Re: Firewire/3D/embedded

[Greg Alexander <galexand@xxxxxxx>]

Sorry, meant to send this to the list.

>A Firewire 3.2Gb/s optical (or double line 6.4Gbs) has PCI 64 type speeds 
>surely in the future supporting just a firewire type interface instead of 
>the rest would enable Misc access to all periphial devices planned foir it 
>(just about everything if you include the wireless version including hard 
>drives).  This would cut out the required inrterfacing for seperate IDE, 
>floppy etc etc and proabably wouldn't add muck more coding than would be 
>needed to support just the common devices.

Just in case you care, the point of MISC isn't to make a replacement for
the bloated desktop computers of today.  The point of MISC is to make
something that's simple, small, and reasonable, through and through.
Talking to desktop media is nice for mainstream acceptance in a
heterogenous environment, but that's not reallywhere modern MISC is
going.  For example, if we implemented an IDE bus, we'd need to
implement the ATAPI protocol, that'd be bloat, and ugly bloat.  The
reasons to implement an IDE bus are to access mass storage, which you
really only need for most applications if you're being bloated --
excepting data analysis, of course.  Same problems show up with SCSI,
firewire, even PCI.  For example, if you implemented PCI, the only real
reason would be to talk to existing PCI cards, and most of those are
designed for bloatware.
	Yes, the design goals of MISC do not involve working with off
the shelf hardware.  Yes, they do make it so that an extremely simple
technology actually costs more than complex technology, for the time
being, because of economies of scale.  Yes, it is awkward to think of a
computer where a harddisk is just so much wasted baggage.  And yes, that
probably really is a reasonable way to look at computing.  Dreaming
about a MISC device supporting firewire is pointless if we don't even
have a MISC device, let alone firewire devices, let alone firewire
devices of a sane enough design to be worth using if we had the luxury
of using MISC.