i, cid

i, cid
so, i've been thinking... scary, i know. anyway, i've been thinking about x86's. over the years, clever engineers have been teaching the 86 new tricks, bumping up the clock speed, making them smaller, or more specialized to particular tasks. same with hdd's. new tricks, but it's the same old technology that was invented decades ago.

computers are so versatile that people keep coming up with new ways for them to jump through hoops for us, but we really haven't made any significant push in developing new hardware. and definately not as a concerted effort across the board.

i think open source needs to spill over into the hardware side of things in a bad way.

it's not something we can rush. not if we want to do it right, anyway. we need to throw away everything we know about how computers work now, and collaborate to decide what features a computer _should_ have. get all of our best ideas together, bounce them off of each other until we develop a clear picture of how a computer should operate.

other sectors of industry have undergone such revolutions--volkswagen pretty much redesigned the car from the ground up when they came out with the phaeton, vacuum cleaners of old no longer hold a flame to the big yellow dyson.

my point is, computers have made it this far. they still serve our purposes, but from a technological standpoint, there's a lot more we could be doing. and also, i think our society (earth in general, not a particular country) has learned a great deal about what you can and can't do safely and productively. we'll never make the full use of our potential if we keep trying to retool the x86's. it's time for a new set of standards, a new way of doing things.

this isn't something we can rush into. we need to consider our options, decide what will truly work, what we need and what we don't. as, always, i'll be working to get some of my ideas down on paper, but if you've got anything to say, then by all means, get your post on, or fire one off here.

--cid