You think data storage will EVER pull ahead of data requirements? EVER? Windows for Mobile Devices (which will have a bizarre, meaningless name, of course) will require 2^60 sectors of drive space sometime in 2050, assuming that space becomes available. OSS alternatives will be much tighter, of course, only requiring 2^56 sectors of drive space.

As for hard drives, hard-drive-less devices have essentially died out. Very few people do PXE boot, and almost nobody does floppy boot outside of vintage machines. Just because it doesn't have magnetic platters doesn't mean it's not a hard drive. An SSD is just as non-floppy as a conventional magnetic disk hard drive.

You didn't think that 32G of space in an iPad* was DRAM, did you?

Also, you can put flash chips in parallel to increase data rates (that's why an SSD is so fast; the individual chips are pathetically slow, but they're placed in a great amount of parallelism in a high end SSD unit, allowing them to saturate the latest SATA bus completely)

As for making things faster by making them smaller, if that were the case, we'd all be using 32nm 386s. They'd probably look like grains of sand. It would be 1/3600th of the size of a 4-core Sandy Bridge chip.

Note that all of the TOPS500 computers are of the fill-a-room size or larger.

The consequence of advancing abstraction and this horrible fascination with multiprocessing for even the simplest of programs will eventually result in a requirement for 16-core machines to run "dir" or "ls". And even if people didn't have this.. fixation on threading everything, there actually are some problems that can be solved easily by subdivision and parallel processing. Image processing comes to mind.

You'll need a building-sized TOPS500 computer to run the new hyper-dimensional desktop or whatever retarded thing is next.

Eventually Moore's "law" will break down, which will basically forever limit the amount of shrinking that can happen. When that happens, minimum sizes for various computing targets will become etched in stone.

And as for land speed holders red herring:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ThrustSSC ..is 10.5 tonnes and 16.5m long.
Or 14.4 smart cars heavy and 6.1 long. Small? NO.

Nevermind that the Apollo capsules were pretty much the fastest manned anything and a Saturn V, which imparted them with their great speed, is (or should I say, sadly, was?) 110m tall and 3,000 tonnes.

* = there are medium format digital camera backs that can fill an entire iPad worth of memory in less than a hundred shots. How does 268 meg raw hit you?

Heh, that's totally ASUS-like.

Nice systems, documentation which is only so-so at best.

Wrong. If you can make something X powerful in Y volume, you can make something 2X powerful in 2Y volume. And a desktop is considerably more than two times the volume of an iPad-sized device.

Even if we eventually hit an upper limit for CPU speed and such, and then manage to miniaturize those CPUs into little shitboxes, there will always be a desktop tower with 4096 of those CPUs inside that can do any parallel task in a fraction of the time.

"Powerful" applies to storage as well. Can you fit 40 terabytes into a microSD card (assuming your tablet even has any I/O slot)?

You can? Great! I'll stuff ten thousand of those in my full-tower computer* and save five medium format pictures to it. Or maybe even six!

Same with RAM storage as well. I run a 12 gig desktop. is there an iPad with 12 gigs of DRAM? No. By the time there IS one, I'll probably be inching into the terabyte range RAM-wise.

* = it's actually really more like an oversized mid tower than actually fully tower. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to carry the full-tower version home.

Science was outsourced to China as well. Soon there will be nothing but service jobs in North America.

Repeat after me -- "Do you want fries with that?"

I think the definition of "trusted" is being stretched here.

The only thing I trust about Windows is that it's going to somehow line Microsoft's wallet with good old-fashioned dollars, directly or indirectly.

They can't even say the name honestly. Windows 8? Hello? It's an earlier version than Windows 95? It's an upgrade to Windows 3.11? What the hell is wrong with "Windows NT version 6.3" ???

Shut down Verizon!!

Not that I work there or anything >.>

I can totally see Asus having those features installed, and giving it some silly Asus name. "Super SafeBoot Deluxe!"

On the other hand, they will allow users to disable it in the "Boot" section of the BIOS setup.

Super SafeBoot Deluxe [No ]

(Description: "Enable/disable Super SafeBoot Deluxe" -- not very helpful).

I don't see why that ever happened anyways. They were still making revisions to 8088 machines in 1985 and slowly moving towards the 80286 with a few models. The clone makers were a bit faster off the mark, but they were still making PC-BIOS/DOS machines.

I fail to see how a single-tasking, segmented-memory, 1-meg-max machine could be considered even remotely "professional", when even a lowly CoCo could run a multitasking system (OS-9. The non-Apple one). The IBM-PC was completely and totally a member of the 8-bit home computer club. Real IBMs even had a BASIC ROM!

Windows was a complete bomb too. It was fat, bloated, unresponsive and slow. 386enh mode did nothing for stability. Lack of responsiveness killed user experience, and resulted in RS-232 communication difficulties. What's the point of memory protection if you crash hard anyhow?

Yeah, sure, there were lots of games for the other systems*, but that didn't mean you had to put up with DOS / Win3.x hell just to run business apps.

NT-class Windows addressed some of the issues, but at the expense of uncontrolled bloat, DLL hell, and registry BS.

To give an idea to Win3.x people who buried their heads in the sand, here's a translation of Amiga technologies to modern PC technologies:

AUTOCONFIG -> Plug and Play
Datatypes -> codecs/filters
RigidDiskBlock(RDB) -> EFI boot (only leaner, faster, and less retarded)
Intuition Screens -> Whatever Windows 8 Metro term applies to having those full-screen Metro apps. Only Intuition screens could be shared by apps(feature) but could only tile vertically (limitation) and didn't restrict one to Metro-style only (feature++)
Preemptive multitasking -> Name hasn't changed~
Blitter -> GUI hardware acceleration (95% abandoned in Vista, 10% added back to Windows 7).
Volume name -> Like a volume label in Linux.
Drive name -> like a drive letter in Windows, only it's 30 characters in legacy AmigaDOS instead of 1 or 2.
DosPacket interface -> Asynchronous I/O.
DosPacket interface -> zero copy read/write.
AllocMem/AllocVec -> uhh nothing? Windows/Linux compilers/VMs still brk()s for memory and almost never gives it back, even under Java?

* = the PC was a fairly game-oriented system then, just not as good as the competitors. The irony is that it became the primary game system for a very long time, and is still a major force despite the number of "durp! I just want it to work!" people who have trouble double clicking.

As far as I know, all instructions are implemented in microcode... aside from in 6502s.

Actually that's 4G address space in the original 68000.

The address registers were fully populated with 32 bits with the very first 68k. Only 24 address lines were actually connected (er, 23, was something odd with the odd addresses if I recall correctly), or 20 address lines in the 68008. Motorola (and Commodore, but NOT Apple) documentation said not to use the upper 8 bits of the address registers as they would one day be connected to address lines.

Lo and behold, the 68020 came out, and it had a full 32 address lines. Commodore's 32-bit clean code was validated, and Apple had to rush to fix code where they were using those "extra" bits as flags.

Also, the 68000, although only possessing a 16-bit-at-a-time ALU and 16 data lines, is effectively a full 32-bit architecture, just a bit pokey. It's lack of 32bit x 32bit = 64bit multiply was pointed out repeatedly by 386 programmers, but by and large, most high level programming languages even today don't support that. (usually they're limited to 32x32=32 or 64x64=64). Since it could do pretty much any 32 (op) 32 = 32 operation, you could write your high level code, and then expect it to be twice as fast on a 68020.

IBM should have used at least the 68008. It wasn't much bigger than an 8088 (used in the IBM PC and XT), being only a 44-pin DIP (vs 40-pin), and had full 68k functionality. The PC-AT could have then used the full-on 68000 instead of the 80286.

I'd like to add to your comment that the x86 front end, although hideously ugly compared to say, the 68k mentioned above, acts basically as an instruction compression engine.

So you have all the advantages of dense CISC-y instructions with a powerful RISC engine under the hood. Memory is still expensive and very small --> is a cache huge? is it cheap? No, and no. CISC-style instructions pack more easily into those tiny spaces, making cache misses less often and less expensive.

RISC didn't win. CISC didn't win. They both lost out to designs that can leverage the advantages of both.

That's less likely now than it would have been if WinRT had been developed back in the NT4 era.

And it wasn't very likely back then either.

That was done back in the days with the original 68000. They were put in tandem in some machines, and one processor ran slightly ahead of the other. If it hit a bus fault, the second 68000 was used to recover, as the original 68K could not recover normally from a bus fault. Obviously this was not for performance purposes, but rather for reliability, but it's amazingly similar.

The oh-ten could recover from bus faults, and the 020 had a full-scale (although external) MMU option, so the technique ceased to be used.

Canada is getting this way, at least with the large providers. I think Bell tops out at 75 gigs/month on a Fibe 25 connection (25mbit/sec down, 7mbit/sec up). I think you can eat that up in a single standard work shift.

Of course, I've had a connection with them solidly since 1998, and my grandfathered plan is an actual unlimited data plan, but that means I can't upgrade to a Fibe25 connection (without paying a lot of money for their "data insurance", which is still less than unlimited even if you buy it three times) as I'd have to cancel the old contract.

Bell Fibe 25 pricing
Rogers pricing
(Rogers "Extreme" internet is similar to Fibe 25, although upload speeds are 1/7th as fast..)

That's correct. My potato-heating i7 920 draws 110-ish watts while idle (two hard drives, one GTX470), but over 350W when gaming with high CPU/GPU usage.

I figure it's a better way of heating the apartment than the electric-based heating we have, as it actually does useful work with the electricity whereas the heater is ONLY producing heat.