An interesting thought is that the instruction format and register set of AMD's x86-64 is just an extention of x86, so if Intel has a good emulator for x86 running on IA64, then it should be (from a technical standpoint, not a licensing standpoint) fairly trivial to emulate x86-64 at speeds similar to the x86 emulation. THAT doesn't bode well for AMD.
And as for licensing, a clean room implementation should be very easy considering it is simply an extention of x86.
And as every machine boots to a dos prompt, I'm sure you can provide proof of tens of thousands (this is a university after all) of licenses for msdos? remember, NT and derivitives don't include such licenses. Now freedos is another matter alltogeather.
Finally someone is thinking about my favorite transportation system: people bubbles. I've thought for a while that this is the way to go. point to point, private, automated. A huge infastructure is required, but you could also have aggregate links for city to city, aka a train or something that your bubble would drive onto and would take you to the next city.
Drive Bays Why have any 3.5 external? Floppies are finally starting to truely die out. The popularity of CDRWs and networks are finally killing them off. However, 2 5.25s make a lot of sense (plenty of people I know use a dvd and cdrw)
45 degree expansion slots. This takes up precious space in a different dimention. I think either 90 degree risers cards or half height pci cards are a better choice, esp with the width of the power supply. Standardizing on half height pci cards would be fine for everything but the graphics card, but they could deal with it.
Rear Template Space reduction can be acheived by removing legacy ports. Get rid of PS2, parellel, serial, game. Sure, they have purposes, but nothing critical. Further, you allow mb manufactures to not have to keep putting controlers in for them.
CPU at the BOTTOM of the board Be warned that then the power connector will be down there also. It takes some big traces on the MB to transport that much power.
ATX power supply But it is broken, well, it is if you have a UPS. Why do AC to DC to AC to DC, when you could have a standard connector for battery backup on the power supply? Also imagine a standard (external) power bus so you don't have to plug every single thing into an outlet?
Non-conductive motherboard mount points. Conductive mount points allow more grounding and are an intentional design choise by the ATX spec. Grounding is good (lets you control wire impediances with ground traces, etc) and better grounding makes design much easier.
Drive rails. Unnecessary. A better design would be a standard slide in and work design. i.e., no need to open the case at all. Take a look at some laptops.
I think the most important thing here is the half height pci (or card style pci) and vast reduction in bays. Also, if they went back to putting the cpu in the bottom front of the case (below the drive bays, AT-style), you would again reduce the height of the case, and allow one set of fans to vent the cards and the cpu (since the would be in line).
>Multiprocessor Thunderbirds will rock, I am
>certain. But this is as ridiculous as the
>recently reported SMP Thunderbird Linux kernel
>compile that supposedly demonstrated a greater
>than two times increase in speed between one
>processor and two... Yup.
That is common. notice he used -j3. This causes 3 files to compile at once, not 2. This helps because one compiler may be waiting on i/o, but there is still 2 compiles to use the cpus. If the test was done with -j2, then it would have been "fair".
I do hope you realize that VMWare and plex86 will not run on a IBM mainframe since they do not emulate the CPU, they only emulate certain protected mode instructions, while letting the rest of the instructions run on the real processor. This is also why you can't run VMware in VMWare.
But you forget. This is for DIGITAL monitor interfaces. Of corse it is useless on old monitors, they don't use the "standard" digital link between monitor and computer, they use the standard analog one. This technolog is applicable to almost no monitors being made right now.
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An interesting thought is that the instruction format and register set of AMD's x86-64 is just an extention of x86, so if Intel has a good emulator for x86 running on IA64, then it should be (from a technical standpoint, not a licensing standpoint) fairly trivial to emulate x86-64 at speeds similar to the x86 emulation. THAT doesn't bode well for AMD.
And as for licensing, a clean room implementation should be very easy considering it is simply an extention of x86.
And as every machine boots to a dos prompt, I'm sure you can provide proof of tens of thousands (this is a university after all) of licenses for msdos? remember, NT and derivitives don't include such licenses. Now freedos is another matter alltogeather.
Finally someone is thinking about my favorite transportation system: people bubbles. I've thought for a while that this is the way to go. point to point, private, automated. A huge infastructure is required, but you could also have aggregate links for city to city, aka a train or something that your bubble would drive onto and would take you to the next city.
Drive Bays Why have any 3.5 external? Floppies are finally starting to truely die out. The popularity of CDRWs and networks are finally killing them off. However, 2 5.25s make a lot of sense (plenty of people I know use a dvd and cdrw)
45 degree expansion slots. This takes up precious space in a different dimention. I think either 90 degree risers cards or half height pci cards are a better choice, esp with the width of the power supply. Standardizing on half height pci cards would be fine for everything but the graphics card, but they could deal with it.
Rear Template Space reduction can be acheived by removing legacy ports. Get rid of PS2, parellel, serial, game. Sure, they have purposes, but nothing critical. Further, you allow mb manufactures to not have to keep putting controlers in for them.
CPU at the BOTTOM of the board Be warned that then the power connector will be down there also. It takes some big traces on the MB to transport that much power.
ATX power supply But it is broken, well, it is if you have a UPS. Why do AC to DC to AC to DC, when you could have a standard connector for battery backup on the power supply? Also imagine a standard (external) power bus so you don't have to plug every single thing into an outlet?
Non-conductive motherboard mount points. Conductive mount points allow more grounding and are an intentional design choise by the ATX spec. Grounding is good (lets you control wire impediances with ground traces, etc) and better grounding makes design much easier.
Drive rails. Unnecessary. A better design would be a standard slide in and work design. i.e., no need to open the case at all. Take a look at some laptops.
I think the most important thing here is the half height pci (or card style pci) and vast reduction in bays. Also, if they went back to putting the cpu in the bottom front of the case (below the drive bays, AT-style), you would again reduce the height of the case, and allow one set of fans to vent the cards and the cpu (since the would be in line).
Um, everything points to Civ 3 having the SAME turn based game play as Civ 1 and 2 and Alpha Centari.
:)
So, yes, it may fall into the turn based games
Oh, BTW, any of the civ series (even civ 1 for dos) blow away these "RTS" build lots of tanks games.
This is almost exactly how BeOS was able to use GPL'd drivers in their OS. By redirecting though an internal network/RPC interface.
>Multiprocessor Thunderbirds will rock, I am ... Yup.
>certain. But this is as ridiculous as the
>recently reported SMP Thunderbird Linux kernel
>compile that supposedly demonstrated a greater
>than two times increase in speed between one
>processor and two
That is common. notice he used -j3. This causes 3 files to compile at once, not 2. This helps because one compiler may be waiting on i/o, but there is still 2 compiles to use the cpus. If the test was done with -j2, then it would have been "fair".
You can buy rounded cables for high end SCSI, but they tend to be rather carefully crafted, not hapazardly cut and tied togeather :)
I do hope you realize that VMWare and plex86 will not run on a IBM mainframe since they do not emulate the CPU, they only emulate certain protected mode instructions, while letting the rest of the instructions run on the real processor. This is also why you can't run VMware in VMWare.
NT's GDI layer (graphics) was written in C++. It was one of MS's first attempts at C++ in the OS.
But you forget. This is for DIGITAL monitor interfaces. Of corse it is useless on old monitors, they don't use the "standard" digital link between monitor and computer, they use the standard analog one. This technolog is applicable to almost no monitors being made right now.