What is your dream computer?

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What computer system past or present did you always dream of having?

Ive always wanted a high end multi-cpu SGI or Sun system.

I've had several Sun Workstations but in about a week I will have a fully loaded SunBlade 2000 with Dual 1.2Ghz UltraSPARCIII processors 2GB of ram(expandable to 16GB) and other goodies in it. Its not exactly new now but I always wanted a machine like that and It will make a nice desktop for me to replace my Ultra 10 with.

one of these days I might grab an SGI O2 with the right hardware/software to do video stuff on
I have an R5000 indy but its not really beefy enough to really work with video. its a nice IRIX 6.5.x box otherwise though.

Pretty much an everlasting computer system, where I had plenty of memory, didn't have to shell out money for patches/upgrades and such, and is flexible when necessary, would be my dream system.

I've never had a system that just quit working on me. I still have the Radio Shack Color Computer 2 that I got back in 1985. and as far as shelling out money I rarely need to do big upgrades and generally don't spend much on software.

I tend to buy a computer, usually used (an older but very high end high quality system for its time) and use it for about 5 or so years before upgrading to a computer 2 generations newer. I never throw out computers though. since It'
s nice to have a system in mothballs you can fall back on.

Oh dear... now you got me thinking about this: I want one full of neat technology for example a RISC CPU, an exokernel OS or a microkernel OS, harddisks in a RAID array, Journaling file systems, probably not X since I think it is weird to have a userspace-program access hardware directly, but the joe-editor and latex would definitely need to run - and a decent browser, 'enough' memory - oh and it would be fully documented and all software on it OpenSource.

i want to spend my £45,000 inheritance money on a custom built, high spec computer taylored to my specs.
like for instance:
WINPOWER 650W
ECS P4M800
ATHLON 64 X2 6000
DDR2* 2GB RAM
MULTI FORMAT CARD READER
LIGHT SCRIBE DVD RW
SOUNDBLASTER AUDIGY 2
500GB SATA AND 500GB IDE
RAID 5 (MIN 3 DISKS)
NVIDIA 8800GTS
ADSL MODEM
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
WINDOWS XP PRO
MICROSOFT OFFICE SMALL BUSINESS
BULLGAURD INTERNET SECURITY V7
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
7.1 SPEAKERS AND SUB
USB WIRELESS ADAPTER
22" WIDE SCREEN MONITOR
8 WAY SURGE PROTECTOR
EPSON DX6000
BEAR PAW 2400CPU
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
all coming in at around £1k - 2k

MacOS X almost got there. but its not documented and they ended up giving up on the open source idea and killed darwin pretty much. QNX is available and can do a lot of cool stuff and its a wonderful microkernel system you could try. its commercial though.

Solaris however now is open source and has a lot of really nice features out of the box now. check out
www.opensolaris.org I'm not quite sure what you mean by exokernel are you meaning monolithic kernel here?

My new Sun pretty much all ready has all of this (not to mention my old one, Ive had a 64 bit computer before most people ever heard of 64bit desktops)

An Exokernel is a really strange concept, which would allow to replace about everthing without re-compilation of the kernel, it takes the idea of microkernels to an extreme. While I know what monolithic kernels can do, I started liking alternative ideas and thus my ideal computer would give me lots and lots to try and tweak. I despise Mac OS X with a passion, it is the best argument against the BSD-license. I would like to test OpenSolaris somewhen even though it does have a monolithic kernel. I once tried SchilliX already, but there were issues and the holidays were over before I could re-try it.

My dream system would be the same. Everlasting, not only because computers eventually break down(Which they do), but because it constantly upgrades itself so I don't ever have to upgrade it again(OS included). But the main feature I want is this: It could play any game or program from any system past, present, and future flawlessly. I could plug in any accessory(Printers, monitors, cameras, etc.) from any system past, present, and future and have it work. It would be compatible with everything, forever.

I hate MacOS too but not because it is closed source. I hate it because of lack of documentation and the stupid apple mentality that its so simple you don't need a manual and if you ever need to do something that is not in the GUI you really dont need to do it and certainly don't need to know how its bolted togeather under the hood.


they even do this with MacOS X Server. which is why I will NEVER recommend it to a customer if Apple wants to be the largest UNIX vendor they had better learn from other UNIX vendors like Sun Microsystems and actually document the system (see docs.sun.com for really nice info on solaris in depth) It's not like apple didnt have documentation either as MacOS X is Mach based and is directly descended from NeXTStep which they already had documentation on. Ive had to use old NeXT manuals to learn about OS X internals because Apple couldn't be bothered.

I think MacOS X is a great desktop OS. but as a commercial UNIX it is very much lacking. if they produced better documentation on the internals and what all of the configuration files do under /Library etc do I would like it a lot more. until then its a neat toy thats very useful on a desktop and easily managed but its not well documented enough to fully support when the s**t hits the fan or you need to do something apple never thought of. Sure I've done it but it was a major pain in the ass because of lack of good documentation and Apple basicly throwing off any standard UNIX conventions to do their own thing without telling anyone.

Quad-core Alienware with all the bells and whistles. LOTS of RAM and a freaky big hard drive.

So right. A colleague of my mother (computer science teacher and admin of everything IT of the school) said the Mac OS Server he uses forgot many settings - no one understood what happened or what to do to keep it from happening again (and of course they refused my offer to 'be locked in the computer-pool for a weekend and set up a Linux to replace it Apple software' and instead 'solve' this problem by paying 400-ish € for an upgrade)

The computer that I would own would be an Alienware Computer, tailored for gaming, but you can buy the newest computer programs that come with the computer when they ship it to you, Completly customizable from internal cooling, graphics cards to the latest hard drives, etc. At the moment their most exspensive hard drive is pretty much just like a giant flash drive, so it is completely silent while running( I know I sound like a salesman ), though they are customizable they come with a hefty price tag the one I customized just to see how exspensive it would be had a $4699 price tag(the cheapest was around $1200) and that was me trying to be frugal on what I chose. though It's definitly worth it in my opinion. you can even pay for it in monthly payments but at $4699 dollars it would take a while to pay it off with a bill of (depending on how much the total for the computer this could change) $204 dollars a month.

to check these computers out for yourself go to alienware .com(this is totally up to you to check out this site because I'm not getting anything out it if someone buys one of these computers.)

I want to build one of these.

Except replace the 2 gig / dual core / 250GB with 4 gig / quad core / 1TB. On each motherboard.

Games would need to be designed to benefit from that.

I've pretty much got everything I want from my computer. A Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L mobo, E4500 Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of DDR2-6400 RAM in dual channel configuration, and an 8800GT video card. The only thing I can think of wanting to upgrade in the near future is the CPU, which is the oldest part of my system. The new 45nm C2D processors look like excellent bang for buck.

1000w+ psu
intel quad core with 12mb cache
some SLI motherboard that will overclock
two 8800 ultra in sli
four western digtal raptor hard drives 150gb 10000rpm

I am saving up the $$$$$$$$$