New Hyperion Entertainment Website http://a-eon.com/ - The Mystery Continues

[hazydave]

A new board that has the capability of running all the new goodies we  are used to like wireless and hd video yet can run all those old programs we love  would just be awesome.I think it can be done with a 1.5GHz PPC,didn't Apple do so?

Apple's "HD" video has largely been 720p... I don't think they're doing full 1080p AVC decoding on a 1.5GHz PPC, certainly not without serious GPU acceleration of the video decode.

But, if you're dedicated to outdated concepts like the PowerPC, this is probably as good as it gets. At least they have modern interfaces for I/O and memory. But 1.6GHz.. that's like netbook-class computing power, in the PC world (and yeah, the better ones have dual-core CPUs at 1.6GHz). Still, that would make this the first ""Amiga"" sold in years that compares to ANYTHING still being sold in the PC market.

The inclusion of the XMOS chip is pretty mysterious. It's not a huge expense.. you can buy the four-core version at DigiKey for about $20 (they sell at devkit at $99, including demo board and software). But this is a weird chip... four fairly lower powered cores, each of which runs eight threads. They claim 1600MIPS, but that's going to be peak... every thread in use. There's some weired connection matrix, so you can arrange these things in different orders.. maybe interesting for simple audio processing. But overall, less of a CPU than an ARM Cortex A8 (eg, regular smartphone chip), with the FPU and SIMD units taken out. And there's a slot for this? Weird... though I am curious what they intend to do with this that couldn't better be done with another 400MHz of host processor juice.

[hazydave]

Ok, speculating in a different direction, the area for the CPU seems to have the standard mountings for some fairly heavy duty cooling, which a high-efficiency CPU probably wouldn't need anyway. So maybe we are barking up the wrong tree all together...

Yeah, I noticed that myself... they have a cooler area much larger than you'd need, FAIKT, for any of the embedded PPCs. The only CPU that wouldn't be very, very silly to drop into there, with a PPC ISA, in 2010, would be a PPC970-series chip. This doesn't compare to today's Core2s... it was on par with the original Opterons when it came out. But it's big, and hot, and was originally designed as a desktop chip.

You can actually buy these from IBM, they have a dual-core version, they start at around 1.6GHz, and yeah, they actually CAN be faster than SOME x86-based Netbook CPUs today.

There are four memory slots. A machine with only a 32-bit address space probably doesn't need that many. A machine with a wider address space (either 64-bit or using some sort of physical address extensions) might do. What sort of PPC processors match that description?

That's a good observation, and I do agree... assuming a modern DDR2-or-so memory interface, there's zero reason to offer more than two DIMM slots on a 32-bit motherboard anymore. So PPC970 fits here, too.

[hazydave]

Quoting hyperion:

"We know it means eceptional. Remember when Amiga hardware was eceptional, not just the OS? You won't need to remember much longer. Nemo brings Amiga back to the high-end."

So in other words, it will be up to par with high end 2000 Euro+ PCs? You know, I would have settled for something less powerful, and a matching price.

They'd like to claim the high end. That doesn't mean they actually there, any more than any other of the zillions of Amiga-industry promises made since ESCOM closed the Amiga Technologies doors.

Whats high end now anyway? 3 SLI Video cards, quad cores, 4 gigs RAM and all that?

i7 CPU, 6-12GB DRAM, certainly at two full PCIe x 16 slots (well, at least they tried on that... they have two full lenght PCIe slots, but they degrade to x8 if you use them both... so there's really only one x16 slot).

So, in other words, the new Amiga will do stuff that current PCs dont? Nice. With which OS?

Well, they're letting you fill in that assumption, rather than just outright saying it. It would be really nice if Amiga wanna-be computer companies stopped doing this.. what's the point of raising Amigaoid hopes once again, just to smash them. I would like this to not be another one of those, but really... not much to expect here. PowerPC CPUs have a hard time beating Intel Atoms on performance these days (and the ARM may be a valid competitor, soon). I can't imagine how this is going to be anything but overpriced and underwhelming.

And I'd love to be proved wrong.

[hazydave]

I've said that what Hyperion needs to do is at least become price competitive with Apple, selling mobile phone spec hardware for over over €1000 is not being price competitive.  Nobody expects them to get down to PC range, but can they get down close to Apple range?

Well, it's very different, cellphones vs. PCs. The cellphone industry has blown the price of phones way out of line with most any other sort of consumer electronics. Mush of that's due to many countries (USA, Canada, for example) always buying subsudized phones.

But chew on this one: you can buy an iPod Touch here for about $200. That's almost exactly the same thing as an iPhone... it leaves out the cellular modem, Bluetooth, and a microphone. What else? GPS? In much smaller quantities than Apple's doing, that's less that US$40 worth of parts. So an iPhone ought to run around $300 unlocked, unbundled. But they start around $600. Why? Because they can, pretty much.. everyone else is doing it (the retail price for the Motorola DROID is $599, too).

Apple's a bit out of line with PCs, but Macs are, precisely, just plain old PCs today... I guess you could add "with casework some people consider pretty, and without a frickin' removable battery, too, if you look at the laptops. I bought an HP laptop two years ago for US$1280... a Mac laptop with identical memory and CPU, and virtually identical everything else, ran US$2999.

But don't discount that last bit... identical CPU and other features. You might justify paying twice as much to get the same computer with MacOS.... I'm pretty sure I won't be paying $1719 for an OS in this lifetime, but plenty of people did. The problem is, these guys may very well be asking you to pay twice the high-end price for something with netbook-class performance. And think of this... even modern netbook-class performance would be a new thing in the post-Commodore world of Amiga. None of the "Amiga" hardware so far has even made it that far. In fact, today's cellphones probably have faster CPUs.

And hey, I do realize CPU speed ain't everything to every person. The problem is, doing the things that really made the Amiga the Amiga, like video and other multimedia, CPU performance pretty much IS the live or die thing. That's why I have a Q9550 CPU here, 2.83GHz, Quad Core, 8GB of really fast DDR2 memory, nVidia 8800GT graphics, etc. I don't play games, and you don't need this hardware for electronics CAD... it's all for doing multimedia on my desktop. If you can do this on "Nemo", than they ought not to call it "Amiga"... there was a time, at least, when that name really meant something, and something good.

Not to be all Davie Downer on you all, but you know this is a well-traveled road, big promises followed by same-old, same-old disappointments.

[hazydave]

I have to disagree that the Amiga never competed on price. It always did. Comparing it to the Spectrum/64 - still available at the A1000 introduction is unfair. You have to compare them to the 8-bit machines at the introductory price of those older machines, and to contemporary mac/pc hardware. I paid about $1500 for my 1000 in 87 or so... That was only a little more than my Atari 800 setup in 79. The Amiga was cheaper than the MACs and PCs available at the time, and more powerful, especially for multimedia stuff.

I agree... you can't really put the A1000 up against the Spectrum or C64... its initial competition was really the Macintosh and the PC/PClones.

At the time it shipped, the A3000 was about half the price of a comparable Macintosh. When the A500 shipped, it was faster and about half the price of the cheapest PCs could could buy. But time does march on. And as well, no real billion-dollar consumer electronics company has made anything with an Amiga brand on it since Commodore... well, you could count the brief time of Escom. But other than that, it's been glorified garage shops. They just cannot built comparable hardware in the 100's or 1000's of units and price them against machines made in the 10's of millions or more (since, after all, even the big PC companies rarely make their own motherboard... they buy from the guys in Taiwan, same companies that make the motherboards you buy at Newegg or MicroCenter if you build your own).

[hazydave]

EON definition...

An eon is an indefinitely long period of time. In geological time it is the period of time that includes two or more eras.

Could the EON reference to two or more eras refer to legacy amigas and new OS4 or OS5?

hmmm

I think its an allusion to how long it might actually take before a real Amiga hits the market again.

[hazydave]

When A1000 released 1985 it cost around 1295$
Recalculated into todays value should be around 1950$

So either cheaper then 1295 or 1950.
If that is with a case you got a deal

No... because that's only looking at the value of money, not the value of computers. In 1985, the typical entry-level home computer cost about $500... because it was a Commodore 64, before the last few price cuts. By the mid 1990s, it was up to $1500 or so, as everyone moved to PCs and Macs. Today, it's back about $500, though it's a full PC, complete with monitor and probably printer.

If you had something as groundbreaking as the Amiga 1000 was, that might really sell for 2.5x-3x the going rate of the typical home computer (both Amigas, Macs, and PCs took on the typical home computer, before they became it, of course), you could start at around $1500.

But that's a pretty big IF... The A1000 was better in every single way than the $500 home computers and even the $3000-$5000 PCs of 1985. Faster computation, better graphics, much more capable and sophisticated OS, etc. Everything was groundbreaking.

Anyone REALLY expecting that here?

[hazydave]

Aiming at the professional market first is a smart move imo. It will ensure a backbone for further development. And I don't mind having to wait if it turns out to be too far out of my reach price-wise.

WHAT professional market could they possible address?  First of all, you're picking off what's likely a tiny segment of the population, so you're setting an inherent upper limit to your customer base. And then, of course, professional markets are already well established, so even if you offer something revolutionary, many people won't consider moving.

For example, Avid and Adobe have both sold video editors (NLEs) in the professional market, for years. Both have become established standards, and both typically have offered trailing edge features (it was only recently, relatively speaking, that you could mix different video formats, or get reasonable audio support, in these apps). Sony, NewTek, and many others have offerings that are more powerful in many ways, but they are never going to get some people off "the standard". And this kind of thing is true in pretty much every professional market.

Next, you have infrastructure. Let's say I want to do video editing. So I need the video editor, something pro-class. I also need a high-level audio program or two, something like Cakewalk's Sonar or Sony's Acid... and an editor for audio, while you're at it, like Sound Forge.

Back to video... I need something for compositing and particle animation... Adobe AfterEffects or Boris FX or something like that. For some users, a high-end titling program, for others, 3D animation tools like Lightwave.

Of course, your video has to go somewhere, so you need a pro-class DVD and Blu-Ray authoring program. You have to prepare artwork for video, disc, and packaging, so you need something like PhotoShop for graphics editing.

And within the video and audio editors... I'm going to do stuff here, right? I need effects, transitions, equalizers and dynamics processors and noise reducers and noise makers... I probably have close to 100 plug-ins for audio and video processing on my system. If you do lots of music, you need to add in software synthesizers, etc.

That's just do the CORE of one professional job. If you're a one-man shop, you might also need web development tools, business tools, publishing tools, etc.

And if some of the pieces in this ecosystem are not up to par, don't expect to get any professionals interested. You not only need to attract them from what they're doing now with something better, you have to make that a smart move. Think about it... if you're already doing this job, you have thousands already invested in hardware and software... why do I move to something new and different, rather than, say, new, more powerful, but otherwise the same... like upgrading that Core2 CPU to an i7. That's a move that can be measured directly in increased productivity, and it doesn't add software expenses to the hardware expenses.

[hazydave]

http://www.power.org/devcon/07/Session_Downloads/PADC07_Chang_AMCC_Titan_V0_2.pdf
    * Cores that comply with the Power ISA v.2.03
    * The PA6T core from P.A. Semi
    * Titan from AMCC

Titan AMCC anybody? -

[/quote]

I think that's a good guess. For one, it just started shipping at 1.5GHz last October... they say you probably haven't seen the chip yet (true), and something about clocking at 1.6GHz (implying that's the not the normal speed).. regular speed is 1.5GHz. And all the SOC I/O matches the stuff they're claiming for the main board. Here's the AMCC paper on this from the 2007 PowerPC Devcon:
http://www.power.org/devcon/07/Session_Downloads/PADC07_Chang_AMCC_Titan_V0_2.pdf

Manufacturered on the cheaper 90nm CMOS process and other cost reductions
Design allows for dual cores at under 15watts power consumption

They's using some weird NMOS with mult-phase clock (6502, anyone?) and dynamic logic, like CPUs from back in the 80s and early 1990s, to cut down on speed demands. Certainly better than the stuff that's been out in the Amiga market, but a shame they couldn't go to a real [at least formerly] destop-class CPU like the PPC970.  The AMCC has an FPU, but no vector unit. So, multimedia performance is even worst than it might have been with a modern applications processor.

And of course, they would be crazy to use a PA Semi chip... scraps from Apple's table that could be withdrawn at any minute.

Only thing.. that huge heat sink area show on the MB is crazy overkill for the AMCC chips.

They claim 4000 Dhrystone MIPS per core for the AMCC at 2.0GHz, so that's 3000MIPS per core at 1.5GHz. That's in the range of a Pentium 4 or Athlon/Athlon "Barton" CPU, PC-wise, at least from the one benchmark.. but of course, dual core... great. If they have AmigaOS supporting dual core, of course. Not modern desktop, but let's see... my Q9550 system replaced an Athlon64x2, which replaced an Athlon Barton system... so that's only three geenrations behind the PC state of the art (given my Q9550 is already one generation behind). This is about 1/2 the performance of a Core2 core, or 1/3 the performance of an i7 core, give or take. Of course, it's the FPU and Vector instructions that come to play on the heavy duty multimedia stuff once associated with the Amiga.

Since the Titan just started shipping limited quantities in October of 2009, is dual-core, has a very low thermal design point - the clock speed could be at 1.6Ghz but the cores are rated to 2Ghz currently. Sounds like a contender to me. ;^)

According to the article I saw, it's actually the 1.5GHz version that's shipping. They need a shrink to 65nm to support 2.0GHz+.. at least according to the article.

a-eon site - "Just as Commodore did with the A1000, we're aiming at the high-end first, with a powerful desktop computer aimed at the professional and serious hobbyist markets (although you won't have to wait until summer, and it should be a little cheaper!)"

A professional doing ... what? Does anyone make a living doing AmigaOS development? That's about the only profession I can see happy here.

Commodore Amiga 1000   Price:   US $1295 without monitor   (So under $1295 for those asking about price.)

Yup... back then, Macs and PCs were averaging around $3,000. In 2009, the average desktop computer bought for home use was just over $500 in the USA, and came with monitor and printer.

[hazydave]

Now for the serious question: Does anybody have experience with the XMOS chip? It looks very nice, but what it is capable of?
I undertand that as it uses a parallel architecture, I should not take the 400Mips speed as I would do for an ARM fo example, but is it fast enough for data processing, or it is just something I could use for minor tasks?
Would it make the difference or would it better to rely on raw CPU power instead?

Well, it's a weird ass chip, that's for sure... I haven't used it. Not sure anyone has... they don't explain very well why you would want to, rather than, say, a normal ARM. Their idea seems to be to support a bunch of hardware threads per chip. Now, of course, eight threads on a single core, all running, means each thread is lucky to get 1/8 of the total performance... there's enough delay and waiting in a typical modern CPU to make two threads per core sometimes a good idea (Intel "Hyprethreading"), but eight?

But they also say "event-driven computing". So maybe as an I/O processor? Most threads would be sitting idle most of the time, but spring to life when triggered a hardware event? Remedial I/O processing for folks who haven't discovered multitasking and interrupts, or something more profound? I really do wonder if they have an actual use for this, or just dropped it in to fool Amiga fans into thinking "ooooh... magic chip".

I'd much rather have seen an FPGA that could be addressed on the PCIe bus, as a standard feature. A decent one could be programmed to accelerate all sorts of things that the CPU may be too anemic to do to a modern par. I don't see how a PEAK of 1600MIPS (all four cores and all eight threads per keeping busy) is a big help, even to a 6000MIPS or so host processor. But if it's doing something significant to handle I/O, then maybe it's a good idea. Again, have to see just what they're doing with it.

[hazydave]

IIRC Apple switched to Intel because Motorola were unable to make a G5 processor run cool enough to use in a laptop. This was a serious issue for Apple who were stuck with the increasingly obsolete G4 chips for laptops, they had to do something.

That was a symptom of the greater problem... the PPC just could not compete. Period. The PPC970 caught up to the Operton's of the day (they were a pretty decent match), but that, after how many years. And the big battle between AMD and Intel was still hot. Today's desktop chips are better than twice as fast, in not that many years.

And that PPC970 was just one chip. There were dozens of parts, from many companies, competing in the PC market, optimized for desktop, laptop, server, etc. PPC had and has far better representation for embedded computing, but for PC-class, it was never that strong. This was the inevitable result of Apple's ending of the Mac Clone... the market never got large enough to compare to the x86 market.

Apple was also losing customers and applications. Their market was too small for custom coding and testing, being the only PPC folks around. And there was a certain risk going to a Mac, particularly given the apparent dead-end of the PowerPC on the Mac. And they were charging quite a bit more for quite a bit less CPU.

All of these things lead to Apple switching to the x86. Making the Mac into just a PC in an Apple case, they actually improved the breed. It didn't cost Apple crazy money to keep developing motherboards and system chips.. they could just order them up from Foxcon or whomever.. so they could fall in price... one big barrier to entry. You could run Windows, native, full-speed, etc. as long as Apple supported some way of booting though a standard BIOS... there goes the risk, and that's one big barrier to entry. They follow the CPU, chipset, and peripheral market driven by pretty much everyone except Apple. All very good things for Apple, and their customers.


[/QUOTE]

[hazydave]

I work in graphics... I can tell you. This is never going to get professional markets. If they win a military or government contract for some specialized task then great, but those machines are built to "military spec" (where's Doomy when you need him)

Actually, a very great deal of what the military buys is COTS (Consumer off-the-shelf) or "hardened COTS". The robotics controllers I built for a number of different robots found their way to Iraq in about 3000 robots. Consumer technology, but "hardened" by using higher spec parts where possible. But a far, far cry from MIL-spec. There's no faster way to turn a $5,000 robot into a $50,000+ robot... well, you all have probably heard about what it does to hammers and toilet seats. Same deal.

But for PCs, unless there's some very special purpose, they have all kinds of rules about security, operating systems. etc. And it's usually very difficult to get your company approved by the government for military or other government procurement. My company did, mainly because we had the only R/C controller technology at the time that did what they wanted.

[hazydave]

All this talk of x86 this...x86 that....

Has it ever occurred to anyone the x86 viability roadmap is coming to an end, even with multiple cores?

Let's see.. there hasn't been a new PowerPC desktop chip in six years, but you really think the x86 is ending its life. Despite the fact Intel and AMD sell over half a billion CPUs a year? Despite the fact that Intel is nearly 15% of the IC industry's sales, but nearly half of the profits for the ENTIRE chip industry (hint: the AVERAGE CPU is sold for $6.00.... ?

And despite widely published roadmaps to the contrary?
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_32nm_westmere_roadmap/
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/amd_cpu_roadmap_update_2008/
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-deneb-heka-propus,6364.html

[hazydave]

I have the same opinion. A FPGA could be programmed to emulate AGA for compatibility and other nice stuff. They selected a 400MIPS chip, so based on speed, it is not a big help regarding processing power

Nope. It seems possibly designed for use as an I/O processor, but you can't tell from what they've said if it's actually going that job already, or just counting on someone to provide additional hardware -- as you said, a glorified user port. I don't see hardware development being a big attractor for a machine with effectively zero installed base. This was a hard enough cookie to swallow at Commodore... adding the video slot, CPU slots, and Zorro III slots as a I did. But at least C= had intentions to do something with those, so we could internally justify it, and keeping the interfaces simple enough to allow garage-shop guys using PALs to play helped, too.

At some point, they stated that it could be used to emulate SID.

Well, you need it routed to audio a DAC and audio out path. And heck, there's a SID emulator out for an ATMega 168... that's an 8-bit micro with 16K of memory. I would HOPE a 400 MIPS per core device could do this. But why bother.. you can do this on the host CPU for an immeasurably small amount of CPU. Most current PCs do a full 16-32 voice General MIDI synthesizer in software... that's built in on Windows.

 I believe most of us would expect this chip to be capable of emulating the Amiga chipset, or doing something brand new. (I bet on the last one)

You can emulate the Amiga chipset running UAE on the host machine... what's the minimum speed CPU that does a passable Amiga emulation. I guess you could splt up the emulation between threads... maybe. But you'd have to watch that whole multi-threading thing.

And as well, a forward-moving AmigaOS can't get bogged down worrying about custom chip emulation. Just run UAE. If they wanted to be nice about it, integrate the UAE functionality within the OS, like Windows 7 does the full XP emulation, or OS/2 used to let you run Windows 3.1 windows on the same Presentation Manager screen as native OS/2 apps.

But long run, the goal needs to be to never want legacy apps, or they're doomed to forever be seen as some weird retro machine.

(PS: Oh my god, I'm talking to "the man". It's such an honor)

I'm really not that impressive :-)

[hazydave]

I don't claim to be an Electrical Engineer but from what I was reading on the Titan they think it'll go to 2Ghz at 90nm.

Yeah, maybe you're right... though I think that's after some process tweaking. They seem to be using the Intrinsity technology, or something very much like it, on that CPU. They do a much of tweaking up just the bottlenecks, changing CMOS to NMOS circuity, and some other tricks to get the speed of things up. There are a bunch of CPU companies doing this... for example, Samsung used Intrinsity to get their ARM A8 core running at 1GHz (Samsung has the kind of ARM license that lets them the ARM... and keep in mind, they were the guys pushing the DEC Alpha to new levels, back in the day).

I have no idea, that's from a quote from the marketing on the X1000 page. However, I know the Titan is geared at the Telecommunications/Embedded markets,

Of course it is... that's "code" for "PowerPC" these days. At least some years back, Cisco was putting PowerPC in most every router and switch they made. Thus, PowerPCs grew all sorts of router and switch friendly hardware, like modern memory buses and RapidIO links.

Of course, every CPU that's not an "applications processor" (eg, desktop PC, PDA/phone, etc) is an embedded CPU... they're used in a box or board, hidden away somewhere. For example, I built an R/C controller system. which had two 32-bit ARM CPUs on the main controller, one 16-bit RI MSP430 CPU on the remote, even a tiny Zilog Z8 on an optional tachometer sensor. That's "embedded". So are the CPUs in your DVD player, TV, microwave oven, etc (in case anyone here's not familiar with the term).

The first TiVo used an embedded PPC... not super fast, though, so they had a bit of hardware to decode and encode. Second model used some MIPS CPU, fast enough to decode MPEG-2 in software, but they still needed the hardware encoder.

so you tell me does having an Xena chip with custom I/O socket on board give anyone the opportunity to develop/test Telecom/Embedded systems using this board before moving them onto a physical board or is it pointless with today's virtual circuit design and automatic PCB milling system?

I don't believe anyone building embedded telecommunications gear would bother with something like this. You can get a reference design board for any CPU you're after... all CPU companies either make the boards themselves, or partner with a board company. These are often small enough to fit your target device... in fact, many embedded designs just use off-the-shelf embedded CPU boards -- not everyone wants to design these things from scratch. But you wouldn't likely waste the space of a full-sized ATX motherboard, even for development.

    The question would be, as you point out well, is there any use today for AmigaOS 4 running on what for the OS is a fast system with a Xena processor that would move this to other markets. I don't have a good answer but I for one would love to see AmigaOS get even a small foothold in the market so that it can continue to be developed.

That's the question. I'm not sure just what you'd do with that XMOS chip on its own. It's interesting, but I reject their example of MP3 player... that's well served by $3.00 DSPs these days, probably with a bunch of on-chip peripherals specifically designed for making MP3 players, ultra-low power, maybe even power managed to run off AA cells or a 3.6V Li-ion rechargeable. And they'd have reference designs, software, etc. There's a whole food chain for every microcontroller, which goes by application. Some companies web sites have hundreds of application notes, examples, code, hardware designs, etc.... for each CPU family they make. The fact I didn't really "get" the XMOS chip... ok, I wasn't motivated by "this is work", but you know, I do this for a living. I shouldn't have to guess :-)

     I guess I'm still a dreamer.  8^)  Those crazy Commodore engineers made me into one. 8^) Starting with the VIC20, progressing to the C64 onto the Amiga - they always had a way of pushing the envelope and creating something revolutionary not evolutionary.

None of those guys are working on this, far as I know. And it's a very different world. When we were doing this, personal computing was still very, very young. Right now, not so much.. it has matured. And yeah, it's a little sad, because who gets excited about a new computer release? Ok, maybe a few silly Macheads, but really, the PC you see this year is just a little better than last year. There are occasionally new CPU microarchitectures, but most of the time, it's just small improvements. Same with GPUs.

The reason isn't that no one's trying.. but rather, that many tried, and most ultimately failed. Those who are left are spending billions to incremental improvements, funded by the billions of chips they sell. Mature market.

Doesn't mean there can't be fun, or cool new things. I've been far more interested in the cool computing devices I can put in my pocket, or even my livingroom, than on my desktop. There's just more action in those places.

P.S. It was enough to get Dave to follow the thread so maybe it's at least a little intriguing. 8^) Good talking with you again after all these years. Last time would have been on a newsgroup in the early days of the Internet on my A4000D/030 over modem. 8^)

Ok, I'm hooked in via satellite modem... it's a little faster than dial-up. And many, many times more expensive. But all those dishes on the roof is great for my tech-cred :-)