Two things: I thought of this like, seriously, 20 years ago, as a teenager. Then I thought sometime after that, what a stupid rediculous idea! Now, I'm not sure what to think...
Secondly: I want to see the first TV show with an air car that goes rolling down a cliff side, hits the bottom, and then instead of bursting into a fireball it just expands (windows blow out of course) and freezes instantly. And then the police check out the flash frozen preserved body...:)
Never mind the logistics of setting up the infrastructure for doing this (which will more than likely make it not happen any time soon, if ever)..
Why is this such a bad thing, in theory? If you use the roads more, you ought to pay more in tax. Its only fair. That's why they tax the gas.
I have a better way to achieve the same thing. Why not just handle it at the DMV? When you go to renew your registration, they will check your odometer. Then your mileage will be multiplied by some kind of "handicap" for your particular car, based on its fuel efficiency and weight or whatever. Your tax will be based on that.
This way, you pay based on how much you use the roads, how much wear and tear your car might cause and how much polution you cause. Fuel efficient hybrid cars would pay much less.
The only thing is, people will certainly bitch about it because the tax will be much more noticable at the end of the year rather than paying a few cents a gallon.. even if it amounts to less overall.
OR: we continue to pay gas taxes, but when you renew at the DMV they use the same formula and give you a tax return if you payed to much! Now that would make some people real happy!
1. Even if they had Macs and Linux PC's everywhere they sell Windows PC's, and even if they were presented exactly the same way (IE, not stuffed into a dark corner, etc), people are still more familiar with Windows pcs. Of course things could be the exact opposite if Apples had retained their popularity way back when. Point is, it makes no difference which machine or OS is better, or which has more games, or software, or anything, because most people's brains just shut right off before even considering something different from what they've been using or grew up with.
So of course, those of us who grew up with Commodores and Apples and such are not afraid of new things as much as those who just grew up with a PC clone.
Consoles are an exception because, even though they are computers, they are made to be so dead simple to use that there's no fear. Like a toaster. There's really no investment in learning how to use it. There's not much penalty for getting the newest one. You can still play your old machine. They're small. You dont have to worry if your financial software's data is going to transfer over, etc...
Simple reason why people don't switch: fear of something different. A basic human instinct. People tend to stay with what they know, even when it sucks. You can see this all throughout human history. It takes a LOT to get people to try something new en-masse.
And this happens well before any considerations about whether the different system is better or worse in any way. Most people won't even bother considering if a Mac or Linux is better than Windows, simply because its different than what they already know.
This is why Apple's effort to market their pcs by getting them into schools is brilliant: get the kids used to Apples so that they will want them as adults.
1. If they used commodity PC hardware, then all Amiga hardware companies would be up sh*t creek.
2. If it ran on an Intel board with PC cards they would have to support umpteen zillions of combinations of hardware, which would be a support nightmare for a small company to handle.
3. Marketing reasons, including not wanting to totaly alienate the existing users.
Why doesnt Apple use Pentium motherboards and standard PC stuff? Same reasons. That's why apple wont be switching to pc hardware like a lot of people have rumored over the years.
Now it would be nice if they made a G5 Amiga with DDR and all the bells and whistles but how much more would it cost? It would take more resources and a longer time to develop for a product that may or may not sell.
How hard could it be? The worst part would be AGA emulation, but we already have that in UAE. All that needs to be done is to create some handwriting recognition software, drivers for touch screen and memory cards (I believe these are usualy formated in FAT so that should be easy).
With even 16 or 32 megs of ram and 256mb flash card, a 200Mhz+ coldfire cpu (yes they now have one that is 68k compatible) you could run dozens of games and applications... that's higher specs than my A4000 back in the day.
The AROS people ought to be doing this. I wish I had the time and resources to do it myself..
It was touched upon in the article, but I think they are really missing the boat on resurecting the Amiga (and have been for years). It would be nearly impossible for Amiga PC's to compete today. They need to go where the AmigaOS, in today's hardware market, could shine: PDA's. With modern Coldfire processors (very fast 68k compatible, low power, embeded cpus) you could easily build a PDA that would run AmigaOS screamingly fast.
Even better, if they could make a custom graphics chip that could emulate AGA and maybe add some new features, this PDA could double as a great game machine (and you have all the old amiga games to run on it). There's two markets right there.
Yes, its faster. But I think the primary reason they are doing this is not because we all want or need that kind of speed, but because it simply allows them to build simpler machines. Since its just a form factor for PCI-Express+USB, that means less circuitry.
Its called an antenna. You want your WiFi to work, dont you?
One thing you could do is get a better card that has a detatchable antenna (I have a high power SMC card that does this). Then get a connector cable and a small antenna you can stick on the back of your laptop (they have flat antennas). the cable will only stick out a little (like 1/8"), much better!
what a stupid list. Sure they got some of the things that should be there (like cell phones, PCs, etc), even still a lot of those things are really just things that got popular in the last 25 years, not invented... almost half that list!
HDTV? I dont know anybody that has one. Sure hasnt effected the lives of anybody I know. Change this one to TIVO.
Space Shuttle? A pile of crap! A representation of inovations that result from wasting lots of money on a bad design. Change this to Space Ship One.
OLEDs? OK yeah they were invented, but havent yet had a real impact... Change this to high-power LEDs, IE laser diodes, blue and white leds, etc.
My favorit is the idiot at MIT: "Flash memory is a tiny version of the disk drive that's in your computer," said Gene Fitzgerald, MIT professor of material science and engineering"
What? Flash memory is not even remotely like a disk drive other than that it stores things. I hope he was just misqouted or taken out of context..
And what's number 1? Gotta be the World Wide Web, right?
What about the GUI that made computers so usable for everybody?
I can't believe they didnt mention the evolution of the 68000. It didnt just end at the 68060 (which isnt mentioned either) but evolved into the ColdFire chips and the DragonBall cpu's that were used in Palm PDA's until fairly recently.
I remember back then pretty well. Like many others, I learned to program on Apple II's, TI's, Sinclairs, Ataris etc. The thing about the C64 was that it had great sound and video (though arguably perhaps not the best), a real keyboard, real peripherals (floppy), and it had a real good price. How much was an Apple II back then? For a lot of people (and remember the C64 is one of, if not the, most popular computers ever in sales) the c64 was the right balance of looking and sounding great at a price we could reasonably afford.
Its really representative of a golden age of PC's that lots of us fondly remember.
..film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair.
Although the physical features gradually change from one face into another, the researchers showed that subjects looking at the images tend to be "suddenly turned off" from seeing Marilyn turn into Maggie, explains team member Jon Driver.
"I've never seen an erection go flacid so quickly" explains team member Richard Head, "and I've seen a lot of erections..."
The problem that I see with this scenario is that if people do not realize that the discs are HD-DVD compatible when they buy them, they will not have a clue about it when the salesman mentions the "better quality" perk.
Entirely possible. Never underestimate the ignorance of the average human...
As for the comparison to SACD.. Can you tell the difference between CD and SACD? I dont think I can. Most people are happy with lossy MP3, much less CD, so SACD is kinda dumb. But I bet anybody with eyes can tell the difference between DVD and HD-DVD...
I for one welcome our new dual DVD, HD-DVD overlords...
But seriously, this is a great move. Not because it technologicaly better, but simply because people will buy these disks, perhaps not even knowing they are HD-DVD compatible. Some time later, when shopping for a new DVD player, when the salesman says "and if you have any DVD-HD-DVD disks, you will get better quality from your existing disks!" thus sealing the deal for lots of people...
Secure the computer: dont give them access to be able to install software. Remove AOL/MSN/etc IM's, disable IE and install firefox (I dont know if you really can disable IE completely?). Then explain to them that these things are security risks to your computer. That way they may think you are a paranoid, but they arent going to argue it: either they are ignorant to such things, or they know you are right.
Dont put the computer in their room. Unless you have an obvious nerd. In which case you probably cant do anything to stop them anyway.
I'd rather my kids were looking at porn in their rooms then going out and having sex. As for the chatting, that gets old. You grow out of it. Many of nerds have been there.
Give them reasons to come out. Go to a concert with them. Go to a computer convention if that's what they are into. Be creative.
1) You are forgeting that you can set up a charging station almost anywhere, and for very little $. Anybody that has an electric car can charge it at home, over night, and that's going to be enough to get them to work and such for most people.
2) We've been making electric motors for as long, if not longer, than internal combustion engines. There's quite a huge history and body of knowlege on electric power. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure an electric motor is going to do WAY better under adverse conditions.
An electric car is also probably going to be an order of magnitude simpler in complexity. Compare an electric motor to a multicylinder gas engine + transmission + emission controls (you know, that mass of tubing and wires that surrounds a modern engine) + starter + alternator etc etc.
There's a lot less to break down. An electric car is going to be simple, and cheap once they get into mass production. And reliable.
I really like the suggestion made to have a car designed with electric power, and a retrofittable power source -- gas generator, battery only, fuel cell in the future.
Unfortunately, the major car makers probably dont want to see things go in this direction...
I love this line: ".. somewhat like the gullwing doors on a McLaren SLR supercar, makes you giggle like a schoolboy that's just seen his first pair of bare boobies."
Has anyone considered that the "Cell" chip of the PS3 is just a graphics processor (or maybe for more general use, but highly specialized just the same) and that they still need a GPU for controling the whole system?
So maybe they both use a PPC core, so what? Do you realize how many things have PPC cores in them? There are cars with them. Does that make your car an XBox II or PS3? Of course not.
I'm sure Sony and Microsoft know exactly what they are getting from IBM and what the similarities are (and arent). And I'm sure they all have numerous contracts and NDA's and other legal paperwork that would prevent IBM from "pulling a fast on" on sony and MS by giving them the "same chip rearranged", unless of course that's what they ordered.
Here here! I like to make the differentiation between geek and nerd, because quite frankly there are lots of people who get grouped with people like myself who I do NOT want to be associated with. Since the term "geek" originaly comes from "circus geeks" I choose to be a nerd. And a nerd is the kind of person who makes things -- be it hardware, software, or even wetware; whether created from scratch or modified (hacked) from something else.
Geeks are just socialy backward people who do weird things, like spend all their time reading comic books, or biting heads off of chickens.
Mind you, I like comic books, scifi and chickens too. But I spend more time making things (nerd stuff), having sex, and living an otherwise "normal" life.
The geeks make the us nerds look bad. Just like "Jocks" make athletic people look bad.. I'm sure you can think of many more examples.
The problem with this analogy is that it's too simple. "Programming" spans a greater skill set than "blacksmith". A more accurate comparison would be not to "programmers" as a whole, but to "low level programmers" -- people doing tightly coded assembly, or even low level libraries and objects in C, C++ etc. Because these things are equivalent to the things smiths made -- commodity components like fasteners, gears, and even small machines like electric motors.
Like somebody else said, programmers will become more like the engineers who take common components and put them together, only sometimes making any low level changes to the common parts.
Yeah, it was great when we all did amazing things with our 2K of program space in assembly code. I really miss those days. But I dont want to do that anymore than I want to design and fabricate a gear so I can build a robot. Now certainly there are going to be a few people somewhere who need to design things like that, on a low level.
You can find all sorts of similar analogies. How about textiles? Do you know anybody who makes their own fabrics? Do you know anybody who makes their own clothing and who laments the fact that they dont get to weave the fabric first?
I'd rather stand on the shoulders of giants -- and create bigger and better things using the components people have perfected before me.
When I first started to read this article (which I found tedious to read) I thought sh!t, he's right! And then I realized I'll still be programming in the future, just using more tools than low level programming. Already I use code generators and libraries of functions and object components. Programming will be more like engineering the overall structure, or designing the data base or protocols, etc. That's more fun anyway.
Nostalgia aside, hooray for the death of the programmer! Long live the Software Engineer!
There is one good reason why Microsoft might want to make windows for PPC:.NET. If they made windows for PPC (or any other cpu for that matter) the only way to make windows applications that ran on both x86 and PPC would be to write them in.NET exclusively. And since MS wants everybody to use.NET, this would be one way to do it.
And I'm sure it bugs them that Apple is still around, an albeit small thorn in their side. What if MS made a slick looking stylish PC running windows on a PPC? Something to compete on the same level with iMacs? They're already doing hardware with the XBox. Aside from the DRM issues, what if they made an "X-PC" that was a suped-up XBOX with PPC (isnt the new xbox using PPC already?) but meant as home media / pc combo? Put it in a pretty box, make it play xbox games, and run Windows and.NET applications.
800mhz? You dont need that much to emulate an A500. I ran winuae just fine on a 360Mhz celeron way back when (shortly before overclocking it to 550mhz:).
The dreamcast has a 200Mhz cpu. Granted I'm sure it's better at 200Mhz than the arm/xscale at 200mhz. But it's close. UAE started back when PC's were 100Mhz, so it's just about the right time to get it going on PDA's...
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Two things: I thought of this like, seriously, 20 years ago, as a teenager. Then I thought sometime after that, what a stupid rediculous idea! Now, I'm not sure what to think...
:)
Secondly: I want to see the first TV show with an air car that goes rolling down a cliff side, hits the bottom, and then instead of bursting into a fireball it just expands (windows blow out of course) and freezes instantly. And then the police check out the flash frozen preserved body...
OMG, I havent laughed that hard in a long time. I'm going to be giggling all day long now.
Now if there was only a loop of "Two weeks.." from Total Recall...
Never mind the logistics of setting up the infrastructure for doing this (which will more than likely make it not happen any time soon, if ever)..
Why is this such a bad thing, in theory? If you use the roads more, you ought to pay more in tax. Its only fair. That's why they tax the gas.
I have a better way to achieve the same thing. Why not just handle it at the DMV? When you go to renew your registration, they will check your odometer. Then your mileage will be multiplied by some kind of "handicap" for your particular car, based on its fuel efficiency and weight or whatever. Your tax will be based on that.
This way, you pay based on how much you use the roads, how much wear and tear your car might cause and how much polution you cause. Fuel efficient hybrid cars would pay much less.
The only thing is, people will certainly bitch about it because the tax will be much more noticable at the end of the year rather than paying a few cents a gallon.. even if it amounts to less overall.
OR: we continue to pay gas taxes, but when you renew at the DMV they use the same formula and give you a tax return if you payed to much! Now that would make some people real happy!
1. Even if they had Macs and Linux PC's everywhere they sell Windows PC's, and even if they were presented exactly the same way (IE, not stuffed into a dark corner, etc), people are still more familiar with Windows pcs. Of course things could be the exact opposite if Apples had retained their popularity way back when. Point is, it makes no difference which machine or OS is better, or which has more games, or software, or anything, because most people's brains just shut right off before even considering something different from what they've been using or grew up with.
So of course, those of us who grew up with Commodores and Apples and such are not afraid of new things as much as those who just grew up with a PC clone.
Consoles are an exception because, even though they are computers, they are made to be so dead simple to use that there's no fear. Like a toaster. There's really no investment in learning how to use it. There's not much penalty for getting the newest one. You can still play your old machine. They're small. You dont have to worry if your financial software's data is going to transfer over, etc...
Simple reason why people don't switch: fear of something different. A basic human instinct. People tend to stay with what they know, even when it sucks. You can see this all throughout human history. It takes a LOT to get people to try something new en-masse.
And this happens well before any considerations about whether the different system is better or worse in any way. Most people won't even bother considering if a Mac or Linux is better than Windows, simply because its different than what they already know.
This is why Apple's effort to market their pcs by getting them into schools is brilliant: get the kids used to Apples so that they will want them as adults.
Well here you go:
1. If they used commodity PC hardware, then all Amiga hardware companies would be up sh*t creek.
2. If it ran on an Intel board with PC cards they would have to support umpteen zillions of combinations of hardware, which would be a support nightmare for a small company to handle.
3. Marketing reasons, including not wanting to totaly alienate the existing users.
Why doesnt Apple use Pentium motherboards and standard PC stuff? Same reasons. That's why apple wont be switching to pc hardware like a lot of people have rumored over the years.
Now it would be nice if they made a G5 Amiga with DDR and all the bells and whistles but how much more would it cost? It would take more resources and a longer time to develop for a product that may or may not sell.
How hard could it be? The worst part would be AGA emulation, but we already have that in UAE. All that needs to be done is to create some handwriting recognition software, drivers for touch screen and memory cards (I believe these are usualy formated in FAT so that should be easy).
With even 16 or 32 megs of ram and 256mb flash card, a 200Mhz+ coldfire cpu (yes they now have one that is 68k compatible) you could run dozens of games and applications... that's higher specs than my A4000 back in the day.
The AROS people ought to be doing this. I wish I had the time and resources to do it myself..
It was touched upon in the article, but I think they are really missing the boat on resurecting the Amiga (and have been for years). It would be nearly impossible for Amiga PC's to compete today. They need to go where the AmigaOS, in today's hardware market, could shine: PDA's. With modern Coldfire processors (very fast 68k compatible, low power, embeded cpus) you could easily build a PDA that would run AmigaOS screamingly fast.
Even better, if they could make a custom graphics chip that could emulate AGA and maybe add some new features, this PDA could double as a great game machine (and you have all the old amiga games to run on it). There's two markets right there.
Yes, its faster. But I think the primary reason they are doing this is not because we all want or need that kind of speed, but because it simply allows them to build simpler machines. Since its just a form factor for PCI-Express+USB, that means less circuitry.
Its also great for marketing.
Its called an antenna. You want your WiFi to work, dont you?
One thing you could do is get a better card that has a detatchable antenna (I have a high power SMC card that does this). Then get a connector cable and a small antenna you can stick on the back of your laptop (they have flat antennas). the cable will only stick out a little (like 1/8"), much better!
what a stupid list. Sure they got some of the things that should be there (like cell phones, PCs, etc), even still a lot of those things are really just things that got popular in the last 25 years, not invented... almost half that list!
HDTV? I dont know anybody that has one. Sure hasnt effected the lives of anybody I know. Change this one to TIVO.
Space Shuttle? A pile of crap! A representation of inovations that result from wasting lots of money on a bad design. Change this to Space Ship One.
OLEDs? OK yeah they were invented, but havent yet had a real impact... Change this to high-power LEDs, IE laser diodes, blue and white leds, etc.
My favorit is the idiot at MIT: "Flash memory is a tiny version of the disk drive that's in your computer," said Gene Fitzgerald, MIT professor of material science and engineering"
What? Flash memory is not even remotely like a disk drive other than that it stores things. I hope he was just misqouted or taken out of context..
And what's number 1? Gotta be the World Wide Web, right?
What about the GUI that made computers so usable for everybody?
I can't believe they didnt mention the evolution of the 68000. It didnt just end at the 68060 (which isnt mentioned either) but evolved into the ColdFire chips and the DragonBall cpu's that were used in Palm PDA's until fairly recently.
I remember back then pretty well. Like many others, I learned to program on Apple II's, TI's, Sinclairs, Ataris etc. The thing about the C64 was that it had great sound and video (though arguably perhaps not the best), a real keyboard, real peripherals (floppy), and it had a real good price. How much was an Apple II back then? For a lot of people (and remember the C64 is one of, if not the, most popular computers ever in sales) the c64 was the right balance of looking and sounding great at a price we could reasonably afford.
Its really representative of a golden age of PC's that lots of us fondly remember.
..film star Marilyn Monroe gradually morphed into that of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, or that of James Bond actor Pierce Brosnan transformed into current prime minister Tony Blair.
Although the physical features gradually change from one face into another, the researchers showed that subjects looking at the images tend to be "suddenly turned off" from seeing Marilyn turn into Maggie, explains team member Jon Driver.
"I've never seen an erection go flacid so quickly" explains team member Richard Head, "and I've seen a lot of erections..."
The problem that I see with this scenario is that if people do not realize that the discs are HD-DVD compatible when they buy them, they will not have a clue about it when the salesman mentions the "better quality" perk.
Entirely possible. Never underestimate the ignorance of the average human...
As for the comparison to SACD.. Can you tell the difference between CD and SACD? I dont think I can. Most people are happy with lossy MP3, much less CD, so SACD is kinda dumb. But I bet anybody with eyes can tell the difference between DVD and HD-DVD...
I for one welcome our new dual DVD, HD-DVD overlords...
But seriously, this is a great move. Not because it technologicaly better, but simply because people will buy these disks, perhaps not even knowing they are HD-DVD compatible. Some time later, when shopping for a new DVD player, when the salesman says "and if you have any DVD-HD-DVD disks, you will get better quality from your existing disks!" thus sealing the deal for lots of people...
Secure the computer: dont give them access to be able to install software. Remove AOL/MSN/etc IM's, disable IE and install firefox (I dont know if you really can disable IE completely?). Then explain to them that these things are security risks to your computer. That way they may think you are a paranoid, but they arent going to argue it: either they are ignorant to such things, or they know you are right.
Dont put the computer in their room. Unless you have an obvious nerd. In which case you probably cant do anything to stop them anyway.
I'd rather my kids were looking at porn in their rooms then going out and having sex. As for the chatting, that gets old. You grow out of it. Many of nerds have been there.
Give them reasons to come out. Go to a concert with them. Go to a computer convention if that's what they are into. Be creative.
1) You are forgeting that you can set up a charging station almost anywhere, and for very little $. Anybody that has an electric car can charge it at home, over night, and that's going to be enough to get them to work and such for most people.
2) We've been making electric motors for as long, if not longer, than internal combustion engines. There's quite a huge history and body of knowlege on electric power. I'm no expert, but I'm pretty sure an electric motor is going to do WAY better under adverse conditions.
An electric car is also probably going to be an order of magnitude simpler in complexity. Compare an electric motor to a multicylinder gas engine + transmission + emission controls (you know, that mass of tubing and wires that surrounds a modern engine) + starter + alternator etc etc.
There's a lot less to break down. An electric car is going to be simple, and cheap once they get into mass production. And reliable.
I really like the suggestion made to have a car designed with electric power, and a retrofittable power source -- gas generator, battery only, fuel cell in the future.
Unfortunately, the major car makers probably dont want to see things go in this direction...
I love this line: ".. somewhat like the gullwing doors on a McLaren SLR supercar, makes you giggle like a schoolboy that's just seen his first pair of bare boobies."
:)
Must been some machine to see...
Has anyone considered that the "Cell" chip of the PS3 is just a graphics processor (or maybe for more general use, but highly specialized just the same) and that they still need a GPU for controling the whole system?
So maybe they both use a PPC core, so what? Do you realize how many things have PPC cores in them? There are cars with them. Does that make your car an XBox II or PS3? Of course not.
I'm sure Sony and Microsoft know exactly what they are getting from IBM and what the similarities are (and arent). And I'm sure they all have numerous contracts and NDA's and other legal paperwork that would prevent IBM from "pulling a fast on" on sony and MS by giving them the "same chip rearranged", unless of course that's what they ordered.
Here here! I like to make the differentiation between geek and nerd, because quite frankly there are lots of people who get grouped with people like myself who I do NOT want to be associated with. Since the term "geek" originaly comes from "circus geeks" I choose to be a nerd. And a nerd is the kind of person who makes things -- be it hardware, software, or even wetware; whether created from scratch or modified (hacked) from something else.
Geeks are just socialy backward people who do weird things, like spend all their time reading comic books, or biting heads off of chickens.
Mind you, I like comic books, scifi and chickens too. But I spend more time making things (nerd stuff), having sex, and living an otherwise "normal" life.
The geeks make the us nerds look bad.
Just like "Jocks" make athletic people look bad.. I'm sure you can think of many more examples.
The problem with this analogy is that it's too simple. "Programming" spans a greater skill set than "blacksmith". A more accurate comparison would be not to "programmers" as a whole, but to "low level programmers" -- people doing tightly coded assembly, or even low level libraries and objects in C, C++ etc. Because these things are equivalent to the things smiths made -- commodity components like fasteners, gears, and even small machines like electric motors.
Like somebody else said, programmers will become more like the engineers who take common components and put them together, only sometimes making any low level changes to the common parts.
Yeah, it was great when we all did amazing things with our 2K of program space in assembly code. I really miss those days. But I dont want to do that anymore than I want to design and fabricate a gear so I can build a robot. Now certainly there are going to be a few people somewhere who need to design things like that, on a low level.
You can find all sorts of similar analogies. How about textiles? Do you know anybody who makes their own fabrics? Do you know anybody who makes their own clothing and who laments the fact that they dont get to weave the fabric first?
I'd rather stand on the shoulders of giants -- and create bigger and better things using the components people have perfected before me.
When I first started to read this article (which I found tedious to read) I thought sh!t, he's right! And then I realized I'll still be programming in the future, just using more tools than low level programming. Already I use code generators and libraries of functions and object components. Programming will be more like engineering the overall structure, or designing the data base or protocols, etc. That's more fun anyway.
Nostalgia aside, hooray for the death of the programmer! Long live the Software Engineer!
There is one good reason why Microsoft might want to make windows for PPC: .NET. If they made windows for PPC (or any other cpu for that matter) the only way to make windows applications that ran on both x86 and PPC would be to write them in .NET exclusively. And since MS wants everybody to use .NET, this would be one way to do it.
.NET applications.
And I'm sure it bugs them that Apple is still around, an albeit small thorn in their side. What if MS made a slick looking stylish PC running windows on a PPC? Something to compete on the same level with iMacs? They're already doing hardware with the XBox. Aside from the DRM issues, what if they made an "X-PC" that was a suped-up XBOX with PPC (isnt the new xbox using PPC already?) but meant as home media / pc combo? Put it in a pretty box, make it play xbox games, and run Windows and
I for one welcome our new Chimp overlords...
800mhz? You dont need that much to emulate an A500. I ran winuae just fine on a 360Mhz celeron way back when (shortly before overclocking it to 550mhz :).
The dreamcast has a 200Mhz cpu. Granted I'm sure it's better at 200Mhz than the arm/xscale at 200mhz. But it's close. UAE started back when PC's were 100Mhz, so it's just about the right time to get it going on PDA's...