Google Acquires Rights to 20 Year Usenet Archive

[Cymric]

That's a weird computer you're describing, even for the year 2000. I can see the need for a dedicated graphics processor, but a dedicated sound processor... Hrm. No cards is of course a Bad Thing, unless you want your users to be locked in and not be able to upgrade properly or replace broken parts. (I know, card replacement doesn't happen very often.)

Boottime is inconsequential. It never ceases to amaze me that people can see this as a plus. I would rather have a system which does not need to boot (read reboot) at all: it's always on, doesn't crash, and only needs to be shut down in case of severe hardware problems. Quick reboots lead to sloppy programming and sloppy use: I saw this in an OS4 video presentation. (A PDF reader was not very responsive. Ugh, what is causing it to be so slow... Dunno. Let's reboot and restart. Bad!)

OS on PCMCIA... That would be an USB stick noawadays, but the idea is nice. Although I'm not sure what you would gain with it unless you need to perform system rescue/installs often.

System configuration: nice idea, not necessary in practice because the requirements of many programs are not that demanding on the system. A good OS always maximises availability of resources to the applications, there is simply no need to hold things in reserve. What would be useful is easy automatic/manual tweaking of the task scheduler, but you don't need a partitioned OS for that.

Storage capacity: overkill. The people who use their machine for video editing is small, so having a rack as standard is not necessary. But a version of the hardware which incorporates RAID is definitely something to be considered.

RAM: aha, you're thinking about FPGAs for graphics, sound and bus controller (or something equivalent). Not a bad idea, but AFAIK FPGAs are not fast enough to meet today's demanding specifications. (They sacrifice speed for generality.)

Secondary storage: forget proprietary systems. Way too expensive, and you still end up building interfaces for the regular devices which could have easily been moved to the main board. The new Amiga would only offer USB and Firewire, and do away with all those ancient RS-232 and Centronics connectors.

Mobo: I don't think you realised how important the electrical infrastructure of the mobo is. You cannot simply upgrade the relevant chips and be done with it: simply look at the incredible data transport speed which now occurs in mobos. That is not doable with older hardware simply because the specifications don't allow it. And then it doesn't matter whether certain core chips are removable or not.

Video Toaster: make that an add on for those willing to pay for it. I don't intend to do video with my computer, ever---it simply doesn't interest me. So why should I pay for it?


It would have made an interesting device, but still one which would not be competitive.

[Cymric]

This is sidestepping a little, but I think you're placing too much faith in graphics alternatives. There is a reason why we are manipulating textures, bump maps and working our asses off to get affordable and quick lighting in a chip, and that is simply because the alternatives are even more demanding and expensive. Do you have any idea what it takes to render a decent-looking 3D scene? In other words, have you ever written out the math (traditional, fractal or otherwise)? Because I have a hunch you haven't.

Second, blaming the PC (graphics) architecture for turning out the way it did 'even when the Amiga already had a better way' is really nonsense. The Amiga showed the power of a coprocessor doing video or sound work, and unless I miss my guess, that's exactly what nVidia, ATi, Matrox, 3dfx, Creative, Terratec, and all the others were/are/will be doing. In fact, they make exchangable coprocessors. On cards, true, but exchangable nonetheless. So please, enlighten me, what is the 'better way of the Amiga'?

[Cymric]

@MiAmigo:

I note that your emphasis has shifted from technical matters to matters of 'elegance'. Which is fine, but does not quite address the issue at hand. You claim PocketPCs and notebooks even get quite a lot of bang for the buck, and even run cooler too. True, very true. But nobody is expecting them to run Doom III or Half Life 2 at 1600x1200x32 at 8xFSAA and over 80 Hz refresh rate either. Whether you need or want such insane specs is quite another question. (I would not, my monitor cannot cope, so why bother?)

In addition there is always the tendency of people to buy 'for the future': buy a too-fast card today so it can be normal specs tomorrow, and while not perfect, be adequate the day after. It takes a strong will to buy a lower-spec model just because you know you won't need anything faster and if you can just as easily buy the faster model! 'Elegant' and tight solutions are much harder to upgrade: I have yet to see people upgrade their PocketPC and notebook. Instead they sell off the old one, and buy a newer model. The Amiga, 'elegant' as it was, proved to be a {bleep} to upgrade, as many A500 owners found out to their detriment as magazines began to show all the benefits of faster machines. (CPU upgrade usually caused problems with the caches or conflicted with stock standard hardware on the expansion port, Kickstart upgrade messed up games and demos, and if you wanted different graphics or sound, well, you would be very much stuck.)

With that all in mind, and going back to 'hot' and 'noisy' nVidias, I am not at all sure whether you could do much better than is the case now, given, of course, our current state of technology, and the fact that it is a consumer product, so cannot be overly expensive. That is elegant, in a way, but of course not the 'elegant' you had in mind.

[Cymric]

Waccoon wrote:
It would be nice if computers could mix many types of memory and prioritize them appropriately.  Who said you had to break things down into RAM and a hard drive?  Why is on-die memory only used for state caching?  Why can't we have high-speed RAM for calculations, cheaper years-old RAM for scratch work, flash RAM for result storage, and then page things out to the hard drive (with no filesystem) at leisure?  Virtual Memory and filesystem models used in today's OSes are far too simple.

Now that is a good idea. I wonder when it will become mainstream to include a line like RAM: 256/1024/128/lots MB in advertisements ;-).

[Cymric]

Hammer wrote:
3DLabs's Wildcat Realizm 800 is quite dangerous since this sucker has theoretical of ~700GFLOPS (shame about the drivers).

Holy smokes... Very, very impressive. A genuine wild kitty, that's for sure. I'm almost inclined to look for the 380 V three-phase socket in my home once computers are fitted with this purring furrbal :-). And not all that expensive too. Makes you wonder what you can get if you really spend some cash.

And the Wildcats already have stereo support too! *Drool*. Now this is beginning to look interesting. Playing Doom III not on a flat screen, but with 3D goggles (or a good wide-screen projector) and force feedback harness. Killing demons will never be the same again...