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I think that a "PC" is a sort of weird limbo between a focused device like a kindle or iphone and a truly general device. The way that I use my PC is mainly as
by jiggy2011 13y ago
I think that a "PC" is a sort of weird limbo between a focused device like a kindle or iphone and a truly general device.
The way that I use my PC is mainly as a host for virtual machines, be they JVM or vagrant instances etc. I don't really want to have an "operating system" so much as I want a hypervisor and a windowing environment to tie everything together.
It would be great to have a system where I can just slot in arbitrary stuff, for example: If I want to develop mobile applications I'd like to be able to just pop an ARM system into my case via a PCI card or something and just have certain software execute on that.
Maybe if I want to edit video, I'd like to be able to rent a bunch of high end CPUs for a weekend and just slide them in there and then take them out and return when I'm done.
This is sort of what I hoped the new Mac Pro would be, but they seemed to go in the opposite direction.
- stephengillie 13y agoAs the PC was the original computing device, it was indeed very general, and many remain this way today. I also host VMs on my main PC, as well as gaming client and server, media center, social terminal (fb, hn, email, text & voice & video chat, etc) & main programming environment. But at this point, I'm about ready to fragment these roles into dedicated hardware -- dedicated server for VMs, RasPi for media center, phone for social terminal, laptop for programming environment & admin/control for all the other devices. The only thing really holding me back is that there really isn't a good replacement dedicated device for PC gaming. Even though some consoles use PC-grade hardware, and keyboards and mice can be made to work on some, it's just not the same.
- jiggy2011 13y agoKind of, I'd just like to be able to orchestrate it all easily from one terminal and set of monitors so as to have seamless copy/paste etc.