Re: Mensch Computer

[fsdlb1@aurora.alaska.edu]

Rather than delete 100+ lines of text, I'm responding to tombo via a new
message...
  Firstly,  I'm sorry if you thought that I was trampling on your dreams --
that was not my intention.  It is my dream to see the gs survive as well.  I
have at least 4 other people using my gs to do homework, databaseing, etc. here
at my dorm & they do so even though there are many other systems here to choose
from.  My point?  Well, there is an undefinable quality to the gs that many
people find comforting to work with.  Maybe it's the fact that I've named my gs 
Whindy in honor of the cartoon woman that I use for a desktop ( thanks to Dave
Leffler :)  I don't know.  
  Anyway,  it is this easy going quality that I so want to see preserved and I
have a gut feeling that designing a whole new dedicated hardware platform is
the wrong way to go.  Look, Apple is NOT going to just allow the designers of
the Avatar to use real gs roms (heck, thay may not even let us use the name!),
so this means that some sort of emulation will be needed anyway.  So why not
utilize the millions of dollars in R & D that have been spent by Apple, IBM &
Motorola already and write the emulator for the PowerPC?  
  The pool of gs programmers is continually shrinking because the pool of gs
owners is also shrinking.  If we had a PPC emulator than the pool of potential
customers would increase dramatically.  By the same token, very few people
outside of current gs owners would buy an Avatar.  
  I could go on about the fallacies of thinking that the computer is just doing 
nothing while the user is in a graphical interface, but I'll let others do that
if they want :)  I will say, however, that it is silly to think that there is
no need for faster systems just because a few applications don't appear to need
it.  My CS specialty is graphics and I need to have a system at home that will
have the speed, power, software etc. to help with this.  
  Well, sorry for the length of this post, but I really (really) think that a
software solution is the best bet for the long-term & I want to support this
logically.  Thanks for listning :)

Derek Bastille      fsdlb1@aurora.alaska.edu