Could You Imagine?

[dmacburry2003]

Could you imagine the possibilities?

PalmSource (or Palm, whatever) joining with Microsoft.

Microsoft joining with Apple.

Real Networks joining with Microsoft.

Intel joining with AMD.


Hmm... If this ever happened :roll: I'm sure no one would ever be unhappy about their palm pilot (thats what they used to call 'em eh?).

[PetiteFlower]

Sure, no competition, no innovation, life would be damn boring.

[dmacburry2003]

We will still have Mickie D's and Burger King :lol:

But really, it would be boring for Pocket PC geeks like us; this website would be of no use, but for the business user it would be great. There would be so much innovation and development... Prices might rise, since there is no competition to sell lower than.

[PetiteFlower]

No there would be no innovation because there would be no competition spurring it on. That's why monopolies are illegal. If there was only one company to buy PDAs from, we'd just have to take whatever they offered us, there would be no consumer power, no choices, nothing. Not a world I'd like to live in.

[JustinGTP]

Not a world I'd like to live in.

Well - if anything does happen that you don't like in this world then I guess you would be in a problem then wouldn't you? :lol:

I don't think those companies will be joining anytime soon because I just don't think their company values or CEO's for that matter would get along.

-Justin.

[PetiteFlower]

Even if the companies wanted it the US government wouldn't allow it.

[dmacburry2003]

If that big supa dupa company was composed of the tons of those genius people at Palm, MS, Intel, etc., and they listened to their end users, they'd be able to focus on making an OS that contains what users want instead of making it flashy to beat the competition. But if they didn't bother with feedback then I'd just go back to my Day Planner and Game Boy. :wink:

[Kati Compton]

If that big supa dupa company was composed of the tons of those genius people at Palm, MS, Intel, etc., and they listened to their end users, they'd be able to focus on making an OS that contains what users want
But why would they bother doing even that if they didn't have to worry about losing customers to a competitor?

[dmacburry2003]

I'm responding to Kati on this one (don't know how to quote in the little box yet :oops: )

I see your point. Its very true that you wouldn't have to worry about loosing customers because if you lost them, they'd have nowhere else to go to buy PPC's from. Maybe MS (or the OEM's) should just get with the program and update their OS to every little problem we find. Eventually we will have an OS so integrated it will run from the internet.

[Kati Compton]

BTW - to quote a post, press the "quote" button on the post you want to quote. Then you'll see how the quote tags work.

Eventually we will have an OS so integrated it will run from the internet.

That would be going backwards in time when there were only terminals and no one owned their own computers... I don't think that idea would go over well with a large number of people.

And you wouldn't want a personal computer that loaded the OS from the internet (or ran it from the internet) every time. that would be SLOOOOOW.

[dmacburry2003]

Slow, but efficient. MS could update it automatically and no one would need patches. It could be like a Flash interface. Plus, If you got a virus, you could re-format your HD a million times and have like one floppy to install the internet software on.

Oh, thanks for the heads up :rock on dude!:


BTW - to quote a post, press the "quote" button on the post you want to quote. Then you'll see how the quote tags work.

Hmmm... I think I did that wrong.

[Kati Compton]

Slow, but efficient. MS could update it automatically and no one would need patches. It could be like a Flash interface. Plus, If you got a virus, you could re-format your HD a million times and have like one floppy to install the internet software on.
Efficient for updates, but slower than a user would tolerate. Janak - you're CS. Wanna elaborate? :)

[dmacburry2003]

I love efficiency, but your right, slowness would kill me (or anyone for that matter). I can't imagine how people could stand it back in the i486 days (I have one of those around here by the way).

I still think MS has issues communicating with their users......

[PetiteFlower]

The people at my work are on this new kick trying to run all our apps from the internet. Sure everyone can be simultaneously updated, but it really limits you in what the apps can do, and DAMN is it slow! Even on a company intranet it's obnoxiously slow.

[Aerestis]

Over time, the speed issue could easily disappear.

[Falstaff]

But this kind of OS requires a constant internet connection, unless I'm mistaken, which is no good for PPCs. How would you be able to have a connection whenever you turned it on. That would basically require a constant connection, which (if even possible) would mean no battery life. That type of software/OS only works for networked PCs with big backbone internet connections. Someone please correct me if my info is wrong.

[dmacburry2003]

Perhaps that one company I heard about in The Register will continue developing their wireless power sources for handhelds. Then we could have wireless internet access, wireless charging, and a wireless OS. If PDA's had this (and it was hypothetically fast, like 10-20GB/s), it would make them small, because the ram could be remote, other components such as audio could be remote, and there would be no battery.

[Kati Compton]

the ram could be remote
Remember that the whole reason processors have caches is because memory access is too slow *even when on the same motherboard as the processor*.

[Janak Parekh]

Efficient for updates, but slower than a user would tolerate. Janak - you're CS. Wanna elaborate? :)
Sure. There's a lot of different concepts being debated here.

One is thin computing. The handheld or desktop acts as a remote terminal to a server. This is here today and used in various corporate installations. As to whether the consumer will adopt it is an open case. Historically, consumers have shunned thin-computing appliances. Whether that will remain the case as broadband becomes more ubiquitous is up in the air, although I don't see it happening in the next 5-10 years.

The other is networked computers, i.e., instead of a PCI or other very low-latency bus, we decouple the logic and use a fast network (say, 100mbit or gigabit). This would imply having several different processors, with local memory and local caches. This is an active area of research, unlikely happen to hit your local PC or handheld in the next 10-20 years as well.

Having just the memory truly remote is unlikely to work, as Kati explained -- current engineering simply doesn't allow for such latencies to be even remotely practical. Even if we get into the 10gigabit or 100gigabit range for bandwidth, latency will far exceed existing memory architectures. This would require a revolution that we have not yet seen -- if anything, trace lengths between processors and memory are decreasing.

--janak