Technology Sheeple

Everyday the IT industry grows stale because people are force fed "norms". By norms I mean Intel Inside and Microsoft Windows. I can only hope for a day when the x86 processor architecture is no more and Windows is nothing more than a pane of glass to look through. With so many superior processor technologies out there from the PowerPC based systems like the IBM Power 5/6, PPC 970MP, Cell Broadband Engine to ARM and MIPS it makes me wonder how in the hell the x86 has endured. To think that the DEC Alpha was canned in favor of the Intel Itanium sickens me. Now on to operating systems.. ugh. Windows is a commercially available virus, no more no less, I would go as far as to say it is defective by design. Knowing this people STILL buy it en masse! I guess the brandwashing that happens at an early age is effective as both x86 processors and Microsoft OSs still reign supreme.

I just have a dream of having REAL computers capable of teraflops on my desktop and not these little toys. These computers would be running a real operating system like Linux or something similar to OS X using a BSD kernel. You may say to yourself teraflops! HA! Well it is coming and FAST but not in the x86/Windows world. An example of my dream machine with currently available technology would be a dual CPU Cell with 2 to 4 gig of RAM, a decent little GPU and another watered down Cell processor to offload transcoding, upscaling and heavy media functions to from the GPU. All this with a flavor of Linux and all is right in the world. Hell the Cell in its' current form, 65nm SOI, is estimated to cost about $75 to produce. Even if the cost of the system was $1500 it would be a bargain knowing what was under the hood. Granted the Cell is still in its' infancy but seeing what can be done with it on the HPC front, the PS3 and even MIT doing research grade gravity well simulations with a 8 node PS3 cluster makes me want a system like that even more. Not to mention the more of them out there the faster compilers, libraries and software becomes available and optimized. Well it's time for me to leave lala land and my ideal computer and come back to the reality which looks more like the stone age as opposed to the digital age.