots of space
64kbps (at 22khz) for good playability
I don't suggest a Mac server because I can't testify to the reliability to PPC linux or MacOS X. Alot of the question depends on your bandwidth too. If you're running off a full T3 you're going to need a faster server with more RAM because more people are going to be using it at once. If you've got a smaller connection you don't need as much umph in the server and you probably should encode the MP3s at a lower bitrate to maximize your bandwidth.
has alot of points I think alot of people miss out on. The whole cathedral and the bazaar idea seems a little idealistic to me anyways. Sure open software is great but for the most part users want things to run without tweaking them, things the bazaar has a hard time understanding (at least what I have seen). Cathedrals have the problem of putting too much emphasis on their talents and charge you amazingly exorbant fees to merely license the use of their software without actually owning it. I think ESR goes too far to one extreme and people like Bill Gates go too far to the other. FreeBSD is an excellent example of how the middle ground can be more versatile than either one of the extremes. The BSD license doesn't require you to reproduce the source code yet it states you need to give credit where credit is due. This kind of license doesn't force anyone to do anything except give the person who they based their software on the credit they deserve. Imagine if all the software Microsoft copied was released under the BSD license, it would add another GB to the size of Windows 2000. More to the point, FreeBSD is a successful development model because it's major development and source tree is maintained by a smaller group of individuals yet it remains completely open and free. Smaller groups are much easier to manage than thousands which leads to better organization and cohesion.
this article is very insightful in many respects. It focuses on problems in the desktop arena that I haven't seen too many other people talk about. Mainly about what would happen in open standards ceased to exist due to a monopoly. I really like the SMTP example; IF M$ could get exchange on every email server or at least a majority of them it could change the protocols just a little bit to leverage everyone else to use their products in order to compete in their markets. Imagine being forced to use Outlook compatible HTML e-mail, horrible. Open source or at least open standards let everyone compete fairly as long as they have as much talent as the competition. In 10 or 15 years I see mainstream computing not existing on the desktop or set top but somewhere inbetween. The web will most likely turn into a big hard drive rather than a huge network, not physically but access to information and applications will be network based because connection speeds are bound to increase logarithmically in that time. You'll probably think less of websites and more of places (I doubt .com's will end up being much more than a trend for businesses). The open source "movement" I guess you would say needs to start working on this sort of development right now rather than waiting to do it in responce to Microsoft or anyone else. O'Riley agrees with me on this, the killer app will be a website or net-application rather than a new kind of spreadsheet. The desktop technology has hit somewhat of a wall because there's not many places left for it to expand to, it has productivity and entertainment, the network is it's last frontier. Linux and open source can keep ahead of this by being the next killer net application or means of accessing information. If Microsoft bullied it's way into the control of netWidgets, everyone would have to use M$ netWidgets and would have to pay them handsomly for their use but if an open source group is the first to release netWidgets in a mass scale to get them universally accepted and providing open standards then netWidgets will not only become the standard they'll remain free and open. Keep the network open.
If he blabbed about Transmeta's company secrets he would be fired faster than kernal patches appear. It's assanine to think because he designed an open operating system that he somehow owes you all of his employer's company secrets. Go hack in peace without a modem so you don't make yourself look like an a$$hole.
I see one of the biggest problems of Windows CE as being the damned GUI, which tends to be the problem with most versions of Windows. The Win32 API works marginally well on a low res desktop (remember Win95 at 640x480 resolution?) but on a screen that's much much smaller than your 13.1" monitor is just assanine. The PalmOS is a pretty much "perfect" operating system for palmtop computing, it's super easy to use, great interface on a small screen, and stable. There was an OS before Palm that did that, NewtonOS. I unfortunately was never able to get a Newton even though I really wanted one but I did have the opertunity to use one. If Apple brought the Newton back at a comparable price to the Visor or Palm I'd seriously consider one. If any palmtop designers are reading this, here is what I'd like to see in a palmtop:
1. Easy access expansion slot (preferably a type 2 PC card slot) that can hold anything from flash memory to microdrives.
2. A cradle that uses USB to recharge the batteries and synch it to my desktop or laptop. Not to mention an IrDA port on the corner of the device for use with my Powerbook's IrDA port (the corner so it has wider visibility).
3. A really long battery life, somewhere in the range of weeks (one would be fine). I don't want a colour screen and have third party device manufacturers put little lithium ion batteries in their stuff so my handheld's batteries arent taxed to heck. Enforce a voltage limit of 3.3 and make your device run on 1.1v.
4. Access to the sub-etha net and "Don't Panic" written plainly on the outside. Maybe include travel information for most of the galaxy.
5. Team up with Victorinox to create a Swiss Army Palmtop complete with scissors, fish scaler, and modem.
6. Wireless access given to me in the same fashion as text pager messages (think XML). I dont need cell phone capabilities but I would like be able to hand surf a handfull (pun intended) of web pages parsed to my viewing ability.
I'm done.
a brown dwarf rather than a 10th planet. For years astronomers have been theorizing an as yet unseen large body in some kind of orbit around the Sun. It's more plausible that it's a Brown dwarf with enough mass to keep itself from being drawn into the solar system at large but not enough mass to keep from being caught in the Sun's deep space gravity well.
The machine itself is damned fast but the GUI isn't as excellerated as much as Windows or new XFree servers. Do some 3D rendering on it and then try it on an Ultra5 or something and you'll see a hell of a difference. Sun needs to work on their interface for their workstations but the backend (the Solaris kernel) is damn fast and pretty efficient.
I'll wait to get myself a Visor. Palm stuff looks cool but then as soon as you buy something they come out with a more expensive feature laden model and you're stuck with the one that wasn't the cool toy youy thought it would be. The stuff from Handspring is priced much better than 3Com's not to mention has Tiger Woods. The Visor looks to me like a much better buy, you get what you pay for plus Palm OS which tops all others in my opinion. The Visor also seems to be much better at expanding with the slot on the back (a great idea) for modems, games, memory, microdrives, ect.
I dont need a multi user network command line OS on my palmtop. Linux is useful in alot of paces but not a palmtop. People who bitch about linux palms have never used Palm OS, the easist OS I have ever seen.
I already have 5 computers. The new iMac is really cool in my ever so humble opinion, it's what most people want a computer to be. You turn it on and it works with no setup and few wires. If you naysay the lack of a fan, stop yourself. The PowerPC chip runs very very cool because it uses this wonderful thing we call copper. Copper lets the chips run on a lower voltage (1.1v) instead of the 3.3v for Intel's chips which means you get alot less heat and alot less powerr consumption. The G3 in my Powerbook is the same chip in a desktop Mac. My powerbook is the only one of my computers that I could leave running alnight without keeping me awake. I think it's also a great idea to include Airport hardware with the iMac, it really looks like technology thats going to beat the pants off phone line and power line networking in the home especially because it uses the 802.3 standard so any device you buy can work on it. iWebpads in the future maybe? I did notice something funny about the iMac though, when you turn it off it wilkl save it's state and whe nyou powerup again you can start where you left off, this is a feature found only before on their Powerbooks (either when you put the screen down or the battery is about to die also when you set it to sleep) up it just puts that info back into the RAM, I'm not so sure if thats so good for a desktop but it'll be interesting to see if it's a featurew we'll see in alot of PC's from now on.
if you believe this I have the USS Enterprise parked in my garage, want it?
that AMD needs really badly at this point which would probably turn the company around.
1. A better relationship with Microsoft- Microsoft you say? How can he really think anyone needs to be friends with Microsoft? Well you need to take into account something Intel realized a long time ago. Microsoft will not go away, kinda like gum stuck to the bottom of a pair of Airwalks. Linux is great yada yada, but the linux geeks of the world don't have the mass buying power that PHB's have. 3D Now extensions in M$ products like office and maybe some special support in NT and 98 for it also.
2. An intelligent marketing director- AMD is missing something that Intel has and it's not money. According to Intel's commercials if you buy their processors you can actually move into the internet and cute bears will walk around your screen all because of the P3. All AMD has to do is get people to believe they can do some extraordinary stuff with the Athlon and when it comes down to buying a P3 system or an Athlon system Jonny and Suzy Nontechsavvy will buy the Athlon.
3. Some kind of relationship with any computer manufacturer that has TV commercials- People watch alot of TV so when they see a Dell or Gateway commercial with the AMD logo they'll think the processors are damn cool, like they do now with the P3. Intel makes a majority of their megabucks selling though computer manufacturers, learn the lesson AMD.
4. Really snazzy SMP- This fits in with all of the other suggestions. Make the SMP run really snappy with up to alot of processors, companies like Dell and Compaq will put them in their servers and then sell NT on them and put them in commercials. If AMD can keep prices low we might even see consumer SMP boxes for under 2000$ with any distro of linux or Windows NT or 2K from a said computer company. SMP is sorta like RAID in that it would work wonders in a consumer environment but never panned out and has for the most part been relagated to enterprise class machines. SMP just leaves so much room for expansion on a system, if you really need more power you can buy a second processor and you're set, no worrying if you can find a slightly faster chip to work in your system or if you just need awhile new system. Thats why I got a dual motherboard, when I need more speed I want to pay 200$ for a second processor, not have to upgrade to a while new motherboard AND faster processor. When I need a faster system still I can replace both processors and up the bus speed by 133mhz giving me a much longer life span out of my investment. This is good for Joe COnsumer. Slap the motherboard companies to get their SMP boards out AMD, you need it.
Ok that's all.
A 128bit chip designed like the Velocity Engine on the PPC 750 chip would work damn well as a full processor. 32bits will do most if not all of your calculation very well, and if you need a bigger word size you can go with 64bits. But then comes the processor with it's 128bit pipe, uh oh it's wasiting most of it's pipe on small words, or not. A 128bit system would work wonderfully if it ran 32 and 64bit code because it could run 4 or 2 instructions per cycle which makes it more efficient, this is what the PPC 750 (G4) does with the Velocity Engine. The main die could be 128bit but the memory bus could be 64 so motherboards wouldnt be too much more expensive than they are now.
I could overclock my P3 to 750mhz if I stuck a 4 foot tall heat sink on it too :P
The Merced has always been thought of by Intel as a way for them to transition into the 64bit RISC market while still keeping the 32bit CISC market open. The McKinely will be the real ass-kicker, while Merced is more of a warm-up bout. I've heard rumours about Intel not even actually producing the Merced and skipping right to the McKinely because everyone who currently uses the IA-32 is well on their way to porting their stuff to IA-64 which would mean backwards compatibility would be awaste of core space. I think skipping Merced would be more beneficial to them than releasing it them a year later come outwith the McKinely. Sure AMD might be able to kick Intel's ass with the K7 for now Intel could easily pop out the McKinely and leave AMD waaaay behind since the K8 wouldn't be ready for production any time close to when Intel could release McKinely.
for way too many years your computer was a beige-turned-yellow flat sided box that looked really bulky and just not something you wanted to show anyone. They were bland because that was the style of the tyme, both socially (in the tech workplace at least) and functionally, the big boxes helped the chips not overheat. Now the social trend is to have an office that works for you but also has a sense of fashion, it impresses people. It's also possible now to stick processors in small boxes because they don't run quite as hot. Once you get to the point where the technology to build something isn't hindering you it's natural to explore with it. We saw computers turn black (I think Acer started with black PCs) so fit in with your living room decor, then IBM made their desktop look like some techno-art piece. Apple came along and changed everyone's view of the desktop with the iMac. The iMac was a complete reversal of desktop design, while you may scoff it's a natural cycle. When a technology is hard to produce and maintain it's designed to be extra serviceable and accessible but when you reach the point where it's maintenance is negligible and it's easy to produce you work on the visual design of it. Look for example at cars in this century. At first they were designed for ease of manufacture because they were difficult to manufacture but then the technology to manufacture them was improved and you begin to see a more artistic approach to them. Computers are now entering the artistic design phase, don't get pissed off at computer companies cuz you don't have to buy a coloured computer. The technology is getting to the point where speed is beginning to become irrelevant to all but power users since everything is so fast now, how much a difference do you notice in Applix or StarOffice running on a 600mhz Athlon and a 200mhz Pentium? In another couple years you'll start seeing super slim computers stuck everywhere in your house purring along with a 1Ghz processor, it'll run Quake 5 fine at 14400x10800 resolution on your 30" screen.
I did that with the Sony VAIO I have. All the panels on the damn thing annoyed me but without them it looked wrong, so I replaced the panels with blue tinted plastic and it looks damn cool now. I'm working on making a mold out of the plastic on the CPD-120 monitor so I can make that translucent too.
This isn't the biggest deal since sliced bread you realize, Solaris isn't Sun's cash cow. Someone said the other day that if Soalris was open sourced it would be more popular than linux for servers. I think this is true for the most part, for super huge servers linux will work but FreeBSD would probably do it better while SOlaris would do it damned well but until now you couldn't just obtain a copy of Solaris. I see this as more of a push for linux onto desktops rather than big servers where it could do the job but not as well as other things. Sure some people want linux toothpaste but personally I would like to use what works for the job it needs to do.